The Wixárika People Candidacy

We westerners have come to believe in One God, or no god at all.
We perceive people’s earnest talk about their god, or worse still, their gods, with an unlimited dose of scepticism. What lots of us secretly really would like to do is laugh in their faces and beg them to stop their infantile talk.
Now, imagine for a moment a Huichol, listening to the voice of a forebear – a father or mother, a grandparent or even a great-grandparent – talking to her or him from the depths beyond the mind, opened up by the hikuri, the venerated peyote. Imagine that Huichol person entering into a discussion with this forebear, through which the entire past of the Huichol people is progressively revealed, its tribal customs and its intimate relation to the natural world. Archetypal images of peyote, deer, corn - the mother – and the primordial snake that represents cosmic creation, are hallucinated from beyond the mind. These archetypes are not just images, but symbols of the divine Huichol pantheon that form part of their mythology and are venerated together with the forebears. Accessible once the doors of perception have been cleaned by hikuri, these images come to life and turn the Huichol celebrant into an equal of these divinities, participant of creation and responsible for it. Since this responsibility is not a mentally accepted political issue but the result of a profoundly lived existential, physical experience, the Huichols engage from personal desire in a harmonious relation with their natural environment.

We westerners have been prohibited the use of mind-altering products; we have been separated from the voices of our forebears and our gods and are totally alienated from our bodies and nature around us: we live in an existential void.
We say that we are trying desperately to save the natural world, although we continue turning it into an ever bigger garbage can. After all, what do our small efforts matter if governments and the captains of industry promote toxic waste on unimagined levels? The way out of the global ecological suicide and the economic model sustaining it seems almost impossible. Hopefully it isn't and as long as we believe in the possibility of a future for our off-spring, we must look for alternative ways of development. The Huichol people do give us an example of a spiritually rewarding life coupled to a deep respect and devoted care for the natural environment, enabled by their wise and respectful use of the mind-altering peyote.
We are therefore happy to propose the Huichol people, represented by the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and the Traditional Arts in the person of its director Susana Eger Valadez, for the nomination of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, in the hope that this candidacy will draw attention to the valuable example the Huichols offer the world.

In her "Presentation" and 'Interview" (links in the left margin) Susana Valadez gives relevant information on the Huichols, the Huichol Center and her own person.
In his paper "The Shared Candidacy of the Wixárika People for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize", our president Adriaan Bronkhorst puts this candidacy in its historical context.