The Wayfinders (15 page)

This primordial act of creation is never
forgotten. The loom, the act of spinning, the notion of a community woven
into the fabric of a landscape, are for the people of the Sierra vital and
living metaphors that consciously guide and direct their lives. They survive
as farmers, and in order to exploit diverse ecological zones, they are
constantly on the move, harvesting manioc, maize, coffee, sugar, and
pineapples in the hot lowlands, planting potatoes and onions in the cold
mist of the cloud forests, climbing higher still to graze cattle and gather
thatch. They refer to these periodic wanderings as threads, with the notion
that over time a community lays down a protective cloak upon the earth. When
they establish a garden, the women sow the southern half by planting in rows
parallel to the sides of the plot. The men, responsible for the northern
half, establish rows perpendicular to those laid down by the women, such
that the two halves if folded one upon the other would produce a fabric. The
garden is a piece of cloth. When the people pray they clasp in their hands
small bundles of white cotton, symbols of the Great Mother who taught them
to spin. The circular movement of hands in prayer recalls the moment when
the Great Mother spun the universe into being. Her commandment was to
protect everything she had woven. This was her law.

Those charged with the duty of leading all human
beings in the ways of Serankua are the mamos, and their religious training
is intense. The young acolytes are taken from their families at a young age,
and then sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness, inside the
kan’kurua
, the men’s temple, or in the immediate environs, for
eighteen years — two periods of nine years that explicitly recall the nine
months of gestation in a mother’s womb. Throughout their initiation, the
acolytes are in the womb of the Great Mother, and for all those years the
world exists only as an abstraction. They are enculturated into the realm of
the sacred as they learn that their rituals and prayers alone maintain the
cosmic and ecological balance of the world. After his arduous
transformation, the young man is taken on pilgrimage from the sea to the
ice, from the cloud forests up through the rock and tussock grass to the
páramo
, the gateway to the heart of the world. For the first
time in his life he sees the world not as an abstraction but as it actually
exists in all its stunning beauty. The message is clear: It is his to
protect.

From the coast he carries cotton, shells, and the
pods of tropical plants to make
pagamientos
, or payments, at high
sacred lakes where the wind is the breath of the Great Mother, and spirit
guardians dwell, those with the responsibility of enforcing her laws. The
offerings preserve life in all of its manifestations. The pure thoughts of
the pilgrim are as seeds. From the páramo, he gathers to take back to the
sea herbs and the leaves of
espeletia
, a plant known in Spanish as
“the friar” because seen from a distance it can be mistaken for the
silhouette of a man, a wandering monk lost in the swirling clouds and mist.
Pilgrimage, movement through landscape, is for the Elder Brothers a constant
gesture of affirmation that binds together humans and nature in a single web
of reciprocity.

Since Columbus, the people of the Sierra have
watched in horror as outsiders violate the Great Mother, tearing down the
forests, which they perceive to be the skin and fabric of her body, to
establish plantations of foreign crops — bananas and sugar cane, marijuana,
and now coca for the illicit production of cocaine. Drawn by the profits of
the coca trade, and pursued by the military, leftist guerrillas and
right-wing paramilitaries have entered the Sierra and engulfed the Indians.
To the Elders, this danger from below is echoed by a threat from on high.
The snowfields and glaciers of the Sierra are receding at an alarming rate,
transforming the mountain ecology. For us these may seem like quite
unrelated developments. But for the Elders they are inextricably linked to
each other and to the folly of the Younger Brothers, harbingers of the end
of the world.

When I was last in the Sierra I travelled
overland with the Arhuacos, a journey that began in their main centre of
Nabusimake with a ritual purification, and then led to the sacred lakes and
back to the sea. With me was Danilo Villafaña, son of Adalberto, an old
friend of mine who was murdered by the paramilitaries. Danilo is today a
political leader of the Arhuaco, but I remember him as an infant when I
carried him on my back up and down the slopes of a then peaceful Sierra
Nevada. Violence has been the backdrop of Danilo’s life, and scores of
Kogis, Wiwas, and Arhuacos have been killed by the FARC (the Fuerzas Armadas
Revolucionarias de Colombia, the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia),
slaughtered by the paramilitaries, or caught in crossfire by the army. Still
the Indians cling to peace. As Danilo told me as we sat by a stream in
Nabusimake, “The spiritual world, the world of mamos, and the world of guns
do not go together.”

When I returned from my pilgrimage I spoke with
Ramon Gill, a highly respected Wiwa mamo. “The ancestors say,” he told me,
“that one day the Younger Brother will wake up. But only when the violence
of nature is on top of him. That’s when he’ll wake up. What are we going to
do? Well, we are not going to fight. We just want to make people understand.
We are here speaking calmly so that hopefully the whole world will listen.”

On January 9, 2004, at the height of the violence
unleashed by the international consumption of cocaine, and after a two-year
period that saw the death of several hundred Indian men and women in the
Sierra, including many mamos, the Kogi, Wiwa, and Arhuaco issued a joint
declaration: “Who will pay the universal mother for the air we breathe, the
water that flows, the light of the sun? Everything that exists has a spirit
that is sacred and must be respected. Our law is the law of origins, the law
of life. We invite all the Younger Brothers to be guardians of life. We
affirm our promise to the Mother, and issue a call for solidarity and unity
for all peoples and all nations.”

It is humbling to think that even as I write
these words the mamos of the Elder Brothers, living just two hours by air
from Miami Beach, are staring out to sea from the heights of the Sierra
Nevada, praying for our well-being and that of the entire earth.

ONE’S INCLINATION UPON HEARING
such an account is to dismiss it as being
hopelessly naive or so impossibly beautiful as to be untrue. This, sadly,
has too often been our response to cultures we encounter but do not
understand, whose profound complexities are so dazzling as to overwhelm.
When the British reached the shores of Australia, they were utterly
unprepared for the sophistication of the place and its inhabitants,
incapable of embracing its wonder. They had no understanding of the
challenges of the desert, and little sensitivity to the achievement of
Aboriginal people who, for over 55,000 years, had thrived as hunters and
gatherers, and guardians of their world. In all that time the desire to
improve upon the natural world, to tame the rhythm of the wild, had never
touched them. The Aborigines accepted life as it was, a cosmological whole,
the unchanging creation of the first dawn, when earth and sky separated and
the original Ancestor, the Rainbow Serpent, brought into being all the
primordial ancestors who through their thoughts, dreams, and journeys sang
the world into existence.

The ancestors walked as they sang, and when it
was time to stop, they slept. In their dreams they conceived the events of
the following day, points of creation that fused one into another until
every creature, every stream and stone, all space and time became part of
the whole, the divine manifestation of the one great seminal impulse. When
they grew exhausted from their labours, they retired into the earth, sky,
clouds, rivers, lakes, plants, and animals of an island continent that still
resonates with their memory. The paths taken by the Ancestors have never
been forgotten. They are the Songlines, precise itineraries followed even
today as the people travel across the template of the physical world.

As Aborigines track the Songlines and chant the
stories of the first dawning, they become part of the Ancestors and enter
Dreamtime, which is neither a dream nor a measure of the passage of time. It
is the very realm of the ancestors, a parallel universe where the ordinary
laws of time, space, and motion do not apply, where past, future, and
present merge into one. It is a place Europeans can only approximate in
sleep, and thus it became known to early English settlers as the Dreaming,
or Dreamtime. But the term is misleading. A dream by Western definition is a
state of consciousness divorced from the real world. Dreamtime, by contrast,
is the real world, or at least one of two realities experienced in the daily
lives of the Aborigines.

To walk the Songlines is to become part of the
ongoing creation of the world, a place that both exists and is still being
formed. Thus the Aborigines are not merely attached to the earth, they are
essential to its existence. Without the land they would die. But without the
people, the ongoing process of creation would cease and the earth would
wither. Through movement and sacred rituals, the people maintain access to
Dreamtime and play a dynamic and ongoing role in the world of the Ancestors.

A moment begins with nothing. A man or a woman
walks, and from emptiness emerge the songs, the musical embodiment of
reality, the cosmic melodies that give the world its character. The songs
create vibrations that take shape. Dancing brings definition to the forms,
and the objects of the phenomenological realm appear: trees, rocks, streams,
all of them physical evidence of the Dreaming. Should the rituals stop, the
voices fall silent, all would be lost. Everything on earth is held together
by Songlines, everything is subordinate to the Dreaming, which is constant
but ever changing. Every landmark is wedded to a memory of its origins, and
yet always being born. Every animal and object resonates with the pulse of
an ancient event, while still being dreamed into being. The world as it
exists is perfect, though constantly in the process of being formed. The
land is encoded with everything that has ever been, everything that ever
will be, in every dimension of reality. To walk the land is to engage in a
constant act of affirmation, an endless dance of creation.

The Europeans who washed ashore on the beaches of
Australia in the last years of the eighteenth century lacked the language or
imagination even to begin to understand the profound intellectual and
spiritual achievements of the Aborigines. What they saw was a people who
lived simply, whose technological achievements were modest, whose faces
looked strange, whose habits were incomprehensible. The Aborigines lacked
all the hallmarks of European civilization. They had no metal tools, knew
nothing of writing, had never succumbed to the cult of the seed. Without
agriculture or animal husbandry, they generated no surpluses, and thus had
never embraced sedentary village life. Hierarchy and specialization were
unknown. Their small semi-nomadic bands, living in temporary shelters made
of sticks and grass, dependent on stone weapons, epitomized European notions
of backwardness. For the British, in particular, it was inconceivable that a
people could choose such a way of life. Progress and improvement through
time were the hallmarks of the age, the essential ethos of Victorian life.
To European eyes the Aborigines were the embodiment of savagery. An early
French explorer described them as “the most miserable people of the world,
human beings who approach closest to brute beast.”

“They were nothing better than dogs,” recalled
Reverend William Yates in 1835, “and it was no more harm to shoot them than
it would be to shoot a dog when he barked at you.” Rationalizing the liberal
use of the whip, an early settler in West Australia noted, “It should
remembered that a native had a hide, and not an ordinary skin like ordinary
human beings.” Shot dead, the corpses of Aborigines were used as scarecrows,
limp cadavers hung from the branches of trees. “Their doom,” wrote Anthony
Trollope in 1870, “is to be exterminated, the sooner the better.” As
recently as 1902 an elected politician, King O’Malley, rose in Parliament to
declare: “There is no scientific evidence that the aboriginal is a human
being at all.”

By stipulation of the Native Administration Act
of 1936, no native in West Australia could move without permission of the
state. No Aboriginal father or mother was permitted legal custody of a
child. Aboriginal people could be ordered into reserves and institutions or
banished from towns. The government had final say over the legitimacy and
legality of any marriage. As recently as the 1960s, one school textbook,
A Treasury of Australian Fauna
, included the Aborigines among
the more interesting animals of the country.

By the early years of the twentieth century a
combination of disease, exploitation, and murder had reduced the Aboriginal
population from well over a million at the time of European contact to a
mere thirty thousand. In little over a century, a land bound together by
Songlines, where the people moved effortlessly from one dimension to the
next, from the future to the past, and from the past to the present, was
transformed from Eden to Armageddon.

Knowing what we do today of the extraordinary
reach of the Aboriginal mind, the subtlety of their thoughts and philosophy,
and the evocative power of their rituals, it is chilling to think of this
reservoir of human potential, wisdom, intuition, and insight that very
nearly ran dry during those terrible days of death and conflagration. As it
is, Aborigine languages, which may have numbered 270 at the time of contact,
and may have had more than 600 dialects, are disappearing at the rate of one
or more a year. Half have been lost, and only 18 are today spoken by as many
as 500 individuals.