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Adana Omágua Kambeba was still a little girl when adults started coming to her for advice, asking how to deal with their problems. She liked to speak to plants and to smoke, puzzling the elders. No one had taught her that – it came naturally.
When she reached adulthood, her grandmother told her that of all her grandchildren, Adana had inherited a place in the lineage of healers and shamans of the Kambeba group, also known as Omágua, “the people of the water”, which has communities in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon.
“She saw strong signs in me. These signs have always led me to believe I didn’t choose medicine, I was chosen by it,” says Adana.
Her father was not impressed. Being a doctor was incompatible with their reality in an impoverished rural settlement, with houses on stilts by a stream on the outskirts of Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazonas state.
“He told me medicine was for those who have money, not humble people like us,” she recalls. “But I had some kind of decisive faith when I was a girl, a certainty of myself. When people told me something wouldn’t work out, I did it anyway.”
Her determination led her to pursue an exceptional life mission: to become both a medical doctor and a shaman, integrating these very separate systems of knowledge and mediating disputes that often arise in Indigenous healthcare.
Danielle Soprano Pereira, as she was baptised in Portuguese, is part of a generation of Indigenous people who have gradually had more access to universities thanks to affirmative action policies in Brazil.
In 2012, a place at university took her 4,000km (2,500 miles) from home and made her a resident in a city of 2.3 million – Belo Horizonte. At the prestigious Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), she was no longer seen as gifted but as “different” – the first Indigenous person from the Amazon to gain a coveted place at the medical school, mainly the preserve of Brazil’s elite.
“I learned first-hand that prejudice can be covert. It can come with a smile,” says Adana.
Students would ask how she got into university. Or would react with surprise when she excelled in an oral exam. A handful of colleagues welcomed her. “But most people felt bothered by my presence. It was very uncomfortable, at times cruel,” she says.
Adana also suffered from clashing notions of time and productivity. The standard duration of the medical course was six years, but she decided to respect her personal rhythm. “The medical course leaves no time for sleep, leisure or to live one’s own humanity. This goes against what we learn with nature, which is to respect our limits,” she says.
In 2017, she almost had a breakdown. At home, alone, she questioned aloud how she would become a doctor and a shaman. She heard a voice and spoke to it. She said she would only keep going if certain situations arose.
The next day in the hospital, Adana says all the conditions she had set happened, one after the other. She cried in the hallway. “Something inside me said, ‘This is your mission. Never doubt it.’”
Covid-19 interrupted Adana’s studies and she joined emergency workers in Belo Horizonte and Manaus, amid a critical shortage of staff and supplies.
She finally graduated in March 2022. Prof Humberto José Alves, the first black director of UFMG’s Faculty of Medicine, handed her the diploma in a room hung with portraits of the faculty’s former directors, all white men.
“It was a historic moment. Those directors would never have imagined a black man in their seat, nor an Indigenous woman graduating there,” she says.
Until recently, Adana worked as a doctor at a maternity hospital and a dengue emergency centre in Belo Horizonte. She has left both roles. In April, she will embark on a journey along the Amazon River, visiting more than 30 Kambeba communities.
She intends to provide medical care to those in need and run workshops on healthcare issues such as suicide prevention and child sexual abuse.
At the same time, Adana will undergo shamanic trials to become a pajé, a spiritual leader and healer in Indigenous cultures. She will perform rituals and prayers in front of the Kambeba people and shamans using ayahuasca, a plant-based infusion with hallucinogenic properties traditionally used to connect to the spiritual world and explore the depths of one’s soul.
“Experiencing revelations under the influence of ayahuasca is profoundly powerful, and there I will prove if I am worthy or not,” says Adana.
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In the meantime, she has been speaking in forums, schools and conferences as a doctor, Indigenous activist and educator, seeking to gather funds for her expedition and spread her message on building bridges between western and Indigenous medicines.
In August, she spoke at a conference on innovation and technology in Rio de Janeiro to entrepreneurs, students and executives. On stage, wearing a long blue skirt, blue bead ornaments and waist-length feather earrings, Adana made a presentation comparing traditional Indigenous medicines with “official scientific medicine”.
Adana denounced the colonialism inherent in a recent wave of scientific and pharmaceutical interest in traditional psychedelics such as ayahuasca. She also demanded Indigenous groups be heard over the exploitation of their ancestral knowledge.
“Indigenous people are not invited to the conversation, and nature is seen as if it were here to serve us. It is not,” she told the audience.
Adana is also a musician (she plays the violin) and actor who starred in the Brazilian film Xingu. So she felt comfortable finishing her presentation by singing an a cappella ode to Mother Nature while shaking rattles made of seeds. The crowd burst into applause.
In 1999, Brazil created within its public healthcare system a specific subsystem for Indigenous people, devising an intercultural approach to respect their beliefs and employ Indigenous people as healthcare workers.
According to the doctor and anthropologist Luiza Garnelo, however, these ideals are not easily translated into everyday practice, as she has found during her research with Amazonian communities around the Rio Negro.
“Most Indigenous professionals in the subsystem are community healthcare agents and nurse technicians, lower in the pyramid when compared to doctors. And being Indigenous doesn’t necessarily give them the right to create new ways of providing care,” says Garnelo, a researcher with the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
For a doctor striving to become a pajé, Garnelo says it is difficult to reconcile the principles of scientific biomedicine – strictly based on symptoms, examinations, diagnostics and medications – with Indigenous medicinal practices, in which body, mind, soul and context are seen in confluence.
This is often an issue when Indigenous people seek treatment, as healthcare providers may show disregard for Indigenous beliefs. In turn, Indigenous people at times avoid hospitals or reject medical intervention, preferring to trust their shamans and healers.
Adana recalls a case around the Rio Negro where a Tukano Indigenous man was bitten by a snake and doctors said his leg would have to be amputated. His family abandoned the hospital and treated the wound with sap from a vine. His leg was saved.
Recently, she mediated a standoff in the intensive care unit of the Sofia Feldman hospital in Belo Horizonte. An Indigenous child had presumed sepsis and needed urgent medical intervention but his father, a shaman, opposed the doctors’ recommendation. Adana stepped in and promised to say an Indigenous prayer in the intensive care unit. The family allowed the treatment.
“The family listened to me because I am Indigenous preparing to be pajé. The doctors listened to me because I am a doctor,” she says. The father later said that Adana’s prayer had saved the child. “The doctors said it was the antibiotic,” she laughs. “What matters is that we managed to save a life.”
Adana continues to consult the two shamans mentoring her on the pathway towards becoming a spiritual leader. If she succeeds in becoming a pajé, she plans to invite both her worlds to the festivities – celebrating with doctors and shamans.
