Untitled Document

RARAMURI EMERGENCY FUND

The Copper Canyon is in the northern part of Mexico in the state of Chihuahua, recognized the world over as the nesting place of the monarch butterflies. It is in this very canyon where we, the Raramuri people make our home. We are commonly known as the Tarahumara Indians but in our language we call ourselves Raramuri, (light of feet).

These lands, this canyon, these forests and plateaus has been our home for thousands of years. We Raramuri are an ancient people, For the past 400 years we have had contact, with those who came from across the Atlantic Ocean and this contact has been and continues to be brutal to our well being.

Upon first contact we confronted devastating foreign illnesses, then foreign religion, then foreign agri-business, then foreign drug-lords, and now more injurious than all these put together, is the modern way of life, which is still foreign to many of us.

But now its Spring of 2007 by the count of your calendars and we have the following message to convey to you.

The nomadic winds that cross the cities, the deserts, the marshes, the forests, have come into our remote canyon areas laden with acids that now burn our skin.

Our children, our elders, our women, our men have city sicknesses, though we live where there is no electricity, no asphalt roads, no oil refineries, no refrigerators, no air-conditioners, nor any of the myriad of millions of things, that make up your modern way of life. Our water is sick, our deer, our medicinal plants, our wild turkeys are all sick.

The lament from our sister the water, our brother the air, our mother the Earth, and our father the sun is heard even while we are asleep.

Through all this, we have continued to keep our language, our attire, our art, and most of all our responsibility and respect for all living things. We have not forgotten how to walk on our sacred mother Earth as human beings. We are the caretakers.

We listen to the deer because they do not forget, nor does the cedar tree, the flower, the squash, nor the fish or snake, they all remember how to be. They remember who they are. But us the human beings, we are forgetting how to be humans.

So now, we the Raramuri are forced to come out and ask for your help.

Over twenty thousand of our people live in the most remote areas of the Copper Canyon, taking three to four days of walking to reach the nearest gravel road, these are the traditional beings, keepers of our ways. We the Raramuri, ask for your help because there is no food, no wild game that is not diseased, no clean water. Our ancient father trees have been cut to pieces and the mountain sides left barren. We the Raramuri have no other choice.

Though you and I have never met, or spoken we are connected.
We may be thousands of miles apart and use different sounds to say the same thing, but how you choose to live your life, your modern life, is making our life impossible to live

We are Raramuri
We still run to the precipice of the Sierra Madre
We still sing our songs to the spirit of silence
We still dance to the honor of She who sustains us
We still play our drums in harmony with our dreams
We still grind our corn to make pinole our sacred sustenance
We still whisper our thanks to the sun that lives inside each of us
We still hold our place in the universe at the hearth of our mother’s womb
We are Raramuri light of feet.