Before diving into the pages of this work, some critical notes will significantly help me orient you toward Indigenous worldviews. I hope these notes begin to build better bridges between our ways of knowing and aid you in getting a little bit more familiar with my writing position. Some of these notes may sound introductory. Setting a beginner’s mind is intentional. The beginner’s mindset is a most helpful place to incite curiosity. You will find in these notes various topics, from Indigenous languages, the plurality of Indigenous Peoples, respect for traditional protocols, and Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) to the now ubiquitous yet mostly lackluster Land Acknowledgments. May these initial orientations invite you to enter feeling welcome, just as I hope you would feel coming to a newly met Relative’s home.
At the beginning of every speaking engagement or here in the Invitation to Enter Flourishing Kin, the audience often listens to my introduction in my Indigenous language. While I have Maya ancestry on my father’s side and Nahua Tlaxcalteca and Ñañhu Otomí on my mother’s side, I grew up in the Maya area of the Ba’tsil k’op Peoples (the People of Truth), known in Spanish as Tzeltal. Thus, this is the language I mostly heard as a child and the one I feel most familiar with.
In the Invitation of this book, you will find a taste of the writing in what we call our original language, Ba’tsil K’op, the True Word, or Maya Tzeltal language. If you use the QR code, you can listen to how this language sounds in the recording of my reciting it. This opening with the Native language that I heard as a child is an invitation to entrain the resonance the language has in my heart.
Apart from being a statement of presence, speaking my Mother tongue invites you to come forth to listen to sounds that may be unfamiliar. It is not surprising these Native languages haven’t been commonly listened to. Historically, Indigenous languages have been silenced for centuries due to colonialism. You may have heard that boarding schools prohibited children from speaking their Native languages so that the children would acquire mainstream languages. This happened to me. I was discriminated against for speaking my tongue and was advised against speaking it in public for fear of jeopardizing the possibility of social mobility.
It is troublesome yet inspiring to comprehend how crucial this statement of presence is. Let me explain a bit what I mean by this, from the particular to the universal aspects of language preservation.
There are thirty recognized languages in the Maya family of Mesoamerica. Around 6 million people speak one of these Maya languages in Mexico and Guatemala—eight are spoken in the former and twenty-one in the latter. Tzeltal is one of these.
I have listened to Ancestors on my father’s side speak in Tzeltal since I was born. Because of family migrations from Guatemala to Mexico, I have Ancestors ascending from my Grandfather speaking Mochó, Mam, and Kaqchikel Maya. My Grandmother’s line has lived for the nine generations we know of in the Chiapas Ocosingo Valley, speaking Tzeltal and Spanish.
Estimates from the 2020 census suggest that 590 thousand people are monolingual speakers of Tzeltal. Together with Tzotzil (550,000 speakers) and Ch’ol (130,000 speakers), these three are the only Maya languages that are flourishing—due to recent revitalization initiatives to slow the cultural loss and recover linguistic diversity. Most other Maya languages are endangered, and two have become extinct.
Another example of the diversity of Indigenous languages is from the Nahua Peoples, Ancestors on my mother’s side. The Nahua are the largest and most diverse Indigenous group in Mesoamerica. The Nahuatl language originates from the Uto-Aztecan language family and has more than twenty variants.1 Before the Spanish colonization, the Nahua were composed of various groups sharing practices, beliefs, customs, and linguistic aspects. The ancient Nahua tribes split off from other Uto-Aztecan-speaking peoples and migrated from the current Mexican states of Durango and Nayarit to central Mexico around 500 CE.2
In the fifteenth century, before contact with Spain, a collection of Nahua ethnic groups lived in and around the basin of what is now Mexico. The more influential of them formed a political coalition called the Triple Alliance in 1427, nearly a century before the Spanish arrival. This Alliance brought together the city-states of Tenochtitlan (Mexica, most commonly yet erroneously known as Aztec, Nation), Texcoco (Acolhua Nation), and Tlacopan (Tepanec Nation). The Mexica nation may be the most famous, but they were the last group to arrive in the area and become dominant due to their war-driven nature.
The Nahua continues to expand southward from Mexico to Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.3 While 1.7 million people self-identify as Nahua in Mexico today, many speak mutually unintelligible variants.4
I recall my Elders reaching out to Mother Earth and our more-than-human Relatives in these tongues. My Grandparents, Aunties, and Uncles spoke them, however, less and less as time passed. We started talking in Tzeltal only among the community, then in private. The stigma of speaking an Indigenous language carried identity wounds from which colonial society forced us to hide. We were encouraged to learn the settler-colonial languages to guarantee social mobility. Others, in turn, distanced themselves from the tongues, trying to assimilate, adapt, and conform to the ideals—twisted as they are—of mainstream structures.
Those were other times.
Those were times of banishment and falling.
Those were times of shame and hiding when colonialism and its practices of discrimination pushed for only a handful of languages.
We are losing complex webs of relating, naming, experiencing, learning, and being day by day. These ecological complexities are dissolving like our planet’s glaciers.
In a way, languages maintain and respect the equilibrium of these natural flows because they nourish Spirit and give it a voice. When the tongues of Mother Earth fade—wordings as diverse as her landscapes and Peoples—it also dwindles her living presence. We forget how and when She speaks to us. We forget Her ways of gratitude and reverence. We disconnect from Her web of relations. We deny our responsibility to and impact on others. As a result, we unknowingly block our path to the flow of flourishing.
And so, in time, even Mother Earth hid Her Spirit from us.
Many humans didn’t realize when we started speaking only to other humans. Eventually, most fell enamored with the sound of their own voices.
But times are changing.
As resistance is relentless, so is cohesion.
Times are changing as water shifts, enlivening those she touches—or drowning them.
Like water, enraging, receding, and returning in full force, Indigenous languages resurface in tides of cultural restoration.
Like water, Indigenous wisdom persuades the rock heart to yield.
So, too, I believe humans are relearning how to listen.
By bringing our sounds to the people, we breathe new life into our cultures and ways of being. We conceive our places, origins, and nourishment through a spiral time, enduring our stories to the present.
We are committed to preserving our intangible heritage, emotions, thoughts, art, and spiritual expressions through our languages. We remember that the health of languages relates to the health of the people and the planet, and that collective states of flourishing and well-being are the rivers of living systems within natural cycles, emanating a sinuous grace in their surroundings.
Over half of the 6,700 languages spoken today are Indigenous (almost 4,000). While Nahuatl and Maya Tzeltal seem to be healthy living languages, recent estimates have shown that half of the world’s Indigenous languages are spoken by less than 1,000 people, resulting in the loss of one Indigenous language every two weeks. I shudder at the stark projection of 90 percent of all Indigenous languages being lost by 2100.
The Los Pinos Declaration was signed in Mexico to highlight this critical language loss. It calls for the Decade for Indigenous Languages (2022–2032), inciting the international community to join Indigenous Peoples in urging for the integration, preservation, revitalization, and promotion of our multilingual tongues and linguistic diversity at the local and global levels.
The first University for Indigenous Languages launched in Mexico in 2023 with the mandate to ensure mother tongue, bilingual, and multilingual education. Worldwide, many actions are sprouting to guarantee access to health care in Indigenous languages and to strengthen our Indigenous medicine systems. Initiatives are establishing justice systems, public services, and policies in our Native languages. Promoting Indigenous knowledge is happening in technologies and media in our languages.
By honoring these different voices throughout time and space into the here and now, we incite awareness and action. A sudden insight, moment of wisdom, commitment, and hope bridges identities with possibilities and opportunities for becoming kin.
Exquisite treasure chests that open up cultures, knowledges, and ways of being, languages are the sound practices of our Ancestors’ lifeways. They remind us of how they experienced Lands and life. We learn to care and belong from these songs because we have become familiar with them. We have made them family, we have made them kin.
As the conduit of new stories, languages are creators and destructors of worlds. Their performative quality extends our circle of care for Mother Earth.
The Tzeltal poem that begins this book sings of our living lifeways. It is a bittersweet song of diversity and planetary health to reverse biocultural loss. It is a challenge to the ongoing human othering of colonialism. It is a call to action to keep singing life through these sound windows of values and cultivate hearts to reclaim their place and belonging.
It is the song of a world in which children do not need to hide. A world in which we listen to our Ancestors of Earth and blood right here—in the whisper of these pages and out there in the plazas, in the markets, and why not, also in the digital worlds.
It is the lullaby of the grandma to her grandchild, who is dreaming while awake.
To speak about Indigenous Peoples is to discuss plurality, diversity, and ceaseless change. Living, dynamic Indigenous cultures are tremendously complex to explain in a cultural overview. This book considers certain agreements on Indigenous identities and shared worldviews that have helped establish an international collective voice. However, these insights do not intend to be comprehensive or speak for those voices represented unless through their own stories.
Indigenous Peoples represent around 6 percent of the world’s population and live within the most culturally diverse and enduring traditions.5 And yet, across these nearly 5,000 cultures, we share similar perspectives about relationality and caring for Mother Earth.6 The mere capitalization of the words “Land” and “Country” emphasizes the cultural importance and vital relation with our Landscapes.
It is well known that Indigenous Lands make up a third of Land-protected areas, containing almost 80 percent of the remaining biodiversity now harshly threatened by the climate crisis.7 Furthermore, Indigenous Peoples all over, as widely diverse in tribal identity as the biodiversity of our territories, are threatened by exclusionary practices of colonialism and coloniality. Therefore, for Indigenous Nations, nourishing strong relationships, reclaiming our Lands, and ensuring the conservation of Mother Nature are matters of survival.
The Indigenous movement has found consistency within plurality and unity by asserting symbols that allow Indigenous Peoples to emerge as political actors in the international community. Our agreements on a global identity have been intentional with the sole purpose of constructing a global movement that rises above multiethnic differences to create assemblies, consensual processes, and platforms of participation in the international, regional, and national political arenas around the world.
However, the right to self-determination also grants each Indigenous Nation the right to define their customs and traditions. Self-determination is one of the most vital demands of justice and presence. It is a way to get past historical discrimination and marginalization in national and international political and judicial frameworks. The emergence of this robust global influence has been called Indigenous diplomacy, which moves through the international community through horizontal and democratic structures.8
Indigenous traditions have endured ongoing appropriation, exploitation, extraction, capitalization, and commodification of tangible (e.g., material property) and intangible heritage (e.g., intellectual property, cultural skills, traditions, arts, rituals, ceremonies, and genetic material) by Western research with devastating consequences. My life’s work with my Indigenous lineage and other Indigenous traditions follows strict protocols for proper and respectful approach, translation, and dissemination. I work closely with traditional Elders and knowledge-holders to identify the most relevant practices of their region to be shared with the world for planetary benefit without infringing on what is culturally sensitive. Oral traditions and knowledges have only been shared with the Elders’ approval. Together, we orient this research toward a new generation of collaborative work on equal standing with the West. We are keenly aware of ethical principles of acknowledgment, knowledge-translation, benefit-sharing, and belonging.
My mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and so on were Spirit medicine practitioners. My father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so forth were poets (poetry is a medicine for the soul). I have faced the push for assimilation for my entire education in Western systems. Fortunately, my lyrical and medicinal lineage roots are rebels and have held firm. As you will see, my Indigenous ontology and epistemology invariably appear in my expression. Some of my stylistic choices will seem unfamiliar, even incorrect, to non-Indigenous readers. I ask you to question the role that a Western-biased mindset of linguistic coloniality may be playing in such interpretations.
Among the style differences you will notice are purposeful capitalization to denote respect and awareness of personhood (e.g., Mother Earth, Lands, Ancestors, and Indigenous Peoples); the use of collectives and plurals to indicate multiplicity and plurality (e.g., of our wisdom, sciences, knowledges, Peoples, Lands, etc.); the use of Indigenous names in favor of colonial names (e.g., Turtle Island for North America, Abya Yala for Latin America, and Indigenous-specific tribal names instead of settler-colonialist identifications).
I generally avoid the use of pan-Indigenous language. It only appears when applied to the global political identity and shared issues that have achieved consensus agreements (e.g., working definitions within international entities, policies, movements, and so on). This attitude is part of a robust movement toward the Indigenous reclamation of identity aimed at asserting agency, difference, and plurality. We transform prejudice by bridging and educating on what it means to be Indigenous.
Indigenous Peoples assert our tangible and intangible intellectual cultures. The mere idea of property is a Western notion of ownership from which many Indigenous traditions distance themselves. Being Indigenous does not ever imply the loose handling of cultural wisdom or other Indigenous oral traditions. As a stand against extractivism and appropriation, any material constituting Indigenous cultural property will clearly state their lineage holders and will be used only under appropriate permission.
Indigenous cultural property such as traditional knowledges and oral traditions follow specific protocols for their use, sharing, and implementation that require permission from lineage holders. Any stories, ceremonies, and rituals shared here have been granted permission for respectful sharing with a wider audience. No cultural property whatsoever is shared that is deemed sacred and intended only for traditional member-specific use.
We are here.
We stand strong.
We are changing the world.
With the purpose of replacing the stereotypical views, assumptions, and generalizations about Indigenous Peoples, this book offers a glimpse of the sophistication, current standing, living and adapting, and transformative power of diverse Indigenous perspectives on living.
Land acknowledgments have become ubiquitous today. Institutions have a disclaimer recognizing that they have historically benefited from the Indigenous Peoples and Lands on which they stand without returning the benefits to the original inhabitants. Acknowledging is the first step. Now, institutional transformation through community engagement is the next imperative step. Reparations are urgent. Recognition of Indigenous governance is essential.
We must move from an identity of othering to one of belonging. We must do so in a way that honors Indigenous presence, dignity, and reemergence. Institutions must begin to establish relationships that return Lands and benefits to their original stewards, restoring authority, recognizing Indigenous Tribes as Nations, and establishing kinship.
That is to say that naming is not enough.
Land acknowledgments are not enough.
Collective action rises as far as collective insight happens, with a vision for humane societies and institutions based on flourishing kin. Engaged relationships center on reflection and reorientation through reckoning, reparation, and revitalization of lifeways that pursue planetary flourishing.
What do Indigenous worldviews or cosmovisions tell us about how to do this? What do they say about who we are and the community-created identity versus the self-created one imposed upon us? How do we learn to relate based on narratives of belonging? How do we connect intentionally and compassionately with the larger Mother Earth community?
Acknowledgment may lead to flourishing as long as it translates into action that ensures access to education, health, safety, and overall dignified living. For our Lands, this means protecting their personhood, thus the rights to the well-being of waters, forests, soils, and skies.
Land acknowledgment is a starting point, but there is much more in terms of reparations that must be done. Demand that your institutions participate in the restoration of dignity and home for all. Some explicit and recognizable initiatives are free education and scholarships for Native students, from elementary school to earning a college degree; Indigenous representation in tenure-track faculty positions; institutional Indigenous-led review boards for all concerns related to Indigenous affairs; and, of course, LandBack recommends ways to return actual Land and initiatives to restore authority to Indigenous stewardship and Land management. Some of these ethical ways to right relationships will be covered here, and we can create more possibilities together.