Deep in Colombia’s rainforest, the indigenous Tikuna people live along rivers and small tributaries, their open-air stilted houses accessible only by water. The highly spiritual tribe practices the Pelazón, an ancient coming of age ceremony introducing a girl into adult society by first isolating her in a house made of palm leaves. Left by herself, which the locals contend is voluntary, the young girl works hard to learn the grown woman’s ritual tasks; first and foremost: to create threads from the fiber of young palm leaves. Eventually, she will spin threads used for hammocks, clothing and more. After 30 days or longer depending on the clan, the young girl emerges as a woman, her hair shorn, her head marked with the clan symbol, and she will be ready for marriage. The entire village celebrates with feasting, drinking and dancing. Called Fiesta de la Pelazón, it is the life event that calls on this artful tribe’s greatest talents. Revelers wear costumes crafted from a natural bark fiber called yanchama, decorated with geometrics and fauna and flora of their beloved rain forest. Dancers don masks, shields, staffs and full costumes to represent the leopards, toucans, and monkeys living nearby. Our collection of striking Muñecos de la Pelazón (Pelazón dolls) honor this important ritual. Preserving the Pelazón is life’s work for artist Antonila Ramos Bautista, her family and others who together collect raw materials, carve from balsa wood and fashion clothing from yanchama. They paint each figure using natural pigments derived from more than a dozen fruits and leaves to create ancestral and anthropomorphic characters. But outside world pressure is closing in on the Tikuna, including animal and bird poachers, the mining industry’s lethal mercury residue, deforestation, a degraded environment, and violent traffickers. in narcotics and human beings. This comes on the heels of longtime trouble, the breakneck expansion of a rubber industry that enslaved indigenous people and aggressive Christian evangelizer missions that commanded Tikuna to erase their traditional spiritual practices to make way for a western mindset. Highly collectible and hardly available, what’s most remarkable about the Pelazón is they are untouched by colonial or commercial interference.