By Wendy
Griffin--This article was published in HondurasWeekly.com in 2013
Doña Juana
Carolina Hernandez Torres, the new female Chief (cacica) of Moradel and Silin,
outside of Trujillo, Colon, is well known around Trujillo. Most weekends she is on the beach in Trujillo
selling Pech crafts from one restaurant to another. She is also active as a catechist in the Trujillo
dioceses of the Catholic Church, and so she and her husband Hernan, a
Celebrator of the Word of the Catholic church attend many sectorial meetings. In Moradel, she runs a small store that sells
Pech crafts which is a popular stop for Honduran university students studying
social sciences. It can be seen on the blog www.culturapech.blogspot.com. She and her family still speak Pech, so they
are commonly visited by international linguists studying the Pech language. Doña Juana is also a midwife (partera), a massage therapist (sobadora), and ahealer with medicinal plants(curandera).
Her son
Angel Martinez, in the same Pech Assembly that elected Dona Juana in April 2013
as Chief, also was chosen to be the Departmental Coordinator of Pech bilingual
intercultural education program in Colon, a new position started in 2013. Since
he has become coordinator, there have been several large and small Pech
bilingual intercultural education seminars in both Colon and Olancho, the formation of a Pech dance group in Moradel
and Silin which danced in the streets of Central Park of Trujillo recently for
the first time ever, and the formation
of a Pech musical group in Moradel which sings modern Pech songs which combine
traditional Pech instruments like a Pech drum and a Pech flute made by Doña
Juana’s husband Don Hernan and maracas made by her son José with modern
instruments and songs in Pech composed by Prof. Angel himself. In2014 the funding for the Pech Coordinator position was cut although that for Garifunas was continued, which is fairly typical of the discrimination of smaller ethnic groups inHonduras like the Pech and the Tawahka in internationally funded projects.
His song in
Pech about “Who were our relatives? The wild animals of the mountains were our
relatives, the white collared peccary (quequeo), the peccary (jaguilla), the
deer, the tapir (danto), were our relatives and they are gone and we are
worried”, was a popular song at the Central American Linguists Conference in
Tegucigalpa in August 2013, and at the first ever Celebration of the Day of the
Wata on 13 October 2013 in the community of Moradel. The Departmental Office of
Education in Trujillo together with the Pech and the Garifunas of Colon sponsored a conference last year in 2013 on the Challenges of Bilingual Intercultural
Education in Honduras which even the
Minister of Education Marlon Escoto attended, said Prof. Angel Martinez.
The Pech
and the Garifunas of Colon and the UNAH-CURVA in Olanchito, Yoro near the
Jicaque community of Agalteca, and some Miskito Indians and Black English
speakers are also working on an oral history project of the Ethnic Groups and
the Banana Companies, the preliminary advances of which are tentatively proposed to be shared
at a mini-conference in the Trujillo area at the end of March 2014 to
commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Truxillo Railroad, a United
Fruit subsidiary, and the beginning of African Heritage Month which is the
month of April in Honduras.
Since Doña
Juana and her family also speak Pech, and know many details about traditional
Pech culture, her house is usually one of the first stops of visitors to the
village. She is the co-author of the
book Los Pech de Honduras with her husband Hernan Martinez and me, published by
the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH) in 2009, and she and
her family have given talks on the Pech or their crafts or bilingual
intercultural education around Honduras.
They are members of the Trujillo Artisans Association and their crafts
were recently displayed in the US in Atlanta, at the University of Kansas,
Western Washington University, and are now part of the collections at the
University of Washington’s Burke Anthropological and Natural History Museum and
the San Pedro Sula Museum of Anthropology and History. In that book she describes the Pech versions of illnesses which are common on the north coast of Honduras like haito de agua, haito de leche, empacho, etc. and their treatement.
She and her
family also helped produce a Spanish translation of the Pech grammar book Pech
(Paya) with comments by the Pech themselves, and a new book on Pech crafts,
being prepared to accompany an upcoming permanent exposition of Indian crafts
in the San Pedro Sula Museum which is being planned to open in January 2014.
Juana’s husband Hernan Martinez and her
husband’s father Don Amado also contributed to a published collection of Pech
Myths, Dioses, Heroes y Hombres en el Universo Mitico Pech (Gods Heros and Men
in the Pech Mythical Universe) written in 1991, while French linguist Claudine
Chamoreau and Professor Angel, Juana and Hernan’s son, are currently working
with Doña Juana and her husband Don Hernan on new bilingual (Pech-Spanish) collections
of Pech stories and in March 2014 started a documentation project of the
endangered Pech language with funding from a University in England. Pech
stories of Don Hernan with translations by his son Prof. Angel Martinez are in
a collection of stories from the Department of Colon being published by a USAID
project Educaccion.
Why losing Traditional Stories and Traditional Songs Affect Health and Societies
According to studies of members of the
traditional knowledge network often the key stories to convincing people how to
protect the environment, are often in stories, songs and taboos about killing
too many fish or too many rainforest animals or cutting too many trees. Studies
of how social values are taught like don’t steal (no tocar cosas ajenas, no son
suyos), don’t kill your neighbors, a good reputation is worth than L100, how to start strong families, are also often
encoded in stories and songs in native languages. I warned in 1993 in
intercultural education seminars about values in the Mosquitia and in Colon,
that if we did not teach the young people a good sound foundation of the
traditional values of their cultures, the young people would be at risk for
learning the values of the street—having more is better, it does not matter how
I get it.
You only
have to look at the statistics of San Pedro Sula, with the highest homicide rate per capita in the world and 70-80% of the public health dollars goes to attend gunshot and machete wounds, or the HondruasWeekly.com
articles about Colon and the Mosquitia, to see the results of 20 years of not
teaching traditional cultural values in the schools, and the young people often
not hearing them at home either because they do not speak the language of their
ethnic group, or they were watching TV (usually programs from the US translated
into Spanish or Spanish telenovelas from Mexico both of which often have
bizarre social values shown), or they are listening to popular music in
Spanish, like narcocorridos (popular songs in Spanish teaching young people how it is fun and exiciting to be a drug trafficker) which includes a whole genre of narcotrafficante music from Mexico and
their families do not go to traditional ceremonies of their ethnic group due to
having become Christian.
When I read
to my gringo friends, who are only too
familiar with stories of theft in Honduras, the Miskito stories collected by
MISKIWAT, for example if a child steals a watermelon, a big ogre pops out it
and chases the child until it has a heart attack and dies, they say, "Why don’t they teach those stories
in the schools?"
While the
fact that visitors to Moradel used to visit primarily Doña Juana’s family’s
house and store, used to cause friction with the rest of the local Pech
community, now they have elected her as Chief to help them rescue the Pech
language and culture in Silin and Moradel, also choosing her son Angel Martinez
as Departmental Coordinator and her son Jeremïas as a Pech Bilingual
Intercultural Education teacher in Moradel’s Elvira Tomé school which like many
schools where bilingual intercultural teachers work is a PROHECO school rather
than a regular Honduran government school.
Her husband Hernan was elected Wata, at the recent Day of the Wata in
Moradel in October 13.
Don Hernan
is also active in the local Catholic church as a Celebrator of the Word (lay
minister). The Catholic Diocese based in Trujillo celebrated earlier this year
a “Encuentro Cultural” (Cultural Encounter)
of the Pech, the Garifunas and the Miskitos in the Trujillo area in the
community of Moradel, which was very well attended in spite of happening on a
day of heavy downpours. The Day of the Wata also ended in a torrential downpour
after not raining heavily for months, which the Pech took as a sign of blessing
that the spirits were happy with the celebration.
Among the
Pech of Silin, the Chief serves for two years, but can be reelected. Doña Juana
is the second female chief of Silin and Moradel communities, the first one
being Doña Guillermina who recently died and the Pech there held a large kech
ceremony in her honor prior to burying her. Profesor Angel had previously been
elementary school teacher in the community of Moradel during two years and has
taught a course on the Pech language for adults there funded by the new
Secretary of Indian Peoples and Afro-Hondurans (SEDINAFRO), which was started
during President Pepe Lobo’s administration.
All the ethnic groups say that the Minister of Education under Pepe
Lobo’s Administration Marlon Escoto, has been very supportive of bilingual
intercultural education, which in Apirl was upgraded to a “Direccion General”
(General Directorate). Unfortunately the President of the Congress is not so
friendly to them, and the new Law of Education recently passed downgraded
bilingual intercultural to a “Subdireccion” and has no participation of the
Indians and Afro-Hondurans (or Honduran universities) in the National Council
of Education, confirmed Scott Wood, the Miskito Sub-director of Bilingual
Intercultural Education. Because it leaves out the UNAH, which by law sets the
guidelines of education in Honduras and almost all Honduran lawyers graduate
from its Law School, the UNAH has filed a case saying this law is
unconstitutional, too. In the end they were able to save bilingual intercultural education from being downgraded and the Minister of Education under Pepe Lobo was renamed under Juan Orlando Hernandez in January 2014.
While many Pech teachers in Olancho were able
to become graduated teachers with help from training programs sponsored by the
National bilingual intercultural education program PRONEEAAH, the children of
Doña Juana only became graduated teachers through a lot of work and sacrifice
by her, her family and her children which included abandoning their lands in
the Mosquitia, where there are no high school or university programs to train
teachers. She and her husband said in
their speeches after she was sworn in as chief in April 2013, “We made the
decision to teach our children Pech and
the Pech culture when they were young, and you can see that it has helped them
(to get these jobs in the bilingual intercultural education project)”.
Violence
Increases towards Honduran Indian Bilingual Intercultural Education Teachers Who are Often Younger Family members of Traditional healers and Craft people and Singers or Musicians
By Wendy
Griffin Published in HondurasWeekly.com
I am
excited that the Honduran Minister of Education Marlon Escoto is going to go to
Trujillo for a Conference on the Challenges of Bilingual Intercultural
Education being organized by the Departmental Office of Education there,
together with the Pech and the Garifunas there. But it is very disheartening
and worrisome that one of the current challenges
of bilingual intercultural education is the trend to target Honduran Indian
bilingual intercultural teachers as targets for threats and assassination, with
the most recent case being two Maya Chorti cousins José and Ismael Interiano
who were shot at in November 2013 as they returned home by motorcycle from
teaching in the PROHECO schools where they began teaching this year to
Carrizalon, Copan Ruinas, killing one of them. Their motorcycles had parts
taken.
Although the deceased had over L2,000 ($100) on
him as he had been recently paid for being a teacher, the money was not taken,
supporting the idea that the murder was designed to frighten and intimidate the
Maya Chortis, and was not just another simple robbery. “Asombro” a feeling of frightened surprise is
how the mood of the Chorti in Copan Ruinas is described after the murder news
was known. The story of this murder of the Maya Chorti teacher has not been
covered by the Honduran Spanish speaking newspapers, even though they were sent
articles in Spanish about it with photos.
This
problem that violence in the general society was also affecting directly
schools in Mexico and their personnel, was also a topic at the First
Pedagogical Exchange in San Pedro Sula in July 2013. My last articles for
Honduras This week on Honduran maras or gangs began that when you think of the
risks of taking a job as a primary school teacher, you do not think that seeing
one of your students murdered in front of the school would be one of them, as
happened to my UPN students in San Pedro Sula. Accepting to be a school teacher,
especially for elementary grades or for the Ministry of Education in
Tegucigalpa, has not traditionally been thought of as a high risk job but it
has become so in Honduras.
The mother
of one of the young Maya Chorti teachers, both only around 20 years old, had
been the First Consejera Mayor (lead Council Person, the highest position in
CONIMCHH, the Chortis’ ethnic federation) of CONIMCHH (National Council of the
Maya Chorti Indians of Honduras), which has its main office in Copan Ruinas,
Copan.
An employee
of CONIMCHH confirmed the murder of one of the Chorti teachers, and said the
organization of CONIMCHH denounces this kind of activity against its teachers
and against the Chortis. An earlier
report had erroneously said both the teachers were killed. As in the case of
the Pech, the younger people involved as bilingual intercultural education
teachers, are often family members of Honduran Indians who practice a wide
variety of traditional skills, because these are the families most likely to
speak the language and to value the traditions enough to teach them to their
children, and also because they are often local leaders, and being a leader in
the community, first means being a leader and an example within your home.
The mother
and aunt of the Chortis who were attacked
is a craft person in the Chorti pottery cooperative project in
Carrizalon, while the grandfather of both of the teachers attacked is a well
known healer and one of the few makers of the traditional maguey fiber crafts
among the Chorti and who still grew maguey, currently a very scarce plant among
the Chortis. An example of Maya Chorti Carrizalon pottery and maguey crafts, as
well as examples of crafts important in healing ceremonies, are now in the Burke Anthropology Museum at
the University of Washington and in the office of CONIMCHH in Copan Ruinas. The
San Pedro Museum has plants to include Maya Chorti crafts in its upcoming
Honduran Indian craft exhibit, but has not yet found the funds to be able to
fund the purchase of them, nor the display cases to put them in.
Other
examples of Honduran Indians being killed who worked in the bilingual
intercultural education project include Maya Chorti Candido Amador, and the
Pech teacher from El Carbon Blas Lopez. Candido Amador who was the Chorti with
the highest grade of education at that time, was a 9th grade
graduate and had been working as a tour guide at the Copan Ruinas
Archqueological Park when CONIMCHH request that he accept the position of
Chorti Bilingual Intercultural Education Coordinator at the National level. He
was an official Ministry of Education employee paid with international funding
from the World Bank in the bilingual
intercultural education program at the time of his death.
Candido
Amador was murdered outside of Copan Ruinas on his way home, where he was found
with machete wounds and at least 9 bullet wounds, and his long hair was cut off
by a machete. He had been in a nearby village helping the almost illiterate
Maya Chorti women of the village fill out a grant proposal for sewing machines
for a sewing cooperative. His death
galvanized the Chortis who fought even harder after that, and his picture hangs
in their office and his photo and his story is on their website www.conimchh.org. As the Chorti currently
have no sewing cooperative with sewing machines, I assume that not even to
honor his death, were the funders encouraged to approve the sewing machine
project grant which he was working on.
I met Prof. Blas Lopez in 1987 when he was one
of the sixth grade graduates, along with Hernan Martinez the husband of the
Pech chief of Moradel Doña Juana, who
were hired to be bilingual intercultural education teachers among the Pech of
Olancho. These Pech teachers had generally studied two years in a formal
primary school with a teacher, but then they had primarily finished sixth grade
through adult education programs by radio, such as Alfalit of the Evangelical
churches during the Contra war period, or such as Escuelas Radiofonicas (Radio
Schools), who had studied in groups led by volunteers, usually themselves Pech
Indians who did not have 6 years of formal school education. It is actually very brave to decide you will
take up teaching first graders to learn to read and write when you yourself
have such a low level of education.
If US
teachers with Master’s degrees in reading have problems teaching reading in US
schools, how much more difficult to teach reading and worse Math in rural
Honduran schools. I observed a few of the classes they gave over the years, and
sometimes it seemed very difficult to deal with the orders that came from
Tegucigalpa. If it says on Monday, at 10 am you must listen to the radio class
on math, they did this.
There is terrible reception of the radio in
the Olancho mountains, so if it was not raining, it was still not clear what
the radio instructor said. But if it was raining, as was often the case in this
edge of the rainforest area in Olancho, it was totally impossible to hear a
thing on the radio. But the instructions said on 10 am, you must teach Math by
radio, and so for an hour the Pech students and the Pech teachers listened to static or the rain,
or both.
The use of
the official textbooks was also difficult in Pech villages. The textbooks and
curriculum said you teach about cows in the section of “Domestic animals”
(Animales mansos—tamed animals). The
Pech children grow up in Olancho where Ladino cattle ranchers let their cattle
which they do not visit for months at a time, roam wild in the forest. The Pech
children grow up afraid a running steer will run over them, or gore them, or
knock the clay off of their clay house.
So if the
Pech teacher asks, “Are cattle “manso” (tamed), or “bravo” (wild, angry,
dangerous)?” the Pech children all answer “Bravo” (wild, angry, dangerous).
This is the wrong answer according to the curriculum. In the world of the
textbook writer, cattle are tame, domesticated, while in the world of the Pech
the cattle are semiferal/wild and
extremely dangerous. I have been in a Pech village in Olancho when the Ladino
cattle owners finally came on horse to round up their cattle for sale and
dozens of cattle are hurrying down a path only wide enough for one person
towards the highway, when I was walking the other way. I ran. I know Olancho
cattle are “bravo” and a lot bigger than I am.
Some Pech
teachers dropped out of the project almost immediately, like Don Hernan of
Moradel, the father of Profesor Angel, but Blas Lopez kept getting more training and teaching. First he spent
six years studying on the weekends in a professionalization program to get a
high school degree as an elementary school teacher. He went on studying several
more years on the weekends to get a college degree, so that he could qualify to
teach and eventually become the director/principal of the Centro Basico (a combined elementary school and nineth
grade junior high school) in El Carbon, which did not exist until he helped
fight for it. On several occasions Blas Lopez lived in Tegucigalpa, helping the
Ministry of Education project to write Pech textbooks or the Pech grammar book
that was published last year, or a proposed Pech dictionary that was never
published.
If you are a rainforest Indian, living in
Tegucigalpa is often not a pleasant experience. The Tawahkas have come to my
house in Tegucicalpa, amd I asked what they liked to eat, and they said, “sopa
de tepescuintle” (tepescuintle soup). Tepescuintles, a rainforest animal that
eats only fruits is delicious according to everyone that has eaten it, but it
is not available in Tegucigalpa supermarkets, and in fact due to its
overhunting and loss of habitat, especially the wild fruit trees, is rarely
available anywhere in Honduras now.
The lack of
water in Tegucigalpa where there is often only one hour a day of water if any,
the crime, the high cost of food and not food they like, lack of firewood, etc.
is part of what makes one Pech woman who used to live in Tegucigalpa’s twin
city Comayaguela say of a Pech village in Olancho with no electricity or
running water, but which had farmland, forest, creeks, “Estamos en la Gloria
aqui” (We are in glory or paradise here in Pech villages in Olancho.)
When the
bilingual intercultural education program started in the Pech villages, there
were Ladino teachers there. These teachers called the Pech children “payitas”.
Paya means “bruto”, stupid, like a dumb animal, according to the Pech, and
“payitas” is the diminutive, so it means little dumb things if they called their
students “payitas”. Sometimes the dimunitive in Spanish, shows affection, but it
also often shows a lack of respect. To
call the Pech Chief Carlos Duarte, an older well known healer and a hereditary
chief for more than 40 years and he had formerly been Mayor of the county of
Culmi, “payita” is just as insulting of
calling sixty year old Black men in the Southern US “boy”.
I know that
now that I am over 50, I think people should not call me a “gringuita” (a
little gringa) and I am still angry about development agency people or Ministry
of Education employees in Tegucigalpa who used to use “vos” with me. “Vos” (you) is only used with either people you are
very intimate with like your childhood friends, or towards people inferior to
you, and if I have to call the other person, Licensiada ( a person who has a
college degree), I do not want them to use “vos” with me.
Just that
fact alone, of being called “little brutes” was one that made the Pech Indian
children want to drop out of school often before finishing third grade. At that
time none of the Pech schools had a sixth grade, not because of government
policy as in the case of the Chorti, but because none of the Pech children
still wanted to be in school by the time sixth grade came. Honduran children
not liking school and not finding it useful, and not wanting to go, is what makes
the majority of Honduran parents say, Ok, don’t go. It’s not worth the money,
and I have work you can do around the house or the farm”, according to official
studies and my experience with the Pech.
When the
Pech teachers were hired, they said immediately to me, to each other, to the
Pech parents, to the Pech students, “It would be good if we the Pech had Pech
nurses. It would be good, if we the Pech
had Pech bus and truck mechanics. We are made out of meat and bones (carne y
hueso), someday we will die. It would be good to have more Pech teachers.” Since the Pech teachers were hired, in spite
of their original low level of schooling, Pech children school attendance has
soared.
Almost all
Pech finish sixth grade now. There are a lot of Pech who study high school, and
I know of at least 2 Pech college graduates who teach at “Centros Basicos” in
the Mosquitia, and at least 15 in-service Pech teachers are studying college on
the weekends. I think Blas would say, it
was worth it to have spent those years in Tegucigalpa and more than 10 years of
being away from his family on the weekends, so that we could have all these
Pech professionals.
Many Pech
bilingual intercultural teachers also take on roles of leaders in the Pech
village councils or in villages that elect chiefs (some Pech villages elect
chiefs, in some it was heriditary by families), to become chief, partly because
you need to be able to read and write Spanish well to go to this infinite
number of meetings and sessions, and you also need a cash income to pay to go
to these meetings. This means the same bilingual intercultural education
teachers are the ones fighting for land rights. And it was because of land
rights struggles in Olancho that Prof. Blas Lopez, then the president of the
Pech Federation was killed.
And it was
probably because of land struggles that one Chorti Indian bilingual
intercultural education teacher from Carrizalon, Copan Ruinas was killed and
another one shot at over the last month. The Chortis of Carrizalon are one of three
Chorti villages threatened to be dislodged from lands the Honduran government
promised to buy them and then did not. It is strange that Carrizalon should be
in this position, because the Chorti residents say they have lived there since
1820, before the independence of Honduras, and more than a century before the
location of the Honduran-Guatemala border was decided in the 1930’s, a decision
brokered in Washington, DC because the border conflict was between the United
Fruit Company (now Chiquita) advancing towards the border from the Guatemalan
side and the Cuyamel Fruit Company of Samuel Zemurray advancing towards the
border on the Honduran side.
Carrizalon
located 1 km from the Guatemalan border is in the sights of narcotrafficantes,
the drug traffickers, who have bought all the mules available along the
Salvadoran-Guatemala border, according to the mule sellers. A high ranking
member of the Sinoloa gang was captured in Guatemala in the Zacapa Department
on the lower end of the Chortis’ area and armed Zetas, have also been seen
having lunch on the Guatemalan side of the Chorti lands. The Zetas and the
Sinoloa cartel are the two biggest Mexican gangs fighting for the control of
the drug trafficking business in Mexico. The Cachiros, the Hondurans who had their
bank accounts frozen and their lands seized in the Colon/Garifuna area were
reportedly associated with the Sinaloa cartel. The name of the community of
Copan, comes from the Nahua and Honduran Spanish word for bridge copante, because it was on the path
from the Valley of Mexico to the Guatemala city area to the Honduran north
Coast 1,000 years before the Spanish even thought of finding the New World or
the route to the Spice Islands.
When the recent 32 year civil war was going in
Guatemala, a time known as “las ruinas” (the ruins) among the Guatemalan Mayas
because of the high number of murders of Indians, a number of his Mayan
bilingual education teacher friends were also murdered, reported Dr. James
Loucky, a Latin American anthropology professor at WWU in Bellingham, Washington. The start of this civil
war was also associated with problems with United Fruit (Chiquita) and about
land for Indians.
Now
Hondurans is now gaining a reputation that it is competing with Guatemala of
the civil war period for its horrendous treatment of Indians and of the people
who worked in favour of them. English anthropologist Krystyna Duess’s book on
her thirty year study on Mayan Shaman, Witches, and Priests in Highland
Guatemala is dedicated to an American USAID bilingual education project worker
who disappeared in Guatemala and showed up dead later in Mexico. That book is
now available through the University of Oklahoma Press.
I purposely
chose to come Honduras to work in 1985 instead of Guatemala which is much more
famous for its Indians than Honduras, because although I thought Guatemala was
beautiful, they were killing the people who worked with the poor there then
during the civil war, and the situation in Honduras was much better then.
The
situation in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala has deteriorated so much,
that they are now called the “Northern Triangle” by theatlantic.com which
considers them collectively the most dangerous place in the world, and CCN has
done articles, repeated on Honduran radio, comparing the safety of living in
Honduras on par with the Congo.
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