A RETURN TO OUR ANCESTRAL LIFEWAYS

For far longer than imperialism has reigned at the magnitude it does today, humans have been no separate from all of the natural world – the land, elements, plants, trees, seasons, animals, insects, fungi. Our place of belonging is within the natural cycles of life and death that we so clearly see when we step outside of modern infrastructure and back into nature.

As descendants of La Gran Chichimekah, we understand and honor our ancestor’s ways of living in cycles with the world and all other beings within it. We are named hunter-gatherers – as though the naming could hold us still – but we have always been more, always in motion. The people of Aridoamerica never dominated the Earth; they moved with it, through it –  fishing the rivers when they ran full, hunting when the herds called, living in food forests like tunales, drifting the trade routes, carrying stories and gifts, never tethered to the hunger of one place alone. Our interconnectedness to the world allowed us to carry the honor and responsibility of caring for and respecting the world without the need to artificially control it. 

Animals especially have been our siblings and companions on this journey. Our close bonds have guided us in the ways of not over-hunting or harvesting. Our ceremonies allow us to honor all parts of the life we’ve taken. This is done with intention and care, reflecting a reverence toward life that seeps into ourselves, our surrounding communities, and environments. In modern times, we often hear terms like “wildlife management”, but we know that managing animals is an act of control, a prideful dominance that is deeply unnatural. We continue to believe animals are equal to us; living in their own realms, their ways of communication, beliefs, and cultures are unique to them. Just as we do, they migrate, have free will, and are affected by modern concepts and infrastructure.

The Columbian Exchange is described as the era when plants, animals, diseases, and people were brought to the Americas in order for colonists to set up European society and infrastructure on our lands. The colonizers who facilitated this era were among the first to introduce animal husbandry to the Americas in the late 1400s. Eurocentric ideas of control and domestication were imposed onto our own bodies, land, animal relatives and lifeways. Their goal was to also domesticate us and our lands into producing what they wanted for themselves. The natural world and the ancient connection between all of its inhabitants were torn apart.They mined our mountains, overplowed our fertile lands, slaughtered mass numbers of our animal relatives, ripped the Indian from the land, and pushed us into boarding schools. The violent attempt to erase us and our world has changed us forever.

We now see masses of our human relatives upholding colonial patriarchy in the way they engage in relationships with other humans, animals, and land. We are disconnected and living in a confused daze - far from our ancient understanding of our place in the world’s cycles, that once brought us honor and respect. 

For the most part, settlers have dominated the social norm when it comes to relationships with animals - often using them for a particular purpose, producing a commodity, profiting off of their “product”, and discarding their life. This relationship has become even more estranged by the incredible force of the external economic systems at play. Lives become numbers and things. Foods become packages on the shelf. Our alienation from our food systems, medicines, clothing, and all other tools of our lives - leaves us reliant on the commodities that these estranged relationships produce. 

Animal husbandry and agriculture is something that was brought to us through colonization. It dramatically affected the land and every being within it, us people included. And yet we’ve adapted, shifted, and stretched to connect to these relatives. This way, we can observe and begin to understand how the land has reacted to our animals and plants, and how we all can play a role in restoring balance on these terrains once again. 

Many modern-day Indigenous people continue to heed the warnings and prophecies of our ancestors - that is to say, without nurturing interconnectedness we will lose it all. Science and society have seen that our ways of food forestry, intercropping, living alongside our animals and the land - are almost always beneficial and incomparably more sustainable than big corporate agriculture. But, our ways don’t fit the imperialist/capitalist agenda. Indigenous people are plagued by financial poverty, scarce resources, little lands left to care for after generations of land grabbing by Europeans. How do we reconnect ourselves to the ancient web of life that birthed us? How do we make the most of what we have? How do we bring honor and respect back into our forever altered experience on this planet?

Our ancestors’ wisdom is not a relic but a living current. This responsibility shifts with the land - it is not attached solely to what cycles and relationships may have looked like in the past. Movement and time have always affected and changed the land, but the responsibility and lifeway of reciprocal exchange is never-ending. 

Memories lie in our footsteps, in movement under the sun. We walk with our sheep to trace the memory written in the soil. Like us - bastardized and forced to be alienated children of the land - our sheep relatives have also endured being bred and commodified for hundreds of years. Walking and living with our sheep by our side is a simple, mundane act. One that could seem inefficient or cumbersome. But to us, living this way allows all beings involved to be embraced by the land. We do this through the movement of our bodies, gentle stirring and nurturing of the soil, interacting with the landscapes and plants that surround us, and moving with reciprocal exchange. A sedentary, commodified lifestyle is one that may be typical today, yet it is so foreign and disruptive to our bodies and all that surrounds us. Our bodies were designed to lace with our surroundings. Our minds and spirit rely on our steps. The sheep are the same -  meant to roam and explore diverse landscapes, reliant on nutrients from a wide array of wild plants. The movement of our bodies is felt and echoed into the places we tread. 

The land responds to these walks, supporting soil processes through being fertilized by the sheeps manure. While grazing, the trampling of the plants and seeds gets pressed into the soil, supporting regeneration and healthy soil cycles. Tracing our terrain allows us to not only witness the natural cycles at play but to become immersed and reliant on them as well. The movement exposes us to plants and animals along the way, which apply to everything that supports life. Just as our steps fuel and regenerate the vegetation all around us, the vegetation nourishes our bodies through our foods, medicines, and adornments. Walking alongside the sheep allows us to intimately feel this connection and honor it each day. As we move and live together, we are familiarizing ourselves with ways to further intimately connect to our sheep. Through their dairy - we make milk, through their wool - we felt textiles. The more intricately woven together we are to our sheep, the more reliant we become on one another. These practices allow us to step toward autonomy over how we live and what we consume.

These ways of being acknowledge our ancestors' intrinsic relation to these lands, but we look to our community and relatives today to further guide these efforts. The sheep join us in our efforts to revitalize our land and homestead in South TX - Tierra Roja Sanctuario. Here we strive to rewild the land by restoring our beloved Thornscrub. We do this by planting native trees and grasses, creating an environment that will allow us to grow and protect endangered cacti species that are vital to our way of being. With the sheep and our surrounding community, we can steward the land to nourish a reciprocal relationship.

This labor is one of honor, that will inherently teach us so much about the world we walk on. In reflection of these lessons, we hold workshops and teach-ins that further familiarize our neighbors with the skills attained by our conjoined practices. 

We do not think of the land as ours. Our communal relation to it will allow us to respond to the needs of our community. The work and efforts on the land are an ever-changing vessel of our response to and reflection of what the land communicates to us.  

We hope to provide a space for all members of the community to seek refuge and set root in these reclaimed lands. As we work to restore the Tamaulipan Thornscrub forest, we reconnect to those who guide us and invite our community to learn and unlearn alongside us and the land. To root and entangle ourselves like the deep roots of the remaining Thornscrub forest.