“We Muisca are people, new people, seed people, gold that blossoms from the womb of Mother Earth.” Fowe Muisca Community
The Muysca (or “muisca” in Spanish) are a native indigenous community from what today is known as Colombia. Like most indigenous groups around the world, the Muisca have been displaced from their lands and forced to give up their customs, language and beliefs in order to survive an extensive process of colonization. Today, a new community of Muysca, called the Fowe Muisca de Oriente has decided to free themselves from what they call “mental colonization”, a concept furthermore disruptive and destructive than the colonization of land, although intrinsically interconnected. This mental colonization is present not only in indigenous communities, but in most modern societies worldwide, where through the disconnection of nature and our territories, there has been a disconnection of ourselves and our place in the world. Thus, anger, hate and violence are understood as a resulting disease, or disharmony, experienced and extended throughout western colonized minds.
This process of returning to the roots, questioning what it means to be “native” to a territory, has given rise to Aka Muysca, Zuhuskansuka Aba, which means “to start over again”, meaning the one who returns home (to the seed, to the origin) and working alongside other indigenous communities such as the Wiwa, Kogi and Arhuaco from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to join their efforts in liberating the land from privatization and extractivism, which has led these ancestral and sacred lands to become dry, eroded and dead. Together, for over 10 years, the Wiwa and Muisca communities are working together to redefine what it means to be native, beyond frontiers and modern concepts which strive to segregate humanity. With the higher purpose of committing towards a global conscience – according to the Muisca – this decolonization of the mind is only possible through an alternative education model and a permanent dialogue with nature and the surrounding territory, and through the understanding that everything is muysca, everything is people, and that our relationship with “earth people”, “rive people”, tree people” and all living beings who we share the planet with is the first step to re-learn the teachings which have been lost during centuries of separation from our true selves.
Therefore, the process of freeing the mind is inseparable from that of freeing the land from the oppression and exploitation it has been suffering for years, to produce that which it is not meant to produce, at rhythms and times which are unnatural, and to respond to a colonialist model of infinite growth and overproduction which is leading to a global collapse.
All these practices make up what is the process of decolonizing the mind, where the result is what the Muisca have called the “New Humanity”: a humanity which respects and honors life, the water and the earth, and which safeguard the spirit and the memory of the ancestors as guides to maintain the legacy of Mother Earth and this way live in harmony with all living beings.
This project seeks to liberate land in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in the north of Colombia to reclaim and reforest 20 hectares near the Wiwa village of Rongoy and build an ancestral pedagogy/education center where native communities and people from all around the world can come together and learn about the culture, traditions, cosmologies, ancestral permaculture, reforestation, and ultimately about the caring and connection with Mother Earth.
This revolutionary idea of indigenous communities coming together as one is the result of a collective effort which aims to protect the land and waters of the Earth as one, independently of the history, lineage and individual beliefs of each community.
