The World of the One: colonizing to exist and the relevance of Indigenous epistemologies of co-existence

Aura Cumes [Translated by Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores]: Will be featured in the The SAGE Handbook of Decolonial Theory

Abstract

This chapter critiques the colonial and Eurocentric views imposed on Indigenous Peoples' knowledge systems, often dismissed as “traditional” and inferior to Western thought. It argues that this dismissal stems from Western concepts of progress, framed as linear stages of human evolution, which places Indigenous peoples in a “savage” or “barbaric"” stage, compared to the so-called “civilized” West. Latin American elites, heavily influenced by European modernity, have reinforced and reproduced this worldview, as well as erased and distorted Indigenous epistemologies through institutions like universities. The chapter introduces the concept of the “World of the One” as a hierarchical and supremacist structure that prioritizes a singular worldview over plurality. It posits that colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy are intertwined systems of domination that continue to subjugate Indigenous peoples, stripping them of their land, culture, and history. Despite these efforts, Indigenous knowledges endure, exemplified by the Popol Wuj, a Mayan text that counters colonial narratives and underscores the relationality and interconnectedness of all life forms, as well as the plurality of ways of knowing and being.

Short Bio: Aura Cumes is a Maya Kaqchikel from Guatemala, a researcher, teacher, and activist. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS) in Mexico City. She also holds a Master's in Social Sciences from FLACSO Guatemala and a Bachelor's in Social Work from Rafael Landívar University. She is a member of the Maya Studies Community Ixb'alamkyej Junajpu Wunaq (CEMIJW).

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The knowledge of Indigenous Peoples was, at best, referred to under the category of “traditions,” “traditional knowledge,” “traditional clothing,” “customs and practices,” as if they were the product of a backward stage of the West and not knowledge constructed in another time and space. The idea is then copied from the West that the stages of human evolution are savagery, barbarism, and civilization. And these stages are claimed to be universal. That's why the West is considered modern, and we, the Indigenous Peoples, are labeled as “traditional.”

In any Latin American university, we are taught that history begins in Europe, which is later referred to as “the West.” A “civilized West” that must be followed. The creole elites of Latin America and all of the Americas looked towards Europe as the benchmark for modernity; therefore, they sought to imitate and reproduce Western epistemologies while simultaneously destroying or distorting the epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples.

Since the dominant history has been written by the victors, the “Spain” that arrives with the first colonial wave is presented to us as such an advanced society that it was capable, like no one else, of crossing oceans and “conquering territories.” They don't tell us about those kingdoms, now called Spain, drained in religious wars for over eight hundred years. Those kingdoms that burned their critics as heretics, burned knowledgeable and authoritative women as witches, and were expelling Moors and Jews for considering them impure to the Catholic religion configured from the position of power.

Due to the colonial violence our peoples have suffered from the 16th century to the present day, I wonder: Who colonizes us? What world have the colonizers built? What world do the colonizers bring to our territory? I name the world they bring as the World of the One, one obsessed with the supremacist demonstration of the strongest over the weakest and the only one capable of imposing its worldview on those it has subdued, also feeling legitimate ownership over what it takes from those it subjugates. This world, obsessed with imposing one god, one truth, one dominant sex, one dominant race, one dominant language, one dominant culture, etc., is the World of the One.

I think that capitalism and patriarchy, in Europe, go hand in hand, with the radical separation that men make regarding women, just as they dissociate “man” from what they name as “nature.” The understanding and treatment of women as nature and nature as a woman are similar: “savages,” “rebels,” “intelligible,” “insatiable,” “exploitable,” “disposable,” etc. That supremacist subject that synthesizes for itself the idea of “the human = man = similar to his god” is the feudal + Christian + noble + heterosexual + capitalist subject, seeking to impose a tremendously hierarchical world.

That “man = human” considers himself supreme or superior as long as he is not a woman, not nature, not an animal, not a heretic, not a Jew, not a Moor, and later on, not black, not Indian, not rural, not a peasant, not a serf. The World of One has hierarchized plurality, has “unlearned” how to inhabit plurality, and has no intention of doing so. It does not know how to coexist with plurality without hierarchizing or annihilating it.

With the “Spanish” and “European” invasion starting from the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe brings that World of the One and imposes it through the force of violence, the Catholic (later Protestant) religion, and law. Indigenous peoples suffer genocide. A system is imposed to strip away the entire lives of individuals (women and men, girls and boys), of families, communities, and peoples, and of Mother Earth. The goal is to annihilate the past, wisdom, memory, ancient epistemologies; territory is stolen, leaving only bodies available for the tasks that the colonizers deemed important for their lives.

With the independences in Latin America, the Creoles were concerned with building a homeland, as they felt orphaned by “breaking” the umbilical cord with their motherland. Building a homeland was not a concern for the Indigenous Peoples, as they had inhabited and cared for these territories for millennia. After 300 years of colonization, the Creoles remained a minority. In Guatemala, they ranged from 4% to 5%, but they constructed the state as an instrument to manage the wealth they had accumulated over three centuries.

The republican states in Latin America institutionalized the colonial system, despite the ongoing Indigenous anti-colonial movements that existed throughout the 300 years. The systems of capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal domination became the foundation of the republican states and expanded them. Racism served as a powerful resource to legitimize domination over the Indigenous Peoples, who, despite being the majority, were sacrificed for the progress of the Creole, Ladino, Mestizo, and foreign elements through systematic subjection to forced labor and continued dispossession of their lands, territories, and assets. All countries in “Latin America” called on European whites to bring “progress” to our territories, offering them abundant lands, “service Indians,” and tax benefits.

The creole, capitalist, colonial/racist, and patriarchal rationale expanded as truth in universities and schools. Progressive sectors (scholars, intellectuals) firmly believe in the “degeneration of the Indian,” in the “superiority of the white." This justifies the annihilation, whether through physical or “cultural” death, of Indigenous populations. In several countries in Latin America, the annihilation of Indigenous peoples has been through ethnocide and genocide. Some countries consider themselves white and others mestizo, but they tend to be anti-Indigenous. Some view mestizaje (mixture) as a kinder solution to racism, but it is actually a form of homogenization that seeks to convert “the Indian” into mestizo and also seeks to overlook the ladino and mestizo alliance (whether forced or not) with creole culture. Ultimately, mestizaje also represents a way to make inhabiting plurality impossible.

The republican states continue to be capitalist (mercantilist, liberal, neoliberal), colonial (racist, classist, urban-centric), and patriarchal (sexist, macho, heterosexual, and adult-centric). These ideas are widely spread and commonly shared by a significant portion of the population.

Eurocentrism makes it difficult to consider the epistemologies of indigenous peoples within universities. There is often ridicule in many cases. A few months ago, someone told me that some criticized analyses like mine as “epistemological traps of the pre-Hispanic past and fears of essentializing the Indigenous.” That fear is immediately invoked when we want to engage with our past because challenging the established status is seen as subversive. However, when it aligns with folklore, tourist commodification, and multicultural or intercultural decoration accommodated to the system, it is welcomed. This criticism is not used to discredit all those who draw inspiration from the Greeks who spoke five centuries before Christ; they remain the main reference for Western and Westernized politics, theory, and science. Every society looks to its past as a reference, but it is denied to us because the past is powerful; neither the present nor the future can exist without it. If Europe finds “darkness” in its past, it does not mean that we will find the same in ours.

The aspiration for modernity is perhaps one of the great obstacles to charting a dialogical, comprehensive, and coincident path with Ladino and Mestizo populations. While it is true that the left, feminism, and various transformative collectives share the idea that Indigenous peoples “need to overcome poverty and domination,” they do so thinking that their political projects are the only emancipatory resources; in other words, they do not have a radical critique of the colonial problem. On the contrary, thinking of indigenous peoples as political subjects implies that their mechanisms of subversion of capitalist, patriarchal, and colonial/racist systems operate from different places, as we can see in the historical records of anti-colonial struggles that emerged at the very moments of invasion and have been continuous since then.

Our worlds were built in different times and spaces. There is evidence of the antiquity of these worlds. I use the suggested count of 20,800 years, corresponding to four cycles of 5,200 years completed in December 2012 within the framework of the Oxlajuj Baktun (thirteen Baktun). In the long-time span of the Maya peoples (who inhabited Mesoamerica), what happens in any society has occurred: coexistence and conflicts. However, here, a different way of living, of relating among people (winaq), of relating to everything that gives life was invented, different from the European way (De Paz, 2009).

One of the most effective pillars on which colonial domination against the Indigenous Peoples of Abya Yala continues to be sustained is the violent destruction of our past. The burning of writings, the destruction of temples and their engravings, the killing of wise men and women, gradually eroded the long memory and created forgetfulness about our previous life, not without first being filled with other knowledge hitherto foreign to our experience, such as dogmatic Christianity. Our ancestors who experienced the destruction of Maya wisdom, knowledge, and epistemologies understood its gravity. Consequently, they sought to safeguard them by strategically learning their writing codes. This is how the Popol Wuj was written, one of the emblematic texts of the ancient history of the Maya people. The Popol Wuj was not the only text written to preserve history and memory, but it is one of the few that survived the subsequent destruction.

I use the Popol Wuj to challenge colonialist readings that perceive indigenous peoples as masses without a past and without dignified histories. Much of the meaning that the Maya assigned to existence is captured in this book; it continues to live on or is present in the ways of life of Maya communities and in the content of several languages of our peoples. Its connection to the current reality gives it relevance, and therefore, it can be an important inspiration as a political horizon. However, my understanding of this text is related to how I analyze the reality of indigenous peoples, not as idealized societies but as political entities formed in a historical process, like any other.

From the Maya sense of existence or epistemology, everything that the West would call “nature” – earth, stones, valleys, mountains, forests, ravines, rivers, lakes, seas, air, sun, moon, stars – everything has its own life. Neither ri winaq (the people) nor “man” is above all. People are merely one thread in the fabric of rachulew (the face of the earth), or what others would call the “universe.” There is a tendency to associate women with the “mother earth,” but she is venerated and respected; when this no longer happens, there has been a rupture in the sense of life. Currently, especially among rural Maya people, the expression loq’lej (sacred in English is the closest approximation) continues to be used to refer to everything that gives life and existence: loq’lej ulew (sacred land), loq’lej q’ij (sacred sun), loq’lej ya’ (sacred water), loq’lej juyu’ (sacred mountains), loq’lej ixim (sacred corn), loq’lej q’utum’ (sacred food), loq’lej k’aslem (sacred life). Everything also has ruk’ux (heart) and rajawal’ (spirit-owner), which the colonizers simplified as “demons” or “evil spirits” because they lacked the capacity to understand the existence of other beings that are energy and not matter.

There are rituals of gratitude before and after planting, before and after eating, before and after taking a tuj (temascal bath). In these everyday actions where principles like gratitude for everything related to the care of life and existence are practiced, a sense of life opposite to that of the “West” is evident, where “man” is considered the owner and master of nature, and women are considered part of this submissive nature. The creation story of the wooden beings in the Popol Wuj illustrates the processes of self-reflection of this ancient society. When they failed to behave appropriately towards everything that sustained their existence, all their creations rebelled against them and destroyed them:

They were chastised for their incompetence before their creative mother and their creative father… All their water jars spoke, their griddles; their plates; their pots; their nixtamal, their grinding stones. Everything available was present. “You caused us much harm, you bit us; now it will be you who are bitten,” their dogs and turkeys told them. Their grinding stones said: “In our faces you ground every day, day after day; at dusk, at dawn, always joli, joli, juk'i, juk'i on our faces… Now you will feel our strength, we will grind you.” Then their dogs said to them when they spoke, “Why didn't you feed us?... We almost starved because of you… Now you will feel the teeth we have in our mouths... Then their griddles, their pots said to them: “You caused us much pain… we were always over the fire. Try it now: we will burn you!” The stones, the tenamastes that were in the fire were thrown with impetus at their heads. They harmed them; desperate, they ran… they wanted to climb onto their houses, but the houses collapsed, and they fell; they wanted to climb the trees, but the trees rejected them; they wanted to enter the caves and the caves closed before them. Thus was the destruction of those people, the formed people (Sam Colop, 16-19).

In this narration, it can be seen how the text places great importance on the utensils or things commonly found in a Maya kitchen: grinding stone, tenamastes, griddle, pots. That is to say, the space where food is prepared is conceived as a living, cherished, non-degraded space. Everything has life. We learn this from childhood when we are taught to handle everything with care and to engage in dialogue with fire, the griddle, the pot, the hoe, the machete, the cornfield, and the trees. In another moment in the Popol Wuj, we see Ixmukane' not as the formative energy of the first four men and the first four women, but as a mother and grandmother of other characters in the household. Some criticize this as an example of the subordination of women. However, the spaces of the kitchen, planting, hunting, and other tasks in the Popol Wuj are not hierarchized, as will be done later during the colonial and republican period with the sexual, racial, and social class division of labor.

In the Maya sense of existence (ontology or epistemology/knowledge of “it”), if there is no separation between winaq(people, individuals, beings) and something called "nature," there is consequently no expression to name what is defined in Spanish as “naturaleza” [or English as nature]. What exists are expressions like rachulew^[i], which could be translated as the face of the earth understood as a vast fabric, where each thread is held by others and supports others. When a thread breaks, the fabric begins to unravel. The face of the earth is also thought of as a pluriverse, where people (winaq) are just a point. Neither people, nor “man” are legitimized to dominate the rachulew; that would be a pretension of great arrogance. In contrast, it is believed that ri winaq must lead a life of absolute humility in the face of everything that gives life. Rituals, both individual and collective expressions of gratitude for everything, are associated with the practice of caring for life and everything that generates it, as a result of understanding that life is fragile.

Contrary to the origin story in the Bible, where Eve is formed from Adam's rib, and both were created by a single God who is considered male, the Maya origin story described in the Popol Wuj is different. Ri winaq (persons or people) were conceived by the energies of already existing life, who, presenting themselves in interrelated pairs, self-convened to form human beings. The idea of interrelated pairs^[ii] is extremely important in Maya thought, in contrast to the idea of an all-powerful male individual as presented in the hegemonic interpretation of the Bible. The pair represents the meeting of two energies necessary to create, form, or construct something. The meeting of energies in pairs does not necessarily exclusively represent the energy of woman and man, but rather the encounter of different forces that complement each other, that fuse but do not lose their individuality.

The origin of life is not the one, because from the perspective of the Mayan Peoples, the one is not sufficient, it is lacking, it is not reliable. The origin of life is the encounter of two, three, four, and more. It is not that the two is exclusively important, but rather it is the beginning of a life that contains the vitality of encounter, connection, and plurality. It is very easy to find the importance of the pair in the Popol Wuj, as even when it speaks only of uk’u’x kaj, it says that it is the name of kab’awil, a being capable of observing in two directions at the same time, having double vision, symbolizing the encounter of two.

These pairs made four attempts to create people, and it was not until the fourth attempt that they were satisfied. The first people created were birds, but since they could not develop the language to communicate with the energies that gave them origin, they were told that their home would be in the forests, ravines, and hills. In the second attempt, people were made of clay, and only one person was made; it is not said whether it was a man or a woman. But this person could not support itself, could not speak; so the energies destroyed it. In the third attempt, the energies decided to leave the creation in the hands of Xpiyakok and Xmukane, also called the deity of dawn, deity of dusk, grandmother of the sun, grandmother of clarity, twice conceiver, twice begetter. Xpiyakok and Xmukane, female energies, formed beings of wood who spoke, multiplied, had sons and daughters, and lived for a long time, but they were destroyed because they had no thought, no heart, and behaved arrogantly towards everything around them, as explained in the preceding pages.

In the fourth attempt, Xpiyakok and Xmukane were summoned again, but Xpiyakok disappears from the scene and Xmukane remains, who creates beings from corn. Xmukane ground the yellow and white corn cobs nine times. From there, the first four men emerged. Later, Xmukane, using the same procedure, created the first four women, who would be the partners of the first men. Men and women were created and formed in the same way and from the same material: white and yellow corn cobs. Contrary to what is stated in the Bible, women do not come from men, they have an independent existence. Both were created with the idea of complementing each other.

The four couples occupied the four corners: east, west, south, and north, and gave rise to the people of the Great Peoples and the Small Peoples. The last couple did not have descendants; therefore, those who wrote the Popol Wuj in the Latin alphabet are descended from the couples that did have descendants.

Its description is vast and the narrative of how everything in Heaven and Earth was completed: its four corners, its four sides, its measurement, its four angles... on all four sides, as described by Tz’aqol Bitol; Mother and Father of existence, giver of breath, giver of heart; Creator and Throb of the light of eternity; of daughters born in clarity of sons born in clarity... (Sam Colop, 2011: 2,3).

The Spaniards viewed this as aberration because the world of the One did not coincide with ours. They called us “savages” for not having separated ourselves from nature; “polytheists” for not having “a single god”; “zoomorphs” for not having made a clear distinction between people and animals; “sodomites” because there were men who behaved like women and women who behaved like men; “demons” because everything had rajawal (heart, spirit), among others.

The “epistemic principles” found in the Popol Wuj remain in the languages we speak today, despite all the processes of destruction and change of meaning that have occurred in much of its content.

I am interested in reclaiming this “epistemology”, wisdom or root of knowledge of the Mayan peoples, engaging in dialogue with the past that is also present. I affirm Mayan epistemologies as a political horizon, a horizon of life, that inspires our current existence.

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^[i] Relationality

^[ii] Here we begin the teaching, the clarification, and the connection of the hidden and the revealed:

Tz’acol – Bitol

(Being that builds, being that creates)

Alom - K’ajolom (Woman who conceives - man who begets)

Nombres de: Junajpu Wuch – Junajpu Utiw (Energy of the dawn – energy of the dusk)

Saqi Nim Sis – Saqi Nim Aq (Great grandmother of clarity, great grandfather of clarity)

Tepew - Qukumatz (Victorious being – feathered serpent)

Uk’ux Cho- Uk’ux Palo (Heart of the lake – heart of the sea)

Ajraxa Laq – Ajraxa Tzel (Being of the flat surface – being of the blue vault)

Como se nombra, como se menciona a

Xpiyakok – Xmukane, Iyom – Mamom (Midwife – grandfather)

“… there was the Sky, Uk’ux kaj which is the name of kab’awil, as it is called… He spoke with Tepew Kukumatz… They met and joined their words and thoughts. It was clear, they agreed under the light; “humanity” manifested and the emergence, the generation of trees and vines, and the origin of life, of existence in the darkness at dawn, was established by:

Uk’u’x Kaj called Jun Raqan…

Kaqulja Jun Raqan, the first (watery force with lightning, hurricane)

The second is Ch’ipi Kaqulja and (Younger lightning, force in potential)

The third is Raxa Kaqulja (serene water)”