The Shaman's Apprentice
Ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin's quest to preserve
the ancient wisdom of Amazonian shamans.
54 minutes
Directed by Miranda Smith
Produced by Miranda Productions
Narrated by Susan Sarandon
Written by Abigail Wright
Deep in the jungles of Suriname, Dr. Mark Plotkin is racing against time. Here is the Amazon of legend, where men become jaguars, where frogs cry along the riverbanks with voices of lonely women, where fire-feathered birds screech and click in a thicket of vines. Here are remote tribes of Amerindians, eighteenth century African villages, and forest people living in the Stone Age. Here in the vast canopy of trees is a treasure of unknown dimension--the chemically rich and diverse plant life of the forest--the secrets of which could one day yield cures for our most troubling illnesses. But the world is standing outside the treasury door with a torch in its hand, hungry for land, gold, and timber. Mark Plotkin, a committed and passionate conservationist, has vowed to save this forest, acre by acre.
For more than twenty years Mark has searched the Amazon for plants that heal. He is an ethnobotanist, a scientist who studies the relationship between indigenous people and plants. Inspired by the great explorer Richard Evans Schultes, Mark set out from Harvard on a mission to find a new treatment for diabetes, the disease that killed his two grandmothers. What Mark has found in those green and tangled forests has been more complex, more interesting than mere medicine. The Shaman’s Apprentice charts the story of Mark’s discoveries in his own words, and looks with fresh eyes at the astonishing ability of native people to manage their environment.
"No one has done more to popularize the field of ethnobotany than Mark Plotkin. Plotkin takes the viewer into an exotic landscape where only the shamans, or medicine men, have the cures for a variety of tropical ailments. This film will surely introduce countless viewers to an area of immense interest within ethnobotany: the study of medicinal plants." -John R. Stepp, founding editor of Journal of Ecological Anthropology
People of the forests have become sophisticated chemists by necessity, utilizing plants for every aspect of their lives. Often, the entire knowledge of a tribe resides in the mind of the shaman - the tribe’s doctor and spiritual leader - the man or woman who is this generation's link in a long cultural chain that stretches back into pre-history. They encode their wisdom in the language of myth and dreams, and live in a world where magic is as ordinary as daylight. These shamans are the Rosetta stones of the Amazon. Only through them is it possible to interpret the bewildering profusion of botanical information collected by their people.
But the shamans are also the most endangered species in all the Amazon. Marooned in time by the loss of traditional ways, many of the native healers have no apprentices. Most are old, and each shaman's death is a kind of extinction. It is these shamans that Mark seeks out, hoping to save their precious knowledge as one might save genetic material. We may desperately need this information in the future, to treat illnesses, to develop new foods, fiber, or industrial products, or to restore balance to our planet.
The Shaman's Apprentice is a story of survival against the odds. It interweaves the luminous rain forest world of phenomena and legends with western science and the grim
realities of extinction. In the story of one man's quest to preserve the ancient wisdom of our species, we find the intelligence, cooperation and hope that could save one of the most glorious
places on Earth.
Learn more about Dr. Mark Plotkin and the incredible work of The Amazon Conservation Team.
