Laura Soto speaks with Marciane, a Kokama author and community organizer, about the story behind the book The Mucuracaá Bath. What begins as a conversation about a book quickly becomes a reflection on language, memory, and the quiet resilience of Indigenous knowledge across generations.

Author: Laura Soto
Leia em Português. Léalo en Español.

When I asked Marciane what inspired her to write The Mucuracaá Bath, she immediately started talking about her grandmother.

“Today she is 100 years old,” she told me with a smile.

Her grandmother, Massina, has been one of the most important people in her life. Through her, Marciane learned about medicinal plants, traditional baths, and many of the practices that were part of everyday life for Kokama families along the Solimões River.

But the story begins even earlier.

Marciane’s grandparents spoke the Kokama language. Yet, like many Indigenous people of their generation, they lived through a period when speaking their language and openly expressing their identity was not always possible. Growing up, Marciane often wondered why she had never learned her mother tongue.

She remembers asking her father about it many times.

“He used to tell me, ‘My daughter, it was because of the war.'”

Little by little, she came to understand the difficult choices many Indigenous families had made to protect their children. Languages were lost, customs changed, and many families left their territories and moved to cities. The Kokama people, who had lived for generations on the banks of the Solimões River, were no exception.

Marciane herself grew up in the city. There, she became involved in social movements and community organizing, working alongside other Indigenous families to strengthen the presence of the Kokama people in urban areas.

One thing she learned early on was that moving to the city did not make someone less Indigenous.

“Even though we left the village, we never stopped being Indigenous.”

That idea runs through much of her work today.

When she speaks about The Mucuracá Bath, she does not describe it as a book project or a literary achievement. Instead, she talks about memories.

She remembers her grandmother preparing traditional baths with medicinal plants. She remembers learning how and when to use them. Years later, after becoming a mother herself, she found herself doing the same thing for her own children.

“I was already giving the bath that my grandmother had taught me.”

So when she was invited to write a story about a plant, the answer came naturally.

There was no need to search for inspiration.

The story was already there.

“The book that inspired me was my grandmother’s.”

The Mucuracá Bath is, in many ways, a continuation of that conversation between generations. A grandmother teaches her granddaughter. The granddaughter becomes a mother. Later, she becomes an author.

What was once shared around the family now reaches children far beyond her community.

For Marciane, that is perhaps the most beautiful part of the journey. Through a simple story inspired by a traditional plant, children can learn that there are many ways of living, caring, and understanding the world. They can learn about Indigenous cultures not as something distant or belonging to the past, but as living cultures that continue to grow, adapt, and pass knowledge from one generation to the next.

And somewhere within those pages is also a tribute to a woman who is now 100 years old, whose teachings continue to travel far beyond the banks of the Solimões River.

Read the book here and watch the animation:

Read more about this project here