sábado, 29 de marzo de 2014

Water Spirits Can Cause Illness in Honduras, Insights into the Rio Blanco struggle of Lenca Indians


Rewritten Sirena (Water Spirit) articles and Rio blanco issues. Sent to HondurasWeekly.com and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge people at Penn State. Not yet published. How Water Spirits cause Illness in Honduras, which contributes to why Lencas and other Traditional Peoples oppose the 56 dams proposed on Honduran rivers by newly elected President Juan Orlando Hernandez. There are many videos associated with the Rio Blanco protest of the Honduran Lenca Indians on Vimeo.com on COPINH’s website and a new Presbyterian Church of USA webinar on Land Grabbing.

The Ethnic Identification of Indians of Honduras Less Clear than You Would Think

(part 1 of 3)

By Wendy Griffin

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the department with the greatest population in Northwestern Honduras has been Cortés, where San Pedro Sula and Puerto Cortes are.  But throughout the colonial period, however,  the majority of the population in Northwestern Honduras lived in what is now the department of Santa Barbara.  The town of Chinda, Santa Barbara, now a small coffee growing municipio which does a Guancasco  dance ceremony with Ilama and Gualala, was at least 10 times bigger than San Pedro Sula during most of the colonial period and around the time independence the name of the department in Northwestern Honduras was Chinda and not San Pedro Sula, notes Raul Alvarado in his new book on Santa Barbara and Tencoa which was presented at the San Pedro Sula Museum of Anthropology and History in November 2013.  The book is for sale at Libraría Caminante and at the Museum in San Pedro and at Libraria Guaymuras in Tegucigalpa and through Literatura de vientos tropicales in the US over the Internet.

There was, during most of the colonial period, only one town, and  Jicaque Indians lived there, between San Pedro Sula and the Coastal ports of Puerto Caballos (now Puerto Cortes)and Omoa, which are now part of the Department of Cortes. In 1890 when the Honduran government felt they were getting control of the North Coast thanks to immigration and railroads, they sent fact finding missions to find out what was in the “unexplored areas” of Colon, the Mosquitia and the newly created department of Cortés!  In contrast to the low population of Cortes, part of which was not under the control of the Spanish in the colonial era due to the inability to totally conquer free Indians and runaway slaves, there were a number of large Indian towns in Santa Barbara that existed throughout the colonial period  with land titles and most of the names of these towns still exist today.

In the 2001 Ethnic Census in Honduras, analyzed by Dr. William Davidson, 30 communities in the Department of Santa Barbara reported having 100 or more Lenca Indians. These communities were located in 6 municipios or counties of Santa Barbara. In the colonial period, there do appear to  have been Lenca Indians in the department of Santa Barbara, who were refered to generally as Care or Taulepa (house or cave of the jaguar in Lenca, remembered in the place name Taulabé) or Ulúa Indians. However, colonial documents also clearly mention Jucap speaking Indians and Mexican Indians in what is now the Department of Santa Barbara and which was, throughout  the colonial period, called the Partido de Tencoa.

 In the 2001 census it was not possible to choose Nahua or Pipil Indian. It was also not possible to choose Care or Jucap. While Care is generally assumed to be Lencas, the linguistic affiliation of Jucap is not known.  So yes, there is historic and modern evidence of Lenca Indians as such in Santa Barbara, but the picture is more confusing than the first look at the 2001 census would lead you to believe.

The town of Nueva Celilac,  was originally called Julcap  according to Antonio Vallejo or Tulipan (place of lots of tule in nahua) according to colonial documents cited by Raul Alvarado before people from Celilac settled there, after a cholera epidemic  in the 1800’s broke out that affected most of the Indian towns along the Ulua river. Some of the largest “pueblos de indios” (Indian communities with colonial land titles) in the colonial era in Santa Barbara, including Ilamatepeque (hill of the old woman or grandmother or creator goddess of the Nicaraos in Nahua) and Gualala, claimed to speak Jucap, and that if the priest spoke to them in Care they did not understand.

Spanish linguist Atanasio Herranz thinks Guala- is a Lenca word meaning hand and referring to a place where rivers are born, and is also found in the place name Gualaco in the Agalta Valley of Olancho, but many place names with gua-  and near water including Gualala reported having  Mexican or Nahua speaking Indians in the colonial period. Modern descents of the people of Gualaco say their grandparents were Payas, but they were not Pech,and the Indians of Gualaco are now part of the Nahua Federation of Olancho. The word Paya may come from the name of the kingdom founded by Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalocoatl. called  Payaqui translated as “among Nahuas”  in the colonial period or “among Yaquis” by Tulane linguist Dr. Judith Maxwell. Yaquis spoke a  Mexican language related to Nahua, according to Wikipedia, and the term Yaquis in colonial documents often refer to people now called Pipils in Guatemala and El Salvador, notes Dr. Maxwell. Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl reported died in Huetlapalan east of Trujillo, and according to ladinos Quetzalcoatl is buried  in the Ciudad Blanca  in North Eastern Honduras.

An interview on which languages were spoken in Tencoa is in Hector Leiva’s collection of Colonial Documents published by the Bishopric of Choluteca. William Davidson has analyzed the relationships of these Jucap towns of Santa Barbara in his book Ethnohistoria y Etnodocumentos, for example almost all the people in Jucap towns married people in other Jucap towns, which would make sense if they all spoke the same language.  According to Padre Manuel Subirana, the Indians of Ilamatepeque spoke the same languages as the “jicaques” ( meaning unconquered and non-Christian Indians, not just the speakers of Tol) of Yoro, and that is why he used translators from there to preach to the Jicaques, but the Indians  of the town of Ilamatepeque (Mountain of Ilama, the Grandmother from whom the Nicarao Nahua speakers were descended from)  may have been multilingual.

So in the 2001 Ethnic Census, some Santa Barbara towns which were known to be fairly large “pueblos de indios” in the colonial period, and which still today do traditional Lenca ceremonies like the Guancasco, like Gualala (a Jucap town in the colonial era) reported not many Lenca Indians in the 2001 Census.  If the people of Santa Barbara felt they belonged to Nahua, Pipil, or Jucap groups, they might have chosen “other”, rather than Lenca. So “other” does not necessarily mean that the people there are not Indians, they might be members of Indian tribes that were not included in the census.

Also as Atanasio Herranz points out, Lencas who know their families were identified as Care, or Poton, or Taulepa, or Cerquín, or  Ulúa or another internal division of the people currently called Lencas, because the US Counsul in the 1850’s  E. G. Squiers said all of these Indians were Lencas, they might have chosen “other” also.   Traditionally only the Indians around Francisco Morazan like Aguanterique were called Lencas and the other groups had their own names, like Care or Poton (also spelt Putun in some documents).

For some historic tribal names in the Lenca area like Colos, because the place names had colo in them like colosuka, colohete, etc., as with Jucap and Putun, there is controversy if these names were in fact related to Lenca speaking populations. The ethnic and linguistic identification of other groups in Northwestern Honduras like Sulas (of Sula, Santa Barbara and Sulaco, Yoro originally  and later in the Valley of Agalta, Olancho), Toqueguas, and which modern groups the Nahua Indians called Chontales (foreigners) or Jicaques (the people who were here before us)  or Payas (maybe referring to the residents of Payaqui)  in Northwestern and northeastern Honduras is also controversial.

In the census of 2001 it was also not possible to choose Indian, tribe unknown.  In a number of places where there used to be Nahua or Mexican Indians and there are still people who consider themselves Indians like the Catacamas, Olancho area, the Texiguat, El Paraiso area, and the Santa Barbara area, they often are not sure which tribe they were from. The Indian towns in border areas like Santa Barbara on the edge of the Jicaque area were often used to settle Indians from the mountains in, and the Spanish missionaries often tried to mix different ethnic groups in the same “reduccion” or town founded by the missionaries in the valleys for previously free and not Christian Indians.

In the Department of El Paraiso, where about 10% of the people considered themselves Lencas in the 2001 Ethnic Census, the undercount was probably significant because the ethnic census did not permit people to choose Nahua or Pipil, Matagalpa or Pantasma, or  Chorotega or Sumu speaking groups of dialects other than Tawahka like Ulwa, the ethnic groups generally reported there in the colonial era, identified through place names, and by the oral tradition.

Unlike Santa Barbara which was under Spanish control during the colonial period, much of the Department of El Paraiso was not under the control of the Spanish during the colonial period, and free Indians still lived in the Department of El Paraiso along the Azacualpa Valley (Azacualpa means in the pyramid according to Alberto Membreño and the place of the god of the Pochteca merchant class among the Aztecs and Nahua speakers according to Dr. Hugo Nutini) and in the Pochteca River area along the Nicaraguan-Honduran border at the time of independence in 1821, according to Tulane anthropology student Roberto Rivera.  The situation was similar in Colon and Olancho, with wide parts of these  modern departments not under Spanish control. Both the governor of Honduras in 1801 and the Bishop agreed that Indians in the mountains  just before Independence were not following the teachings of the Catholic church and often refused to act in compliance with Spanish law.

Azacualpa is an extremely common place name in Honduras including in addition to El Paraiso, there is an Azacualpa, Santa Barbara near Quimistan  (originally Quiatlan-the place of the Nicarao rain god Quia) and Sula  (deer in Miskito and dove in Nahua) and Azacualpa, Olancho (now Esquipulas del Norte-originally Olancho was Ulanco-place of rubber in Nahua) and Azacualpa, Ocotepeque (now Antigua Ocotepeque—ocotepeque in hill of pine trees in Nahua).

Between 1524 when Hernan Cortes’s men began to conquer Honduras and the New Laws of 1545 which made Indian slaver illegal,  the Spanish  hauled the Indians of Western Honduras, especially from areas now in Santa Barbara and Cortes, all over the country to force them to mine for gold, especially in the gold bearing Guayape River. In the period of 1542-1545, the more than 30,000 Indian slaves  and the 1,500  Black slaves in the gold mining regions in Olancho, in Southwestern Honduras where Lempira rose up, in the area of the modern departments Santa Barbara and in Cortes, the Indians and Blacks all rose up, and many after rising up, ran away into the mountains. This  is one reason why you have similar place names and similar ethnic groups (Sules, Comayagues, Ulúa, Mexican Indians, Agaltecas, Mayan Indians)  reported in Olancho, Colon, and El Paraiso later in the colonial period, in addition to local Pech, Matagalpa, Tawahka and Lenca Indians.


Who Owns the Mines and Natural Resources of Honduras?—The heart of the Honduran government’s conflict with the Honduras Indians

(part 2 of 3)

By Wendy Griffin

At the 2013 SALALM conference in Miami, Teresa Miguel-Stern, a lecturer in law at Yale University’s Law School noted that textbooks about Latin America teach that the law that exists in these countries is the law written in the national laws.  However, Indians both in the US and in Latin America often feel that there is another set of laws, which regulates hunting and fishing rights, inheritance of land, land use,  ownership of trees, interpersonal relations like theft, divorce, murder, marriage, etc.  The conflict between this traditional law and the national law was identified as at the core of the problems of the Indians of Guatemala according to CERMA’s  (Center for Mesoamerican Research) study of traditional law there among the Mayas which is on their website.

The issue of what law will operate in different parts of  Honduras has been at the core of Spanish government and later the Honduran republican government’s relationships with the Honduran Indians. When the Spanish arrived in eastern Honduras and apparently decided that here in Olancho would be a good place to put a city, and so they traced out the town square of Frontera de Caceras, where they were going to put the house plots,  they assigned house plots to each other, and ordered the  chiefs and nobles of the Indians of Olancho to provide the Spanish with good service, when these Indians were used to be the Lords of Olancho themselves.  The Indians of Olancho rose up against them immediately and forced them to flee for their lives. Other than the document which states that it was founded, no trace of that Spanish town is still found.

This was fairly typical of the Spanish government’s experience in Honduras where they commented, “Every day the Indians rise up who were before at peace.”  Cesar Indiano notes in his book “The Sons of Misfortune” (Los hijos de Infortunio), available through Literatura de Vientos Tropicales on the Internet, people do not rise up because of good governments. If Honduras was experiencing an average of  5.6 revolutions a year during much of the 19th century, why has no one looked to see what the government was doing to make them rise up? They were taking away Indian lands, taking away the vote, moving the seat of the “muncipio” or county which affected which ethnic group controlled the local government and the right to assign lands, still requiring forced Indian labor throughout the 19th century, murder, theft, burning their houses and destroying their crops.

While Central America’s First president  Francisco Morazon is almost a saint according to Honduran schools, his reputation among the ethnic groups is often that he took away lands of Indian communities and opened them up to Ladino settlement, took money or cattle of the Indian churches, tried to have cut down trees for exporting wood in the area between the Ulua river and the Aguan River which the Honduran government did not control as so the Indians believed these trees were theirs and also belonged to spirits of trees, his armies destroyed whole Indian communities.

There were reasons why the Brujos or Witches of Ilamatepeque, Santa Barbara, the subject of a still in print Ramon Amaya Amador novel, were against him. There  are reasons the Garifuna closed the ports of Omoa and Trujillo to him, the Garifunas of the Bay Islands immigrated to Belize in the rainy season, and the Garifunas  of Trujillo supported an attempt to bring back the Spanish government after Independence.  If Francisco Morazon was shot in front of a firing squad in Costa Rica, this should give you an idea that some people were not happy with what he was doing. That few Honduran presidents finished their term in office until Luis Bogran at the end of the 1880’s, what were those Honduran presidents doing that made people so angry they rose up and threw them out of office and often out of the country. While Hondurans are retaking up Neo-Liberalism, they might want to reflect that the  president that brought Liberal Reform to Honduras in the 1880’s Marco Aurelio Soto died in exile and when he tried running for reelection, he lost decisively.

 This traditional law among Indian peoples in Honduras  is often tied up with their traditional religion and with systems of belief about how people become ill. While in the laws of the Honduran government, in theory the state is responsible for determining if a law has been broken and  punishing the wrongdoer, in traditional law systems, often the spirits of the land or the water or the spiritual owners of the animals or the fish, punish wrongdoers directly themselves.

These punishments are often collective, that is the whole community or maybe even the whole country, can be affected by these punishments, such as the withholding of rain, wild animals or fish or the coming of illness, and so steps need to be taken to ensure that all community members adhere to the rules, so that not everyone is affected. In Guatemala, some of the Mayan shaman that Krystyna Duess interviewed in her book, felt that there were not cataclysmic floods or earthquakes or that the sun continued to shine and the rain to come because they were faithful in “costumbre”, the traditional Mayan ceremonies and customs. In cases where people do not follow the norms, they are often thrown out of the community and can not return, as in the case of the character Miguel, in the Garifuna in Peril movie, who sells the land, or in the case of a Garifuna who refused to participate in a ceremony to be thankful for fish in Limon, and the other fishermen made him leave Limon.

Europeans who came to Latin America in the colonial period and  the Americans who came after Independence generally were not interested in what the local Indians thought about the spirits and their punishments. Almost every American authored document about Honduran workers in the 19th and early 20th century complain about them being superstitious. You can imagine the situation that if the British tell the Miskito Indians, go cut down that mahoghany tree, they were not excited to hear that before a Miskito Indian would cut down a tree, he must first put a circle of stones around it and ask the spirit for permission to cut down the tree, and then wait for three days for the spirit to go and find another home. The British considered this very annoying, but from the Miskito point of view they were protecting their health, because if you cut down a tree without the spirit’s permission, then the spirits could make you sick, or make your children sick, and you could die or your children could die.

Although most Hondurans are nominally Catholic, most Honduran ethnic groups maintain beliefs about nature spirits, although often their names have been translated to Spanish. The words “Sirena”, (mermaid) “Duende” (gnome, an earth spirit), “Angeles” (angels), or “diablo” (devil) as used by Lencas and Pipils, Miskitos, Pech, and their Ladino descendants appear to be the Spanish translations of a number of nature spirits, generally divided by water (Sirena), earth, trees, animals (duende), spirits that live in the sky or go to the sky or come down from the sky  (ángeles), and spirits that live below the earth like spirits who own trees or spirits who own the mines and the hills (diablo or duende). The Mayan Chorti have these beliefs too, but often use different words for the spirits than other Hondurans.

Among the Lencas in particular, the owner of the earth was often feminine and so the owner of gold mines is often the Virgin in traditional stories.  The continued  importance of the celebrations of Virgins among the Lencas-Virgin of Candelaria 2 February and the Virgin of Suyapa 3 February whose dates coincided with the Pipil dates for the beginning of the 240 day sacred calendar related to the rain cycle is striking.   The Honduran Chortis used to do “demandas” a ceremony with processions and drums for fulfilling promises to the Virgin in February, too. At the time of Conquest, the Lencas had the custom of doing religious processions led by carrying  a goddess the size of a hand, according to Bartholomé de las Casas. The Virgin of Suyapa is a statue the size of a hand that was found by a Lenca Indian outside of Tegucigalpa, in the village, now suburb of Suyapa one of the places where the referendum on becoming a Model city is scheduled to be held, much to the consternation of local residents.

 So obviously the Honduran government’s feeling that the 250  mines  and 50 rivers they are planning to give in concession under the “idle assets of the State” Law belong to them, clashes with traditional Honduran beliefs that these assets have spiritual owners who punish people for taking them without payment. In most mining related stories in Honduras, the owner of the mine pays for the gold or silver with the souls of his workers, but when he runs out of workers, the devil comes for his soul.  There was in 2014 a mine cave in in Southern Honduras and a Honduran dreamed that a pact had been made with the devil for 20 souls,but only 14 were received in the cave in so 6 more deaths or delivery of souls is still pending, according to Honduran historian Dr. Jorge Amaya Banegas. 

This way of becoming rich is called being “enpactado con el diablo” (having a pact with the devil), and in Tegucigalpa,  Santa Barbara and in Trujillo, Hondurans have mentioned names of modern Ladino families who became rich due to selling their workers’ souls to the devil and their workers die every year because of it.  The murder of the American mine owner in the Cedros mine in Francisco Morazán in the 1920’s by his own workers, may have been caused because the workers thought he was selling their souls in return for becoming rich through the mine. This belief that mine caves ins or accidents are caused because the mine owner has sold the souls of the workers are rife throughout the stories in the Honduran mining districts like Aqui en El Corpus or Aqui en Choluteca series, published by the Ministry of Culture. Americans and Europeans often call Hondurans lazy in historical documents because they do not want to work for them, and particularly not in mining, but again the people are worried about their health and their lives.

While European stories about fairies, brownies, leprechauns and other spiritual folk are usually told as amusement of children, and the people who tell them do not believe them, this is not the case in Honduras. When a Ladino man from Betulia, west of Trujillo and Santa Fe, tells me about the “Sucia” (The Dirty Female), a female spirit who appears to men often by the water at and who rocks hammocks at night if you are hunting tepescuintles in an area she is protecting, he tells the story that she personally rocked his hammock personally just a few years ago. When he tells about the Llorona, (the One who cries) a spirit that cries in relation to children and how he had to go and get holy water and herbs and scare her aware from his house personally, because she kept him personally awake by making his twin daughters cry all night for six months when they were young, you realize that even for Ladinos, and even more for the Indians these spirits are still alive.

For example when bulldozers were putting in a road past the Pech villages in the 1960’s or 1970’s, a green duende (short male nature spirit) jumped up in front of the bulldozer and said, I do not bother your home, why are you bothering my home?” The bulldozer operator ran away and the bulldozer sat idle for at least a month. Honduran Spanish language newspapers  have reported Ladinos planning to move whole villages, because green duendes were taking their children, since I arrived in Honduras in 1985.

Asking for permission and respectfully giving thanks, are essential parts of most of the religious ceremonies still done today, such as the “compostura” of the Lencas. The name of the ceremony comes from the Spanish verb “componer” which means to fix so that something works again like your refrigerator or a relationship, or to come to an agreement when there was some problem or disagreement.  Interestingly the Spanish colonial government also used the idea of “componer” a land title, that when there was some disagreement between the Spanish government and the Indians or the Spanish government and the Spanish subjects it was necessary to “componer” the land title, which usually consisted of paying money to the Spanish King. In Lenca composturas, the payment is made to the angels, to the devils (spirits who might bother the crops), spirits associated with the land and the sun and with the corn itself, as these are the forces that will determine if there is a good crop or not and ultimately if the family will eat or not. There is a free video of a Lenca compostura that is part of the video about Red Comal on the Internet. The Lencas talk principally about the waning compostura ceremony in the interviews on MediosdelPueblo radio broadcast on Intercultural education.

The fact that nature spirits kill people or make them sick who violate traditional laws of respect for nature are part of many narratives regarding traditional healing techniques among the Honduran Indians such as the Miskitos, the Pech, the Lencas, and even the Garifuna. Several books and articles have been written about the beliefs of the Miskito Indians that they suffer from decompression sickness, or “the bends” specifically because they accept to take out more lobster, or more conch, or more fish, than the spirit who cares for the fish, “La Sirena” in Spanish and “Liwa Mairin” in Miskito, has given permission for them to take, such as by Dr. Laura Herlihy.  Other times the Sirena kills the person by drowning or kills their favorite daughter or son.  Among the Lencas, often lightening bolts which hit their house or hit them show that the nature spirits are angry, and a special ceremony of the “raising of the angel” is needed.

The Pech report both the Sirena and the Spiritual owners of the animals, such as the owner of the deer, the owner of peccaries (quequeo, jagüilla), the owner of the deer, etc. will take the life of a Pech who hunts or fishes disrespecting the laws established for these activities, specifically so that they will help the owner of the fish or the animals take care of them.  In the case of mine cave ins, the “animas” of the Indian workers whose souls were sold to the deveil are stuck mining gold the rest of eternity, just as the Pech hunter has to take care of wounded deer for the rest of eternity.   So by not respecting the natural resources, and the spiritual owners who own them and make available a few of them to the people who respectfully request them and thank them for them, so that they can live, and the taboos associated with them, if the Indians permit it, either by other Indians, or by the other people in the area,  they may suffer, their families may suffer, and their communities may suffer, not just now, but also through all eternity.

In Anne Chapman’s book on the Tolupan Indians and their myths, that problem of other people acting disrespectfully to the nature spirits and this affecting the Tolupan Indians  is shown clearly in the story of why there are no more “jagüillas”, the collared peccaries. The spirit who owns the “jagüillas” is angry with the people who have killed too many jagüillas, who took them disrespectfully, and so the owner of the “jagüillas” has hidden them in a cave and does not let them out, so the Tolupan Indians are suffering from hunger even if they did not cause the problem, and they continue to be respectful to the animals they have killed in the past, so that the spiritual owner of the animals will not be made angry even further.


Beliefs About Water and Water Resources among Western Honduran Indians

(Part 3 of 4)

By Wendy Griffin

If you are searching on the Internet for information about Central American Indians, such as the Nicaraos, the Nahua speaking Indians of Nicaragua, a UNESCO site based in Uraguay, often comes up as one of the first choices to see. In this time when all over the world, people are saying the next big conflicts are going to be over water and water rights, apparrantly UNESCO commissioned a study on “Water Cultures”, what are the beliefs about water of the different Indian peoples of the Americas.

Ever since I read in Honduras Weekly about the Lencas protesting dams on the Rio Gualcarque in the Department of Intibuca,  which led to the arrest of Lenca leader Bertha Caceres of COPIN, I have had an interest to know where the Rio Blanco was.  While the town of Rio Blanco is in Intibuca, the River called  Rio Blanco in Western Honduras is a small river that flows from Lake Yojoa on the northside to the North, according to Antonio Vallejo’s description of River of Santa Barbara in “El Primer Anuarion Estadistico de 1889”. Lake Yojoa is the largest freshwater lake in Honduras and has two protected around it:.Cerro Azul Meambar and Cerro Santa Barbara.  It is located in the Cortes, Santa Barbara, and Comayagua Departments. Vallejo also confirms that in the 1880’s the Lake also was called Taulabé Lake, the same as the caves. This comes from the Lenca words Taulepa, the house or cave (tau) of the jaguar, or puma (lepa).

The Lake Yojoa basin is one of the rainiest areas in Honduras and its mountains provide a lot of biodiversity of plants, animals and birds, as noted in Honduras Tips, which is why they are part of protected areas. Río Blanco is also the river that provides the water of the Pulapanzak Falls, according to Honduras Tips. These falls are quite high, very picturesque, and a common tourist trip south of San Pedro Sula. They were a sacred site in pre-columbina times.In the colonial period, Taulepa Indians who would be called Lencas today were reported near the lake, and also in Western El Salvador. Ulúa Indians were also reported in both places.  Rio Ulúa is not far away.

Also located around Lake Yojoa is the archaeological site open to the public “Los Naranjos”.  At Los Naranjos and other sites around the Lake there are ruins that show the Lake Yojoa area was used by Honduran Indians since at least 1,000 BC.  Some of the Olmec influenced artifacts from ruins from the Lake Yojoa region are in the San Pedro Sula Anthropology and History Museum. As a lake site, it was important as a source of fish from early times. The archaeology of the Ulua Valley, the Los Naranjos area, the Comayagua area, and Western Salvador are usually similar from the pre-classic and classic periods, indicating that probably all of these areas were inhabited by Lenca Indians.

Most large lakes in Central America—Lake Nicaragua, Lake Managua, Lake Güijar, were sacred to pre-Columbian Indians and Lake Yojoa was no exception.  Copper bells found in nearby Taulabé caves, reported by Doris Stone in her article on the Lencas in the Handbook of South American Indians, shows that pre-Columbian Indians, probably Nahua speaking Pipils, did ceremonies there before the Spanish came. In Honduras, the female spirit who took care of fish and made them available to people is known as “La Sirena” (the mermaid) in Honduran Spanish, but this spirit also had names in different Indian languages.

Among the Nahua speakers of Honduras, who arrived in the Postclassic Period in the Santa Barbara area such as at Machaloa, she seems to have been called Texiguat or Siguaté, which probably mean the Woman in the pool or in the depths of the water, or the deep water of the woman who takes care of the fish. This name is remembered in place names in Texiguat in Atlántida and El Paraíso Departments, and Siguaté, outside of Catacamas, Olancho.

She might also be the woman “Sigua” remembered in the place name Siguatepeque (mountain of the woman), Comayagua just south of the Lake Yojoa and Taulabé areas. This is different than the name of this goddess among the Aztecs who were Nahuatl speakers in Mexico, who called her the lady of the jade skirts or Princess Green, so she may have been the large green stone feminine idol reported in the Trujillo area, in the Olancho area and in the Bay Islands at the time of Cortes’s visit to Trujillo in 1524.  “La Poza de la Sirena” (The pool of the goddess who protects the fish) is on a hill in Betulia, west of Santa Fe and Trujillo, which was recently privatized and has a fence around it as Canadians move into the Betulia area.

Among the Aztecs, this goddess of terrestrial waters was the sister of the rain god Tlaloc or Quia (remembered in the name of nearby Quiatlan, Santa Barbara, now Quimistan) and that was one reason that ceremonies of Mesoamerican Indians in Honduras to ask for rain often started besides pools of earthly water. Among both the Lencas who call them “angelitos” (little angels) and the Honduran Chortis who call them sierpes, they believe that spirits in the water or in the pool rise up to call the rain gods  or saints (now called los hombres trabajando-the working men, los nagualitios-the little spirits, 4 saints who have Spanish names) with the clouds to bring the rain as a result of these ceremonies. Among the Chortí, the burning of the new fire, started on Good Friday and the smoke from burning the fields after Easter is believed to help call these rain spirits, too.

In the Mexican ruin of Teotihuacan, in the valley of Mexico, which influenced the Mesoamerican Indians of Honduras like Chortis, the Lencas and the Pipils or Nahuas, this goddess of terrestrial waters is shown as both the provider of water and of fish and a painting of her in the form of a world tree (usually symbolized now by crosses) is in a cave under a mountain/pyramid in one of the two main temples in Teotihuacan, according to David Dominici’s book The Aztecs. This goddess of the waters, la Sirena, is remembered all over Honduras, including in Santa Barbara, La Paz, Tegucigalpa, Olancho, etc. in the rule that you should not bathe in water like a river, stream, or the ocean on Good Friday, because  you will turn into a Sirena.

An example of a Sirena story of Ladinos of Santa Barbara, is a story told by Doña Trini, from Trinidad, Santa Barbara.  When she was young,  a man she knew in Santa Barbara tried to get undressed to bathe in a river on Good Friday, a “cadejo” (a good or bad spirit that has a dog form) appeared to the man to warn him, and then jumped across the river and ran away. The man, frightened, put on his clothes, did not go for a swim, and walked home. The cadejo (who can be a good protective spirit or “nagual” who helps people) probably appeared to warn him that if he bathed  in the river on Good Friday he would turn into a Sirena.

 Since Good Friday which is shortly before the rainy season begins in Honduras was the day most Hondurans ate fish, which was usually killed ceremonially  and communally with many taboos by fish poison such as pate (which means medicine or poison in Nahua), and it is also the day of ceremonies related to bringing of the rains such as bringing the water from the pool of the source of water to the New Fire ceremony held in the church among the Chortis of Queztalpeque, Guatemala and in a Chorti village in Honduras, this prohibition and its reference to the Sirena or spirit who takes care of the fish probably relates to pre-Columbian beliefs such as not swimming on a day you eat fish killed by chilpate or other fish poisons  or the day the rain spirits are called and not specifically to Catholic beliefs related to Good Friday.

 Among Honduran Indians, the water, the fish and the other animals like turtles and alligators in the lakes, in the rivers, and in the streams belonged to the Sirena, and not to them and so obviously not to any government.  The Sirena could punish them for taking too many fish or being disrespectful of the fish or other aquatic life and the water, by making them ill, by killing them or their family members, or by becoming angry and taking away all the fish. Obviously the Honduran government which has recently given concessions on at least 51 rivers, under a law that classifies the rivers as “unused goods of the State” does not recognize the ownership of the Sirena or of the local Indians either.

In the municipio of Santa Fe, west of Trujillo, there is a pool known as the Poza de la Sirena, and the Ladinos who live near there say, someone dropped dynamite in there to fish, and killed all the fish and the Sirena got angry and took all the fish away and that is why this pool of water has no fish.  Recently this pool which used to be open to the public, was also privatized and now has a fence around it report Santa Fe Garifunas. The Tolupan Indians say similar things about the wild animals like the peccaries (quequeo, jagüilla) that the spiritual owners are hiding them in caves because the modern people did not take care of them correctly or respectfully. 

Miskito Indians and Pech Indians still report people who are made sick or even killed by the Sirena or other water spirits.  The illness is called liwa siknis (illness of the mermaid) in Miskito, and because of the belief of its relation of causing illness for having taken too many lobsters and conchs, it has been the subject of a book on the lobster diving industry and the Miskitos by anthropologist Laura Herlihy from the University of Kansas. A Garifuna healer in Trujillo Yaya or Doña Clara has healed Ladinos who live next to streams in the mountains of illnesses caused by spirits who live near the stream. Her comment about  these spirits was that “God put that spirit there”. The Ladino belief in the Sirena or water spirit who is a female seems to be part of the origin of the Garifuna water spirit in rivers  la Agayuma, who is a female with long flowing hair like the Spanish speakers of Honduras, not like the Garifunas, a Trujillo Garifuna woman noted. The Garifuna sprit of the salt water seas and fish is male, although he has a wife.


Honduran Indians, Ladinos, and Garifunas Feel the Surface Water and Fish are owned by Spirits.

(part 4 of 4)

By Wendy Griffin

When Juan de Fuca was travelling in the areas where Seattle Washington and Vancouver, British Columbia, he said to the local Indians, this looks like a nice place, and asked the Indians, How much would it cost to buy some land here? The Indians responded, “We can’t sell it, it does not belong to us.it belongs to the Man upstairs. Here have a salmon.”  Honduran Indians often have similar ideas about the land such as in the Garifuna in Peril movie, the main character Ricardo says, “What is it called when you sell a member of yourfamily?  It is slavery. We can not sellour land.”

Most Hondurans have a similar view of Honduran President’s attempt to sell the land for mines, the water of the rivers,the home of the fish, the trees in the forests, and even the wind is for lease. He is trying to sell “cosas ajenas”, things that do not belong to him. All of these things have owners, but the owners are spirits, not people, and they get angry and they punish people.

The Garifunas  believe in spiritual owners of fish,  but who in the case of the sea is man with a wife, and of female spirits in rivers, like Agayuma, and ,like among Honduran Indians, believed that if Garifuna fishermen did not do ceremonies to thank the spirit of sea for fish, the spirit could refuse to give him fish or even refuse to give fish to the whole community. This is the reason the Garifunas of Limon made a Garifuna  teacher who owned boats that were used for fishing leave the community when he would not participate in the ceremony to thank the spirit of sea for the fish he took out. Among Bay Islanders, sea spirits, like all other spirits of nature or of the dead are called “duppeys”.

Both Doris Zemurray Stone in the 1940’s and Rafael Girard in the 1950’s reported that Lenca Indians from all over Western Honduras came to the Taulabé caves to do religious ceremonies 24-25 April prior to the rains beginning around 3 May in Honduras. This date of 25 April is also when the Chorti Indians  of Copan Ruinas do  the ceremony of Padrineo de Agua (godfather of the water) besides a well, which they call poza in Honduran Spanish, but in Mexico these pools are known as cenotes, a Nahua word. This was also the date of the Pipil ceremonies including human sacrifice to bring the rains in El Salvador at the time of Conquest according to Wikipedia articles on mitología pipil and Señorio de Cuscatlan, and the time of the similar Aztec ceremony in Central Mexico. The Honduran Lencas and the Maya-Chortis also celebrate in a different way on 3 May, the day of the Cross, for the beginning of the rainy season.

Padre Manuel de Jesus Subirana, a Spanish Jesuit more famous for his work among the Jicaques of Yoro, also noticed this custom of the Lencas from all over Honduras to come on a pilgrimage (which he calls romería) to do a ceremony in the Taulabé Caves 24-25 April in the 1850’s and gave the Lencas a statue of San Gaspar and established the custom of visiting the statue of this saint in a church still known as La Misión (The Mission) in the 1940’s for the Fair of San Gaspar 24 April, before the Lencas went to the Taulabé caves for the rest of the rain ceremony. 

New books about Indians of Santa Barbara and Western Honduras such as Raul Alvarado’s book “Perspectiva histórica del Partido de Tencoa y el Sugermiento de la Ciudad de Santa Barbara” (Historic Perspective of the Department of Tencoa and the Development of the City of Santa Barbara) and Walter Ulloa’s book on Meámbar and The History of the Liberal Party in Siguatepeque, a book on Erandique by a Lenca Indian, and Atanasio Herranz’s book on the Estado, Sociedad and Lenguaje (State, Society, and Language)  collect stories of Subirana’s visits to various Santa Barbara and Lenca towns which tell of curses and amazing feats and struggles with witches, so you can why Father Subirana would have put the fear of God in these Indians.   The Lencas still had traditional religious leaders known as the “henchicero” (the one who put curses)  and were second in command in Lenca villages in the 1940’s, according to Doris Stone .

Rafael Girard tells that during the Presidency of General Ponciana Leiva who was a native of Santa Barbara, at the end of the 19th century, he had thrown into Lake Taulabé or Yojoa, the statue of the idol that the Lencas worshiped in the Taulabé caves 24-25 April prior to the rains coming around May 3 when the Lencas and the Chortis celebrate another ceremony, now known as the Day of the Cross. Apparantly the Lencas felt the idol was still effective, even if under water, as the ceremonies were still being done in the 1950’s when a German who lived around the lake managed to see the ceremony and tell Rafael Girard. Girard who is more famous for studying the Chortis, was interested in knowing where the dividing line was between the Lencas and Maya Chortis in Honduras.

According to Girard the Lencas apparently felt that they had a special relationship with “lepa” which is “Tigre” in Honduran Spanish and variously translated as puma or jaguar in English. They did ceremonies in places called “lepa” like Taulepa (cave of the Jaguar) now Taulabé, or piedra del Tigre (the rock of the jaguar) in the Celaque region in Lempira, their towns were often called “lepa” like Lepaterique (the creek of the jaguar), Francisco Morazan.  The Island where the port of Amapala is called Tigre in Spanish, but that may be a translation of its Lenca name. On their ceramics, the dancers at ceremonies often wore jaguar skins, and Doris Stone said the wearing of animal skins by Lenca men continued into the 19th century. Witches, male or female, who could change into jaguars, coyotes, dogs (cadejos),  pigs, or owls (lechuzas) are reported in stories and dances in the Lenca area.

The Mesoamerican belief in naguals, animal protector spirits that one has at birth, existed among the Lencas and the Maya-Chorti, and the stories of witches who change shapes probably show that  the belief that shaman (nahuat) could change into his nagual or animal spirit, also existed, so the Lencas may have had a collective animal which watched over them like the Jaguar. This special belief that there were those whose animal was the jaguar and those whose special animal was the Eagle also existed among Nahua speakers and the Maya-Quiche in Central America. So the House of the Tiger (Taulepa), both the cave and the Lake, had a very special significance to the Lenca Indians of Western Honduras, especially those who identified themselves as Taulepas.

The change of the name from Taulabé to Yojoa probably indicates conflict between the Lenca Indians and other Indians who arrived later. What is the language of the towns that end in –oa, like Omoa, Tocoa, Toloa, Yojoa, Machaloa, Petoa, Tencoa, and hence what ethnic group they represent is hotly debated. In Machaloa there were Mexican Indians, but in Tencoa there were Lenca Indians who spoke Care, so it is not clear if the language is a Mexican Indian language or a native Honduran one.

Nearby was also Agalteca, Santa Barbara and all of the at least 4 towns named Agalteca (Yoro, Olancho. Comayagua, Santa Barbara) and now their ruins of Agalteca or Acalteca (from acalt-tule water reed or junco water reed) in Honduras were associated with Mesoamericans at the time of Spanish conquest and possibly with followers of Ce Acalt, the Toltec King. Santa Barbara’s original name was Cataquile.  Quile in Santa Barbara and Jutiquile, Olancho may also be related to other place names in Olancho, like Jamasquire (now Nahua Indians), Aguaguire (Pech until the 1970’s, now Ladino who changed the name to Zopilote), Conquire (the Indians were taken away in the 19th century, now Ladino), etc., because while some dialects of Nahua have no r, the Pech almost never use the l, so when one group pronounced the words of the other language, they often changed the r and l’s to the other one. Both –quile and –quire seem to refer to water, as Alberto Membreño notes in his book on place names in Honduras, which coincided with the location of these places all near water. Spanish linguist Atanasio Herranz thought that these quire and quile words might be variations of the lenca word -quira which means a stream (quebrada). According to Dr. Judith Maxwell, the origin is probably not Nahua as the word related to -quile in Nahua means like an edible plant, and does not make sense where these place names are.

Although the Lenca ceremony in the Taulabé caves on the 24-25 April before the rains began on 3 May in Western Honduras was secret, because it was a two day ceremony (most Chorti and Lenca and Pech ceremonies last all night), and the Lencas drank corn beer, called chicha in Honduran Spanish, they would sleep outside around the caves at night during the ceremony.  The Taulabé caves are right off the highway between San Pedro Sula and Tegucigalpa and in the 1940’s Hedman Alas already functioned along the route, although they crossed Lake Yojoa by ferry and the road was unpaved until 1954. Dozens of Lenca men sleeping outside during the ceremony would have been noticeable. 

A German man living in the área of Lake Yojoa reported to Rafael Girard in the 1950's the details of this wáter related ceremony. Rafael Girard, a Swiss ethnographer who worked 40 years among the Maya Chorti spent a signficant amount of time and energy trying to identify the extent of the Maya Chorti are and where was the Lenca territory, so that his books on the Civilization of the mesoamericans includes a lot of good information on the Lencas as well. Ceremonies on 24-25 April and 3 May continue to be important among the Maya Chorti and the Lencas. Maya Chorti ceremonies for these dates tend to have music played all night for them, currently on violin and guitar.

The providing of the music is considered an integral part of the religious act, and this was also true at the time of Conquest in the 1500's when Hernan Cortes noted that in the tax structure of mesoamerican towns money was collected for games and for music and the people who provided them during the fairs even before the Spanish-24-25 April is when the Maya Chortis do the ceremony next to their cenotes or sacred Wells in the área of Carrizalon, Copan Ruinas. Food and drink, especially chilate made of ground corn, cacao, and stirred with a stick of pimienta gorda or allspice (a sweet tasting pepper) so that it is also called a chilateo.  According to the Lenca origin myth, the spirits made people of cacao and corn, so when they drink chilate they are drinking the real essence of what it means to be a Lenca or a person. Some Mayan origin myths, people are made of ground corn, like the form used for tamales, totopostes and tortillas, so the fact that modern Maya Chortis often make chilate simple without cacao may be because of poverty, because of lack of Access to cacao as the trade route to the North Coast has become broken, or because in their world view people are made of corn, and not of corn and cacao like among the Lencas. There is a Spanish language article about Honduran Indians and Garífunas and Ceremonies related to Calendars in Honduras on Wendy Griffin's blog www.crisisderechoshumanoshonduras2015.blogspot.com   To replace human sacrifice in Maya chorti and Lenca ceremonias.either ducks, chickens, or especially turkeys (jolote, guajolote from Nahua in Honduran Spansih) may be sacrificed. Music and dance is one part of a complex set of rituals that are still maintained among many Honduran ethnic groups in Honduras, that can be associated with rain, with agriculture and food, hunting and fishing and food, or trying to recover good health, or giving thanks for the recovery of good health.  

The claim of Honduras Tips that the Taulabe Caves were “discovered” in 1968 does not match historical documents. These caves now have a private owner and are only available to tourists who pay to enter and so obviously the Lencas can not do their ceremony there now. The Pulapanzak Waterfalls are also privately owned and one pays a private owner to enter. Miskitos have commented that the Honduran government already wants to sell the Ciudad Blanca, a ruin in the Mosquitia, and they have not even found it yet.


 

 

 

 

Traditional Honduran Medicine Clash with University style Agriculture and medicine inHonduras


Honduran Traditional Medicinal Practices often Clash with Western Medical and  Agricultural Practices as Taught in Honduran Universities (Not published yet.)

Part 3 of 5

By Wendy Griffin

Comments about  clashes  between traditional medical beliefs and treatments such as those of the Garifunas, Maya Chorti, the Miskitos, the Tawahkas, and the Pech and Western hospital medicine as practice in Honduras or in the US where thousands of  Garifunas  and Mayas live are  common. Also the issue of patenting traditional plant knowledge as intellectual property rights of US or European drug companies, a topic known as biopiracy in Spanish, is also a very hot topic, and not well protected under Honduran Intellectual Property laws.  The destruction of the plants, animals, and for the Garifuna even medicinal fish, used in tropical forest tribe medicines is another hot topic among Honduran native peoples. The intentional destruction of traditional indigenous or Black Hondurans knowledge of traditional plants medicines by Honduran school programs and currently of Evangelical churches, but in the past also by the Catholic Church, is another hot topic in indigenous and Afro-Honduran communities.

 

 I am extremely worried about the new Intercultural Agriculture Program at the National Agricultural University, because if they do at that university what they do in Honduran elementary schools and say they are teaching intercultural education to get funding, and then teach the same old things—use agrochemicals, use imported hybrid seeds or worse Monsanto transgenic seeds, cut all the wild plants down to the ground, I am worried Hondurans will starve, be poisoned and die from the lack of medicinal plants. It is well documented that poor Indian and Ladino small holder farmers produce most of the food in Honduras. The large commercial landholdings in Honduras are almost all for export agriculture—coffee, bananas, African palm, and cattle ranching for exporting deboned frozen meat like the type used for hamburgers.   

 

Interestingly many of the stories collected about the Truxillo Railroad era turned out to be interethnic stories of healing or other medical treatments-rainforest Indians healing Ladino workers of lance de fer (barba amarilla or tamagas in Honduran Spanish, tamagas being the Nahua language name) snake bites because they would have died before getting to the Company hospital by train, Garifuna healers curing the children of rich white English speaking Jews who had tried doctors in the fruit company hospitals and Europe and were not cured, Black English speakers healing  Garifunas who were paralyzed and their parents were high up employees of the Truxillo Railroad so could use their hospital but they were not cured there.

 

One of my favourite stories is of Garifunas being midwives to the current Honduran President Pepe Lobo, whose father used to raise pigs in the Garifuna neighbourhood of Rio Negro in Trujillo, and sold meat to the workers in the Trujillo area. President Lobo has said that his support of projects for the Honduran Indians and Garifunas is directly related to him having been brought into the world by a Garifuna midwife in the Trujillo. Among all Honduran ethnic groups, including the Ladinos, a family like relationship exists between the midwife who cuts the umbilical cord of the baby and the baby. Among Honduran Ladinos and Garifunas in Spanish, the midwife is called the “Comadrona”-the big co-mother of the baby.  Many people address their midwife as “abuela” (grandmother) or if they are an English speaker “goddie” (short for godmother).

 

Doña Juana, the new Pech chief in Moradel and her husband Hernan grew up in traditional Pech communities in Culmi, Olancho and lived for 20 years with their children in Las Marias in the Rio Platano Biosphere in the Mosquitia, so they maintained many elements of Pech culture which the Pech who lived on the Coast near Trujillo had lost. Also her husband’s father Don Amado who lived with them, was one of the last Pech men to perform traditional Pech curing and religious ceremonies, only dying in 1997.  Don Amado was trained by other older Pech men and by the Wata, the traditional Pech shaman, of which there has been none since the death of Don Catarino in 1950’s. Her mother and grandmother taught her how to be a midwife.

 

 Doña Juana also took classes in how to do massages for traditional Honduran diseases like “haito”, “empacho”, “aire” and caring for pregnant women from Catholic nuns in the Culmi area. Also she has taken courses in medicinal plants from Miskito healers and Ladinos from Tegucigalpa. These courses were sponsored by MOPAWI (Moskitia Pawisa-the Development of the Mosquitia),  a development  and environmental agency active in the Rio Platano Biosphere when Dona Juana lived in Las Marias, the Pech village there. The change in the Catholic Church’s stance on traditional medicine came about partly as an issue of social justice, that chemical medicines were out of the economic reach of the poor, and also a willingness to consider traditional plant medicine separate from the issue of witchcraft “brujería”.

 

“Brujería” is actually a crime punishable by law in Honduras among other places like Guatemala. Although Indians were supposed to free from being persecuted for brujería in the colonial period, there are in fact numerous cases of Indians being legally prosecuted for brujería in both Western and Eastern Honduras. I have heard the Honduran government announce campaigns against “brujería” since I came to Honduras in 1985, and the only effect I could see was the medicinal plant sellers in Tegucigalpa were forced to not sell near Central Park and the National Congress’s building. According to an UNAH study, at least 90 types of medicinal plants were typically sold in Tegucigalpa as herbs, and they were in fact for treating illnesses, not witchcraft.

 

One of the leading proponents of plant medicines in Honduras is Father Fausto Milla, a retired Honduran Catholic priest born in the town of Guarita, Lempira  who has a medicinal plant clinic in Santa Rosa de Copan. This is the same Father Fausto Milla who helped file some of the suits against the new laws to give the 51 rivers, the 250 mines, and other areas as concessions or Model Cities and the suits against President Pepe Lobo and the 126 members of Congress personally for approving the laws for these concessions and model cities as an act of treason.

People who are active with medicinal plants are usually in favor of protecting the environment, because otherwise there will be no useable plants.  It’s like the sign in the Maya Chorti’s office in Copan Ruinas, if there are no famers, there is no food, it is that simple. If we cut down all the forest, put herbicide on all the plants, get rid of varieties of plants that are medicinal for plants that are not, our health and our ability to treat our children will suffer.

 

Where my sister lives in Florida, they have orange trees, but they can’t sell the leaves to Hispanics who want to make orange leaf tea to calm their nerves and help them sleep, because there are so many pesticides sprayed on the oranges, you would kill yourself making tea with them.   Now the orange trees in Florida, Arizona and California are dying, because since they plant them all together, a style known as monoculture,  when a disease got in, like “greening” which is affecting them now, they all get sick and die at once, just like bananas did with sigatoka and Panama disease.

 

Traditional Honduran Indians and Afro-Hondurans did not practice mono-culture, and so if one variety died,or even if one crop failed, they usually had several different varieties and several different types of crops planted.  John Solouri’s book Banana Cultures on the Honduran banana industry makes the argument that the whole paradigm  that we take the land away from lazy and unproductive Black and Indians to do monoculture or mining and get development was based on  theories that turned out to be in long run  unsustainable and based on false premises.

 

Most Catholic priests serving in Honduran churches are foreigners and are forbidden by law as foreigners to participate in “political activities”, and if they do, their residency can be revoked and they can be escorted out of Honduras.  In recent time the Catholic priest Father Tamayo who won international awards for his work in favour of the Olancho rainforest was forced to leave Honduras. In the time of the Contra wars, Father Guadelupe Carney, an American who had chosen to have Honduran citizenship, was forced to leave Honduras, and Father Fausto Milla, even though he was Honduran was also forced into exile  in Mexico which is where he began studying medicinal plants.




Intercultural Education and medicinal plants-Pech and Garifuna perspectives


Article one  and two already published on Honduras weekly.com. Includes references to global health conference at University of Washington.(These are all now on the blog www.healthandhonduranindiansblacks.blogspot.com)

New Pech Chief of Moradel and Silin  and Her Family Fight to Protect Pech Culture

Part 1 of 5

By Wendy Griffin

Doña Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres, the new female Chief (cacica) of Moradel and Silin, outside of Trujillo, Colon, is well known around Trujillo.  Most weekends she is on the beach in Trujillo selling Pech crafts from one restaurant to another.  She is also active as a catechist in the Trujillo dioceses of the Catholic Church, and so she and her husband Hernan, a Celebrator of the Word of the Catholic church attend many sectorial meetings.  In Moradel, she runs a small store that sells Pech crafts which is a popular stop for Honduran university students studying social sciences. It can be seen on the blog www.culturapech.blogspot.com.  She and her family still speak Pech, so they are commonly visited by international linguists studying the Pech language.  

 

Her son Angel Martinez, in the same Pech Assembly that elected Dona Juana in April 2013 as Chief, also was chosen to be the Departmental Coordinator of Pech bilingual intercultural education program in Colon, a new position started in 2013. Since he has become coordinator, there have been several large and small Pech bilingual intercultural education seminars in both Colon and Olancho,  the formation of a Pech dance group in Moradel and Silin which danced in the streets of Central Park of Trujillo recently for the first time ever,  and the formation of a Pech musical group in Moradel which sings modern Pech songs which combine traditional Pech instruments like a Pech drum and a Pech flute made by Doña Juana’s husband Don Hernan and maracas made by her son José with modern instruments and songs in Pech composed by Prof. Angel himself.

 

His song in Pech about “Who were our relatives? The wild animals of the mountains were our relatives, the white collared peccary (quequeo), the peccary (jaguilla), the deer, the tapir (danto), were our relatives and they are gone and we are worried”, was a popular song at the Central American Linguists Conference in Tegucigalpa in August 2013, and at the first ever Celebration of the Day of the Wata on 13 October 2013 in the community of Moradel. The Departmental Office of Education in Trujillo together with the Pech and the Garifunas of Colon is sponsoring a conference this year on the Challenges of Bilingual Intercultural Education  in Honduras which even the Minister of Education Marlon Escoto is attending, said Prof. Angel Martinez.

 

The Pech and the Garifunas of Colon and the UNAH-CURVA in Olanchito, Yoro near the Jicaque community of Agalteca, and some Miskito Indians and Black English speakers are also working on an oral history project of the Ethnic Groups and the Banana Companies, the preliminary advances of  which are tentatively proposed to be shared at a mini-conference in the Trujillo area at the end of March 2014 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Truxillo Railroad, a United Fruit subsidiary, and the beginning of African Heritage Month which is the month of  April in Honduras.

 

Since Doña Juana and her family also speak Pech, and know many details about traditional Pech culture, her house is usually one of the first stops of visitors to the village.  She is the co-author of the book Los Pech de Honduras with her husband Hernan Martinez and me, published by the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) in 2009, and she and her family have given talks on the Pech or their crafts or bilingual intercultural education around Honduras.  They are members of the Trujillo Artisans Association and their crafts were recently displayed in the US in Atlanta, at the University of Kansas, Western Washington University, and are now part of the collections at the University of Washington’s Burke Anthropological and Natural History Museum and the San Pedro Sula Museum of Anthropology and History.

 

She and her family also helped produce a Spanish translation of the Pech grammar book Pech (Paya) with comments by the Pech themselves, and a new book on Pech crafts, being prepared to accompany an upcoming permanent exposition of Indian crafts in the San Pedro Sula Museum which is being planned to open in January 2014.

 

 Juana’s husband Hernan Martinez and her husband’s father Don Amado also contributed to a published collection of Pech Myths, Dioses, Heroes y Hombres en el Universo Mitico Pech (Gods Heros and Men in the Pech Mythical Universe) written in 1991, while French linguist Claudine Chamoreau and Professor Angel, Juana and Hernan’s son, are currently working with Doña Juana and her husband Don Hernan on new bilingual (Pech-Spanish) collections of Pech stories and in March 2014 will start a documentation project of the endangered Pech language with funding from a university in England. Pech stories of Don Hernan with translations by his son Prof. Angel Martinez are in a collection of stories from the Department of Colon being published by a USAID project for Education.

 

 According to studies of members of the traditional knowledge network often the key stories to convincing people how to protect the environment, are often in stories, songs and taboos about killing too many fish or too many rainforest animals or cutting too many trees. Studies of how social values are taught like don’t steal (no tocar cosas ajenas, no son suyos), don’t kill your neighbors, a good reputation is worth than L100,  how to start strong families, are also often encoded in stories and songs in native languages. I warned in 1993 in intercultural education seminars about values in the Mosquitia and in Colon, that if we did not teach the young people a good sound foundation of the traditional values of their cultures, the young people would be at risk for learning the values of the street—having more is better, it does not matter how I get it.

 

You only have to look at the statistics of San Pedro Sula, or the HondruasWeekly.com articles about Colon and the Mosquitia, to see the results of 20 years of not teaching traditional cultural values in the schools, and the young people often not hearing them at home either because they do not speak the language of their ethnic group, or they were watching TV (usually programs from the US translated into Spanish or Spanish telenovelas from mexico both of which often have bizarre social values shown), or they are listening to popular music in Spanish, which includes a whole genre of narcotrafficante music from Mexico and their families do not go to traditional ceremonies of their ethnic group due to having become Christian.

 

When I read to my gringo friends,  who are only too familiar with stories of theft in Honduras, the Miskito stories collected by MISKIWAT, for example if a child steals a watermelon, a big ogre pops out it and chases the child until it has a heart attack and dies,  they say, Why don’t they teach those stories in the schools?

 

While the fact that visitors to Moradel used to visit primarily Doña Juana’s family’s house and store, used to cause friction with the rest of the local Pech community, now they have elected her as Chief to help them rescue the Pech language and culture in Silin and Moradel, also choosing her son Angel Martinez as Departmental Coordinator and her son Jeremïas as a Pech Bilingual Intercultural Education teacher in Moradel’s Elvira Tomé school which like many schools where bilingual intercultural teachers work is a PROHECO school rather than a regular Honduran government school.  Her husband Hernan was elected Wata, at the recent Day of the Wata in Moradel in October 13.

 

Don Hernan is also active in the local Catholic church as a Celebrator of the Word (lay minister). The Catholic Diocese based in Trujillo celebrated earlier this year a “Encuentro Cultural” (Cultural Encounter)  of the Pech, the Garifunas and the Miskitos in the Trujillo area in the community of Moradel, which was very well attended in spite of happening on a day of heavy downpours. The Day of the Wata also ended in a torrential downpour after not raining heavily for months, which the Pech took as a sign of blessing that the spirits were happy with the celebration.

 

Among the Pech of Silin, the Chief serves for two years, but can be reelected. Doña Juana is the second female chief of Silin and Moradel communities, the first one being Doña Guillermina who recently died and the Pech there held a large kech ceremony in her honor prior to burying her. Profesor Angel had previously been elementary school teacher in the community of Moradel during two years and has taught a course on the Pech language for adults there funded by the new Secretary of Indian Peoples and Afro-Hondurans (SEDINAFRO), which was started during President Pepe Lobo’s administration.  All the ethnic groups say that the Minister of Education under Pepe Lobo’s Administration Marlon Escoto, has been very supportive of bilingual intercultural education, which in Apirl was upgraded to a “Direccion General” (General Directorate). Unfortunately the President of the Congress is not so friendly to them, and the new Law of Education recently passed downgrades bilingual intercultural to a “Subdireccion” and has no participation of the Indians and Afro-Hondurans (or Honduran universities) in the National Council of Education, confirmed Scott Wood, the Miskito Sub-director of Bilingual Intercultural Education. Because it leaves out the UNAH, which by law sets the guidelines of education in Honduras and almost all Honduran lawyers graduate from its Law School, the UNAH has filed a case saying this law is unconstitutional, too.

 

 While many Pech teachers in Olancho were able to become graduated teachers with help from training programs sponsored by the National bilingual intercultural education program PRONEEAAH, the children of Doña Juana only became graduated teachers through a lot of work and sacrifice by her, her family and her children which included abandoning their lands in the Mosquitia, where there are no high school or university programs to train teachers.  She and her husband said in their speeches after she was sworn in as chief in April 2013, “We made the decision to teach our children Pech  and the Pech culture when they were young, and you can see that it has helped them (to get these jobs in the bilingual intercultural education project)”.

 


 

 

Published on HondurasWeekly.com  in 2013 and read over 1,700 times.

 

Trujillo Education Forum Raises Questions on What is Missing as Part of Intercultural Education—Traditional Medicine and Other Knowledge about Plants is Missing.

 

Part 2 of 5

 

By Wendy Griffin

 

The Forum on the Challenges of Bilingual Intercultural Education will take place in Trujillo 11 December 2013 with the participation of the current Minister of Education Marlon Escoto, the co-author of a new book on how or if the African Diaspora is taught in Public School curriculums in Central America Yesenia Martinez, and Pech and Garifuna teachers, leaders, and artisans. Mayors and District Supervisors for all of the Department of Colon are invited.  Melesio Gonzales, a Garifuna who worked as a social worker in California for many year, but now has returned to Trujillo, will also be speaking on the issues of drug and alcohol addiction, that are increasingly affecting Garifuna schools and towns.  This is the first time such a high level forum has been organized on the North Coast of Honduras to exchange ideas on what is the current situation in the schools of these ethnic groups, and what needs to be done now, to move forward in the Garifuna and Pech communities of the North Coast.  The soon to end term of Minister of Education Marlon Escoto has been characterized by action, but he first asked people what were the problems and why they had not been solved already, something unique in high level Honduran government authorities.

 

All of the ethnic groups concur that this Minister of Education has been very supportive of bilingual intercultural education, which is not something that they have all said about any of the other Ministers of Education in the last 20 years.  He has made sure that the Ministry of Education employees actually comply with curriculums that were written three years before, but had not implemented in the classroom, to the point of reviewing unit and lesson plans to see if they complied within a short time and requiring them to redo them if they did not comply.

 

He instituted computerized registration which shocked everyone, especially when they found dozens of schools did not exist and teachers were being paid for towns that did not exist. When textbooks or dictionaries were sent out from Tegucigalpa for the bilingual intercultural education project, he insisted that Ministry employees make sure that they actually arrived in the schools, and usually in the same week, even in the Mosquitia. He had the bilingual intercultural authorities from Tegucigalpa go out to the communities and meet with the teachers of their ethnic group in the rural areas, something that had not happened for years.

 

He assigned Pech and Chorti teachers to Departmental Coordinator positions, which had existed for Garifunas for many years, but not for smaller ethnic groups.  Pech, Chorti, Lencas, Tolupanes, and Garifunas have all graduated from special secondary programs to train bilingual intercultural education teachers, which for many ethnic groups, especially the Chortis,  represented a huge boost in the number of professionals in their ethnic group. Pepe Lobo’s government has been short of money, but what money they did get for education, Marlon Escoto ensured that it was spent well. I have heard people, “El me convence”, which means something like, I really believe he is working. And he is really making the teachers work, and if their skill level is low, to study. When computer registration was required,(not really easy with about half the communities with no electricity), they found many teachers did not even know how to turn on a computer, so that was added to skills they should study.

 

In spite of all that movement, intercultural education has not flourished, so this is a good time to take stock and ask what is intercultural education and why aren’t we managing to do it?

 

 The ILO Convention 169 on the Human rights of Indigenous and Tribal peoples in Independent Countries which the Honduran Congress approved in 1994and which the Ministry of Foreign Relations ratified in Geneva, Switzerland in 1995, requires the signatory countries to teach the “traditional technologies” of the Indians in the educational programs for them.  For all Honduran Indians, a great deal of their traditional technologies have to do with care of, the planting of, the harvesting of, the processing of and use of plants. They care for and use both cultivated plants and wild forest plants from two inch tall plants that grow under water in the Olancho wetlands, to giant trees and 90 foot tall vines, and bromeliads that grow in the 90 foot plants.

 

The first time I visited the Lancetilla Botanical Garden outside of Tela and saw a cinnamon bush, and found out cinnamon was made from the inner bark of a very nondescript bush, I wondered how did anyone discover cinnamon, which is a widely used bark for tea to treat diarrhea in Honduras? But when the Pech of El Carbon showed me a bromeliad growing 50 feet up in the tree and said that is the plant you should use for enemas if someone is seriously constipated, I was blown away. How went up into the tree originally to get it and tried it out?  Because the Pech up until 50 years ago did not know plastic, enemas were applied with the bladders of peccaries, a type of wild boar in the Honduran rainforest, a use that would not have occurred to me having grown up in cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh.

 

The Pech medicinal plant guide in El Carbon at that time Pablo Escobar, the nephew of a well known Pech healer,  said that we the Pech protect the tall trees, because we know there is medicine in them, and there is also medicine below them. In fact, below that try was growing a chichipinse or achiotillo bush.  Chichipinse, according to Paul House et al.’s book on Common Medicinal Plants in Honduras, is proven to be antifungal, which is why it is sometimes called mazamora in Spanish because it kills the mazamora fungus, similar to athlete’s feet, but more painful, and antibiotic, and  it is also antibiotic to prevent skin infections and helps healing through the rapid formation of scar tissue on open wounds.

 

 While in El Salvador, they export chichipinse soap to help control skin infections, in the African palm district near Trujillo the owners of the African palm plantations kill all the chichipinse which used to be abundant there with herbacides. In Trujillo, the Garifunas who have gone to school and learned in agriculture classes to “chapiar” (to cut grass and weeds with a machete) and to leave areas “limpio” (devoid of plants), are constantly cutting down the medicinal chichipinse plants I identify as I walk around to be able to recommend them to people I see with wounds or skin infections, usually from infected bug bites or from being rubbed raw by sandals or ropes for carrying drums. 

 

The Garifunas who know medicinal plants know the uses of chichipinse which has a long name in the Garifuna language, but many young people do not learn about medicinal plants. Honduran schools typical taught that Indians, were “gente sin cultura” (people without culture) because they had not gone to school, and thus there was no need to study with them. The historical terms for North Coast Blacks are worse, usually something along the lines of savages and menaces to civilization.    Obviously there was no need to study anything with them.

 

In fact Honduran schools often followed the teachings of the founder of the Carlyse Indian School in the US, that you should kill the Indian, but save the man.  He did that by literally beating the children until they forgot their native language and took them away from home so that their parents could not teach them, such as shown in Rich Heape’s video on Indian Boarding Schools, available through his website. US Native American adults in their 60´s and 70’s still cried in the video to remember their school experiences. This type of education continued in Canada until 1990.

 

Not only were Honduran schools not teaching medicinal plants, and instead teaching the kids  to hate them as “brujeria” (witchcraft) and as signs of lack of modernity and as part of being a savage, but first the Catholic church, and later the Evangelical churches, such as the Moravian church in the Mosquitia and the protestant churches in the Bay Islands,  had similar or even stronger teachings against medicinal plant use.  This is the reason that Danira Miralda’s book about the War of Low intensity and the original people of the Mosquitia,  is full of comments of “lack of medicine”, when there are over 600 known medicinal plants in the Honduran Mosquitia, but the Moravian church prohibits the church members from seeing the people who know how to divine illnesses and prescribe the plants, the sukya, for being associated with the Mosquitia’s pre-Christian religion.   

 

I do not know why the Mosquitia has such a high rate of infant-maternal death, but it is also likely to be related that the fact that there are almost no government or private healthcare centers in the Mosquitia, and yet the church wants to forbid using the medicinal plants and the traditional people who knew how to dispense them. Even Honduran Ladino midwives use plants in helping to control typical birthing problems like infection, anemia, hemmoraging, prolonged labor, the placenta not coming down, etc. One Pech woman in Culmi who was expecting her 8th child and was malnourished, said she was not concerned about giving birth as there was a Ladino midwife in Culmi who used 8 different plants to treat people, and she had never lost a baby or a mother.

 

My Garifuna midwife friend Yaya  who also uses plant to treat the complications of birth also reports in 70 years of experience only losing one mother and no children.  At the TED conference on Maternal health care, a Garifuna woman Katherine Hall Trujillo from Honduras pointed out that the infant and mother mortality  was higher in the US than in Honduras. Cartoons in US papers show African babies being born in huts in Africa saying, I am sorry to Black babies being born in Washington, DC because the Black child born in the US is more likely to die than the African child, the same is true for its Mother.

 

 My thought as I was speaking to Hondurans in San Pedro Sula at the UPN in a conference on Intercultural Education, was that it has not gone well for Honduras to try to adopt US models of health and dealing with plants—the Hondurans can’t afford the chemical medicines, they are often not available, they are often not safe especially for young children, there are easily available Honduran medicines for illnesses that US chemical medicines do not know how to cure, and if they let them be lost either through forgetting or refusing to learn them to be modern, or because they lose the land base which the plants grow on or they kill them all with hierbacides, they are going to be much worse off and might even die or have their children. This is in addition to the problem of the hierbacides killing the birds, the animals, the fish, and damaging the humans, such as the Dole banana workers who have won lawsuits regarding the chemicals used to control banana diseases in the Aguan Valley.

 

The new chief of Moradel Doña Juana is also a traditional healer with plants (curandera), a massage therapist (sobadora), and midwife (partera).  She grows food and medicinal plants and some craft plants near her house which she shows to visitors.  Some of the foreigners and Honduran-Americans who live in Trujillo have visited her for treatment. One woman commented that she had spent all this money and time and effort to get a foot operation in Houston, Texas in a very sterile environment, which left her foot feeling worse, but after a few treatments of Honduran massage, given in a mud hut in Moradel where the owners still cook with a wood fire and have chickens running around, her foot felt better.

 

 The Pech and Garifunas of the Trujillo area have been invited to speak at a Global Health conference in Seattle, Washington next year, about topics related to health and minority ethnic groups, including topics which are often censured in meetings of hospital trained doctors. The University of Washington (UW) in Seattle has a $30 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to work on the topic of Global Health. In addition to the Medical School, three Anthropology professors at the UW are specifically identified as working in the area of Global Health.

 

They were especially intrigued by the idea of identifying the best practices of Garifuna midwives who have almost no infant or mother deaths and seeing if they could help the high mother and infant mortality rates among the Miskitos, who probably have access to similar plants, but they just don’t know them, an idea suggested to me by a Miskito Indian Walstead Miller who worked with MOPAWI. We have not been able to get funding to do that exchange yet, but we did document the Garifuna practices and send the books to the Mosquitia. US Medical students from the University of Massechusettes who have come to observe the Garifunas in Trujillo, have commented that US doctors did not know these techniques. A Mexican Anthropologist who has studied midwife techniques in Honduras and in the US, particularly related to Hispanics, also said, the US doctors did not know these techniques and their lack may have caused deaths. The talk proposed for Seattle suggests ways that this exchange could be helped with access to the Internet, and programs like ”Go to Meeting” and video equipment and documentation centers in the area of the ethnic groups of Honduras.

 

I am sad, because my Garifuna friend Claudio Mejia lost his wife after she had their sixth child in a hospital, due to hemmorging, which a Garifuna midwife can generally control with a strong cup of  coffee. Are his six kids orphaned because of a lack of a strong cup of coffee?  Also all over Honduras children—Garifunas, Ladinos, Black Bay Islanders, etc. are given something when they are born to make them spit up placental fluid (agua sucia de la fuente), they may have swallowed while being born, because if they don’t do that the child will be sickly (enfermizo), and have asthma and problems with colds and coughs. The recipe varies—sometimes chicken lard or sometimes garlic with rue, but in each case the children do not have asthma when they grow up. In 70 years of treating newborn  children that way, none of the children Yaya delivered had asthma.  Are millions of US Black kids suffering from asthma because of a lack of properly prepared “fowl fat” (Manteca de gallina)?