Posted on 02/14/2012 2:21:03 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
...For a Canadian mining company, these same hills look like a billion dollars worth of buried silver.
In a stark collision of cultures, the famously mystical Huichol are trying to stop a $100 million, 15-year mining project from starting this year.
Their struggle comes as indigenous people from Alaska to the Amazon are rallying to protect not just their environment but also their cultures from decay.
This raises a tough question: How do you protect a cosmic portal?
“For them the whole mountain is a temple, and the gold and silver below the ground are there for a reason — they contribute to the energy, and it would be best if they just left it alone,” said Eduardo Guzman, an activist and spokesman for the Huichol living in a hard-scrabble pueblo called Las Margaritas at the foot of the magic mountain.
Past Guzman’s ranch gate, a minivan loaded with Huichol, dressed in embroidered muslin tunics and straw hats dancing with colored balls and feather totems, bounced by on their way to a ceremony. The elders said they were too busy to talk and departed in a cloud of dust.
The Huichol had come from their village 150 miles away to hunt peyote — the hallucinogenic cactus they call “the blue deer.” The Huichol eat the peyote cactus raw or dried, producing auditory and visual hallucinations — pleasant or not — and sensations of introspection and deep insight.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Hippies, environmentalists, and indigenous people "face off" with the mining company creating jobs for the locals (and jumping through liberal appeasement hoops to do it) close to sacred mountain ground where their religious sacrament, peyote, grows.
And my house is a domestic church - we’ll see if that works when I don’t pay my mortgage.
I’m sure some self-described Catholic do-gooders are there muddying the water, too. Maybe that crazy “priest” (now Episcopalian Fr. Fox) with his “cosmic rave mass” can claim it as his church, too?
The crowd there seems blissfully unaware that the Fundamentalist LDS temple there in West Texas is smack dab in the middle of the most productive peyote growing region in the world.
If they seriously wanted to protect their culture from decay they’d lay off the peyote.
And top it all off with a Sedona "sweat lodge" experience.
Great link — fits so well.
And the liberalism.
Exactly. The mine owners are already (greasing the stuck wheels of capitalism) planning a visitors’ center, a museum and a repaired mine to tour....not to mention hundreds of jobs. Those paying jobs will attract more business to the area and so on and so forth...
And then turn yourself into a crow and fly away...
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