One of the most beautiful things that start to happen when one starts to walk the Ancient Medicine Path is that you get to meet amazing people who are also walking their own self-discovery road.

On November 2019 I started using facebook ads to advertise my Yopo and Jurema Ceremonies here in Colombia. I was still making my name known here as a shamanic medicine facilitator and I needed something to boost my visibility.

To that date I had written a couple of articles for the DMT Times about Yopo and Bufo Alvarius

It was through these articles that my friend Alex from Jamaica found me.
And what an amazing guy this one was!

My friend Alex is also a student of Traditional Plant Medicine, following the footsteps of his elders and recovering his ancient traditions.

See, he is in a quest to get back the ancient knowledge of Sacred Medicinal Plants that was wiped by the conquest by killing the curanderos and curanderas and making their knowledge "heretic".

The good news? They didn't manage to erase all the knowledge!

Some of them, like the ancestors of my master Rufino fled and hid in the jungle, mountains and even deserts to keep their customs and medicine. And nowadays they are looking for those interested and prepared to hold these sacred human knowledge to pass it along.

I'm one of those students. If cared about titles mine would be right now something like "Student of Traditional Huotujjan Ancient Plant Medicine". So I'm in the perfect spot to help Alex reconnect to his roots as well.

To start with, the sacred plants weren't killed along with the curanderos, so the medicine IS already there IN Jamaica.

For example Yopo (anandanathera peregrina) a traditional visionary medicine of the Huotujjan people is present in Jamaica. It is called Cohoba, and there are stories of old traditional use lost to time and conquest.

source

So, Alex is looking to learn all he can about Traditional South American Plant Medicine from the shamans, curanderos and taitas to give that knowledge back to his people.

And I resonate deeply with his quest, it is harmonic to mine so I'm doing all in my power to help Alex and his wife come to Colombia to learn Plant Medicine and traditions.

We'll be their hosts and guides here in Colombia and hopefully we all can get to Venezuela and visit Rufino in the heart of the Venezuelan Amazonian Jungle to learn and share with our beautiful Huotujjan people and my beloved friend and master Rufino Ponare.

Without further ado here is Alex story:

A PILGRIMAGE FOR GLOBAL HEALING

by Alex E.G. Moore-Minott and Malkia C.S.Moore-Minott

As indigenous descendants and a young married couple in the neo-colonial era, we carry the struggles of our ancestors, including all the memories and emotion concerning our current situation caused by colonization.

Individually we have our own stories which we got from our family members, stories of heartache, mental and physical oppression, demonization of our culture and traditional values and ridicule of even our bodies and how we look.

Colonization and all that it brings has forced many of our family members to hide and shy away from their identity in order to distance themselves from struggle and oppression. The hardest part for us growing up was facing the education system where it is taught that we, the indigenous people of the island now called Jamaica, were wiped out and are extinct. A frail image of weak indians who died out from a little hard work, is not something anybody would be proud of.

Generations of acculturation and socialization through the education system, media marketing campaigns promoting alternate cultures and the misappropriating, hijacking and repackaging of our culture has been detrimental to the current generation of indigenous descendants living in Jamaica now.

Contributing to these factors is the reality that each generation had to experience; discrimination, oppression and demonized for embracing your own heritage contributed to the layering and mystique ingrained in the story-telling which was passed on to each successive generation which has resulted in the current generation having to unravel a mystified and parabolized version of our story, done so by our ancestors to ensure that the children receive certain values and ways of life necessary for our survival in a period of invasion and occupation.

Even today, we still have certain relatives deathly afraid of our identity, for fear of being extinguished by those with bigger might and power who did actually violently kill some of our relatives and ancestors who they encountered upon contact. It is indeed our knowledge of our lands and its difficult to maneuver terrains that enabled our survival.

Our prolific nature and exogamous tendencies enabled our numbers to increase and repair the near decimation. The ones the invaders encountered upon contact and committed violence against were killed, subjugated, conquered, placed under encomienda systems and required to pay taxes or face land seizure and serfdom, the ones that refused subjugation and manage to get away to inaccessible regions were of course unreachable.

Over the generations though intermingling between the assimilated and the ones that refused has occurred, not to mention the natural exogamous tendencies of some of our people which has created something unique our present society.

Our island is small, so in an absence of an overt declared war, there is be travel and connectivity across the entire territory which creates a sort of shared experience among everyone, including those initially assimilated and those who were actively at war in defense of a peaceful existence, human rights, freedom, land possession and simply the right to be left alone, for as long as occupation continues there will be some level of contact regardless of anyone's desire to live in isolation.

Even for those who simply want to be able thrive in our little island or the Caribbean or anywhere regardless of where it is, because whether you live in a reservation or not, or what has been defined as your "territory" by an invading force, it does not change the fact that the entire space which transcends invisible borders belong to us and we should be able to live anywhere within it or traverse it freely because this is our land.

This generational experience of disinheritance and disenfranchisement of our territory by the installment of invisible borders is something we all have inherited as indigenous descendants. We are a part of this earth, who is our mother and we are fragmented and divided by these invisible borders. We need to mend these fragmentation and tears, stitch them up and reconnect with our relatives as they are a part of us, and we a part of them.

Life in the Caribbean for an indigenous descendant is hard.

Your own kind is looked down upon, your own kin seen as not good enough to associate with. Our communities are poverty stricken, which results in a lack of education and intellectual decay or brain drain and assimilation. The brilliant minds amongst us are forced out by push and pull factors shrouded in "ambition", with the others left to self-destruct. Ambition is a natural factor of assimilation, as it is only human to want to live a good life. There are some of us, who want a good life but not at the risk of the destruction of our identity and communities.

Some of us feel compelled and obligated to be the glue which keeps us all together, whilst unraveling our shrouded and obscure history. This obscurity is like a mask that we put on for the public, as a now instinctual survival mechanism.

The destruction of our communities which were comprised of extended families has led to some of us seeking such familial connection and community in every and anything. Whether it be religious groups, sports groups, community groups, groups arising from trends and fads, our natural tendency to connect in such a way as to be like family engenders another source of acculturation that result in a steady erosion of our culture.

Carnival on Jamaica. Source

The elements of our culture that invading forces saw the novelty in has been repackaged and commercialized in some cases.

For examples, carnival has its ancient ritualistic and ceremonial origins in a part of our history that the invaders dare not allow to be spoken about, as it would shatter certain enchantment that some of us may have with some existing structures that have mirrored certain elements of our culture (and would certainly explain some of our relatives natural attraction) if the masks were to be removed. Carnival has been appropriated, repackaged and commercialized and made available in a perverted and sexualized way, which only places the original fascination the invaders had with our nakedness and ethnocentrically perceived scanty clothing in a modern context.

Then there is another remake of our culture that is only more intense and sexualized now known as the dancehall.

Our traditional festivities, gatherings and celebrations and anything that does not originate from the imposing religious systems have been marketed as of the devil, and so is painted as lewd, wanton, lawless, without inhibition and highly sexualized as a rebellious counteraction to the imposed culture which does contribute to a sort of "self-fulfilling prophecy" of most things revivalistic.

At the end of the day, in the circle of life there is a good way of living taught to all people in various parts of the world, but in these various parts of the world, this occurs in a manner suited to them.

Throughout history various prophets, teachers, knowledge seekers and people led by divine instruction have traveled and their stories have helped to shape a collective experience that has tremendously shaped the entire world's worldview as a global society.

Whereas the writing of history is incomplete, as we are the writers of tomorrow's history, we need to do this trip for the enrichment of humanity as a whole.

As a young couple, we find it an obligation to make this pilgrimage because we ourselves have wounds to heal. We have dark places and dark forces that we must confront and overcome within ourselves. We have painful memories that we need to learn how to reconcile with, and we have gaps that we need to build bridges over to make sense of what has for many years seemed like nonsense.

We realized as a young married couple that a lot of the knowledge we had was to live a life that was unsustainable and upon realizing this fact we made the only natural decision someone could make in such a situation and that was to get back to basics. We now know with a certainty that the ways of life of our people prior to colonization were ways that were tested by time, and were mature ways, not the ways of children.

That is another effect of colonization; perceiving the past and the old people in a childlike manner. This is of course another legacy of an education which values the physical over the spiritual, and what seems like a blindness in one eye causing an inability to perceive the wisdom in anything not physical.

We need as a married couple a legacy of love, sustainability, honor, respect, humility and reverence for nature to pass to our unborn children.

We fear bringing them unto this plane without having acquired that legacy for fear that they may fall into the same situation that we did.

Yes, we do love knowledge and we do love to heal, and we do love the feeling it gives when one says "thank you, you have healed me" but we do not want to make this pilgrimage for ourselves in reality, but for all our sisters and brothers who carry the same burden of colonization we do and for all our unborn children who have not yet been touched by colonization, we are calling into existence a good way of living for them and the ones after them because for some reason now feels like the right time.

Support Alex and Malkia on their pilgrimage using this Gofundme:

West Indian Tribal Society