Category: Indigenous culture
-
From Medicine Bow to Standing Rock
By Tracy L. Barnett Dec. 9 – I landed back at my daughter Tara’s doorstep at almost midnight, filled with gratitude and relief to have made it safely full circle home from my journey to Standing Rock. I fell into a deep deep sleep and awoke with a fragment of a dream – just an image,…
-
San Antonio Missions preserve Native American history in Texas’s first World Heritage Site
Story and photos by Tracy L. Barnett for the Washington Post Two weathered gravestones sit in a small, dusty rectangle in front of the grand Spanish church at the heart of the nation’s newest UNESCO World Heritage Site, the San Antonio Missions. I’ve been to Mission San Jose many times — to attend the lively…
-
Huicholes: The Last Peyote Guardians
This week Huicholes: The Last Peyote Guardians had its world premiere – fittingly in the remote mountain enclave of Real de Catorce, the picturesque colonial capital of Wirikuta – followed by a second showing after a rugged two-day journey into Wixarika territory in the even more remote Sierra Madre. The most important movie to date…
-
Evo Morales, the plurinational president
Forget Barak Obama – he’s so 2009. Evo Morales is the new rock star president, as I learned in Coyoacan this weekend. A sea of enthusiastic people of every ethnicity waited for hours in the hot sun to hear his plea for a more just society, one that provides a dignified life for all and…
-
Hope prevails through a bitter winter in Bancos de San Hipólito
We arrived in the fog-draped settlement of Buenos Aires, Durango, just after 9 a.m. It had been a hard night’s drive through a pouring rain, enlivened only by the stories of my tireless travel companion, human rights lawyer Carlos Chávez of the Jalisco Association in Support of Indigenous People (AJAGI, by its Spanish acronym). We…
-
The movie Chevron doesn’t want you to see
Like most of his friends and neighbors in the Amazon village where he was born, Pablo Fajardo went to work for Texaco at an early age. But unlike most of his coworkers, he was unwilling to disregard the flagrant abuses of the land and people that he witnessed every day on the job. He made up…
-
Amid sweat and tears, Esperanza is born
Here in the darkness of the temezcal, sweat, steam and mud become one with the throbbing beat of Teresa’s drum. The heat bears down, melting away the boundaries between us. Rhythms from her Mayan heritage rise in the air with the incense-like scent of copal, her voice carrying us to a place beyond time. She…