Maya Chorti Talk at the UW 5 April 2014 part of WRIHC 2014 at the HUB.-Without photos

Maya Chorti Talk at the UW 5 April 2014 part of WRIHC 2014 at the HUB.

Maya Chorti of Copan Ruinas Celebrate the End of the Mayan Calendar in December 2012 with a Ceremony of the New Fire-Foto Adalid Martinez

Honduran Anthropologist  from the National Pedagogical University (UPN) Santa Rosa de Copan campus,  Adalid Martinez will speak at the Western Regional International Health Conference (WRIHC 2014) at the HUB at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, at a Session Related to the Thread “The People United” on Saturday,  5 April between 11am and 12:30 pm.  His talk will be translated by Wendy Griffin, a research colleague since 1996. Questions and Answers will follow.  The other speakers in this panal will speak on Indian Boarding Schools, Resistence and Resilience, and on health and human rights and the Surinam Indigenous Health project.

Abstract of Adalid Martinez’s talk:  Strategies of Survival of Traditional Medicine after Five Centuries of Colonial Pressures to Make It Disappear:  The Case of the Maya Chortis of Honduras

The modern inhabitants of Maya-Chorti villages in Honduras are the direct descendants of those who built the monuments now known as Copan Ruins, an archaeological park which has been declared UNESCO World Heritage site and the most important Mayan site in Mesoamerica for its fine sculptures.  

The Maya Chortis developed their own corpus of medicinal knowledge for the use of the Maya Chorti people, which only they can use and which only they know the value of, because medicine, health, spirituality and religiosity are intricately linked. 

Mayan medicine survives although under strong pressure for it to disappear, because of Western ethnocentricism which continuously tries to delegitimate these processes, associated with practices of sorcery, witchcraft and paganism.

In this sense, we can show that Western ethnocentrism attacks Mayan medical practices by means of churches, civil authorities, schools, governmental health institutions (such as hospitals and health clinics) and through the mass media. In spite of this, the Mayas have created their own strategies to conserve traditional medicine, including syncretic religious practices, preservation of sacred sites such as sacred wells or cenotes, “temascales”, caves, maintained alive medicinal, edible, and ceremonial plants, medical rituals, which have helped maintain the good health of the Maya Chorti for centuries.

End of Abstract

Adalid Martinez  Perdomo, Honduran Anthropologist and Researcher, author of 8 books among which is one on the Maya Chorti of Honduras “La Fuerza de la Sangre Chorti”  (The Force of the Chorti Blood) and one is how he was cured of lung cancer after being sent home to die by medicinal plants and other traditional medical treatments of Western Honduras “La Casa de Salud de Padre Fausto”.  Professor of Anthropology and Education, National Pedagogical University (UPN) “Francisco Morazon”, Vice President of the National Network of Local and Regional Historians.  He resides in Quimistan, Santa Barbara, Honduras. He has his Bachelor’s and his Master’s degrees from the UP

Adalid Martinez is also bringing a video of Padre Fausto Milla who is one of the leading proponents of medicinal plant care and Access in Honduras, having changed 180 degrees the Catholic church of Honduras’s stance on medicinal plants from seeing them the same as witchcraft to seeing access to them as human justice issue so that the poor have access to good quality medical care. Padre Fausto Milla, a retired Catholic priest, has been threatened for his activism since the 2009 coup against Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, which has included forming a paralel truth commission about the 2009 coup, denouncing that there were drug traffickers of the highest level, the people with millions in Libre, the party headed by Manuel Zelaya in the November 2013 election, raisingquestions about campaign finance, and presenting legal case against the Model city law, now called ZEDE, as being unconstituional. His assistant had toleave the country and seek political asylym in Spain which was granted. Padre Fausto Milla has also been concerned about the human rights issues involved with the peasant conflicts between the cooperatives inthe Lower Aguan Valley (Bajo Aguan) and millionaire businessman in Honduras Miguel Facusse, who also has issues with the Garifunas in the Limon/Vallecito área as shown recently on Venezuelan TV Telesur’s Tierra negra (Black Earth) segment of the TV show Causa Justa (Just Cause),which can be seen on Youtube. The New York Times and HondurasWeekly.com  have published articles about the World Bank Omnibudsman reports related to issues of poor oversight, environmental issues, and social issues, related to Miguel Facusse’s Dinant Corporation’s issues in the lower Aguan and in the San pedro and Tegucigalpa áreas, and also about FICOHSA which has been funding a dam in the Rio blanco área where the lencas live, Dinant Corporation,and amegatourism Project in the Tela área with World Bank money.  Padre Fausto Milla’s Project INEHSCO and another Project that Works with safe agriculture,good safe nutritious food at an affordable Price for Hondurans, selling at a just Price, and beingconcerned about medicinal plants and wáter quality Red Comal, are threatened with havingtheir corporate charters taken away by the Honduran government along with 5,000 other non-government organizations including churches, unions, and groups that manage drinking wáter projects called juntas de agua.   For a number of years Red Comal was partially funded by American Jewish World Service.

The founder of Red Comal is a friend of Dr. Dario Euraque, Honduran History profesor at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut who has often taught at least once a year in the social work program at the UNAH in Honduras and who has worked with both Wendy Griffin and Adalid Martinez while he was the Adminsitrator  (Gerente) of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) during the government of Manuel Zelaya. IHAH is the Honduran government’s highest authority as far as archaeology and issues of history and anthropology. Dr. Dario Euraque wrote a book about his experience as head of the IHAH in Spanish and lectured in the US and overseas related to the coup against Manuel Zelaya. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Honduras and commonly speaks at conferences.

While Adminsitrator of IHAH Dr. Dario Euraque founded the Network of Local  Historians of which Adalid Martinez is the vice.president, and IHAH published in 2009 Wendy Griffin’s book Los Pech de Honduras: Una Etnia que Aun vive, written with Pech Indians Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres,now the Chief of Moradel, Colon, Honduras and her husband Hernan Martinez Escobar. Crafts by Juana Carolina Hernandez Torres were put into the Trujillo, Honduras Museum of the fort ofSanta Barbara while Dario Euraque was Administrator of IHAH.   Crafts by Doña Juana and her husband Don hernan and their son José were later donated to the San Pedro Sula Museum of Anthropology and History and to the Burke Museum at the University of Washington here in Seattle

2009 Book by Adalid Martinez on his experience of being diagnosed with lung cáncer, being treated by Padre Fausto in his house of health (Casa de Salud) and then was diagnosed with no morecancerous tumor by a clinic in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Adalid Martinez remains healthy and very active teaching, being aprincipalof a high school, active in Alcoholics Anonymous,autor of several new published books since being cured, and enjoys his new grandson.

. Their crafts have also been on exhibit at the Conference of Central American Linguists (see Wikimedia Commons Honduran Crafts), at the Latin American Pedagogical Exchange, San Pedro Sula, at the University of Kansas’s Anthropology Club sale, Western Washington University’s Anthropology Club meeting at a talk by Wendy Griffin (WWU ’77), and recently at the   Society of Applied anthropology Conference. The book Los Pech de Honduras and a new book on Pech crafts with Doña Juana and Don Hernan and extensive documentation onthe crafts in English and Spanish were doanted to the Burke Museum. Rebecca Andrews of the Burke Museum said she hoped to have the potos of the donated Honduran crafts up on the Burke Museum’swebsite by the end of 2014,and hopefully in 2015,they could be on display inthe New Aquitisition case of the Burke Museum.

The Pech Indians of Moradel, a group of rainforest indians whose rainforest has mostly been cut down,  are also threatened by the proposed Model City between Betulia, Santa Fe, Colon, Honduras and the Rio Patuca in Northeastern Honduras, which they had not realized until the Tierra Negra TV show.  Upon hearing about the news, Doña Juana’s  son Angel said, “Then we truely would lose all the culture (patrimonio) left to us.” The lawyer who speaks in the Tierra Negra video saying that the Model City is a bigger problem even than proposed mega-tourism projects was the lawyer for the Lenca Indians of COPINH whom Padre Fausto Milla and Red Comal have been helping in the áreas of health, sustainable and safe agriculture, and sale at a fair Price their produce. It is well documented in Honduras that small farmers like the Lencas are who produce food for most Hondurans, as  the vast flat lands are given over to cattle ranching or export agricultura like bananas and African palms. At least15 projects such as mines and dams are planned in the Lenca área  and for atleast the last 2 years they have been complaining something was worng with therivers,that there were not fish, that the trees that they harvested where not there, an open sky mine was opened up.

 

When Honduras built the El Cajon Dam most of the small farmers who had lands in the lowlands at the time of the construction were not compensated for their land, according to studies by Dr. William Locker, now at Chico State University in California. At least 425 sites of archaeological interest were put underwater by the El Cajon da, according to the old Comayagua Museum exhibit about it, including an important Lenca City that was the center of the commerce of the área at the time Copan Ruinas flourished, and it was tied in commerce to the Classic period site  Copan Ruinas, and was abandoned about the same time between 850 and 900 AD..  So the Lencas of Rio Blanco are fighting against being dispossessed of their lands, the source of their food and their wáter and their homes. 

The Maya Chorti face similar or worse problems of threatening to be dispossed from their lands in Honduras. Many Maya Chorti who practiced traditional medicine on the Guatemalan side of the border chose to stop doing it during the Guatemalan Civil War,which they called the “ruinas”, because they were physically threatened for being “brujos” witches, noted University of Kansas anthropologist Dr. Brent Metz. They stopped wearing their traditional clothes, partly because soldiers particularly threatened and killed Mayas during the 32 year long Guatemalan Civil War, so it was not safe to identify as Indians or Mayas. The Mayor of the nearby county of El Paraiso, Copan where the highway between there and the Guatemalan border is known as the “highway of death”  is considered to be closely associated with the Sinaloa Cartel, and the election fraud there in favor of the Nationalist Party Mayor was unparralled in Honduras in the questioned November 2013 election. See HondurasWeekly.com and lablogacitodelagringa.  The drug traffickers have the Maya Chorti área of Copan  in their sights, and there are issues with the land titles and lawyers who take money to lose cases, and the precandidate for Honduran president, former Tegucigalpa mayor and the Honduran vice president is also head of the Institute of Property and the Honduran Agrarian Reform. The Honduran Constitution is being reformed at an unprecendented rate and when the judges found that the Model City was unconstitutional,the person who is now President of Honduras had them fired, and got new judges who would findconstitutional what he chose and now Model Cities or Zede’s are legal, The newly appointed Minister of Tourism told Causa justa reporter,that the first stepwe take is we determine what is the best use ofthe land, for example if it is vocación forestal (good for forestry) or vocación turística (good for tourism). She said clearly thepeople could be forced to move,if fo rexample they were farmers,but their lands were vocación turístico. The Law of Zede says that the government  can take the land through eminant domain.Honduran laws will not have effect in the Model Cities, so that could leave even  communities that have had Spanish land titles before the Pilgrims thought to cometo America,could be displaced for supposed tourism projects. As a foreigner I can not see investing in tourism in a country with the highest level of homicide in the world,but maybe the final goal is not to make money through tourism,but rather to launder drug money through land and nice buildings aquisitions.

Adalid Martinez with Doña Sasa, a Garifuna woman in Barrio Cristales in Trujillo, Honduras whose father was a Fruit Inspector for the Truxillo Railroad Company, a subsidiary of United Fruit, in the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s. One of her sons is a US citizen and a member of the Sailor’s Union in the US who Works as a Chef on  transport ship, such as those which go to Iraq for the US military. The Garifuna of Trujillo and the Pech of Moradel are threatened by a proposed Model City  or Charter City in their  área. Liberatarian Paul Romer is the person behind the idea of Model Cities.