This is Benki. Benki is a leader of the Ashaninka Nation. His people live in Brazil and in Peru. Benki comes from a village so remote up in the Amazon that to get there, either you have to fly and land on water, or go by canoe for several days. The Ashaninka people are known throughout South America for their dignity, their spirit and their resistance.

The biggest threat to the Ashaninka people comes from illegal logging — the people who come into the beautiful forest and cut down ancient mahogany trees, float them down the river to world markets.

Benki was taken under his grandfather’s wing when he was only two years old & began to learn about the forest and the way of life of his people at an early age. His grandfather died when Benki was only 10 and Benki became the paje of his community. In the Ashaninka tradition and culture, the paje is the most important person in the community. This is the person who contains within him all the knowledge, all the wisdom of centuries of life, and not just about his people, but about everything that his people’s survival depended on: the trees, the birds, the water, the soil, the forest. So when he was only 10 and he became the paje, he began to lead his people, it was his responsibility to protect the forest. For him it was a question of understanding what they needed to do to survive and to protect their community. Eight years later, when he was a young man of 18, Benki left the forest for the first time to go to Rio to the Earth Summit to tell the world what was happening and build a bridge to reach out to people he’d never met before.  He hoped the world would listen. Benki came back to his village full of ideas – Since that time, he’s continued to work with his people. He’s built schools to teach children to care for the forest. He’s led the reforestation of over 25 percent of the land that had been destroyed by the loggers. He’s created a cooperative to help people diversify their livelihoods. And he’s brought the internet and satellite technology to the forest so he could speak from the forest to the rest of the world.