"Attacks on sustainable societies: the Wixárika answer"

Part three: The representation by the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and the Traditional Arts in the person of its director Susana Eger Valadez

The Huichol socio-political structure, quasi non-existent at the overall tribal level, reflects the deep-rooted feelings of distrust of the Huichol society against the state. Power over others will inexorably be used against the interests of those subjugated to this power. It is evident for the Huichols that no human can deliver the sovereignty which the gods have delivered and that power in the hands of others will result in the theft of this gift of the gods. If only out of respect for the gods, power, i.e. the individual’s sovereignty, must remain with him or her. No other person, Huichol or foreigner, will be tolerated to come between the Huichol and her or his deities. That is the Huichol’s responsibility in the cosmic order.

This cosmovision of the Huichol people manifests a profound understanding of the inherent sacredness of nature and a deep sense of place that encompasses all their territories. For them, concepts such as community, culture, spirituality, nature and territory are an indivisible whole, united in space and time, where they live with the deities and the spirits of the whole creation, according to a ceremonial calendar respectful of all the rituals that do establish and maintain the intricate relational network of the Wixárika cosmos. It entails the access of each Huichol to the wholeness of life in the peyote induced visits with the deities. These intimate encounters of the individual Huichol with the gods exist thanks to the commitment between the Huichol people to assist one another to achieve this ‘quest for life’. The Wixárika people are defined by the implicit pledge to allow all Wixaritari to escape all human bonds, to escape Wixárika and the word of the mara’akame for an encounter with the divine world and to return afterwards safely in society. Not the group, but the individual member is the final goal of Wixárika society.

These encounters with the wholeness of life, which the monotheistic world religions and the UN, despite a Bill of Human Rights, have refused mankind, are delicate balancing acts which put man at the interface of two contradictory practices that often rub and collide, like on the boundary of two convergent tectonic plates. They are the practices of the mundane world versus the realm of the deities. In the latter, the spiritual world, auto-sacrifice is the free, disinterested gift to all, as all participate in the wholeness of the cosmos and power is neutralized because individual interest has dissipated together with the selfish ego. In the mundane world to the contrary, the Huichols protect individual sovereignty through the practice of reciprocal exchange, so that no obligations arise between persons and no one can acquire power over other persons and subjugate them. It is a person’s duty to protect his/her sovereignty and to prevent others from destroying it. The Huichols always understood that to thwart collisions between the divine and mundane realms they first of all had to neutralize the potential source of power that could obstruct the passage between the two: the expert interlocutors with the deities, the mara’akate.

These, as advocates of the wishes of the Huichols with the gods, deserve all support, but on their return as divine messengers they are to be distrusted as they might attribute divine qualities to themselves and, like gods who sacrificed their life for man, start to distribute gifts. Free gifts are reserved for the deities and not for the mara’akate, as they establish power with the giver over the receiver and will make from the mara’akame the enemy of his own people, who will insult and mock him and even reject him if reciprocity in relationships is denied, and he tries to formalize power. No man should come between man and his gods as the Huichols know from personal experience. In important ceremonies such as the Peyote Dance, rituals are therefore built-in to control those tectonic clashes between the worlds of reciprocity and sacrifice, exchange and gift, by allowing the ordinary Huichols to refuse gifts -like peyote and sacred water from Wirikuta- and obliging the mara'akate to accept payment.

The Huichols have managed throughout their existence to prevent anyone to close the doors to their gods. They always succeeded to organize on the lowest possible level, to be able to hold their ceremonies in their local ceremonial center with the Huichols of the neighboring ranches, under the guidance of their own mara’akate, in the group that would send its own pilgrims on the annual visits to the deities. Small enough to exercise internal control and to escape external control from the outer world where the many ceremonial duties required their attendance in faraway places. Too small to be of interest to foreign predators, strong enough to defend themselves against power-greedy local Huichols and their mountain holdouts against foreigners or to unite with other ceremonial centers in times of upheaval. The attack on Wirikuta changed it all: this time society didn’t attack the rights-protected humans directly but the soil beneath the peyotes, full of precious minerals. Now, the entire Huichol Nation had to resist. A nation however that doesn’t exist, didn’t want to exist and hasn’t acquired yet the potential to come into existence.

Huichol history can provide the solution, or better, the Huichol mythology, like it always did. The great upheavals of history were not to become the fault lines that would cut Huichols off from their past and their roots, estrange them from their own identity and subjugate them to the narrative of the oppressor. Thus, the myths had to marry past and present, create a synchronic time frame, an ever-modern Huichol identity. Consequently, the Huichols include the defining moments of their history into their mythology and as history had conquered their country, the Huichols had no choice but to overpower history and gobble it up. Their history is then an integral part of a living cosmogonic body of mythology, permanently updated and inclusive of all the Huichols, from the divine ancestors up to their present-day offspring.

Facts are mythologized, like the Aguamilpa hydroelectric dam on the Santiago River, built in the 1990’s, but according to living Huichol cosmogony a feature that emerged along with the great rivers of the sierra, in those “remote times”. Foreign myths are recast, syncretized, like the Roman Catholic Gospel. Indeed, it appeared to the Huichols that Jesucristo was the son of Tayaupa Father Sun and the Virgin of Guadalupe, when Tayaupa took pity on her when she was deserted by her husband, San Joseph, because she had fallen in with a bunch of drunken Spaniards. Jesucristo subsequently rose to eminence by winning a violin-playing contest and became a mara'akame in his own right, standing close to Tatewari in the Huichol panteon. The Semana Santa festivities have since become a most important event of the Huichol ceremonial calendar in some autonomous communities of the Nanayari. In short, the Huichols live rightfully in their XXIth century mythology.

Many of the historically grown events and situations included in Huichol mythology are often unspoken, so that they can be adapted or erased if ever necessary. Like the Mexican State, a foreign body the Huichols will distrust by nature but have come to accept as it prevents the chaos that would surround them in its absence. More important even, it allows them to have the dangers of the state exported to outside groups, like the mestizos, who now have the responsibility to deal with the corresponding power struggles in their society. The answer to ‘Wirikuta’ and to the problems the nationless Huichol people face could very well be the recognition of another fact of new Huichol mythology, in this case the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and the Traditional Arts, as a temporary Huichol Nation representing unit.

The Huichol Center has become during the last 35 years a fixed feature in the Huichol firmament. Located on the important way out of the Nanayari to the Kiekari hinterland, the Center is the inevitable stop for the pilgrims, from where they take off at the start of their long journey and come to rest on their return. The Center is the permanent place of exchange of information coming in from all quarters of the Wixárika world, from all Huichols who pass through. It attends to the physical and economic care of its people in need. It has an extensive ethnographic database containing numerous collections of Huichol language, music, visual arts, seed strains, etc, in digitalized data bases, henceforth available for future generations. The Center runs training programs for Huichol youth to learn and master the Huichol culture, for artists to master the typical painting techniques, for women to reproduce age old designs in their own handicrafts. The Huichol Center has become a true repository of the Huichol Culture and its director, Susana Eger Valadez, the patroness of the Huichol guardians. In fact, the Huichol Center too is already becoming part of the living Huichol mythology and may help the Huichols to once again bridge a fault line of history.

The Drugs Peace Institute has the great pleasure and honor to propose, in the person of its founder and director, Susana Eger Valadez, the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and the Traditional Arts - the most eminent organization defending the survival of a culture with a living spirituality, where the voices of the forebears are heard whispering advice and the archetypal images of the gods are envisioned in the peyote induced ceremonies - as representative of the Huichol people for its nomination for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

I invite you to view the slide presentation, called “Safeguarding the Seeds of Humanity’s Future”, a photo narrative that provides an in depth overview of the Wixárika people and the ways in which the Huichol Center has worked for decades to insure their cultural and spiritual survival. The presentation is accompanied by an insightful interview with Susana, which postulates innovative solutions to insure the continued endurance of the Huichol people, and the ways in which the decriminalization of peyote plays an essential role for the survival of this endangered tribe.