Because they never made a map

They say the Amazon is just jungle

But my mother said

the trees know what is there

Because they never made a map

they say parts of Bolivia

are places the world

passes by

But my grandmother said

the rivers carry stories

older than borders

Because they never made a map

they say the Amazon is empty

But I know

it is full of voices

Voices that speak

Tacana,

Movima,

Ese Ehha

Chimanay

Voices that know

which plants heal,

which rivers rise first in the rain

Because they never made a map

they say history belongs

to the people who wrote it down.

But where my family is from

history is told

under trees

and carried down rivers.

Because they never made a map

they say the Amazon is disappearing.

But I say

it is remembering.

because where `my family is from,

some things are not written down.

They are carried.

And maybe that is why

they never made a map.

This poem reflects on the tension between two ways of understanding history: one that relies on maps, documentation, and written records, and another that is carried through memory, language, and lineage. Within much of the Western academic tradition, legitimacy is often granted to what can be mapped or written down. What exists outside of these systems is frequently described as empty, unknown, or disappearing.

The Amazon has long been framed in this way and imagined as an untouched void rather than a complex landscape shaped by communities whose knowledge is deeply embedded in the land itself.

Through the voices of mother and grandmother, the poem points to another archive: one held in rivers, forests, and oral transmission. By naming Amazonian peoples like the Tacana, Movima, Ese Ejja, and Chimane, the work interrupts the narrative of absence and affirms the presence of cultures whose languages and ecological knowledge shaped the region.

The repeated line “Because they never made a map” reflects on the history of colonial cartography and the ways mapping has often been tied to control, extraction, and possession. What is mapped becomes legible to outside power; what remains unmapped can remain protected.

The poem suggests that the absence of a map is not a lack of knowledge but a different philosophy of it.