From a blazing fire pit at Highgrove to global climate summits, Indigenous leader Mindahi Bastida is urging the world to listen again to the Earth.
It is a glorious sunny July day in the gardens at Highgrove, King Charles’ grand estate in Gloucestershire. The monarch is one of a ring of people encircling a blazing fire pit. As group members hold up their hands to pay their respects to nature, an Indigenous leader in a splendiferous cape of vivid turquoise feathers sounds a conch shell and begins a ceremony dedicated to the natural world.
Welcome to the inaugural Harmony Summit.
The King is playing host to an event celebrating Mother Earth and advancing his long-held philosophy of “Harmony”, the subject of his 2010 book. The idea behind the summit is to draw on the wisdom of Indigenous peoples, whose knowledge of pre-industrial ways of living offers a different model for working with nature, rather than against it.
The service is led by Bastida, Ritual Ceremony Officer and Caretaker of the philosophy and traditions of the Otomi-Toltec people in Mexico, and a global advocate for Indigenous peoples and the rights of nature. Bastida, whose first name means “the One who comes with the Wind”, describes the Harmony Summit as “an important step toward rebalancing our systems by centring Indigenous knowledge, protecting sacred lands, and remembering that true progress begins with listening to nature.
That Bastida is presiding over the ceremony at the King’s residence reflects the esteem he enjoys in ecological circles. He is the founder and convenor of The Earth Elders, an influential environmental organisation that began in 2013, when more than 100 Indigenous Elders from across the Americas assembled in northern Colombia as ecological disasters spiralled out of control. They gathered to seek guidance from Mother Earth, through prayer, ceremony and communion. At that moment, The Earth Elders was born.
The charity was set up as a global project to share Indigenous Knowledge Systems. Its Elders, Original leaders from across the world, remind us of our responsibilities to nature, to one another and to the ancestral wisdom that sustains life.Bastida’s organisation has since contributed to discussions at the UN, COP, Climate Week, the World Economic Forum and the Vatican. Yet, speaking exclusively to I-M from Zurich Airport, in the middle of a whistle-stop week that takes in Benin, Liechtenstein and Davos, he says powerful supporters are not enough.
“We also need engagement and ongoing intention. It’s not easy, but at least we are trying. We are attempting to open not just the doors, but also the windows. “The Earth Elders bring the idea of unification, of coming together, of learning together and, ultimately, of transcending together. We want to reconnect with our ancestral way of living, our harmony with nature and the cycles of life. This is all about how we are nature ourselves.”
Left: The sacred Samaúma tree and Amazonian Indigenous people are both in critical danger by illegal logging, agro-industrial expansion and organised crime, which destroy ancestral territories, deplete the rainforest’s vital water cycles and threaten native cultures. © Lucy Martins.
Right: Quebrada de Humahuaca (UNESCO World Heritage site) and the Jujuy people face an existential crisis driven by lithium mining, tourism and real-estate expansion, which drain their water supply, strip away their ancestral land rights and threaten their culture. © Rebecca Routman.
The need for an authoritative global voice on the environment has never felt more urgent. Bastida, a calm, charismatic presence, believes our relationship with the natural world has been profoundly ruptured. “At a certain point, we forgot those structures. Some people began to go away from this original instruction because of greed, because of the desire to be taking over instead of taking care.
“They started to go in another direction, believing that humans are the most intelligent beings and the only ones who think. But that is just a mirage. It’s the arrogance of human beings who think that we are the pick of creation, when in reality we are just another species in the concept of life.”
For Bastida, greed sits at the heart of that rupture.“Greed is not just a material sickness; it’s also a spiritual sickness. Greed has been the main characteristic that has taken us to the point of no return, to the point where we need to examine who we are as human beings and how we behave.”
The repair required, he says, is not merely environmental. It is historical, spiritual and human. “We need to come together once again after such a long night of colonisation, slavery and all of the exploitation around the world. Coming together, we are stronger. We can learn from each other and take responsibility for Mother Earth.”
An advocate steeped in the accumulated wisdom of Indigenous peoples, Bastida believes we must rediscover “the capacity and the need to be happy, to give, to be joyful and to enjoy the beauty of this world without exceeding our footprints or our handprints or our mind-prints.”
[…]
Read James Rampton’s thought-provoking interview with Mindahi Bastida in full in the Spring issue of I-M Inquisitive Minds, with Laura Dern as our cover star. An issue full of incisive interviews, original voices and features that ask how we might live, think and see differently. Available HERE.
Lead image: Mindahi Bastida, Otomi-Toltec wisdom keeper and founder of The Earth Elders, in a moment of quiet connection with a sacred tree in Benin, West Africa.
Show Comments +