Summary Colloquim PUC - Day 2 - Table: INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS

Hare Krishna, Dear Guru Maharaja,

HpS - Thank you. The post seems to end abruptly and the described Spanish language original is not there. Is there more?

Gaston Soublette refered this epic poem, “La Araucana”, which according Britannica: “Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, a Spanish soldier who fought in the Araucanian wars, celebrated the courage and martial qualities of the Araucanians in the epic poem La Araucana (1569–89). This work is known as the “Aeneid of the Chileans.”

https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Araucaniad

Wikipedia add that is “one of the most important works of the Spanish Golden Age (Siglo de Oro).”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Araucana

 

Now about the summary:

The table two, last Wednesday, it was a crucial table of this colloquium because the indigenous theme now is relevant in Chile and other countries too.

The name of the second table was:

TABLE 2: NATURE AND THE SACRED: INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS

Moderator: Claudia Lira

The accurate summary of the table was made by Carlos Rold and is here now mainly thank Microsoft Translator tool (original Spanish at the end). We will add a shorter-summary of the first day of Colloquim also in a second entry, just for knowledge.

UC COLLOQUIUM SUMMARY, 2ND SESSION WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14

Presentation 1: Jorge Calbucura (living now in Sweden): "Reflections on the sacralization of the territory. Two indigenous perspectives: Mapuche and Sami"

The emotional worldview of indigenous peoples defines our well-being from the knowledge and of our feeling and thinking.

Indigenous worldview is a cosmos imbued with sacrality.

The shaman is a special human being who has direct communication with the gods and spirits of nature, but who also performs many functions and has many attributes in his community.

Shamanic culture is more than 50.000 years old.

The Mapuche shaman is the machi, in any case most machis are women.

Definitions of shamanism are numerous, the concept exists only as an abstraction in the minds of researchers.

Shamanism Sami remains a mystery to researchers and represents a practice of thousands of years of history that is still not fully understood.

Today there is an institutionalized "shamanic" culture that is exercised without an understanding of shamanic roots.

The Sami people, settled mainly in Norway, Sweden and Finland, were definitively Christianized in the 17th century and with that they were dominated along with their territories, the Sami were judicially removed from all political activity and those who did not accept Christianity were accused of witchcraft, banned from doing their ancestral activities and many were burned at the stake

The Sami tried to integrate Christianity as yet another element of their shamanic spirituality, but the Catholic church did not accept it and began a campaign of persecution, for example: they were forced to deliver their musical instruments to prevent them from performing their rituals. It is very likely that the Sami drum caused much fear to the authorities and rulers because of the powerful beliefs in the environment.

The Sami shamanic vision allows us to understand where we are, who we are, what hurts us and that our future is in the past, so rediscovering our past is fundamental to the construction of the future.

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I'll do a little parenthesis here,

This estimated [esteemed] researcher and actual Mapuche person reply to my email saying:

"Dear Javier Armijo
Thank you very much for your kind words, I am glad that you liked my presentation. On the possibilities of establishing contacts, actually, I appreciate your interest with great pleasure and in advance. On the similarities between knowledge (India and Mapuche). It is very possible, it is ancestral knowledge and in the case of indigenous peoples, my interest is the Kultrun circuit that begins in Mongolia, Siberia and descends to the Wallmapu (Land of Mapuche in South America, Chile and part of Argentina)"



Presentation 2: Francisco Huichaqueo: "W'ne adngen / the image before the image"

He recounted a testimony, a story that happened to him in relation to his work as an audiovisual artist.

Four years ago the authorities of the Archaeological Museum of Santiago invited him to work on Mapuche relics, the museum calls them archaeological objects.

 He didn't want to take the job, because it wasn't his specialty, so he traveled south for advice and spoke to the director of the Cañete Museum, Juanita Paillalef, and she told him to accept the mission, and called it a "spiritual mission." The museum managers wanted everything fast and set up an exhibition of Mapuche ancestral objects in 1 month, but Francis said that it can not be so fast, you have to wait, the Mapuche times, and especially for these matters, are different, there is no rush. During his trip south a Machi told him a dream would come to him. Then after a while he arrived and had a mystical dream where there were many objects flying in space and it was experienced as a revelation, for him it was a spiritual experience of unfolding or astral journey. Suddenly in space a white light opens and he saw many Mapuche objects in an enclosed space, those for domestic use, those for ritual and spiritual use, everything was caught flying. He told the Machi's dream and she told him that he needed time to "digest" Francis' dream, then the days passed and the Machi had his dream: that light was the ancient Mapuche people who wanted to connect with the objects and be released from the glass boxes. Francis wrote the following for the exhibition:

"Wenu Pelon - Portal of Light

There is a portal where distant spaces are connected, it is a tunnel through which objects travel to meet their original meaning.

The objects leave our fields, from our houses, are for daily use, but they are also our ceremonial objects. They are now heading through space towards the glare of the sky, spiraling up into the portal of light. Shaking the dust they leave behind the drawers of conservation, the labels of the archaeological cataloguing disappear. Thus, flying, they stir their energy to regain the condition of living objects, bearers of wisdom. They are activated by our energy, our way of seeing and living today's world.

Voices are heard as objects move through the portal on the way to Wenu Mapu, the Land of Heaven - we are not museum objects, we are a living culture. You see a silhouette, it's a familiar portrait, a horse recognizes the smell of a Kultrún, a branch of Fuye/Canelo travels down the river water until he finds the hands of a Machi.

In this space and for an indefinite time will rise a begging day and night. By the end of the process, our objects will be lighter and have regained the secret of why we're here.

"Spiritual instinct before reason."

This last sentence came suddenly to him as an intense vision.

Wenu Pelon is the name of the expo.

Francis said "I obeyed my dream, we must obey the dream, I could have claimed all the objects for the Cañete Museum, for example, but it was necessary to bring the ancestral Mapuche energy to the center of the capital. The exhibition was inaugurated with a guillatún and with the participation of representatives of the Mapuche people... I let myself be guided by my dream"

Francis projected his audiovisual work inside the objects

Mapuche archaeological sites.

He assembles his programming with which he is feeling and with which he dreams, so is his job as curator, because the museum appointed him curator of art, and a machi told him that he was like "healer", so that he could "cure" through that space; that's curatory, feelings, dreams and life itself, there are no authors.

Presentation 3: Carmen Vicente: "School of Secrets of Carmen Vicente; an aesthetic education from his shamanism"

She was born in 1956 in Loja, southern Ecuador. From the age of 4 she began to be educated as a shaman and is now recognized as a spiritual leader. In 2003 he [she] promoted and created the "School of Secrets".

"I grew up watching adults hide the crops so the authorities wouldn't take everything. As a child I learned to cure animals and then boys, I was 5 years old and at 14 I just went to town.

Shaman is a trade, a job, a shaman will also go fishing, to seek water, to work the land, he does everything for the coexistence of the community."

sHe wanted to go into town to understand the lyrics and know what the lyrics say. She said she was "old" by the age of 14, so she had to go to an adult night school to learn to read. She became friends who took her to the courtyards of the universities to listen to the debates that took place at the time influenced by the artistic current that came from chili in the 70s and that talked about the political situation in that country.

"Today health systems do not reach the Amazons where children are sick from the toxicity of rivers caused by companies; then, the energy and work of shamans understand which plants you can heal this toxicity with and diseases.

From all the women teachers in my community, I learned what education should look like in order to maintain direct communication with nature.

One of the things I learned in the city is that the authorities were white men; then, when I started teaching in different groups and communities, I understood that I also had to educate white people because they will remain in power.

When I had the idea of creating a school, I told myself it would be a school of secrets to teach everything we have on earth. I want to be because what is one's own is loved. I love it when people say "our indigenous peoples," because we want them to see us and feel that way: "ours"; this has to do with care, taking care of the peoples who have been here for thousands of years, of course modern people could live without us, but how nice it would be if we all continue together, that we all integrate and live together in the world. Shamanism is also this "joint" or union of knowledge and experiences. The school is defined by us and not by the ministry."