Ten years since the First Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery International Conference held at Arizona State University West on April 19-20, 2013, the Continental Commission Abya Yala will advance into the next cycle of INTENT and ENGAGEMENT towards the objectives and goals of the local-regional, continental-global initiative which has remained active across the continent throughout this most recent chapter of our collective history as Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala.
The continental call to consciousness and courage will be emitted today at dawn during the Tlanexpapalotl (Butterfly Sun) Ceremonies of the Izcalli Abya Yala at dawn. The date corresponds to the spring equinox north of the equator, and the fall equinox in the south which will occur on March 20, 2023.
As was the case ten years ago, the call by the Continental Commission Abya Yala is being led by the same three organizations of Indigenous Peoples: Techantit, Vision Maya, and TONATIERRA.
Now advancing beyond the initial ten-year phase of the Dismantling of the Doctrine of Discovery of Christendom, the Continental Commission will coordinate and synchronize with ceremonial protocols appropriate to each particular nation and territory, the EMERGENCE and REGENERATION of the Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala in exercise of an autonomous and interdependent geopolitical continental alliance of Indigenous Self Determination.
In the north, the ceremonies will commence at sunrise and go to noon of the Tlanexpapalotl (Spring Equinox) on March 20, 2023.
South of the equator, the Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala will synchronize and coordinate accordingly as they celebrate the Yohualpapalotl (Fall Equinox) in complementarity with the spirit of the Kundur Anka, the Continental Confederation of the Eagle-Condor.
It was in 1990, during the First Continental Indigenous Encounter in Quito, Ecuador that the seeds of the mandate of the Continental Commission Abya Yala were first collected and planted among the delegations of Indigenous Peoples who came to together in that historic event.
After the First Encounter in 1990, the Second Continental Encounter took place in Temoaya, Mexico in 1993. Subsequently, there have been five continental indigenous Summits:
First Continental Indigenous Summit - Teotihuacan, Mexico 2000
Second Continental Indigenous Summit - Quito, Ecuador 2004
Third Continental Indigenous Summit – Iximché, Guatemala 2007
Fourth Continental Indigenous Summit – Puno, Peru 2009
Fifth Continental Indigenous Summit – Cauca, Colombia 2013
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At the plenary of the Fifth Continental Summit in Colombia in 2013, the decision was made to take the sixth summit to Honduras at the request of Berta Cáceres and COPINH. Due to the assassination of Berta Cáceres in 2016 and the pall of violence and impunity in Honduras against COPINH and other human rights defenders and environmental activists, the trajectory of the continental indigenous movement also was set back, but not deterred. Then came the COVID pandemic of 2019-2021.
In response, TONATIERRA traveled twice as emissary and representative of the Continental Commission Abya Yala to Honduras, to propose that the objective of organizing a singular continental summit be modified and reformed as a call for Continental Council instead. We proposed to continue coordinating our work in continental solidarity and synchronicity, by setting our own agenda with our own calendar systems to convene annually during the Fall and Spring Equinoxes of every year, each Indigenous Nation within their own territory across Abya Yala.
This proposal was supported by the elders of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and in 2020 the Izcalli Abya Yala was initiated.
Since 2020, in the fall and the spring, these actions of cultural indigenous self-determination at have continued to mature and develop. Now, in 2023, with this foundation, the Izcalli Abya Yala echoes the call of the original Continental Encounter of 1990 in Quito, Ecuador and all of the subsequent summits and diverse initiatives of the Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples to proclaim the Superseding of the Doctrine of Discovery of Christendom as the objective of the next cycle of the work of the Continental Commission Abya Yala.
CEMANAHUAC
Superseding the Doctrine of Discovery
The world is not flat, it never was.
Similarly, the dogma of the geocentric description of the cosmology of Christendom, which was imposed upon its constituents and colonial outposts, has now been abandoned for the fallacies and bias of the cultural hubris of its perpetrators in the hierarchies in power. The dogma of the geocentric model has been superseded.
Abandoning the geocentric doctrine of cosmology, the "Western World" of Christendom moved into a heliocentric description of our solar system. Yet, as a physical description of interrelationships among spatial bodies of mass in the solar system relative to each other, while the sun does not revolve around the earth - neither does the earth revolve around the sun.
Both Sun and Earth, entities of mass and therefore revolution and spiral orbit, revolve around their respective centers of gravity, in barycentric and cosmetric interrelationship within the entire field of gravitational forces, including the vectors of distance, duration, and energy that describes our world in the Universe of the Four Directions: Cemanahuac.
The doctrine of a geocentric universe was challenged by Copernicus and eventually superseded by the current “BIG BANG” model, but to challenge the dogma of the Holy Roman Catholic Church in terms cosmology in 1492 was blasphemy punishable by excommunication, torture, and death under the courts of the Inquisition.
Today, although the corresponding political dogma of Eurocentric theology known as the Doctrine of Discovery falls in the same category of antiquated and globally repudiated concepts of cultural supremacy and colonialism as geocentrism, the Doctrine of Discovery remains as the fundamental legal principle that defines all US property law and jurisprudence not only within the courts but the entire legal US legal system of jurisdiction and law enforcement. Internationally, the dogma of the Doctrine of Discovery also perpetuates the norm of 531 years of continental colonialism across the entire continent by the mechanism of the concept of “successor states” to the doctrine that is upheld by each and every “American” state today.
This nefarious international policy of impunity in violation of the right of self-determination of the Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples is further reinforced by another discriminatory dogma of contemporary international law known the “Blue Water Rule” relevant to the right of Self Determination of Indigenous Nations.
“The question is no longer whether the Doctrine of Discovery as it is still being perpetuated in policy and practice across the hemisphere is valid. That question has been answered, definitively and finally. There is no moral, legal, or cultural presentation that can legitimately argue that the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, which spawned the Doctrine of Discovery by Christendom, can hold any validity in a democratic society by positing the “Divine Right of States”. What is in question now, is on what side of history will each of us as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations and as Human Beings stand."
Continental Commission Abya Yala
World Water One
CONTEXT
Today, just as there is no valid legal, moral, religious or ethical case to
made in defense of the Doctrine of Discovery of Christendom as the theological
premise for the continued normalization of the ongoing colonization and
genocide of Indigenous Peoples of the Great Turtle Island Abya Yala, operating
with purported privileged territorial claims of jurisdiction over Indigenous
Nations territories, neither is there a valid presumption to continue to prescribe
and officialize the temporal aspects of the regimes of domination that
originate from the same cultural pathology of the “Western World”.
TIME is NOW: Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth
The celebration of the fulfillment of the 13th Baktun of the Maya Calendar on the winter solstice of 2012 has as its measurement of cyclical proportion a fundamental set unit of 20 days which is marked by the Maya Long Count starting on August 13, 3114 BCE. Known today in Izkaloteka tradition as the Cicitlalmina, the original date has correspondence to the annual appearance of the Perseid Meteor Shower every year in mid-August. Today, the Tolteka-Izkaloteka continue to celebrate the annual arrival of the cicitlalmina. The active imagery of this astronomical phenomena symbolically depicts the falling of rain upon the original milpa (cornfield) of the ancestral nations of Anáhuac.
With this millennial history and collective consciousness in place and activated, in 2020 the Continental Commission Abya Yala called for the Izcalli Abya Yala as Continental Indigenous Uprising and Emergence to coincide and synchronize with the Spring-Fall equinoxes of that year.
The call of the Izcalli Abya Yala of 2020 was to vision, to organize and exercise the Right of Self Determination as Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples acting in Continental Alliance and Confederation in defense of the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth. Since 2020, the processes of uprising and emergence, evaluation and organizing from local-regional, continental-global scales of incidence by the Indigenous Nations of Abya Yala continues to develop and mature.
The World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia took place in 2010. The event was attended by some 30,000 people from over 100 countries.
After Cochabamba, the conceptual and political disconnect between the rhetoric of the “progressive” and “ecologically sustainable” discourse at the international levels collapsed of its own weight. It became evident, not for the first time of course, but in today’s time that there was an urgent need to intentionally shift the paradigm of context of the global climate debate beyond the limiting and controlling agendas of the “sovereign state” Westphalian system (AKA the UN system) and move strategically into regeneration of a global set of relationships of INTERDEPENDENCE as Nations of Peoples of Mother Earth.
In Cochabamba at the World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, these principles were hailed as the Cochabamba Protocols.
The Cochabamba Protocols
Respect
Inclusion
Complementarity
Self Determination and Interdependence
Today in 2023, in the wake of the recent failures of the UN systems to competently address the climate crisis impacting the planet and all humanity, the call is now for the invocation of the defense of the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth as a fundamental and complementary principle and strategic framework in order to interconnect, interrelate and move forward outside of the fractured and competing agendas of the states, and the economic interests of supra-national corporate dominion and exploitation that control and define the terms of the climate change crisis in terms of “development”.
What is in question is the need for the international legal system of the planet to escape the conceptual constraints and the ethical void of the colonial legacy which gave origin to the present international framework, in open violation of the right of self-determination of the Indigenous Peoples, equal to all other peoples.
Such a geopolitical trajectory could provide an effective strategic repositioning of global ecological concerns vis-à-vis the fractured interests of the states and the corresponding geopolitical blocs of power and competition.
A multilateral world that integrated the recognition of Indigenous Nationhood, where the rights and responsibilities of the Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples of Mother Earth are acknowledged and respected could provide a possible alternative to the self-destructive modus operandi of the present international regimes of competition, consumption, and finally the fatal degradation of the biosphere.
Today the Continental Commission Abya Yala reaffirms and now proclaims our mutual commitment to defend and protect the Territorial Integrity of Mother Earth as a fundamental tenet of contemporary International Law which integrates the Right of Self Determination of the Nations of Indigenous Peoples to intervene in the defense of Mother Earth and to take necessary corrective action in exercise of the right of Free, Prior and Informed Consent in defense of their territories and nations.
We further proclaim the fundamental precept of World Water One as the common cultural principle of cognition, collective planetary consciousness, and responsibility in order to empower our efforts of corrective actions to ensure the well-being of all humanity and the future generations.
The issue is not about what we want.
It is about what we WILL.
Self Determination of Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples of Mother Earth.
In a moment’s time
There is a place.
Where all that came to be
Arrives
In grace
then-there
Here-Now
Nican Tlacah
Cemanahuac
#WorldWaterOne
Continental Commission Abya Yala
TECHANTIT
VISION MAYA
TONATIERRA