“Gratitude is so much more than a polite thank you. It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship. Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency for a giving economy or regenerative economy.”
Angela Martínez, Amazon Defenders Fund Director
At Amazon Watch, our work is rooted in the principles and cosmology of Indigenous peoples. Over the last 26 years through our solidarity with Indigenous, forest, and traditional peoples of the Amazon, we have built long-term, trusted relationships with our partners. Each relationship is guided by Indigenous principles of interconnectedness, relationality, and reciprocity.
These principles are uplifted by the tens of thousands of donors and advocates who support our work. Each time someone donates to Amazon Watch, they are taking a direct action to strengthen a network of gratitude and reciprocity that connects people throughout the Amazon and across the world. Donors empower Amazon Watch’s campaigns and solidarity grantmaking funds, ensuring that we can continue to amplify our Indigenous partners’ visions for their territories and to drive transformative change in how the rest of the world relates to the Amazon and our planet.
We know that the governments, financiers, and corporations most complicit in rainforest destruction are powerful and well-resourced. The success of our Indigenous partners’ resistance and solutions is a testament to the strength of their visions and organizing, and to a global community dedicated to seeing Indigenous rights and the rights of nature honored and upheld.
This movement of people power is reciprocity in action: Amazon Watch donors contribute to a system of solidarity that we have built to settle historical debts from colonization, free from colonial ideas of transactional exchanges, and instead rooted in gratitude as an active practice.
As a core example of gratitude in action, donors empower Amazon Watch’s Amazon Defenders Fund (ADF) and our Women Defenders Program. There is a common pattern whereby funding is not given directly to Indigenous peoples on the front lines defending land, water, and life, but rather to intermediaries. Bureaucratic barriers prevent frontline communities from accessing funds pledged for climate resilience and biodiversity protections. The ADF and Women Defenders Program address these systemic injustices by providing timely and direct funding to Indigenous peoples and specifically to Indigenous women, determined by their needs and requests, in order to interrupt colonial cycles and address the outsized risks faced by Indigenous women and environmental defenders in the Amazon Basin. Donors engage in active gratitude by supporting these programs, which amplify the voices and autonomy of Indigenous peoples who are defending their lands, their lives, and our global climate.
As Amazon Defenders Fund Director Angela Martínez says, “Amazon Watch does not expect a type of thank-you that reinforces unequal power relations, because our relationship of solidarity goes beyond a transaction. We are humbly contributing to settle historical debts that people carry from the colonization of their lands, and we want to reciprocate for everything Indigenous people and the Amazon give to us.”
When donors support Amazon Watch, they become a part of this system of reciprocity and gratitude: Gratitude for Earth Defenders, gratitude for the Amazon, gratitude for the planet, and gratitude for one another. Gifts of every size propel this movement, and we’re so very grateful for the commitment our donors make to seeing Indigenous proposals forward.
Our team reads every note that comes along with donations, and we love to hear what connects donors to the Amazon and to our mission to defend the rainforest and our climate in solidarity with Indigenous peoples. Here are just a few messages we have received recently:
“Keep up your good and important work for our planet!”
“This is in memory of my father who supported The Amazon most of his life!”
“Sorry I can’t give more but be assured I am with you all the way, heart and soul.”
“Thank you for helping to heal our planet!”
“Skennen’kó:wa” (this means “Great Peace” in Kanien’kehá:ka/Mohawk)
“Never been to the Amazon but I grew up around the Atlantic forest in southeastern Brazil, and it’s the most surreal feeling to be surrounded by so much green on the way to the ocean. The Atlantic forest has already been decimated and I don’t want the same to happen to the Amazon and the indigenous people living there.”
“To my parents… revolutionaries who loved forests.”
“In gratitude for your work and hope that things can change now!!!”
“Work to do, with so much Joy!!!! Thank you!”
“There is hope for the health of the Amazon and our planet. I am so grateful to the defenders!”
As our wonderful supporters have shared, gratitude flows both ways. Hearing how much it means for members of this movement to be able to live their values and support Indigenous rights and solutions for the rainforest reminds us what an important opportunity it is to be in solidarity with Amazonian peoples, amplifying their visions for a more just and livable future.
In all the ways people support this work, from making a monthly donation, to giving proceeds from their business or art, to advocating, to leaving a legacy gift for the Amazon, each action strengthens the tapestry of gratitude and reciprocity, and moves us toward a transformed world.
Onward for the Amazon, with gratitude!
