OPEN LETTER TO OUR SACRED MOTHER EARTH
A CALL TO RESPONSIBILITY OF ALL HUMAN BEINGS
IN THE REGENERATION OF OUR SACRED MOTHER EARTH
Qachu alom (mother-grandmother who comes from time and space)
Xa oj ulew - xa oj poqlaj (we are only earth - dust)
Xa oj iwir - xa oj kab’ijir (we are only yesterday - yesterday)
Xa oj utza’m che ’- xa oj uxaq che’ (we are just branches - leaves)
Xa oj aq’es - xa oj ichaj (we are only bushes - herbs)
Xaq na oj ko taj - xaq sa ’kojsach wi (we are fragile - our death comes
easily)
Xaq koj tzelej tanchik chwa k’u’x la (we will return to your being – your
energy).
Tanmi qtxu Tx’otx ’(Heart, essence, energy of Mother Earth)
The
Community of Ajq'ijab ', Ajkunanelab', Ajchomanelab ', Ajq'atal taq tzij,
Ajkemab', Ajtikonelab 'of the Pueblo Maya, who, following the wise advice and
sound recommendations of our grandmothers and grandfathers, we here present
this open letter to our Sacred Mother Earth. A message from her daughters
and sons. To our Mother who has been mistreated under a mercantilist vision of
society, as she suffers ailments in her body and in her whole Being. In a
national and international context, in which political, economic, scientific
and religious powers make decisions that have affected the very fabric of life.
Decisions that take shape in daily life through social institutions, which put
into daily practice serious damage to the life of the Sacred Mother Earth.
On
your Day, Sacred Mother Earth, we greet you and kiss your face with tenderness,
humility and with all the strength of our hearts. We are your daughters and
sons, and we thank you for giving us life, thank you for raising us, for
feeding us and for taking care of us. Sacred Mother Earth, we admire your beauty
in the valleys, mountains and ravines, in the gorges, rivers, lakes and seas,
and in your belt of volcanoes. From you comes the purified air and the birth of
the crystalline waters.
From
the bottom of our hearts we say thank you, because despite the colonial
invasion, looting and submission, we are still alive. In your mountains and
ravines, Sacred Mother Earth, we have taken refuge when we have been persecuted
by the landowner, the military troops, the church, the school and the projects
of extractive industry. You have been our consolation, how many times have we
cried before you, for our sufferings, mistreatment, the despoiling, the diseases
and humiliation. These are recorded on every stone placed on our altars.
We
thank you for the sustenance of our life with the fruit that he provides us
from your bowels: the sacred white, yellow, red and black corn, beans, squash,
chili and all kinds of grasses, shrubs and trees, small and big. Thank you for
the life of our animal brothers. Those that we raise at home, those who live in
the mountains and ravines, those who live in the water, those who are active
during the day and also those at night. We thank you for the lives of our
families: daughters, sons, granddaughters and grandchildren; for the lives of
old women and men, that of girls and boys.
We
also thank you, Sacred Mother Earth, because, despite the devaluation of the
community sense of life, and the fundamental role of grandparents, leaders and
ancestral authorities, our principles, values and
practices remain. And thanks to the organization of our communities, our Peoples
survive and reappear amid the ashes of internal and external mechanisms of colonization.
Sacred
Mother Earth, we share our concerns with you:
1. Small powerful groups, empowered with
great capital, have implemented a monopolistic, accumulative, and extractive
economic model worldwide. On that basis they control life in the world. Each
country is only one piece of the global capitalist system. This system has
forgotten the principles of reciprocity, equity, solidarity, justice,
democracy, respect for collective human rights, among others. Above all, the
system disrespects your rights, as Sacred Mother Earth. We are also very
concerned that countries with socialist systems do the same.
2. We are concerned with the
privatization of life. It is a fact that takes shape in the piracy of genetic
resources in the territories of Original Peoples, in the imposition of
extractive megaprojects, which privatize and exploit rivers for the
construction of hydroelectric plants, privatize, exploit and damage mountains
and large areas of our territories with mining projects and oil tankers. These
and other projects or models of development imposed affect the web of life:
more families in extreme poverty, desertified lands and territories, and disappearance
of biological diversity. Damage to the environment and communities are
responsibilities shunned by companies operating in collusion with national
governments. Under these aggravating circumstances, they create division in the
communities and then criminalize, persecute, prosecute and murder the community
leaders (authorities) who defend the Sacredness of Mother Earth.
3. Sacred Mother Earth, we are concerned
about the state of your health. We see, feel, live and suffer from your
tiredness and diseases, caused by the intensive and extensive destruction of your
forests and mountains, the enormous pollution of the atmosphere, rivers and
lakes. Also due to the enlargement of the hole in the ozone layer, the melting
of the ice mountains in Antarctica, the disappearance of species of flora and
fauna, among others. Millions of your sons and daughters also now suffer from
strange diseases foreign to our millennial peoples.
4. We are losing the sense of our being,
of our identities. With individualistic, ethnocentric, nationalist, economistic
and racist ideologies, the conscience of many of our sisters and brothers has
been manipulated and mediatized. They are taught to think in the hereafter. They
magnify poverty, they devalue the ancestral principles of social and community relations,
and the relationship with you, as our Sacred Mother Earth. They forget their
social, cultural and environmental responsibilities, based on a clear vision of
transcendent dimension, as taught by our grandmothers and grandfathers. For
this reason, we want to recover our Being, to be your children, Sacred Mother
Earth, to learn from the water, the air and the sacred fire the principles and
natural laws, to respect them and put them into practice and share them with
all humanity. We want our life to have meaning, responsibility and
transcendence. We want to be ourselves, with our identities born of our millennial
cultures, open to the other peoples and cultures of the world to achieve
together the fullness of Life.
We
recognize with regret, Sacred Mother Earth, that, in many ways, our systems of
life, with its principles, its sciences, its world view, its philosophy, its
forms of political organization and social functioning, have been mutilated and
replaced by an alien system, imposed, through colonizing mechanisms (education,
religion, health system, among others). When we question the logics of this
imposed system, we are repressed, criminalized, or, what is worse, we repress our
own selves.
We insist that our system of life is different. Our principles open us to human responsibility for Life and the different forms of life. Such principles guide all our actions in all spheres of life. We are convinced that the inequalities, the different forms of discrimination, the impoverishment of the majority and the injustices among human beings are not typical of the full life that we aspire to. Just as the unbalanced relationships between human beings and beings in the cosmos are not normal or natural. They can and should be corrected. For this reason, today, Sacred Mother Earth, allow us to rediscover our own ways of thinking and feeling, to raise our consciousness and our dignity, so that we influence all national or global action for the regeneration of your life, your vitality and your health.
A
call to responsibility and reciprocity with the Sacred Mother Earth
Sacred
Mother Earth, by virtue of all that has been said, we make an emphatic appeal
to every woman and every man conscious of the colossal damage that we as
humanity have done to you. Women and men also in conscious awareness of the urgent
need to reorient our actions: political, economic, social and cultural, to
avoid grave threats to life. We do it with the simplicity and certainty that
the mission given us by Ajq’ijab ', Ajqkunanelab', Ajchomanelab ', Ajq'atal taq
tzij, Ajkemab', Ajtikonelab’, based on the guiding principles of our cultures
and our worldview:
- Everything is sacred, everything has life, everything has a heart and spirit, everything has a mother and father (Rajawal), everything has a language. Qana ’qawa’ Tzuultaq'a, is life, spirit, is mother and father, is grandmother and grandfather.
- The Earth does not belong to the human being, the human being is the one who belongs to the Earth. Water, rain and rivers have feminine energies, they are our older sisters. The air is what shares its spirit with all cosmic, spiritual and human life. Animals are our older sisters and brothers.
- The purchase and sale of the Sacred Mother Earth is an idea of political and economic systems foreign to our Peoples (individualistic capitalism or collectivist socialism), which break with the paradigm of thought of the Original Peoples. Everything that exists is related to each other, in the fabric of life.
To
the National States, Governments and multilateral international Organizations,
we demand that they approve and implement the content of the Earth Charter, but
that they include a total and global day of rest for the Sacred Mother Earth,
one day every 21 days (every three weeks), which can be a Sunday. This allows
us to go through the 20 energies of the Mayan calendar during the 260 days. It
would allow for our Sacred Mother Earth to rest and also planetary
harmonization of all human beings and Peoples. It has been verified during the
first months of quarantines by COVID-19, that the cessation of industrial
economic activities, have led to a visible recovery of the Sacred Mother Earth
and vital spaces in different countries around the world. As an antecedent, in
the Mayan calendar, every 20 days there is an encounter and a dialogue with the
Sacred Mother Earth, through the energy of day I’x.
To
the world leaders, scientists, artists and others, we request that you be
spokespersons for the Sacred Mother Earth, that your interventions and
addresses provide linkage with our responsibilities as inhabitants of the
Earth.
To
the international, regional and national organizations (NGOs) that generate
policies and programs aimed at the regeneration of the Sacred Mother Earth, to provide
spaces for the leading role of organizations and authorities of the Original
Peoples. That they contribute to recognize and observe the character of the subject
of rights of the Sacred Mother Earth.
We
urge the Original Peoples to strengthen our hopes, to exercise our character as
political subjects and to continue to enhance each of the elements of our
culture: language, science, proper forms of social, political and economic
organization. At the same time that we elevate the respectful and wise
relationship with the Sacred Mother Earth. As well as requiring governments to
generate and respect spaces for the exercise of collective rights as Original
Peoples.
To
all human beings, from all the countries of the world, we remind that the
Sacred Earth is our home and is our Mother. We depend on her to have where to
live, where to work and where to eat. It is necessary to be reciprocal and
responsible with Mother Earth. It is necessary to become aware and change our
ways of living and relate to all the elements of the fabric of life: no more
consumerism, no more superficial luxuries and crazy arms races. We must not
allow our governments to spend on weapons of war: no more manufacture, purchase
and use of weapons in fratricidal wars. Yes to the construction of a
coexistence in harmony between our Peoples and, the Peoples with our Sacred
Mother Earth.
Chi, Paxil Kayala ’, Job’ Kawoq, Keb ’Wo
Guatemala April 22, 2020
###
Translation:
No comments:
Post a Comment