Landscape Matters Issue 4 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 15
For these communities, spirituality is indivisible from the
land; and vice versa.
Minga Indigena delegate Manuela
Dahua of the Manga Urka nation
speaks of the reality of the
struggle to maintain sovereignty
within the Sapara territory of the
This means that any decision has to take account of the
spiritual life of a given site. The speakers described the
measures taken to act in accordance with ancestors’ wishes
- who may, for example, be buried in the ground close to a
sacred site. As such, the connection between humans and
territories is fundamental: the one is indistinguishable from
the other. A woman may give birth on the land, bleed on the
land, look after and love it all her lifetime until she dies. At this
point, her body is given back to it: to decay and feed the land
with her organic matter and the spirituality invested in it. She
might then return to the same territory in a different life form
– as an animal, bird or insect. The land is therefore a living,
integral part of the social realm: it belongs to them and they
belong to it. They look after it, sing to it, and give it the names
of body parts. Mountains have feet, ears and mouths.
Ecuadorian rain forest.
Video available on the
@mingaindigenaorg Instragram
page.
It therefore follows that for indigenous cultures, the land does
not represent a property to be owned. It is not Real Estate, nor
is it a resource for extraction. Indeed, the land weeps when it is
eviscerated by imperialist forces that can only conceive of it in
those terms. Imperialist forces driven exclusively by profit that
blast into its sides to extract minerals, clear its forests to plant
palms or poison its rivers with chemicals.
The impact of all this is not only ecological disaster: it
is cultural genocide. The fundamental bond between
humans and their territory is irrevocably destroyed.
This constitutes a dual tragedy, as one Inuit leader
declared: “the land misses us, just as much as we miss
the land”.
In the so-called developed cultures of the Global North, many
of us live in different areas in different chapters of our lives.
And so, our relationship to the earth is different. For many of
4
