Reflection

The traditional relationships of indigenous peoples with the land, the community, other cultures and the economic market keep changing. In some cases, they do so in response to pressure from diverse development projects promoted by States and NGOs. In others cases, as a reaction to their own desire for well-being in a world whose gaze changes in contact with others, where modernity and its technology inexorably penetrates the most intimate spaces until it mutates the very imagination and identity of the people. In any case, the development and economic growth based on the exploitation of natural resources does not cease. Even though in the so-called "First World" the economy migrates towards the provision of services and technological innovation, what changes is only the type of natural resources to be exploited in less explored areas, which are usually inhabited by indigenous peoples as their last areas of refuge. Neither can the countries of the ”Third World", euphemistically called "developing", give the impossible magical leap to the First World without leaving aside the exploitation-exportation of natural resources with something of an added value. In any case, the pressure over the access to natural resources increasingly clashes with the presence and rights of indigenous peoples, whose territories are being invaded by mining, agro-industry and livestock, and whose leaders are criminalized for opposing "development”.

But it is not simply about a conflict over ownership rights or ownership of the goods of nature, which voraciously loom over oceans, freshwater sources, Andean highlands, Central American jungles and the Amazon in Latin America. The greatest clash is at the level of the imposition of imagery that force people to consider as "resources" that which has traditionally been seen as "gifts". This is one of the maximum levels of violence because it forces indigenous peoples to fight for even the defense of their rights and traditions in the terms or imagery used by the colonizers: of the transaction and protection of "resources". In that way, the Earth, that in the different originating concepts of the indigenous peoples of America is a mother, a source, a cradle and shelter, space for life inseparable of the existence of all those in it inhabit, it becomes treated as an externality, useful and necessary for business. With that colonization of the fundamental imagery, we (indigenous and non–indigenous peoples) are dragged to the scission of life itself because of the forced separation with the biome in which we live.

For that reason, when indigenous fighters are aware that they have been dragged into the fight for life in terms of fighting for "resources", resistance and indignation are not enough to repair the anguish of knowing that they are losing the battle from the beginning: that the struggle is no longer for living well, but for not living badly. Moreover, the uneasiness grows when the generational gaps come to the surface and the division of the community that struggles to maintain the imagery that sustain its traditions and rites becomes evident. Thus, in the same community there are young and old who struggle to maintain the oxymoron of the integration of cultures trying to live the better of "two worlds", as when they distinguish organic crops for their own consumption and use agrochemicals to maximize the always elusive possibilities of profitability from the harvest that goes to the market. Others refuse to accept the contradiction in which they are and defend the purity of a legacy threatened rummaging through their collective memory to recover fragments of what once was; and they become torn between isolationism and the nostalgia of that glorious mythical past, even rejecting the Christian clothes that were imposed on them during the processes of colonization. There also are those who give up and seek to join the logic of the use of biomass resources to live better than other families; to that end, they use the possibilities of integration into the mainstream culture through temporary migration, the western education and the business of their own culture. These last people usually become "successful and developed" groups, with money and even political influence, although they are often loaded with nepotism. However, to further complicate things, in the middle of all these "groups" and their "strategies", there are external religious presences, especially forms of Christianity, that support all of these tendencies in the name of "God". Either from the "benevolent" presence of missionaries who seek to "educate" indigenous people to be modern and pious natives. Passing through the experiences of "inculturation" that value the indigenous as a source of revelation and that propose forms of accompaniment based on respect, solidarity and the discovery of the mutual richness of their differences through awareness processes. Up to the quasi negation of the culture and it’s "pagan" traditions in pursuit of religious fundamentalisms and a theology of individual prosperity that has good sources of funding for its models of success (an increasingly common reality, where indigenous people with better businesses tend to be of different evangelical denominations).

However, it is the indigenous peoples with their way of life, of resisting and changing that make us aware of this process. Their relationships with the land and the community, make it evident through their culture and traditions that instead of biome that we are part as a gift and grace, we have entered a logic that imposes a life of struggle and competition where everything is ”bio-resource ". Including the splintered territories and their inhabitants (minerals, flora, fauna and humans) that must be used (exploited) for the superior purpose of "development" in the form of economic growth. Where the component "resource" ends up strangling the components of the "bios". Well, for the indigenous peoples of America, it is not only about biomass (available organic energy) or biomes (life zones) independent of human beings over which we have authority. And this phenomenon reaches its revelation epitome in the cities, where indigenous people who have migrated for various reasons including the need for survival, feel lost and uprooted. Because the more urbanized the territory is, the greater the split with the biome, the competition for resources and the distancing from ancestral cultures. Therefore, this same phenomenon, on its reverse, allows us to illuminate the emptiness of the citizens, who live to work and work to consume, because they inhabit an artificial territory where nothing is free, a gift; but scarce resource that should be worked for to fill in this way, with effort and goods, the growing fragility and lack of existential meanings in the midst of community and socio-environmental relationships competing for the limited resources of a biome made up of cement, steel and integrated circuits.

Even in the Catholic faith every Ash Wednesday remembers that "we come from dust and we will return to dust." Commemorating creation, which in the Judeo-Christian version affirms that we are children of Adama (earth), land (Adam), and that we will return to it. But for indigenous peoples to be part of the land does not refer simply to the source material and material end, but to the constitution itself, the characteristics of human existence, which are never separated from the Adama, the Pachamama. That is why the indigenous people cannot conceive themselves nor can live fully in exiled from their territory, from which they keep being historically displaced. Because the mountains, plants, stones and rivers... are their sources of life, they are common-unit that shelters us, never forgetting in the past the presence of the spirits that have lived because they keep being road companions. Therefore, by affecting the flows of rivers and forests, we also affects both the ancestors who inhabited them and ourselves who use them. The ancestral peoples show us that we are not the center and the ultimate goal of creation; we came from Adama but Pachamama is not for our service. The earth is the mother who "gave birth" to us, who welcomes us and from whom we live, because we are all Adam, born of water, mud, wood, or corn, as myths tell us.

Hence, for the various indigenous cultures there cannot be "government or power over" the earth (Genesis 1:28), but a respectful interaction with creation. Indigenous peoples know and thus live it, that life (global biome) is not a "thing” that is "used" without paying the consequences of altering its harmonies. That is why their rites and traditions always seek justice as a common experience of restoring balance. Justice that has cosmic dimensions and where there it seems to be no room for forgiveness and forgetfulness. The search for balance that is expressed in the rites of payment and offering to the land, in the non-appropriation of what is common and in the solidarity with the needy, in the community cooperative work, in the redistribution of the resources of those who have more making them responsible for the celebrations; and also in the reciprocity of violent acts and bloody acts between members of different tribes because they threaten the balance of their coexistence. In the end, our indigenous brothers and sisters look to live in harmony with nature (biome which includes everyone) that is a guide when it is listened to and respected, but that punishes violently when it is threatened and tried to be governed. For this reason, the diverse myths of the peoples tell us that we cannot destroy the Great or Common House without the Pachamama (Mother Earth) annihilating the generation that preys on her, and preserve a remnant of peoples so that they continue to live in harmony with her, because life does not harm itself, but rather enacts justice restituting and renewing itself.

Today we need to recognize with humility and courage the deep ties that unite us with indigenous peoples in their ancestral cultures and practices, but that we have set aside to promote various paradigms of development and cultural and religious supremacy. Inside our community, we might even say that the experience of the Cardoner, San Ignatius acquired a renewed synthetic and organic view of life that should not be far from the primal experience of the imagery of our indigenous peoples: all is one, but not same. For the indigenous peoples teach us a way of life that is not simply animistic or pantheistic (concepts alien to their experience), but that remind us of what Ignatius recorder in the Spiritual Exercises: that we are created, that we must order our affections , that we should only "use" the created as long as it helps us to live the fullness for which we were created by a God who does not cease to live and work in all creatures so that we can do our will and actively collaborate so that His will is fulfilled wherever we are. All of it tinted by the Christian experience of mercy and loving manifestation of the creator Father that, liberated from cynicism and incoherence, fulfills justice.

In Latin America there is a long tradition of Jesuits that we have lived and worked with indigenous peoples and that we continue to contribute to the reflection and dissemination of cultures, traditions and ancestral imagery even from new places of mission. Currently there are Jesuits 66 who are working directly with or for indigenous peoples: 24 in Mexico, 13 in Peru, 10 in Brazil, 7 in Bolivia, 5 in Central America, 3 in Chile, 2 in Ecuador, and 2 in Paraguay. The services vary from parishes with more or less inculturated pastorals, intercultural and scientific institutions, community radio stations, schools and vocational training centers, organizations of organic producers and "fair trade," to the simple supportive presence in foreign territory of communities that open up and welcome us without fear of religious, humanists and even ecological neo-colonialism. However, the challenges and opportunities for the Society of Jesus to serve the indigenous peoples of today are enormous. We must continue walking in their struggles for the biomes, the life of which we are part of, with a solidary and/or missionary presence, advocacy, legal and financial support. Above all, we have to promote a new understanding of justice and law that recognizes the intrinsic value of creation and help to protect it (to protect us) in our present and to preserve the viability of a decent future for everyone in the Common House. Politically, we have to promote changes in the regulatory frameworks to include the Rights of Nature, as it has already been done in Ecuador and Bolivia, although they are threatened with regression because it has not become a State policy but rather a policy by and administration, despite it being consecrated in their Constitutions. And at the individual level, it will help greatly to review the reflections and practical recommendations made in Healing a broken world (PI 106, 2011/2) and delved into "Laudato Si".

But also, we must accompany those, indigenous or not, in the countryside or cities, who "Lose their life" in exchange of satisfying the competition for well-being through the use of natural and human resources. This can be done by everyone, no matter how far we may be from indigenous peoples; in all our ministries of the Society of Jesus. We can and must make ours, but this time in terms of global ecology, the challenge of working all for the poor, some with the poor, and a few like the poor when they open their doors, as Father Kolvenbach invited us to do. But we cannot preach that which we do not believe in, we cannot share that which we do not live. It takes a deep awareness of our own fundamental imagery through which we interpret interpersonal and socio-environmental relationships, understand the biomes, and read the Gospels. Will we continue to preach that we have been placed in Eden to "master the created," as if we were not part of the same creation, as if that dominion did not begin with ourselves, with our disordered affections? Well, perhaps it is not about the dominion or the care of that which is foreign to us, but about respect for the reality that surrounds us, as the indigenous peoples show us despite the threats that loom over them.

In all our works and ministries we can work as not to continue ignoring that incarnate ecological mystique of the indigenous peoples that connects us directly with the heart of the mystical sources of the Church from the Semina Vervi of the priests, going through the spiritual legacy of Francisco de Asís and Ignatius, the blood of the indigenous fighters for justice and integral ecology, even the desiresthat they promote the call to the Synod of the Amazon.