Dreaming Mother Earth: The Life and Wisdom of Native Cuban Cacique Francisco Panchito Ramirez Rojas - Softcover

Jose Barreiro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934370738 ISBN 13: 9781934370735

Publisher: Editorial Campana, 2018

Synopsis

In this revealing and deeply researched book, José Barreiro (author, activist, and retired director, Office for Latin America, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian) distills over a decade of interviews with Francisco Panchito Ramirez Rojas, a true cacique, or chief, in the tradition of the original Native ancestors of the Caribbean. In the track of an uninterrupted lineage reaching back to before the late 15th century European invasion, Panchito speaks with the simple yet powerful voice of one who understands and communicates with nature, humans included, in ways that the western world has long forgotten.  Dreaming Mother Earth offers the reader perhaps the first authentic testimony of a man who retains, and lives, many of the ancient traditions of his people. Panchito and his community of several thousand in the eastern Cuban mountains leave no doubt that the Tainos, as the Spanish invaders called his ancestors in the Greater Antilles, are still with us, and that the news of their extinction by historians and scholars has been, in the words of Mark Twain, greatly exaggerated.   Combining ancestral knowledge of the land with newer European and African beliefs and technologies, today s Cuban Indian people offer no "lost tribe" romanticism. They are contemporary guajiros as mountain and country people are called in Cuba, but who, in their strong Native kinship culture, still carry a deep practical and spiritual knowledge in the power and sacredness of the natural world.  Thanks to José Barreiro for bringing this extraordinary leader, his family, and his community to all of us.  And thank you, Panchito, and all the people who never relinquished their Native Caribbean identity for resisting, and for preserving a way of life that just may signal our path to survival in this 21st  century.

About this title

About the Author:

José Barreiro is an author and activist with over forty years of service to Native causes and issues. Scholar Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, Barreiro served for a decade as head of culture and history research at the National Museum of the American Indian (2006-2016). He is a pioneering voice of contemporary indigenous journalism, serving as associate editor of the national Native newspaper, Akwesasne Notes(1974-1984), Editor in Chief of Akwe:kon Press and Native Americas Magazine at Cornell University (1984-2002) and as senior editor and redesigner of Indian Country Today (2002-2006). Barreiro was an organizer and communicator for the first United Nations conference on the human rights of Indigenous Peoples (Geneva, 1977) and involved in dozens of human rights cases with Native communities. He is author of the novel Taino: The Indian Chronicles, and editor numerous publications, including, Thinking in Indian: A John Mohawk Reader, Chiapas: Challenging History; Indian Roots of American Democracy, and; The Great Inka Road; Engineering an Empire. A member of the Taino Nation of the Antilles, Barreiro has organized several conferences in Cuba and other Caribbean islands on the issues of indigenous survivals and indigeneity in the region. He led the research and design working group that curated the Smithsonian exhibition, "Taino: Native Heritage and Identity in the Caribbean," (2018). Barreiro resides with his family on the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation in upstate New York.

Review:

Native cultural continuity for Cuba that has been largely ignored. Dreaming Mother Earth is a labor of love. Over a lifetime of love and labor, Barreiro has chronicled many Native people and provided a map to the spiritual and land based constellations of our ways of life. Barreiro remains a lifetime storyteller, impeccable scholar, and journalist from his early days at the Native movement publication, Akwesasne Notes, in the 1970s, to this coolest of books, an actual Native chronicle from contemporary Cuba. I am forever grateful for his love of our people, history, and research. --Winona Laduke, Native author and scholar-activist,is executive director of Honor the Earth, a Native environmental advocacy organization

Barreiro [is] challenging the essentialist notions of culture that would sequester Amerindians to an ancient past and thereby deny that the much-vaunted hybridity of the modern Caribbean includes indigenous hybridity as well. --Maxemillian C. Forte, Concordia University, author of Extinction: Ideologies Against Indigeneity in the Caribbean Southern Quarterly, Summer 2006

About this edition

• Publisher: Editorial Campana
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1934370738
• ISBN 13: 9781934370735
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208