Narberth will soon be screening a documentary of the Kogi people of Colombia, who after deliberate isolation have decided to speak and share their knowledge of balance between mankind and nature in hope to help us understand the consequences our own way of living.

The Film Evening takes place at the Bloomfield Centre, Narberth on Friday, March 17. Doors open at 6pm for soup and bread, the film, and a talk by the film maker Alan Ereira.

Voluntary donations for the food and film will go towards the Tirona Heritage Trust, an organization raising money to help the Kogi buy back their land in Colombia, to regenerate and heal the land.The Kogi are an indigenous people living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains of northern Colombia, in South America.

The only civilisation to have survived the Spanish conquests and to have kept their individuality, they are perhaps the only indigenous people in the world who have been able to keep themselves apart and sustain their culture inviolate. The one anthropologist who managed to study them in the 1940s and 50s concluded that though they are similar in some ways to the other Indian peoples around the Caribbean, northern Central America and south to the Andes, there are such profound differences that “in the end the Kogi stand alone.” They have survived to this day, keeping their traditions and relying upon the mountain environment. They believe it is their duty to look after the mountain which they call “The Heart of the World”. They call themselves the Elder Brother and refer to the newcomers as the Younger Brother, who they believe is destroying the balance of the world.

In 1990 the Kogi decided they must speak out to the rest of the world. They had survived by keeping themselves isolated but they decided that it was time to send a message to the Younger Brother. They could see that something was wrong with their mountain, with the heart of the world. The snows had stopped falling and the rivers were not so full. If their mountain was ill then the whole world was in trouble.