I've always heard people around me say "our north is the south" and while I understand to some it is a merely political statement, coming from a piece of poetry from the last century, written by a white man, there's a much older cultural and spiritual origin to that idea that shouldn't be overlooked.
In the North, people use the star Polaris to identify their directions and navigate. Our star(s) that we use to navigate the world, physically and spiritually, is the Chakana constellation (the southern cross). Through it, we can always find the South first. It is a bridge between worlds (acting as a psychopomp). It's diagram encompasses the entirety of our beliefs as southern Andean peoples. It's rotation, accompanied by the observation of other stars and constellations, and natural omens in general, also marks the arrival of different events in our ritual-agricultural calendar, ensuring not only our sustenance but also our Right Relationship with the Land that provides it for us, and all it's Spirits.
So, "our North star" is the Cross Constellation, and the direction that we will always look at for guidance, to find ourselves, for indigenous peoples, our "North"... has always been the South. And I think it's important to honor that particularly today, at Chakana Raymi.
It should be important to anyone who's work claims to be decolonial to start centering these traditional teachings instead, and listen to Indigenous people's voices on these matters, not white authors, specially not foreign authors, when we share our traditional knowledge for the greater good, many times at our stakes. White authors are praised for anything they put out, where there's often bastardized appropriated ideas, misunderstandings of real teachings, cherry-picked and out-of-context statements and plain misinformation, whether they do it willingly and consciously or not, while indigenous peoples are silenced and killed. For us, speaking up doesn't come without a cost.
We are not just exposing ourselves to a chance that we'll be mocked, or that our traditions will be misinterpreted and abused, damaging the very chance at continuation of our culture, but often putting our very lives at danger for going against "progress" projects that seek to abuse land and it's people, to pollute land, water and air, and us with them, for the benefit of the (often foreign) elites.
Indigenous people will always be the first line of defense in our territories and it is our voices that should always lead these movements, because we live here, and we have lived here for thousands of years. We are the very living proof that humans can live in harmony with their environment, that it is the system that is harmful, and being destructive is not inherent to human presence. And we are the ones dying from all the poison in our rivers, aquifers and springs, and from gunshots if we protest about it. And we have been, and continue to be, the ones protecting these territories and our people, because it is our lives that continue to be at stake.
That is who I am honoring today. The ones taken too soon in protest for clean water, land rights, justice, or a fair compensation for their labor. The ones shot by mercenaries sent by land speculators and a genocidal complicit state, shot in their own Land, in their own homes. The countless, hundreds of families, men, women and children, all being kicked off their own property, all across the country, for the profit of a handful of landowners and corrupt government officials. These are all things happening right now. Not 500 years ago, now.
Remembrance of these ongoing battles asks me to give you an Andean decolonial call instead, the same words I've heard uttered in every circle of indigenous peoples I've been in:
"Today, you kill me alone, but I will return, and I will be millions."
—Tupac Katari, indigenous rebel leader, XVIII century.
