Giving Compass' Take:

• Trina Moyles shares the stories of Mam - indigenous - women in Guatemala who resist the mining companies and government officials who try to remove them from their lands and traditions by planting native crops and teaching their daughters the traditional ways of farming.

• How can philanthropy support local efforts to maintain traditional lifestyles? 

• Find out how indigenous women are taking leadership roles around the world.

At an elevation of nearly 4,000 meters above sea level, Comitancillo, a province in northwestern Guatemala, was a formidable place to farm. Maya-Mam communities had lived on these barren slopes in northwestern Guatemala for nearly 500 years. The Mam were one of 24 indigenous cultures in Guatemala, a country where although nearly 50 percent of the population were indigenous people, the country had never elected an indigenous president. The mestizo elite owned politics and power in Guatemala. Marginalized to the mountains in the northwest, the Mam survived on growing food and grazing livestock.

Rosa wanted to talk about the present moment, and about what was under her feet. She wanted to talk about what every woman in Comitancillo wanted to talk about. She wanted to talk about the owners of the mine who had blasted open the mountainsides and whose destruction of the mountain was creeping closer to her land and livelihood every day. She wanted to talk about how the mines had already changed everything for the Mam.

Women gathered beneath the trees every week to visit with one another, to speak in Mam, to give voice to the experiences of farming, of protecting the land, of being women. Beneath the large, protective branches of the trees, the women kept a nursery for tree seedlings. Beneath the trees, women planted the seeds of pine, cypress, and avocado in tiny black biodegradable bags of soil. They watched the seedlings over weeks, from germination to seedling. I estimated around a thousand seedlings, maybe more. When the rains returned each woman would go home with the seedlings and plant the trees on her land, acts of reforesting the barren mountains. Trees would bring back and hold the rain, they said. They’d provide food, forage, and fuel to keep the Mam alive on the arid slopes.

“The streams that flowed here before are dying. Our harvests were once plentiful, but today there’s only desert,” explained an elderly woman holding a moon-faced baby on her lap. “We don’t want our children and grandchildren to inherit this reality.”

Read the full article about indigenous women in Guatemala by Trina Moyles at YES! Magazine.