Listen To The Mother Earth
Call of the First Nations and Indigenous Peoples -
Representatives, members,
spiritual guides, and poets of the earth
It's time to listen to the Mother Earth. Today the sacred word, the poetic word arrives and stays engraved in the wide and narrow paths of Mother Earth, who sheds verses for the freedom of all living beings that inhabit this planet.
Indigenous territories and cultures have suffered a long history of colonization and dispossession and are currently being threatened by the excessive exploitation of the agro-industry and transnational megaprojects of minerals, water, and fossil fuels. Therefore, in the framework of the 28th International Poetry Festival of Medellín (Colombia), representatives and members of the indigenous nations of ABYA-YALA (Gunadule, Ikü, Navajo, Uwa, Cheyenne, Mapuche, Guarani, Mazateca, Maya, Inga, Kamëntsá, and Nahuatl), OCEANIA (Yankunytjatjara-Kokatha and Maori), EUROPE (Sami), AFRICA (Zimbabwe), and ASIA (Tuva and Siberia) met to petition the governments of the world and to call upon our own sisters and brothers.
This is every day life in our communities, so we call upon political leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, artists, and writers of this blue planet, as well as all our indigenous sisters and brothers, women and men who are aware of the crisis of our time, so that we can collectively:
- Remember the ancestrality of the territories in which we live.
- Strengthen the native languages and their oral traditions, incorporating them into a contextualized educational framework from and for our peoples, with an emphasis on childhood and youth, and on changing the curricula in such a way that its main objective will be environmental stewardship.
- Protect indigenous territories, recognizing them legally as sacred sites for the future of humanity.
- Recover the ancestral ceremonies as a way to stop the extractive voracity towards nature.
- And, keep our spirits serene, because even though we are few, the territories we inhabit today are the most biodiverse of the planet, which shows that our resistance has not been in vain and that our flame remains intact.
It is time for the world to begin to listen to indigenous peoples, because the cycle of destruction is exhausted, and it is evident to all that we are in the time of truthful words and ancient songs of water, birds and clean rivers running from the mountains to the sea.
Mother Earth is screaming and screaming. We are not listening to her. We are deaf, and she is confronting our irresponsibility.
It is useless to deny global warming or the fury of volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, and wildfires.
We, indigenous peoples, know how to lead this new era, to trace this new path based on our laws and origin stories. These stories were given to us in the beginning, and thanks to them we can still breathe light and balance in our mountains, islands, deserts, and lagoons.
Humanity’s forgetfulness is what has infected the womb of Mother Earth with sickness.
Today, in this Festival, with the spiritual strength of the first nations and indigenous peoples present, we invoke the keepers of fire, air, earth, water, the infinite space and the forest, as well as the grandparents, grandmothers, and social leaders who have lost their lives protecting the Mother, so that they continue accompanying us during this decisive moment for the planet and our species.
MOTHER EARTH IS SICK. SHE IS IN DANGER OF DEATH. This brief document reaffirms what we have learned from our elders.
It is time to love the earth, to talk with water, and to walk together for the good living of the planet.
It is time to listen to the earth, to the air, to the water, to the fire, and to the night.
Let's start listening to each other for the good living of humanity.
The peoples of the earth, the native peoples who care for and protect the mountains, rivers, lakes, seas, valleys, are also protecting life on this planet. Therefore, we are not terrorists, but guardians of life.
All those attending the 28th International Poetry Festival of Medellín support this call and invitation to the world.
July 18th, 2018 – 11 Tz’ikin in the Mayan calendar
