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Now
Once in 2001 while on a two-week speaking
tour of schools, Boys & Girls clubs, colleges, and other
venues in the state of Delaware, I heard a strange but familiar
language. As I washed clothes at a local Laundromat in Georgetown,
I noticed about a dozen dark-skinned indigenous men and women
addressing themselves in a tongue I recognized as Mayan. It turned
out that several hundred Mayan families from Guatemala had migrated
here to work in produce, factory, and service jobs.
The following weekend after
a church service, I addressed around 300 of these migrants who
were then calling the area around Georgetown their home. In my
travels as a writer, lecturer, and poet, I've met other Native
Mexican and Native Central American migrants, including Nahuatl-speaking
people from Puebla, Guerrero, Veracruz, and El Salvador; Mixtecos
and Zapotecos from Oaxaca; and Yaquis, Huicholes, and Raramuris
from northern and central Mexico. There are in fact millions
of native-speaking people (many don't speak Spanish very well)
from south of the border now living and working in the United
States.
One organization, EcoMaya Festivals
based in Los Angeles, claims there are around two million Mayans
from Mexico and Central America in the greater LA area alone.
I don't have actual numbers, but I would say indigenous people
from those countries now outnumber the official Native American
population (currently at around 3 million people).
Among many Chicanos (US-born
or raised persons of Mexican descent) there has been a long history
of consciousness and connection to tribal/native roots. Today
you see Aztec dance groups in Pow Wows and other community gatherings;
Day of the Dead altars and processions sprouting around the country;
and Nahuatl (known as the language the Aztecs and other tribal
groups spoke, currently in use by 1.5 million people in Mexico)
being taught in schools and community centers.
Many Chicanos have also linked
with Native American communities and their ceremonies such as
sweat lodges and the Sundance, including with the Lakota, Navajo,
Hopis, Chumash, and Pueblos. In the US Southwest, intermarriages
and alliances between Chicanos and Native Americans have been
going on for generations.
Mayan sayings like En Lak Ech
are being used by poets and in greetings this particular
expression means "you are the other me." Implicit in
this is what these native peoples carry over to this country
a fascinating and complicated, yet accessible,
way of being, living and relating. Another cosmology.
As for me, I have spent about
a dozen years linking to my own Native roots as well as studying
and practicing indigenous spiritual traditions from the United
States, Mexico, and Central America. My mother has family ties
to the Raramuri from southern Chihuahua (also known as "Tarahumaras").
My father comes from a large Nahuatl-speaking area in Guerrero
that also had significant numbers of former African slaves and
Spanish ranchers. I've visited the Copper Canyon region of Chihuahua
where some 80,000 Raramuri people still live in relatively traditional
ways, using their own languages and customs. My wife Trini and
I also helped create sweat lodges in our present home community
in the San Fernando Valley and Tia Chucha's Café
& Bookstore has a large section on indigenous books, including
Nahuatl-English dictionaries.
Around 10 years ago, a Navajo
medicine man, Anthony Lee, and his wife Delores adopted our family;
we've been driving to the Navajo Nation for ceremonies ever since.
This month, Trini and I travel to Peru with some of our sweat
lodge circle to partake in healing ceremonies with Native elders
and medicine people.
Despite borders, differences
in customs and tongues, we are all connected in more ways than
one there are linguistic ties, for example, between Aztecs,
northern Mexican tribes, and US tribes such as the Hopis, Shoshone,
Arapaho, and Utes. And according to my Purepecha/Chicano friend,
Luis Ruan, there is a linguistic connection between Purepechas
of Michoacan, Mexico and Quechua-speaking people in Peru.
Two weeks ago, Trini and I
went to see "Apocalypto," the Mel Gibson film about
Mayans in the Yucatan a moment (according to Gibson) before the
Spanish conquerors arrived to the so-called New World (in reality
most Mayans had abandoned the thousands of structures in culturally
advanced urban centers some 600 years before the Spanish ever
set eyes on these shores).
Taking into account the license
film makers have to change history, mix cultures and times, and
generally distort whatever they want, I must say there is a deeply
disturbing aspect to what is an otherwise visually-arresting
and emotionally-wrenching motion picture.
Whatever authenticity in details
Gibson claims he achieved in the film, he continues to promote
some historically-destructive "Big Lies" that may be
missed by those who aren't as attuned to the subtexts, the messages
beneath the messages, that some of us in this culture have had
to deal with to orient and maneuver ourselves into the world.
The first one is about the
"savagery" of the pre-Columbian peoples that supposedly
required a civilized Christian world to overrun, tame and change
them.
In the film, Mayans hunt down
innocent villagers, they enslave women, they cut out still beating
hearts, and pile hacked up bodies in mass graves. The salvation
message got nailed at the end when the film's protagonist runs
to the beach, chased by two enemy warriors. After more than two
hours of heart sacrifices, rapes, beheadings, and blood sports,
there emerges a pristine image of Europeans coming to shore
a priest is among them holding a cross (we know now they came
not for God, but for gold). Without words you feel a sense of
relief it's about time somebody came to stop these brutal
and lost cultures! Sure Gibson portrays the villagers on the
periphery as nice, funny, loving (in other words, totally idealized),
but at the core, in the main centers of art, life, ritual, and
work, everything seemed rotten, ugly, despicable (another idealization).
Here's the reality: There is
no proof that Mayans ever practiced large-scale heart-removing
human sacrifice, although they were known for blood-letting rituals.
Yes, there were also wars between Native groups, brutality, subjugation,
and any other drama and trauma that people have been capable
of committing from time immemorial they are human after
all. But nothing about mass graves, mass sacrifices, or slave
auctions (seen in the movie as if they were in the Deep South).
What's missing in Gibson's
vision (he's a known archconservative Catholic) is the fact that
the Mayans, like the Aztecs (properly known as Mexikas), the
Incas, and others like them were sophisticated, cultivated, spiritually-driven,
and intellectually-grounded. At one point in the film, the people
act as if they had never seen an eclipse, to be manipulated by
blood-thirsty priests and rulers. Yet these cultures had achieved
amazing astronomical advances, including devising some of the
world's most accurate calendar systems. The Mayans had a complex
writing system, complicated mathematics, wondrous architecture,
and advanced achievements in art, botany, zoology, and tools.
They also developed sophisticated economic and political systems.
They saw no separation between sciences and their spirituality
almost all their practices were tied to natural processes,
energies, and events.
You wouldn't know that from
watching "Apocalypto" or from hearing about or
reading most popular accounts of pre-Columbian societies. This
is precisely what Gibson is banking on the public's conception
of what they don't know or think they know about these people.
Gibson, like many others before him, has filled in the missing
narrative: Mayans, like other native peoples, were extremely
violent and ungodly they deserved to be destroyed.
Even LA Times film critic Kenneth
Turan on December 8, 2006 wrote, "Given that penchant [for
violence], it was only a matter of time until [Gibson] would
find his way to a civilization that enthusiastically practiced
human sacrifice."
This is simply not true. That
"Big Lie" was first expounded by Hernan Cortez and
his Spanish invaders to justify the wanton destruction of the
orderly and clean Mexika city of Mexiko-Tenochtitlan. Supposedly
with a flint knife, priests were able to rapidly remove the heart
while the victims watched it throbbing in the priest's hand.
In one account, thousands were thus slain in one day. Yet even
today with modern tools, it takes around 15 to 20 minutes to
open up the sternum and the surrounding tissues to reach the
heart. But we're supposed to believe a few priests could do this
to hundreds, even thousands, in a few hours.
There is a very strong indigenous
and academic movement in Mexico against large scale human sacrifice
by any of the major indigenous cultures. They contend that most
Western scholars studying these matters are wrong except
from a mythological viewpoint, since there is a strong mythological
basis for sacrifice. But this is different than actual systematic
human sacrifice. Supposedly sacrifices among the Maya involved
Cenotes: deep water wells. Some may have occurred following ritual
ball games. If they did exist, however, it was done ritually,
not among captives or slaves, but among leaders, honored people,
warriors in "flowery wars" (among the Mexikas), and
considered an honored thing you would reach the highest
levels of the 13 heavens.
But again, most of this is
mythology very little evidence of this except in some skewed
materials. For example, the finding of actual human blood on
stones in the Templo Mayor in Mexico City, which scholars readily
concluded was due to human sacrifices. It may have been blood
letting or a result of mass slaughter during the seize of Tenochtitlan.
There is nothing about heart sacrifices in any of the codices
before the Spanish arrived. There are around 20 Meso-American
codices in the world. Only three are pre-Columbian. The rest
were done under the order and guidance of Spanish priests. Here
human sacrifice, especially heart sacrifice, is greatly illustrated.
The first accounts ever of
human heart sacrifice appeared in a letter from Cortez to the
Spanish crown. Then there was a major account from one of Cortez's
soldiers, Bernal Diaz de Castillo. Gibson is going beyond even
the worse of these claims with "Apocalypto." He even
reportedly changed an image in one of the murals where a ruler
is extending his hand in a gesture Gibson had someone paint
a heart there (this shows up in one of the scenes).
The Spanish used human sacrifice
to justify their destruction. Even the Cathedral and other buildings
were built from the very stones of Tenochtitlan's pyramids. They
killed off millions of Natives through war, slavery, and stake
burnings (for those who refused to convert to Christianity).
Many more were killed from the diseases the conquerors brought
with them, such as small pox.
In fact, within 50 years of
the Spanish arrival to the Valley of Mexico, the native population
went from 25 million people to 2.5 million people. David E. Stannard
in his classic 1992 Book, "American Holocaust: The Conquest
of the New World" (NYC: Oxford University Press) estimates
that 95 to 98 percent of the people in the hemisphere perished
by swords, guns, famine, slavery, conversion, and, most significantly,
illness.
Whatever "human sacrifice"
has been fantasized about the indigenous people of this land,
the real human sacrifice that occurred after the European invasion
is the most monstrous, still resonating hundreds of years later
in our own damaged topography of land, culture, ideas, and interests.
Remember that Guatemala Mayans were systematically killed, an
estimated 140,000, including women and children, during the 36-year
Civil War that ended in 1996 (where real mass graves of broken
bodies existed).
Yet we are still here, us brown-red
people. We are the two to five percent that survived, and are
now revitalizing the political and social landscapes of Bolivia,
Ecuador, Central America, Mexico (then as now, the country with
more native peoples than any other), and parts of the United
States and Canada.
Everything is now turned on
its head the brown-skinned native-rooted people among the
Mexican and Central American migrants to the US, with roots to
these lands as deep as anyone's, are now the "foreigners,"
"strangers," and "illegals." However, they
also carry a new world view that is about balance (supposedly
Gibson "real" message), cooperation, and restoration.
There is much we can learn from these teachers who themselves
are students of nature, relationships, the stars.
This cosmology is summarized
in En Lak Ech, "you are the other me." We are all related,
all life, all being, all things, linked and unified and important.
If only an amazing filmmaker could truly grasp the significance
of this and find a means to portray it in such a vitally important
public space. Instead, Gibson re-portrays the old lies to suit
and benefit a worn-out and dangerous religious ideology.
Native people may have had
their issues, conflicts, and mistakes, but they were sovereign,
earth-connected, and free: Shame on Gibson for trying to correct
the present roller coaster madness of war, ecological damage,
and disaffection at the expense of the very people whose blood
and bones became a major underpinning of this so-called civilization.
CounterPunch
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