By William Booth, The Washington Post
REAL DE CATORCE, Mexico — For the Huichol Indians, the desert mountains here are sacred, a cosmic portal with major mojo, where shamans collect the peyote that fuels the waking dreams that hold the universe together.
For a Canadian mining company, these same hills look like a billion dollars worth of buried silver.
The Huichol had come from their village 150 miles away to hunt peyote — the hallucinogenic cactus they call “the blue deer.” The Huichol eat the peyote cactus raw or dried, producing auditory and visual hallucinations — pleasant or not — and sensations of introspection and deep insight.
“For the Huichol, peyote serves as the central sacrament of their rituals,” said Paul Liffman, an anthropologist at the Colegio de Michoacan, who has studied the group for years. It is not a party drug. “It is taken to illuminate the user, to light them from inside.”
As the permits are sought for the silver mine, and other threats mount in the area (another outfit seeking gold, a hothouse tomato industry nearby), Liffman said, “I have never seen the Huichol this scared. In their view, this is an existential threat.”
The Huichol, who might number 50,000, are poor but proud. They may be subsistence farmers eking out a living growing beans and corn, but they believe that their rituals to honor the deities and their ancestors — and their protection of a sacred geography of springs, hills and beaches — are necessary to preserve the integrity of the entire universe.
“They’re not exactly given to modesty,” Liffman said.
Wary of outsiders, living in inaccessible villages far away, they are allying themselves with a loose confederation of hippies and anthropologists, Mexican activists and horticultural tourists who have made the former ghost town of Real de Catorce into a kind of New Age energy hub of their own, where an ersatz Apache from Italy might take a couple of visiting seekers into the desert to hunt some recreational blue deer for themselves.
Read more from The Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/cosmic-portal-threatened-by-silver-mine/2012/02/04/gIQA7iB0BR_story_1.html
Update on this story: “Mexican court suspends mining in sacred territory of the Wixarika“
Speaking about minig, please check this:
http://damantigui.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/the-dogs-flute-en/
I have to admit I never thought that my comment would be published. The truth is that most environmentalists websites do not accept opposing views. You have my respect for that and I therefore appreciate any -contrary- comments to that published in my post above mentined.
10Q!
No problem. In some ways I like your analysis, insofar as it points out some of the ways that we are bound up in the economic system.
But where I think you are wrong is that you make the assumption that it is hypocritical to say, protest mining and also wear jewelry. But it is only hypocritical if what you are protesting is people WEARING jewelry. If what you are protesting is the existence of mines, it is not hypocritical to wear jewelry, because whether or not you wear jewelry does essentially nothing to eliminate mines or mining. If what you are against is mines, what would make you hypocritical is not using whatever methods are effective at stopping them. If instead you chose to simply live naked without possessions in some cave, living on grubs and berries, that would not do anything to stop mining. Killing yourself wouldn’t do anything to stop mining either. Abstaining from earrings would be a pitifully non-strategic way to try to eliminate mines or mining. We are not the world. We cannot change the world by changing ourselves. We can only change the world by changing it. And because we are situated in the world, we have to use whatever is available to us in that world to accomplish what we want to accomplish. Someone can drive a car and still want to live in a world without them. Someone can benefit from mining and still want to abolish it. Someone can benefit from third world slavery and still fight to see it end. We can act, against our own best interests, to make the world a better place.