: First Person: Sharing indigenous knowledge with tourists #IndiaNEWS #International After successfully reclaiming her people’s territory in Northern Argentina, Celestina �?balos turned to tourism

First Person: Sharing indigenous knowledge with tourists #IndiaNEWS #International
After successfully reclaiming her people’s territory in Northern Argentina, Celestina �?balos turned to tourism to share and promote her indigenous culture. UN entrepreneurship training during the COVID-19 pandemic helped her business to grow.

Indigenous entrepreneur Celestina �?balos runs a tourism business in the UNESCO World Heritage site of Quebrada de Humahuaca in Jujuy province, northern Argentina, sharing her community’s culture and knowledge of medicinal herbs.
“I am a child of Pachamama, Mother Earth. Earth is everything to us. It is life. We cannot conceive of ourselves without her. My community dates back 14,000 years. On behalf of 60 families, I led a 20-year fight for the right to land, education and freedom.
We used to live under a rental system where we had a landlord who delineated the spaces for us to occupy and to live in, both for sowing crops and raising cattle. It was a life very much governed by what the master said, by the space you had to occupy, and by what I saw my parents having to pay at the end of each year. These were very powerful moments for a teenager.
Through the process of reclaiming our territory I began to think more about how to make my history and the history of my people known. I have always seen, and I continue to see in the media, the stigma that is placed on us indigenous peoples. I wanted to show and make the other side of the story known. That motivated me but I was thinking: How do I do it, how do I show this?

Ivar Velasquez
Indigenous Argentinian tourism entrepreneur Celestina �?balos with her children.

‘We are the guardians of our culture’
In 2003, our mountain valley, the Quebrada de Humahuaca, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. This marked a milestone in the history of our people. I saw that many people were talking about our mountains, our culture, our food. And I said to myself: but this is us: we know how to do it, we are the guardians of our culture.
Culture, for us, is part of our daily life, it is the knowledge and skills that have been transmitted from generation to generation. We learn it from the moment we are born. It’s in our medicinal herbs and in our food, in our crops.
So I thought, Why not dare to do what I know, what I have learned? That is how my tourism business, a tea house called the Casa de Celestina, was born.

Ivar Velasquez
Indigenous Argentinian tourism entrepreneur Celestina �?balos with a tourist.

Sharing ancestral knowledge
When tourists come to the Casa de Celestina, I welcome them, I introduce them to the use of medicinal herbs, such as mate, which we drink in the morning and in the afternoon to energize ourselves.