Pech Indian Garifuna Plant Related Technologies How they protected the Rainforest and Coastal Environ.

Honduran Pech Indian and Garifuna Plant and other Natural Resource Base Technologies and how They Protected other Aspects of the Rainforest and Coastal Environments

By Wendy Griffin February 2014

In the 20 countries which have ratified ILO Convention 169 on the Human Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (18 in Latin America, 1 in Caribbean, and 1 in Africa), this ratification means that it is the law that indigenous “technologies” must be taught in bilingual intercultural education programs.  In general, before they can be taught, they need to be identified and documented.

Much of my work has been focussed on two groups whose traditional use of rainforest lands and resources have permitted the rainforest of Northeastern Honduras to exist into the mid-20th century. These groups are the Pech Indians and the Afro-Indigenous Garifunas of Honduras. Much of my work with them is documented in the books Los Pech de Honduras (2009) and Los Garifunas de Honduras (2005).

I put “technologies” in quotations not because I do not believe what they do is not an example of technologies, but rather the word in English is usually associated with machines, and in rainforest peoples, it is more associated with plants. These plants, bushes, and trees include wild plants, cultivated plants, and plants that are left to grow if they volunteer to grow somewhere. While these technologies are plant related, the technologies also ensure that little sediment from erosion enters streams or the ocean in order not to kill the cuyamel fish in fresh waters and shellfish like conchs on the reefs, that both can not live in muddy wáter or an environment choked by sediment. Sediment kills coral reefs themselves, too.

Helping fragile (easily leached of nutrients) rainforest soils recover their nutrients is another aspect of their plant management system.  Ensuring that the rainforest can grow back is another aspect of their land management.  Because they hunt rainforest animals, they are usually noticing what plants and fruits the rainforest like to eat and then leave them or encourage them to grow, so that the rainforest animals will stay in the área.  I personally have been totally unsuccessful in getting the Ladinos who run the national parks in Honduras to reforest fruit trees that the rainforest animals like to eat, and so the rainforest animals have to leave the parks and are shot and killed for their meat.

Plant based technologies include agriculture, food and drink preparation and storing, processing plants and animals to make crafts, firewood, medicinal plants and animals, construction materials processing, and other cultural uses including magic-ceremonial uses, make up, etc.  Agriculture has many sub-processes including soil preparation, planting, weeding, insect, bird, and animal control from eating the growing or harvested plants, and post harvest techniques for food and seed selection, storage and preparation. Some plants, bushes, and trees also require control of flowers and pruning.

The relationship forest-crops-houses between Mesoamerican Indians and their Ladino descendants in Honduras and that of the Garifunas and the Pech are not the same.  For a good description of the Mesoamerican Indian agricultural practices in Honduras seen Honduran folklorist and agronomist Mario Ardón’s “Agricultura Pre-Hispanica” book, available in some US libraries.

Planting is generally not just a matter of sticking seeds in the ground, like when I was a child and was given seeds of petunias to plant in my backyard.  You have to know when to plant, both in terms of when the rains are coming and when they will stop, so that you can harvest.  You have to know where to plant it, how to plant it such as how deep, at what angle, etc., what part of the plant to plant, and in Honduras many plants like yuca (manioc) and plantains are planted according to the phase of the moon. 

Among the Honduran Indians (Pech, Miskitos, Tawahkas) and Garifunas who plant in rainforest areas, most of the plants do not grow from seeds. They might grow from cuttings of the wood, from roots, from parts of a vine, from shoots known as “children” off of the main plant, but seed agriculture is definitely the minority of the types of ways to start agricultural crops in Northeastern Honduras. 

In the past, agronomists made fun of beliefs of planting or cutting wood with the phases of the moon. According to the Pech and the Garifunas, yuca and plantains planted in the wrong phase of the moon are “aguado”, they have too much water in them to have a good taste or consistency. Wood like yagua (royal palm) or the wood for roof beams should be cut in a good moon or else it will get full of termites and not last 2 years. A house built of yagua cut in a good moon will last over 100 years and is also anti-ballistic, it resists bullets, something to consider in the past during Honduras’s many civil wars. It has now been proven that there are insects which are active during certain phases of the moon and not in others which account for the need to cut wood in a “good moon”, according to UNAH ethnobotanist Dr. Paul House. Probably there is a similar issue with planting manioc and plantains by the phases of the moon.

Ladino farmers in Honduras, according to studies by UPN students of the La Ceiba campus, will try to clear 10 acres of land a year.  An individual farmer can only weed 5 acres of land a year by hand in Honduras, so those who manage to clear 10 acres, either get help from children and a wife, and/or also pay their neighbors to help them as agricultural workers “mozos”. Trying herbicides is also another technique to try to overcome this ability to control weeds over as much land as one would like to clear. Slash and burn (quema y roza) is a common technique of clearing land in Honduras among Ladinos that dates to the introduction of corn agriculture in Central America around 1,000 BC,as noted in Brent Metz’s book “The Maya Chorti Area”.

In the past, when the Olancho rainforest still existed around Culmi, a Pech farmer if he wanted to plant, would cut down one tall tree like a mahoghany tree, that grow to about 120 feet.  That would let in sunshine and rain, and the farmer would use this tree as a guide to clear a square the size of the tree, according to Pech farmer Hernan Martinez.  This is an area much smaller than Ladino farmers clear, and is smaller than modern Pech or Garifuna farmers generally plant now. A modern Garifuna farmer tries to plant 2 acres, although they might only plant one as most of the actual farmers are older, noted the UPN students. A modern Pech farmer might have 5 acres planted divided between yearly crops, plantains, and coffee and/or cacao trees, according to my own studies. The latter are planted under rainforest trees among the Pech, like under mahoghany and cedar trees.

I have asked a few Pech farmers who are usually men, as opposed to the Garifuna farmers who are usually women, if they use “quema y roza”, slash and burn techniques to clear the land.  Some told me that they had tried that technique, often on the recommendation of their Ladino neighbors, but that it did not give them good results with the types of soil they have and the crops they plant.  The Pech in particular try to plant twice a year, the first being called “primera” and the second planting called “postera” (the one that comes after). They said if they do slash and burn, the first crop is usually no good. Only the second crop after clearing with slash and burn is adequate. The Pech farmers I talked to planted without burning (sembrar en crudo—literally to plant when it is raw, as opposed to cooked).  I have seen urban Garifunas. who are taking up farming again, do slash and burn, but I do not know if that was what was typical before.

According to the Pech Indians, the Ladino technique of slash and burn, especially of larger areas like 10 acres, burns the roots and the seeds of the surrounding rainforest trees and so the rainforest does not grow back.  According to Dr.Paul House of the UNAH, the burning actually wakes up pine seeds, and helps the pines grow, and the pines themselves make the soil so acidic that most rainforest plants can not grow. If you want to reforest the rainforest after the pines have taken over, as has happened in the Pech area of Dulce Nombre de Culmí, you have to cut down the pines, plant another plant which changes the soil back to less acidic and then the rainforest plants have a chance to grow. That has not happened, and area that was cleared of rainforest in the 1930’s for the Truxillo Railroad 20 and 30 and 40 years later were still not returned to rainforest.

The secondary growth that does come back after using the slash and burn technique of the Ladinos is called in Honduran Spanish “guamil”.  According to plant use studies of Dr. Paul House of the UNAH, the utility of the plants in the “guamil” such as medicinal plants and firewood is very high among the Ladinos, much higher than their perceived utility of uncut rainforest, and often higher than among the cultivated plants themselves.  This is not true of Honduran rainforest Indians like the Pech and the Tawahkas who tend to see the uncut rainforest as extremely useful.  One of Dr. Kendra Mc Sweeney’s studies of the Tawahkas is called, “Our Wealth is in the Forest”. 

While most people see the Garifunas down on the beach and assume they are not affected by the loss of the Central American rainforest, in fact they collected medicinal plants, craft plants, ceremonial plants, and wild food plants in the primary forest. Some Garifuna men also hunted the same rainforest animals as the Pech, Tawahka, Miskitos, and Ladinos. Among the Garifunas knowledge of these kinds of plants and trees tends to be highly specialized such as medicinal plants revealed to shaman or special craft people who sometimes have to do ceremonies to the spirits associated with trees to get the materials they seek.

Honduran rainforest Indians like the Pech and the Garifunas may have more than one plot of land planted. Partly this is to take advantage of different kinds of eco-systems. For example, both the Pech Indians and the Garifunas like to grow rice. Rice likes water. They also like to plant sweet and bitter yucca, which will rot in water.  If bananas and plantains have too much water, they too will rot.  Yuca, bananas, plantains tend to be planted on a slope to allow good drainage, while rice might be planted in lower lands where water might pool.

Both the Pech and the Garifunas also used to plant crops in two places if they spent part of the year away from home, such as hunting among the Garifunas or panning for gold among the Pech. These second locations for crops like the Pech “trabajaderos” along the gold bearing Rio Verde are tending to be lost as the Pech do not have good land titles, and the Ladino farmers fence the land where the Pech used to plant. Garifunas have even reported living on islands like Hog Keys for the good fishing, and also having land on the mainland such as in Sambo Creek to plant. In Trujillo, most of the Garifunas who had houses and crops in Barranco Blanco by the Guaymoreto Lagoon also had houses in Trujillo. Many Pech both had houses in the town of Culmi, and also out in the countryside by their crops. Among the Garifunas, the rural areas are being lost, while among the Pech all of their urban land in Culmi was lost.

If producing for themselves, the Garifunas, the Black Bay Islanders, the Pech and other rainforest Indians do not plant like the monoculture export industries like African Palms, bananas, oranges, etc. They not only plant a large variety of crops, but of each crop type they might plant between 3 and 14 different varieties of that crop like yuca, rice, beans, sweet potatoes, yams, 18 different banana or plantain like plants, 3 varieties of sugar cane, 4 colors of corn, 3-5 kinds of coffee, 3 kinds of chiles, etc. Palm tree crops include coconuts, coyol palms for wine, pejibal palm for its fruit and its wood, cohune palm (corozo) for its nuts and leaves (manaca used for roofs), suita used for roofs, etc.  Many types of fruits are grown, often from trees that volunteer and then are left, like krabow trees (nance).  Other than the petaste, the Honduran name for chayote, actual vegetables are rare, with green leaves more likely to be consumed as tea like avocado leaves, lemon tree leaves, sweet and bitter orange tree leaves, etc. instead of as vegetables. The high level of rains make funguses likely and thus low greens like mustard, lettuce, cabbage tend to get funguses. Forgetting about funguses has been the bane of the existence of the banana plantations in the area and Worldwide.

The idea behind this biodiversity is that if something attacks one variety say of corn or yuca, be it a fungus from too much water or on the other hand dryness from drought, then hopefully the other varieties will make it through. And if all of one crop is lost, like corn, at least there are other crops to eat like plantains and sweet potatoes. And when they had two plots, if one plot suffered from landslides or flooding, perhaps the other one would be OK.  Garifunas also tended to practice having kitchen gardens by the house, because sometimes it rained so much the paths to the fields were flooded and it was important to have firewood, dried fish, and crops near at hand. Abandoning this practice because of bigger houses and more houses in the urban area, means hurricanes or road blockages, when the green banana trucks can not get through, cause crisis in the Garifuna families. 

The goal of North Coast traditional agriculture is to have something harvestable in the field all year long.  This is quite different from corn and bean agriculture with one or two big harvests which you then have to store and eat all year long. Plantain and root crops like yuca and sweet potatoes are planted various times of the year in order to have ones ripening ready to be eaten all through the year. While someone writing about Yams said they were available all year round, this is not true of the yams grown in Honduras where there is just a very short season around Easter when they are harvested.  Many of the crops of Northeastern Honduras like bananas and yucca go bad rather quickly. A Ladina woman in Culmi said, “I would not eat any yuca out of the ground more than 24 hours.”  If Garifunas harvest a root crop, but are not going to eat it right away, they might plant it beside their house and let it grow roots again, just so that it does not go bad after they have harvested it.

Eating fermented foods like yuca breads (sasal among the Pech, cassava bread ereba among the Garifunas) or corn (atol agrio, chicha among the Pech) and yuca drinks (muñía among Pech, hiyú among Garifunas)  and fruit and palm wines (supa, coyol, Pech) is common. The Miskitos used to have foods made of ripe bananas, wrapped in leaves, and buried and left to ferment. It was so humid in Northeastern Honduras that I have seen mold grow on a plastic typewriter case. The rate how fast European style bread will mold in Northeastern Honduras is not even funny, so that sasal will last 10-15 days and cassava bread up to a year is impressive. Flours like banana flour or chata flour for making porridge (Garifunas, Miskitos, Black Bay Islanders) tend to have to be used almost right away.

Planting poisonous plants like bitter yucca (or ackee among Black English speakers) is a way to have a crop that can defend itself against rainforest animals and also thieves of another ethnic group like the Honduran Ladinos. The older Garifuna women farmers would joke “con la yuca amarga misma el ladrón se fregó”  just by eating the bitter yuca itself, the thief did himself damage. The Ladino students in la Ceiba commented on ackee of the Black English speakers, “who knows how many Ladinos have died of being poisoned by the ackee.”

There are special techniques to prepare the ground for planting, like “socolear” with a digging stick and preparing the “guata”, the loose ground where the yuca wood (the stock of the yuca, that unlike a potato does not grow again from the root) can be planted at an angle.  Although bigger yucas might grow as result of planting straight up, you can not get a good angle to pull out a yuca planted straight up and it will break when you try to pull it out of the ground, and you will not be able to get the whole yuca. Another plant planted with the wood is the jicaro or gourd tree. Sweet potatoes are usually grown from “guias” (guides), although some varieties will grow from the root.

Only about 25% of poor Ladinos use plows, introduced by the Spanish. None of the Indian or Afro-indigenous groups do. Studies in the rainforest have shown that yuca production of the roots is worse if plowed or if fertilizer is applied. If herbicide is applied it gets into the root crops and makes them bitter and poisons the consumer. So almost all the common “improvements” recommended for rainforest crops like  plowing, lots of water, monoculture of a new improved type of seed, fertilizer, monoculture of a cash crop, have all been found to not be as effective in maintaining good yields or good food security for the family as traditional practices.

The idea that the traditional practices of the Indians and Blacks are what is holding back the development of Third World countries is definitely not true. Traditional practices of Indians and Blacks are providing most of the food that is eaten in Third World countries, especially Honduras where many of the good lands are taken up for export crops like sugar, African palm, and bananas, often for transnational corporations, and the rest is taken up with cattle, also often for export to the US as frozen, deboned meat, of the type used for hamburgers.

What you plant together might make a difference. Growing “milpa” where the beans that fixed nitrogen and put other nutrients in the soil climbed up the corn, and the pumpkin and squash and large gourds known as “barcos” in Honduras between the rows helped control the weeds and the bugs, is shown to be much healthier for the soil than the Spanish introduced method of planting just corn to get together (un maizal) and all the beans together (un frijolar), according to UNAH ethnobiologist Dr. Paul House.

How you plant, what you plant, when you plant, what you plant it with, all matter, but also where you plant and where you do not plant. Both the Pech Indians and Garifunas report having lands they called “reservas”  (reserved land). Pech “reservas” were usually above their croplands and they did not plant there.

This does not mean, they did not use the land.  This is where they hunted.  This is where they collected some medicinal plants, wild edible plants, construction materials, firewood, and craft plants.  For example, the corn drink “pozol” is supposed to be more delicious if it has “nogal” in it, which grows in the mountains.  When the Pech men went hunting, and they saw a “pimiento gorda” (allspice) bush or a nogal tree, they would collect some and take it home.  Now that most rainforest animals are extinct due to so many Ladinos moving into the area and overhunting them, the Pech still make “pozol”, but without the nogal. They drink allspice tea much less frequently as it is now bought. Pimienta gorda was so associated with the Pech that in their exports of the British called it Pimienta Paya (Pech Indian pepper, like a peppercorn, not hot peppers). Pimienta gorda is also medicinal, especially for stomach ailments. Let your food be medicine was a saying of the Greek doctor Hippocrates, and was firmly practiced by the Honduran Indians and the Garifunas.

According to Garifuna Abraham Norales of the traditional Garifuna community of Bataya, the Garifuna reserved land or “reservas” was located on the land between their uphill cropland, usually called “los yucales” (the place of a lot of yucca), and the houses (el casco urbano). In the reseved land, there were firewood trees and medicinal plants. If people were sick, they might harvest the plants they saw on the way to their fields, on their way home. If they were interested in always having the plant available, they might dig it up and replant it in their fields, such as under the plantains for shade, or by their house, usually full sun.

Garifunas seemed to do this more than the Pech did.  The Garifunas in Trujillo would mention things like, this plant you can just transplant it. This other plant like albahaca de monte (basin in Garifuna) if you transplant it, it will lose all of its seeds and die, but don’t worry as with the next rainy season it will grow again. This plant you can take a cutting. One plant used to treat vajo, the illness caused by the vapors of a dead person, is said to like to grow near concrete. When I went to 50 Garifuna house in Trujillo and Santa Fé with UNAH Biology student Roberto Tinoco, we found the average Garifuna had 10-15 medicinal plants immediately on hand, either as something in their garden, or something they bought dried in the center. The Garifunas were much more likely to have medicinal plants in their yards than flowers.

Between all the Garifunas in Trujillo, between all the medicinal plants that they let grow if they volunteered and those that they planted themselves,  within the urban center there were a lot of medicinal plants which they were using. But there were even more by the Lagoon, up on the mountain, on the beach, or among their crops. People who are using their crops as medicinal plants do not use chemicals like pesticides so that all the parts of the plants, from roots, to bark, to fruit, to leaves can be used medicinally.

In Trujillo, the reserve land which the Garifunas had left “vacant” for the purposes of having firewood, medicinal plants, and also a living barrier to prevent erosion from reaching the beach and the water of the ocean and the streams, has been totally invaded by Honduran Ladinos. Unused land is called “tierra baldio” in Honduras and the Ladinos saw this as unused land, and if they cut down the forest on it, they were the owners of the “improvements” (mejoras).  In Honduras you can sell “mejoras”, independent of the fact of whether you actually have land title to the land.  If Honduras has a trouble with migratory agriculture, that Ladinos clear land, plant one or two years, and then sell it to cattle ranchers, the law of “mejoras”, is a prime reason why.

In order to let the land recover its fertility, the Garifunas would allow land to rest for 15 years. This fallow field system is called “barbecho” in Honduran Spanish. Under Honduran Agrarian Reform Law, if land is not used for 7 years, it has been abandoned and can be titled to someone else. So Garifuna or Pech land that is resting to recover its fertility and their reserve land where they hunted and collected resources is likely to be given to Ladinos under Honduran laws, over and above the problems of corrupt applications of Honduran law.

This has a tendency to make life more expensive as the Garifunas have to buy propane gas to cook and the Pech and Garifunas have to buy meat if they can not hunt for it or if the fish are scarce because of Ladino farming techniques of using agrochemicals and planting crops that tend to leave the land bare at the time of the rains so sedimentation or contamination killed the freshwater fish and some types of seafood. Because of unpaved roads and especially carving out mountains for “development” projects that never materialize, the bay in Trujillo is now sometimes red with clay after a rain for 50 feet out, and the beach which was white in 1996 and had no rocks, is now tan and has a lot of little pebbles or stones. If the Garifunas or the Pech or the Miskito Indians tried to live principally from their crops, they would be seriously malnourished, as they plant many root crops and banana like crops that make you feel full but which without meat or fish, they would be protein, iron,  and vitamin deficient.

The Garifunas also think without the shade cover, which also causes less rain, the creeks are lower and hotter, and this may also have caused the fish to die. Rivers, creeks, and wells have reportedly dried in the Pech area—which in the past reported over 3 or 4 meters of rain a year. Both the Pech and the Garifunas report high levels of malnutrition. Urban Garifunas and Pech also have significant problems of food insecurity. Garifunas in the city have told me we did not eat for 3 or 4 days because we ran out of propane to cook the food, and we did not have money to get more. Nothing that is uncooked qualified in their mind as having had “food” or “a meal”. Urban Garifunas also have a problem of lack of access to fresh water, suitable for bathing in or washing your clothes or flushing the toilet.

The Garifunas and the Pech in addition to leaving area for the rainforest and coastal animals to live, so that they could be hunted, also practiced certain beliefs which helped preserve the animals long enough so that they could reproduce. For example, if the Garifunas see a female crab with its eggs, they let it go so that there will be more crabs.  When they fished, their parents told them, don’t fish near the shore. That is where the fish are small and they need time to grow to full potential and then they will swim out further and you can fish them.  All ethnic groups in Honduras believe in a spirit which protects the fish and which authorizes people to have some. It is necessary to give thanks for the ones you take, and to not take too many or abuse the spirit like putting dynamite in the river (a Ladino technique adopted during the Contra War), because if you do not the spirit will take away the fish from all of us, and you in particular or your family will be punished with illness or even death.  People my age in their 50’s or older still remember these ceremonies to thank for fish being done among Garifunas and the Pech.

Among the Pech and the Tawahkas, the strictures regarding rainforest animals were even stricter. The shaman dreamed how many animals they could take and where they were and what type of animal they could take, and only these. If the spiritual owners of the animals did not give permission to take the animals, then it was better to not hunt, than risk being made ill, being killed, or the animals being taken away by the spiritual owners of the animals. There were taboos and practices related to both rainforest animals and freshwater fish, and giving thanks and not taking too many were also part of this.   The Pech belief in the spiritual owners of trees was also an important part of their belief and fish, animals, trees, illnesses were all causes to have ceremonies, some of which were still practiced into the 1990’s.

Garifunas, Pech and Tawahkas comment a lot on plants that are left to develop because we will need them later.  If a Garifuna man was clearing a field to plant or for cattle, and he saw there was a tree from which “weñu” (majoa  in Spanish) string was made for hammocks, he would leave it.  The Pech left a lot of the hardwoods in their forest, because they said maybe our greatchildren will need them. It takes 300 years to get big trees to the size of making good canoes.

I had suggested to  the Tawahkas that they could take out some of the smaller trees, and leave some of the older ones, a process called thinning in English. The Tawahkas said No, you take the big ones first, so that the small ones have room to grow to reach their full potential.  The small ones need more time to develop. 

The Garifunas in particular are very specific about when you harvest. There is a time when a root crop or a banana like plant is edible, but it is not really ripe. This process to get to its “punto”, when it is really ripe, is called “sazonar”.  The Garifunas complain that you can not leave anything to “sazonar” because thieves will steal the food as soon as it edible, often the whole field to sell it. Ladinos who now grow some of the Garifunas like to buy often do not know when they are really ripe, and bring for example yams into the market because they are really ready. The Garifunas are always excited, oh look, the first yams are here, and they buy them and they get an upset stomach, because until the yams have really finished processing under the ground after the leaves have died, they have some chemical that upsets your stomach. Selling rotten pineapples is the same problem at the other end. I personally am useless as a farmer. I have no more idea how to know when pineapples or watermelons are ripe than the man on the moon.

Devaluation of the lempira has made food more expensive. Increased exports of Honduran food, including fish for cat food, and actually throwing away hundreds of tons of fish as “shrimp bycatch”, because in the Bay Islands they do not consider these fish suitable for serving to foreign tourists or exporting, and many people are hungry.  When the Lempira was two lempiras to one dollar, the Pech sold yuca for 15 centavos a pound, and no one stole yuca.  You could buy fish so that with one lempira you and your family ate for the whole day fish. Now that the Lempira is over 20 Lempiras to one dollar, and fish is over 30 lempiras a pound, and yucca is over L5 a pound, people steal everything. Before the problem of agricultural theft was so minor in Trujillo that you could grow squash and watermelon on the beach. Now thieves will come on to your house plot and steal while you are home or in the backyard, and older Garifuna farmers, usually female, have had their lives threatened by Ladinos stealing from their more distant croplands.

After the food is harvested, the Pech also report special procedures to choose which are the best plants from which to save seeds like squash, corn, rice, beans. Then they dry them, and store them.  The Pech use natural ways to keep bugs out of their crops that are seeds like corn and beans such as ashes and hot chile peppers.  There are chemicals used to control the main bug that gets into beans and corn called “gorgojo” in Spanish, but this “pastilla para frijoles” (pill for beans) tends to make the beans very hard, so that they take forever to cook,which then causes the problem of firewood, and also if they have these pills them, the beans are so hard, they can not be used to plant the next year.  So this chemical imput is considered very bad by the Pech. In order to control humidity so that the beans did not get a fungus and also to help control bugs, the beans and corns were stored on pieces of wood over the roof beams, a system known as tabanco.

The Pech say the smoke “afina”, makes finer the seeds of the corn and beans. USAID and similar development agency houses tend not to have wooden roof beams and so have no where to store corn and beans above the fire. Also development projects have tried introducing “improved” seeds, which the Pech say either do not grow, if they do grow they are weak, if they harvest them they are hard and bitter, and  traditional corn and beans in their different colors cooked differently for different recipes.  The real danger is that the people eat the old seeds after they are given the new seeds, and then they are unable to get the old varieties back. When Doña Juana my Pech friend told her 80 year old mother in law about seeing corn of 4 colors in the San Pedro Museum, her mother in law began crying. We have lost all these things, how can we ever get them back?  My book Los Pech de Honduras every third or fourth plant mentioned says, “And we have lost the seed to grow it” (Perdimos la semilla).

So not only did the Pech know agricultural techniques to ensure that the rainforest could grow back, but they had previously always ensured that they had seeds of every single type of plant that they wanted to grow.  The Garifunas of Trujillo also point out if there is a forest behind our community to put in the Capiro y Calentura National Park or around the Guaymoreto Lagoon which is a Wildlife Preserve since 1992, it is because we took care of it. This seems to be true as over half the Garifuna communities in Honduras are in or next to protected areas, and the same with the Pech Indians.

When Dr. William Davidson and his students mapped where were the forests in 1992 in Central America and where were the Indians, he found that where there were forests there were Indians and where there were Indians there were forests, This led to two assumptions—one the Indians depended on the forest and so they remained in areas where there were still forests, and the other is that the Indians took care of the forests, and for this reason there were still forests there in 1992.  In this article, we have seen both the Pech and the Garifunas did know techniques or practiced beliefs that tended to ensure the reproduction of the tropical rainforest, its plants, animals, and fish, and that they did rely on the resources in these forests. In my books “Los Garifunas de Honduras” and “Los Pech de Honduras”, it is possible to know most of the plants and animals that they depended and used and cared for in these environments.

We can also see that Honduran Ladinos used different plants, different agricultural techniques, and many of the “modern” agricultural practices introduced into the region of Northeastern Honduras  made significantly worse the situation of the rainforest, the quantity and quality of water available in surface water and as rain, and worsened the nutritional security of the original inhabitants such as the Garifunas and the Pech Indians. 

So plant technologies included far more than just making foods, or identifying medicinal plants. Agriculture, forest and fresh water management, maintaining the viability of hunting rainforest animals and fishing fresh and salt water fish and seafood were all parts of interrelated systems which the Pech used for 3,000 years to maintain the rainforests of Olancho for 3,000 years, and the Garifunas also had techniques that helped maintain rainforests along the North Coast. Ladinos with their techniques for agriculture, worsened by issues of export agriculture, cattle ranching, and hardwood exports, have managed to destroy in 50 years what the Pech had been taking care of, and have now moved on to Garifuna, Miskito, and Tawahka zones of Honduras.

The fact that I see no indication that the Intercultural Education Program at the UNA in Olancho in Honduras is anything other than a name to teach Honduran Indians and Garifunas “technified” agriculture like the translated from German manuals on how to grow yuca with agrochemicals and tractors, or the FHIA manuals about “improved” plantains that seem to say nothing about taste, cooking ability, drought resistance, ability to grow without fertilizers, or other factors the Honduran Indians consider important, concerns me quite a bit. I can always go back to the US, but I tell the Hondurans if you screw up the Indian’s agriculture and they are the ones providing you with food, you are the ones who are going to suffer. And you won’t even have medicinal plants to help heal you as you keep teaching in elementary school to leave clean without plants everywhere, and the rest you throw agrochemicals on to contaminate them or kill them.