Arang dak is a small village in northern Nicaragua, near the border with Honduras, inhabited by members of the Mayangna indigenous community. Like many other indigenous villages, the people of Arang dak were violently forced to evacuate by the Sandinistas during the conflicts in that country in the 1980s. The Mayangna and Miskito fought the Sandinistas to recapture their territories, returning to their villages from where they had retreated across the border in Honduras and eventually negotiating semi-autonomous governance.
They are horticulturalists, growing much of their food in traditional “slash and burn” forest gardens, and supplementing their diets with fishing, hunting and raising a variety of domestic animals. They are connected to the market economy via boats that travel up and down the rivers buying their arroz (rice) and frijoles (beans) for sale, as well as gold that they find through artisanal panning.
Anthropologist Jeremy Koster has been visiting the Mayangna of Arang dak regularly since 2004, collaborating with the residents of Arang dak in documenting their lives. In April of this year, I spent a week in Arang dak, taking videos and photos of different aspects of life. The linked video collage is a non-linear meander through life in Arang dak, with only a minimum of introductory text in English. Primarily, you will hear the residents of Arang dak speaking their language, Mayangna, unless they are speaking to me in Spanish.
A few of the shots are by a young woman named Jamaica who was kind enough to borrow my Gopro camera for the day to share some images of the life of her friends and family, getting some shots that i certainly would not have been able to get.
Also in the video collage, toward the end, are some images of local curandero, Juan Francisco Lopez. While there, we collected some images of him showing 10 plants used in traditional medicine, with descriptions in both Mayangna and Spanish. He told me how he personally knows over 100 different local plants and their uses, but thatthose who taught him knew twice as many. The hope is that we can continue and expand this documentation so that local Mayangna youth will have a resource for remembering this aspect of their heritage of traditional ecological knowledge.
