Indigenous voices of South America have demonstrated a range of activism and advocacy instruments and strategies to protect the Amazon rainforest and their territories.

The recent Amazonia event held in Ecuador focused on how to tackle the growing threats of its peoples' future, including legal coordination, and also teams of surveillance and convoy navigation along the world's largest river and across its wider basin that spans eight countries.

"For a long time, I thought that defending the Amazon meant only resistance," Alexis Grefa, an International Affairs leader for Quechua Indigenous people in a region of Ecuador, said at the convention.

"But the Amazon doesn't need heroes. We need to negotiate, create proposals and occupy positions where decisions about the future of the planet are made."

Kichwa people, the common Quechua term in their Pastaza region, have continued demanding a fairer transition from polluting energy, like gas and oil, to cleaner sources for Indigenous communities.

Davixon Payaguaje representing the Siekopai Indigenous Guard in northeastern Ecuador, close to the Columbian border, told the story that his Quechua ancestors had protected its community through the spiritual tradition of consuming yagé, a traditional plant-based drink used ceremonially.

They believed consuming yagé transformed them into spiritual animals that included jaguars and boa constrictors in order to protect the cultural and historical connection to the land.

"Unfortunately, that's been lost," Mr Payaguaje said.

"Today, we physically protect the territory, monitoring and patrolling it with guards."

The Siekopai Indigenous Guard concentrates its defence against all practical forms of invasions and other deforestation threats despite nature in Ecuador being given strong legal rights back in 2008.

But that is not his only concern in protecting their own unique Amazonia culture.

"Our national identity is in danger of extinction," he added.

That comes from losses in language, traditional knowledge of elders, those spiritual traditions in addition to the environmental destruction of ancestral lands.

Patricia Gualinga, a Kichwa leader and longtime defender of human and environmental rights in the country, argued that Indigenous peoples need their own territorial governments.

"It's about self-governance so they can claim property titles ... and demand that contamination not go unpunished," she said.

That has changed for Indigenous people in Brazil, represented among the ministry of the state.

Brazilians also perform song in different parts of the continent.

Even when others do not understand the language, they repeat the lyrics, which describes oil companies entering Indigenous territories and mining on their arrival.

The Sarayaku territory was the inspiration for one of the songs from Brazilian performer Eric Terena, whose surname is a tribute to his Terena people that originally inhabited Paraguay.

The contemporary Indigenous electronic DJ contrasts the song with the sound of mining equipment roaring in the forests.

"It's just an acoustic massacre: an invasive sound that deafens and harms our relationship with nature," he said.