Returning to the Origin collects stories from ancestral authorities of six original peoples of Ecuador, Peru and Colombia, about the origins and trajectories of humanity. The stories were recorded through direct interviews with the original Knowers and Knowers, within the framework of solid bonds of solidarity and, in several cases, deep friendship with them and their communities.

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The book is organized in three parts. The first offers a text, which wants to be just a threshold for the visitor to the stories that make up the central room of the book, about the emancipatory potential that the work of recording and sharing these original narratives entails. It is a question, in this welcoming reflection, of offering the theoretical bases on which the project, and this book, can be understood as an ethical-political act. The second includes the stories of the Knowers and the Knower, and the chronicle of a meeting with the Kogui Council of Knowers. The narratives are accompanied by authorized photographs and brief clarifications on traditional terms, conjunctures or historical and demographic data mentioned in them, and are presented as narrow phonetic transcriptions. The last section offers an output text in which the individual stories of the second part meet, reflect and reveal each other. Narratives acquire, in this inter-ethnic and intercultural narrative fabric, an enormous transfiguring potential. By capturing them in this integrating plot, the structure and epistemic, ethical, aesthetic and political power of ancestral thought seem to reveal itself more clearly to our gaze. Thus interwoven, their common firmament emerges.