We live a transitional situation

A conversation with the Mamos
Francisco Zalabata and Crispín Izquierdo

To answer your question about our justice system in Arhuaco society, I would say it does not exist among us, because we walk in harmony with nature. Our judges are the great stones, the tall trees, and the big mountains, even the singing of the birds. They do not harm anyone. The justice system that we at present know is an imposition of the dominant society, carried through entities as the cabildos, sheriffs, police inspectors, etc. Some behaviours coming from the major society were also imposed on us, and they induced members of our community to commit crimes that are alien to us. Concerning them, we have to use a justice system different from the one we have been using for millennia. The idea we have is that some day society wakes up and finds a thought that fits the teachings we receive from Nature.

Now, the interest of the Mamos from La Sierra Nevada is to share with you the experience we have lived since the arrival of the Spaniards and other societies in this Continent. There ought to be a new awakening. In the Sierra Nevada there are four original societies, and though we suffered several attempts to impose cultural knowledge on us, it has been difficult for them to succeed. Therefore, we have there a sort of core, an embryo, which from the hights is constantly watching over human balance all over the world. And due to this caring for the balance of the world, now we see how they are slowly receiving some of our messages. Such is the case with the announcements of the Ministry of the Environment. For millennia have we protected the environment, and only now they begin to talk about it. But we natives do not want to participate in this. This would then be the opportunity for you to begin to worry about the situation we are going through. There must be a radical change in all that concerns human knowledge, for up to now all we have had is self-destruction; that is, of Mother Earth, of our mountains, the poisoning of the sea, of our rivers, of our lakes, and a decrease of the flora and fauna, which is impoverishing the earth. I ask myself: if we go on destroyng the earth at this pace, where are we going to end up?

You, the young, and the children, who are the seeds of the future, should be on the alert now; and so we could together accomplish a great task for the earth. The area of the Sierra from Simon Bolivar Peak is about 60 kilometers in all directions. The population is of some 250.000 inhabitants, of which 45.000 are natives, and the rest are either settlers or mestizos. There are twelve municipalities, distributed in the Guajira, Cesar and Magdalena Departments. Counting the Wayu, the tribes that inhabit the Sierra Nevada would be five. Most of the present settlers in the Sierra come from inland, and they seem to be sympathetic with our proposal of creating a corporation, or Colombia's first ecological department, or an autonomous territory comprising all the reservations. What we do not want is to create just one more burocratic organism.

As to the problem between the guerillas and the Government, we have been pushed into a corner. We are hardly able to defend ourselves. And we have not suffered the worst lot in this conflict, but the villages bordering our territories have lived the hardships of it. They defend themselves by futher moving into the Sierra. Kidnapper bands operating in Valledupar, Fonseca, Riohacha, and Santa Marta use the Sierra as a hiding place; but we do not get involved in that, since by Nature and by law we do not agree with this kidnapping. And no one of us would belong to any of these groups. That was one of the early agreements we made when the guerillas began to enter into our territories: that no one of us would take part in military practices, for we are not militarists, and we do not like fighting. We have other ways of working: a spiritual work, a human work.

To talk about the violence we live nowadays, we must consider that even before the formation of the planet earth, two kinds of forces manifested themselves: the ones embodying positive thought, and the negative forces. The earth was to suffer great violence. Indeed, since then the earth is being violated. That negative thought took in different directions, different manifestations in the human race... and so, some people want their own thought to be the only one over the earth, as if they posessed the true thought of humankind. Jealousy of thought is then turned into a religious problem, leading them into tremendous rivalry and to the loss of earth's true knowledge. They turn religious thought into prepotency, then into power of riches, and finally into power of war. Those who have more powerful weapons were the ones who conquered in war, and so on.

That kind of thinking gradually degenerated human thought; then they lost control, they lost the thread to the purpose of the creation of mankind, being it the maintainance of the balance of the world. But the dominant society is now living the consequences of those past events. They do not follow the steps of the true Mamos anymore. For indeed they had them in the past, but they have no idea now. They made a mess of all that knowledge, and today you can ask them what they know about a plant, about a tree, about a hill, and we are sure they do not have the slightest idea about their meaning. But they surely have held ideas of destruction. And that is how they are robbing the soul, robbing the blood, as it happens with oil... There, at the bottom of the sea, at the bottom of the earth, are the spirit and the soul of the planet, represented by the water, by the river, by the great sources of riches. But they went mad, as they found the easiest one: gold —the inner force of the earth with which we used to represent the deities and powers of the earth, and make her her offerings. They robbed all that bullion, and not to represent the sacred deities by means of which to thank the earth, but they turned it into a power of riches, of opulence, and they became obscure. That human sense that we should have is turned into competition for power, for knowledge; but that is then a false knowledge, it is not a simple knowledge, it is not a knowledge of unity with our brothers. That is a knowledge of self-destruction among brothers.

To talk about the problems in the Lagoon and Sierra of Santa Marta is a painful thing, and the Mamos are worried about that situation. We have had these great mountains well guarded through millennia, but from the 70s on, an avalanche of younger brothers from the interior has been falling upon us; and they began to make their green gold in this rich lands: first with marihuana, and now with poppies. But that is not our business. Today, only 25% of the ancient forest remains in the Sierra. We know that, and also that it is connected with the serious problems the great Lagoon is going through. Fishermen and landlords arround the Sierra are suffering the consequences of the felling of this 75% of the Sierra's sacred forests. They will soon have no water. We have enough water for our subsistence, but the problem arises when we try to explain to the neighbouring settlers, landlords, and banana growers that if the 25% of forest that remains be felled, they would have no water at all. There lies the problem, and we have insisted upon this to the Government: that the point is not to carry on development plans in the Sierra, but rather to repopulate it with natives, and not only for the sake of our tradition, but also because the Mamos assure that every native's plot will be a sanctuary. Instead of spending so much in technical studies and so on, the Government should buy land from the settlers, and in this way we would recuperate a vast area of the Sierra Nevada.

As to the problem of illness, we have to say that we Mamos are healers, and not only of men, but of Nature also. What we ought to do is a medical exchange. So, among us, the Mamos have to compare diagnosis, which are based on the type of plant that most identifies with the sick person, and the hour and date of birth. With that information it is easy to prescribe a medicine. If the illness is not predominantly biological, the solution must have recourse to the knowledge of Nature's messages. We relate, then, Nature, plant, and man, thus having the precise formula to heal.

However, if the illness is brought by the major society, we have to make a special offering to pay for that penicillin some one is going to be administered. In ancient times, this procedure was not used, and we rather waited for the hour of our blessing. But now we are exchanging both medical knowledges —the traditional and the official. But before we receive the inoculation of any official medicine, we must do a very long spiritual excercise. Only then may we receive it. This attitude is indeed different from the one "evangelized" people have, for they do not accept any kind of medicine or transfusion; they would rather die. And all this as a result of the imposition of the Gospel.

The cause of our mistrust of our younger brothers are the religious onsets we have suffered. Because of them many of our Mamos were assasinated by order of the friars, who also had our temples set in fire. At that time we had to take to the mountains and hide. Some of our ancestors submisively went to the friars, gave themselves up like fish to the missionaries; and once there, they practiced a double religion. While with the priests, they prayed; but when they could escape, they ran back to the Mamos, and sought to be at peace with the Sierra. We lived all that; but the worst part was for those who neither went to the Mamos, nor to the Catholics. After 1982, when the Catholic Church was driven out of the Sierra, the native Catholics were left helpless, and neither continued practicing that religion, nor took refuge in their native tradition. Many of them became "mestizos", as they call themselves, and it is with them we have had the biggest troubles in our internal organization. Many of them assumed this mentality: they became traders and sponsors of illegal plantations... and we know that they are natives.

We are living a similar problem with the Evangelicals: though they are not many, they can cause damage to the rest of our community. Their priests are not natives, they are strangers; they take our people to participate in their practices, and make them become fanatics.

A similar thing happened in 1967 with the gringos and their Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, settled in the Sabana de Jordán region. There they had the seat of their cult, and they launched campaigns to convince the natives to go over to their Church; and, at the same time, used pills that were meant to sterilize our women, aiming so to destroy our community.

Our younger brothers who care for the health of the country and of the earth, should realize that we have a 500-year-old grandpa called the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where all the wisdom lies that might rekindle a great movement all over the world. And that moment is not far, for now we are living a transitional situation until the year 2000. During this period, governments will have a very hard time, very troublesome social upheavals. Form that year on, there will be an awakening of ecological movements all around the world. The Mamos are preparing this moment, when they may give all their wisdom and knowledge to the children, the young, and the women, so that everybody, no matter where he is, may be a soldier of the earth, may carry out his reflections, and take others along that path.

That will then be heard; the principle of balance between man and earth will then be imparted. Very different indeed would it be if the Mamos' claim that the so-called progress do not touch the Sierra is not heeded. Our Mamos, through their knowledge, have taught us that the harm being inflicted to the earth is enormous; that many species have vanished without even leaving us traces of their knowledge, of their teachings, of their healing properties. And that is a great pity. One observes how, in a brutal way, they are ravaging the mountains, causing a great harm to the earth. Therefore, we must appeal to the people to give careful consideration to plants, to their lessons as living beings. If plants are treated as such, other animal species will reappear, because they would find an environment whereupon they can nourish; and we, following the life of that environment, observing which plants animals feed out of, will open the way to their teachings about new foodstuff for us to find. But if we do not find these plants, and, on the contrary, destroy them; if we put our hopes on industrial agriculture, on monocultures; we will be generating new plagues, new deseases, that would be very hard for humans to control. That is why we do not agree to this type of agriculture. We have to undertake again the agricultural practices of our ancestors. In a single orchard they used to have more than 50 varities of food yielding plants, and they grew them in a very little area, and some plants noursihed others, and the insects lived together with them and did not damaged the seeds.

When a plant is grown isolatedly, she does not have the strength she should have, had she been planted in society. And the same would happen to us if we destroy that great society of plants that live upon the earth.

In our rituals we have to engage in reflections in order that the vast number of plants that are on their way to extinction, proliferate again. From childhood they teach us that to procure our nourishment and harmony with Nature, we ought to plant in an associative way, and never in the form of monoculture, for it is noxious to the earth. To maintain the balance in this associative agriculture, we have to make a great "pagamento" -from the verb pagar,to play by means of an offering- before we fell the trees of the land we are going to prepare for planting. We have to make a very special offering in honor of the piece of jungle we are going to sacrify. We ought to have a number of elements related to the different solar positions. Lunar and environmental conditions, as well as the rain seasons, are also taken into account. Everything must be in balance. If we make our offering in this state of balance, we shall have an endless supply of fruits of the earth, and we shall become conscious that we are receiving a very sacred gift from the earth.