This Encuentro, a meeting or “encounter”, was a gathering of people from the Americas, organized by dedicated, visionary, and progressive people at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, and in collaboration with the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, in Belo Horizonte. This Encuentro was about connections with people, a meeting of minds, of sharing cultures, and an expressing of each other’s experiences. This was truly a finding, an uncovering, unearthing of things perhaps lost to each of us in our attempts to survive in our host cultures. In my own quest of finding my own dream of being an artist, I have found the immense nature of people committed to speaking truth, not to power, as in the words of Ward Churchill “power already knows the truth, and could most likely tell us the truth better than I”, but to each other, to the people who have the ability to make up our minds as to what we must do with this knowledge.
Finding the appropriate ways to apply lessons learned at the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro is not that easy, but are immensely worth the effort. These waves of inspiration and admiration of other minds cannot be destined to spill across sands of my mind only to recede and fade into memory. There were many new ideas that were influential in producing acts of change, from women empowering women to demand their rights (and therefore all people in a community), to finding ways to make society at large (that is each individual accountable to the whole) accountable for issues that must be addressed for true social progress.
All who participated were given some of the greatest gifts of knowledge and understanding that any could possibly attain. With the local tribes of Kaiapó, Mebengokré, and Pataxó Indians as thorough participants, we gained access to numerous insights. One such insight being how our own institutions of education and indoctrination that while designed to nurture individuality, have the effect of degrading our appreciation of community. The lectures, workshops, and roundtable presentations brought diverse voices to the table and all came with the desire to learn from one another.
I was struck upon witnessing the biting humor and pain of Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe’s Pre-Hispanic Cabaret, which opened as a satirical look at the trivialization of tradition and transformed into a powerful ritual performance focused on the degradation and infection of indigenous sources of maíz in Mexico by genetically modified and patented strains. Jesusa’s use of traditional Aztec ritual and modern theater was powerfully emotive, exemplified by her closing act of forcefully throwing dried corn down onto the stage, to have it explode back upwards and fall again as concentric rings of seed.
Luisa Calcumil brought forth a tangible loss and reclamation of indigenous culture with her one-woman performance. She depicted, with a palpable sorrow, a Mapuche woman’s culture ripped from her bosom along with her life, the brutality of colonial invasion, the subsequent despair, and the final seeping back of indigenous culture to the surface of our current lives.
With the closing performance, the tone was shifted to one of celebration with the awe-inspiring creations of the puppet theater group Giramundo, and the magical telling of an indigenous fable. The use of dark and light illuminated an amazing re-envisioning of this traditional work in a contemporary setting, building a bridge from the past to the present.
This experience was not only personally enriching, but also opened participants’ eyes to some valuable truths. These exchanges are real, the experiences were and are real. These encuentros should be embraced as tangible methods of learning from indigenous cultures, liberating women from shackles of social constraints, and providing a framework for sustaining life on Earth, as well as finding our place here, in balance.

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