Sacred Seeds and the Holy Fertile Mother Earth: Indigenous Ecological Management and Perspectives in I, Rigobert Menchu

Abstract

The Mayan Culture, like all other traditional tribes, is solely dependent on Land for their existence. Land is their source of food, clothing, habitat, medicine and pastime. They don’t have any life that could be separated from their life. Land is source of power to the ruling class but source of life to the Mayans. The Mayan tribes consider the land as their mother and the spirit of land is called Rajawal. They ask the permission of the spirit of land for a perfect season. The seasons of Mayan Year is based on the process of preparing the land, sowing, growing and harvesting the corn. Corn is divine and they believe man is made of corn and that is why to be born as human is divine. Corn takes religious recognition. Eco is the short form of ecology, which is concerned with the relationships between living organisms in their natural environment as well as their relationships with that environment. Ecocriticism is concerned with the relationships between literature and environment or how man’s relationships with his physical environment are reflected in literature. These are obviously interdisciplinary studies, unusual as a combination of a natural science and a humanistic discipline. This combination of the physical and the spiritual can be seen in some of the terms used in ecology and ecocriticism, which both have the same aim, to contribute to the preservation and survival of man. This paper presents a holistic approach to agriculture.