Deep in the Colombian rainforest, the Tikuna people live along rivers and small tributaries, their open-air stilted houses accessible only by water. This is where the jungle meets the Pacific, where the natural world is highly spiritual for this remote tribe. The Tikuna practice the Pelazón, an ancient coming of age ceremony introducing a girl into adult society by first isolating her in a small dwelling made of palm leaves. Left alone –locals contend it’s voluntary – the young girl works hard to master a grown woman’s tasks, remaining isolated as long as it takes her family to gather enough meat and libations for her release party; it can take a month, even up to a year. The young girl finally emerges, hair shorn, her head marked with the clan symbol. Marriage ready, she is the village celebration’s focal point as it feasts, drinks and dances in costumes that call on this tribe’s greatest talents. Tapping into Mother Nature for material and spiritual inspiration, revelers’ wear is crafted from natural bark fiber called yanchama. Bold graphics along with fauna and flora designs pop in pigments from distillates of nearby plants, seeds and insects. Dancers don masks, shields, and staffs, becoming leopards, crocodiles, toucans, and monkeys of the rainforest. Our collection of striking Muñecos de la Pelazón (Pelazón dolls) honors this important ritual. Preserving the Pelazón is life’s work for artists Antonila Ramos Bautista, Silvestre José, Aristerio Manduca, Cledys Vento, Angelica Vento, Ángel Custodio, and Artetaba, and their community who together collect raw materials, carve from balsa wood and fashion clothing from yanchama. Their very existence is threatened by animal and bird poachers, the mining industry’s lethal mercury residue, deforestation, and violent traffickers in narcotics and human beings. The Tikuna People have endured enslavement by the rubber industry and spiritual raping by aggressive evangelizers who commanded that western ideas replace the Tikuna’s elevated reverence for the natural world. Highly collectible and hardly available, what’s most remarkable about the Pelazón is they are untouched by colonial or commercial interference.