The Amazon Through an Indigenous Lens

Join us for a two-hour gathering with Indigenous leaders, artists, designers, and cultural practitioners working at the intersection of biodiversity, traditional knowledge, fashion, and the emerging bioeconomy. Together, they explore a vision for the future rooted in relationship rather than extraction.

The conversation is hosted by Nicole Briones, founder of Se Luz Healing, in dialogue with the work of Leo Cerda, designer for Indigenous Fashion Week and advocate for Indigenous communities. The morning moves from dialogue into visual immersion, culminating in a showcase of Cerda's work and a communal mignling session.

This is an invitation to encounter the Amazon through the people who know it most intimately, and to consider what becomes possible when Indigenous knowledge is recognized as essential to the future of the planet.

This experience contains 3 parts.

Part 1: The Conversation (~45 minutes)
The panel centers the people actively shaping the future of their lands, cultures, and creative practices. Nicole guides a discussion on Indigenous approaches to stewardship, the emerging bioeconomy, and the relationship between cultural preservation and environmental protection, representing Leo Cerda and his broader network of Indigenous leaders. The conversation also explores the work of Indigenous women, whose leadership and traditional knowledge are central to protecting biodiversity and sustaining communities throughout the Amazon.

Part 2: The Living Archive (~20 minutes)
The conversation moves from words into image. Guests are immersed in photographs, visual storytelling, and imagery from Leo's work and the communities he represents. The projection offers a way to experience the Amazon as a living cultural landscape, expressed through people, materials, craft, fashion, and place. Guests also encounter a selection of Leo's fashion pieces, exploring how design becomes a vehicle for cultural preservation, storytelling, and economic empowerment.

Part 3: A Communal Moment (~45 minutes)
Guests gather and create space for informal exchange and connection. This is an opportunity to continue the questions raised during the panel, meet the artists and leaders involved, and consider how ideas of biodiversity, Indigenous knowledge, and regenerative economies might extend beyond the morning.

The Amazon holds one of the greatest concentrations of biodiversity on Earth, sustained in part by the communities who have lived within it for generations. Indigenous peoples have developed ecological knowledge rooted in close relationships with forests, waterways, plants, animals, and seasonal cycles, knowledge that continues to shape how communities understand, protect, and work within their environments today.

The concept of the bioeconomy offers another way of thinking about this relationship: an economic model built around biological resources and knowledge rather than their extraction and depletion. This conversation explores what a bioeconomy might look like when it recognizes Indigenous communities as knowledge holders, innovators, designers, and economic participants in their own right.

Much of the contemporary conversation around climate change looks forward, toward new technologies, economies, materials, and ways of living. Indigenous communities offer another starting point. Across generations, knowledge about land, plants, materials, food systems, craft, and ecological relationships has developed through observation, adaptation, and lived experience.

Fashion becomes one expression of that knowledge. Through material, pattern, craft, and story, Indigenous designers carry cultural memory forward while creating new economic possibilities for their communities. Leo Cerda's work sits at this intersection of culture, creativity, advocacy, and economic empowerment, using fashion as a way of keeping Indigenous knowledge visible, valued, and alive.

The experience invites a larger question: what might the future of sustainability look like if Indigenous knowledge were recognized not as part of the past, but as part of the future?

Leo Cerda — Executive Director and Founder of Hakhu Amazon Foundation and Hakhu Amazon Design, organizations working to support indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, particularly the Kichwa Nation. Through Hakhu's initiatives, Leo connects sustainable design and artisan income projects with territorial stewardship and climate action. His work bridges the creative economy with indigenous land defense, creating pathways for communities to generate livelihoods while strengthening their capacity to protect ancestral territories. Leo has advocated for direct financing to communities, recognition of territorial defense as climate strategy, and full indigenous participation in global climate decision-making.

Nicole Briones — Founder, Se Luz Healing
Briones is the founder of Se Luz Healing, a wellness company rooted in ancestral knowledge and a deeper relationship with the natural world. Her path to this work began in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where she studied midwifery and natural gynecology with the Kichwa women of Amupakin, ancestral healers and keepers of traditional knowledge. Se Luz's teas are sourced in partnership with Indigenous and coastal Ecuadorian communities, supporting fair economic opportunity and the preservation of ancestral knowledge.