Culture

Chalio - Tatei Kie, Photograph ©Juan Negrín 1986

The Wixarika People

Juan Negrín
| May 2011
The Huichol (wee-CHOLE), known as huicholes in Spanish, and as Wixaritari in their own language, are recognized as one of the Mexican native cultures most resilient to outside influences. Unlike most other Indians, they did not allow Catholic priests to perform mass within the three main communities in the Huichol mountains, except sometimes on Huichol terms just before Easter, and in one community, at a couple of boarding schools.
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View of the Sierra Madre Occidental ~ Photograph ©Juan Negrín 1978 - 2025

Notes on Wixarika History: Early History

Juan Negrín
| December 2003
As archaeologist Phil Weigand puts it, the Wixarika and their Na'ayeri neighbors had deep roots in the area where they are now settled in a sequence that had begun by the Mesoamerican Classic period (ca. 200-700 A. D.). The Corachol branch of this Uto-Aztecan language family leads linguists like Valiñas, cited by Weigand to consider the relative antiquity of this language group in the area.
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The Wixaritari Cleansing Themselves during Easter - Photograph ©Juan Negrín 1979 - 2025

Notes on Wixarika History: Post-Hispanic History

Juan Negrín
| October 2017
The Huichol were distinguished as xurute, according to a geographical map published in 1579, in the Atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (reproduced in various sources: Rojas, Neurath). The term vizurita is used by Father Tello, in his Crónica Miscelánea, written in 1652. The first reference to the huicholes as guisoles appears in a briefing to the bishop Ruiz Colmenares (between 1640 and 1650). Father Antonio Arias y Saavedra used the terms xamucas and huitzolmes in his chronicle (1673), the first ethnological work on the Indians of this area of the Sierra Madre, according to historian Gutiérrez Contreras.
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Antonio Hayuaneme García - Photograph ©Yvonne Negrín 2013 - 2018

Huichi, A Worthy Ambassador for the Wixarika People?

Hayuaneme García Mijarez
| December 2011
The 2011 Pan American Games, to be held in October in Guadalajara, Mexico, have three mascots. One of them is Huichi, a caricature of the sacred Huichol deer, and according to Emilio González, Jalisco state Governor, and the Games Organising Committee, a "worthy ambassador of the Huichol". However, far from being a “worthy ambassador”, for the Huicholes Huichi represents a sacrilegious misuse of sacred Huichol symbology. If the government had bothered asking beforehand – which it didn’t – it would have found that out. In another sleight, the Huicholes, whose artisanry is famous worldwide, formally proposed having a fixed space to sell their artisanry during the games, but this was rejected, all of this by which time Huichi had already been made public. 
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Oscar Ukeme Bautista Muñoz - Photograph ©Janelle Johnson 2009

Languages Also Die: The Case of the Wixárika

| February 2008
The following exhibit can be applied not only to Wixárika (Huichol) but to any indigenous language, and is particularly dedicated to those indigenous languages in danger of becoming extinct. Only due to contextual and regional reasons have we decided to describe it and compare it in this manner. Furthermore, we are not trying to say that the Wixárika language is inferior to Spanish, to the contrary, we intend to make a fitting reflection regarding the preservation of indigenous languages. Let us thus begin.
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Nierika Offering ~ Photograph ©Juan Negrín 1979 - 2023

Nierika by Juan Negrín

| January 2003
The nierika is represented among the Huichol Indians of northwestern Mexico as a focal point on which powerful beings concentrate their energy. This may be as primordial as a well-crafted deer snare that induces the sacred animal’s willing self-immolation. It can be a symbolic spider’s web or threads attached to a wooden loop.
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Te'ekata ~ Photograph ©Juan Negrín 1976 -2023

Sacred Sites by Juan Negrín

Juan Negrín
| January 2004
The Wixarika tradition is rendered by three different terms: the first refers to our heart/ memory, tayeiyari- the second to how we develop, tanuiwari- the third to our life, tatukari, is transmitted by families, reinforced by communal living on extended family ranches and through clans at ceremonial centers, tukite (tukipa, sing.). Three places serve as the headquarters for what appear to be distinct Wixarika subgroups, with ritual and dialectical variants.
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Idiome Huichol par León Diguet

Idiome Huitchol

León Diguet
| January 1911

"Localisation, origine et etendue ancienne de la langue des indiens huichols, étymologie.-- Place occupeé par le huichol dans les langues mexicaines. -- Vocabulaire, affixes, pronoms, prépositions, adeverves, substantifs, metaphores, toponymie.-- Fragment de chant et son analyse.- Conclusion et verbes.

La langue huichole usitée aujourd´hui par une faible peuplade indienne de la sierra du Nayarit, représentée tout au plus par un chiffre de einq mille individus, était, s´il faut en croire la tradition indigene, un idiome assez répandu avant la coquete espagnole"

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Ruz Buenfil for High Times

On the Peyote Trail in Mexico

Alberto Ruz Buenfil
| December 1990

This article was written by Alberto Ruz Buenfil (11 September 1945– 7 December 2023) was a Mexican writer and activist whose work is dedicated to environmental sustainability, and the performing arts. He co-founded two international  theater groups as well as Mexico's first  ecovillage, known as Huehuecoyotl. This article was written for the U.S. based High Times magazine after Ruz Buenfil accompanied a camera crew from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation that was documenting a Wixarika pilgrimage to Wirikuta from the community of Tateikié.

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Shaman's Drum ~ Spring 1990

The Peyote Plant and Ceremony

James Mooney
| April 1990
From its early origins among the Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche, peyotism developed into a major religious movement during the 1880s and 1890s when it spread rapidly among the many tribes that had been relocated into Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Then, in a strange quirk of fate, the very government boarding schools that sought to destroy Indian culture became instrumental in disseminating this new nativistic Pan-Indian spiritual movement; they nourished new intertribal friendships and introduced a new intertribal language - English. Soon the new peyote rituals appeared on reservation after reservation across the country.
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