Adana Omágua Kambeba fought to become one of the country’s first Indigenous woman doctors. Now she wants to bring the worlds of traditional and western medicine closer – and help Amazonian communities in the process

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.