“With their knives they ripped the tires of the truck owned by Benjamín Sandoval, a lawyer from Tepic who is supporting us; Cristian Chavez, our geographer, arrived, and they slashed two of his tires with knives, broke off a mirror, and tried to threaten him. They brought a rope with a noose and they put it through the window, so that I could put my head in (suggesting that I should be hanged).

On Sunday, February 25, the closing ceremony for the for the Conference on Sacred Plants in the Americas was celebrated in the Mexican lakeside town of Ajijic, Jalisco. The conference room overflowed with an audience that anxiously awaited the keynote speakers. Lead organizer, Dr. Bia Labate, motioned that the people she had invited to the front of the room were some of the indigenous tribal representatives participating in the event: medicine women and men, lawyers, small farmers and correspondents.

Members of the Wixarika Tatei Haramara Council of Nayarit, Mexico have denounced the illegal sale of one of their sacred ceremonial sites, Tatei Haramara island, to two “ghost” tourism companies. Now, the island is out of reach for the Wixarikas (called “Huicholes” in Spanish because of the name given to them by the Nahuatl people), who can't perform their religious duties there anymore nor have access to its water fountains, which has also caused severe health problems among them.

A shamanic retreat in Juneau led by a Californian has caught Sealaska Heritage Institute’s attention.

In Northwest Mexico, the Western Sierra Madre Mountains rise like giants from the coastal wetlands of the Gulf of California to the Central Mexican Plateau. Indigenous communities have long found shelter in these isolated lands, and the space to maintain their culture and way of life.

Some of my most treasured childhood memories happened in or near a river. I can still feel the cold water on my feet, and the current that pulled me smoothly past rocks and branches. I remember vacations with my cousins, throwing ourselves into the river near my aunt and uncle’s country house, leaping from the tops of rocks or swinging from the branches of a tree. I remember summer road trips, driving down seemingly endless bridges over the great rivers of southern Mexico.

GUADALAJARA — As commissioner of public lands for the indigenous Wixárika territory of San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán, Miguel Vázquez Torres was at the forefront of the legal fight to recover 10,000 hectares of indigenous ancestral lands from surrounding ranching communities. He was among those who repeatedly urged the federal and state governments to intervene to prevent violence in the increasingly tense region that had been the subject of land conflicts for more than a century and, more recently, an increasing presence on the part of the drug cartels.

The human avalanche began to flow from the ridgetop of the Sierra de Los Pajaritos around 10 am on Thursday, September 22: 500 indigenous Huichols, heirs to the old lords of the mountains, descended in a quiet tide into the valley Huajimic, in search of historical justice. The expectant landholders, who had succeeded them in the domain of these lands, observed them worriedly as an ominous sign.

Yuka+ye Jesús Lara Chivarra’s path took him from the Huichol Sierra to the halls of power. He hobnobbed with rock stars and artists, he faced down police and corporate executives, he taught college students, film producers, attorneys, journalists – but he was always most at home in his village.

Leaders of the indigenous Wixarika people and the Wirikuta Defense Front, the civil society coalition that is supporting them, came forward in a Mexico City press conference recently to give an accounting of how the money was spent – an example of innovation in the face of daunting challenges.

 No further concessions will be allowed until a judgment has been resolved regarding the concessions in the Wirikuta Nature Reserve.

This year, however, would be vastly different from years past. This year, the sacred lands of Wirikuta lay under the shadow of an uncertain future. Vast swaths of the protected, UNESCO-recognized reserve had been concessioned to Canadian mining companies, and hundreds of hectares had been bulldozed by agroindustrial companies. This year they were responding to a call that ran through all their communities, spread out through the Sierra Madre over four states: The candles of life were dying, and they would come together there to pray for their renewal.