I've been thinking a lot about why it hurts me so much when white people exploit indigenous spirituality. It's not just the disrespect, most of all, I feel that it's double theft. When visiting a New Age trade fair a couple of months ago I felt almost sick when encountering white, norwegian people claiming to be native american spiritualists. I thought: My grandparents where looked down upon, they where marginalized and mistreated for practicing their culture, their religion, in their own land. Now a new bunch of whites come and steal from them again.
I would like to write some things about Andean spiritualism, since it really has exploded here in Scandinavia the last few years, and since I know a few things about it. I thought it might be useful for anyone who encounters self-proclaimed (white) "Inca shamans", "Inca priests" (yes, there are many claiming to be that), "Inca healers", "followers of the Inca tradition" etc. (And excuse my english
First of all, as we all know, the Inca empire fell 500 years ago, so no one today can claim to be an Inca shaman, whether they are white, native or extra terrestrial.
Second of all, the Inca empire consisted of hundreds of different tribes, each with their own culture, ceremonies and language. So, my first question to any "Inca shaman" would be: Which tribe?
Most New Age-shamans would claim to follow the Q'ero tradition, but 99.99% have never met a Q'ero person and they most probably don't know any runasimi (the language), and speaking it fluently is of course a must to be able to understand the beliefs and the way of thinking. (17 million people speak runasimi/Quechua today.)
I have noticed that these western "Inca shamans" always have a very traditional western way of perceiving time, and hearing that the Inca/Quechua/Q'ero see the past as
in front of them and the future behind them always confuses them.
But anyway - some questions I would ask these "inca healers":
(All these are essential things in all Andean/Inca/Quechua healing and spiritualism)
* Do you use coca leafs? There are absolutely no ceremonies amongst us without the sacred coca leaf. And since coca is forbidden in the U.S and Europe there can't be any "Inca shamans" here. Excluding the coca from a ceremony, any ceremony, is to us like excluding God from Christianity.
* Do you use guinea pigs? If not, then what you do has nothing to do with Andean healing. The guinea pigs are used to heal (rubbing them against the body of the sick person so they can absorb the sickness, then they are opened so the healer can "read" in their intestines) and the meat is eaten as medicine.
* Do you sacrifice llamas or llama fetuses in your ceremonies? No? Then you are certainly no Inca priest, Andean healer, Q'ero shaman or whatever you claim to be.
* If you actually claim to practice traditional Inca medicine, I suppose you do skull surgeries, like trepanation? And if you claim to be an Inca priest I suppose you sacrifice virgins?
Apart from these important arguments we also have the more common ones, of course:
* No outsider can become a spiritual leader in a tribe.
* You're not a tribal spiritual leader if you're not accepted as one in the tribe, and if you are, you serve the tribe and not other outsiders.
* It takes a life time to become a spiritual leader.
* We don't call spiritual leaders "shamans", we have our own words for them.
* You don't go around bragging about it on the internet.
To all you people here, thanks for the work you're doing!!!
