Indigenous leaders unite at Mayan pyramids marking shift in 500-year run of colonialism
Amid a cluster of ancient Mayan pyramids, a rainbow-hued gathering of Indigenous elders and young leaders from Alaska to Argentina formed a ceremonial circle. They looked on as hereditary Chief Phil Lane,ihanktonwan Dakota and Chickasaw, and Ejna Jean Fleury, an elder from the Crow Creek tribe of South Dakota, took their places to begin the opening ceremony.
Lane and Fleury had traveled thousands of miles from North America to unite in Mexico with fellow Indigenous leaders from throughout the hemisphere. Conch shells rang out in tribute to the four directions, and smoke from the incense of copal from the South mingled with sage from the North, carrying a prayer skyward. Prayers called for unity, peace, and a new beginning throughout the world, one in which all beings could thrive.
Dr. Jane Goodall, the famed British primatologist, sent a message from Tanzania for the entire assembly. It arrived in time for the opening ceremony.
“I want you to know I am with you in spirit as you gather from across the Americas and around the world,” said Goodall in the video. “Such an incredible gathering of indigenous wisdom has never happened before and I am absolutely sure that as a result there will be a change in consciousness and that people will begin to get together for the long process of healing Mother Earth from which people came. The spirit of the Creator will be with you and wonderful good will come of it.”
Indigenous people and allies gathered during the recent Spring Equinox in the ancient Mayan ceremonial center of Palenque, deep in the Lacandón jungle of Chiapas, not far from the Mexican border with Guatemala.
“It was a great gathering of the spirits of all of our nations,” said Fleury, one of the council’s leaders. In a Zoom interview with Buffalo’s Fire, the elder’s face softened and her eyes widened as she spoke of the energy of the encounter, where people had gathered to fulfill an ancient prophecy. “The gathering of Palenque demonstrates the force of prophecy in our lives. Prophecy is guiding, but we don’t always even know how it’s guiding us.”
Participants view the assembly as a pivotal moment that heralds an end to 500 years of colonialism. It also marks the restoration of harmony on Earth, with Indigenous peoples leading the way.
Forging a new path More than 250 Indigenous people and allies from across the Americas convened in Chiapas for the gathering. The Union of the Condor, Hummingbird, Quetzal and Eagle and the Four Worlds International Institute organized and hosted the March 17-24 gathering, in consultation with the Development of Original and Afromexican Peoples, CONADEPOA.
The reunion featured seven days of ceremony, healing rituals, and intercultural dialogue, with a series of agreements reached among the representatives. Four Worlds International signed formal agreements with representatives of all 68 Indigenous tribes of Mexico, who comprise more than 25 million people.
Several initiatives were launched at the event, including an Indigenous-led Global Peace Movement. Attended by luminaries such as Anne-marie Voorhoeve, founder of the Hague Center for Global Governance; representatives of the Indigenous Grandmothers of Europe; and a group of veterans, including special forces from the U.S. Navy Seals.
The principles of
the global peace movement are distilled in the Sacred Covenant: Unify Humanity. Restore Mother Earth. In a ceremony around the Eighth Fire, participants agreed to the principles of the covenant: establishing core values, an ethical framework, and a commitment to foster unity and peace, empowerment of communities, and restoration of Mother Earth.
The Eighth Fire, rooted in an Anishinaabe prophecy, similarly speaks of a time when humanity reaches a crossroads, and Lane believes that time is now. An allied Indigenous network now has the covenant circulating the globe, according to Lane.
Bringing prophecy to life
The main prophecy Fleury and Lane referred to in their interviews and at the gathering is the Eagle and Condor Prophecy, believed to have originated in the Andes more than 2,000 years ago. Different versions are known to many tribes, but the central theme is that when the Eagle, representing North America, and the Condor, representing South America, fly together, it will signal the potential for a new era of peace and understanding.
“These prophecies in essence said that a long spiritual wintertime was coming,” Lane told Buffalo’s Fire. “A time of great sadness in this material world of time and space. A time of great preparation. A
time of great testing. A time of great challenge. And this would last about 500 years.”
He said those 500 years now are coming to a close, and with it, a new opportunity to shift to a new model of humanity. Lane has dedicated much of his life to helping propel that reality. Indigenous thought, he says, will be critical in bringing about this change.
“The Indigenous peoples of these lands are the spiritual mycelium, the cultural mycelium that unite across the Americas,” Lane said, and meetings like the one in Chiapas reinforce and propagate that mycelium across the globe. He said a critical mass is beginning to form, with an estimated 80 million Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, a population that is beginning to approach that of the time of the conquest, when an estimated 100 to 120 million people lived in the Western Hemisphere.
Latin America is key to this strategy, Lane said, as only about 8 million Indigenous people live north of the U.S. border with Mexico. The other 72 million live south of it.
Healing Through Ceremony
For Fleury, one of the most moving moments during the Chiapas gathering was the Eighth Fire Ceremony, when Indigenous representatives from Colombia proposed unification.
“They offered this condor feather to Phil and I in representation of the divine masculine and divine feminine…. so really bringing more healing to the state of that relationship right now. And how lovely to move in poetic ways and more mythological ways in honoring our human journey.”
Fleury has been collaborating with Lane since the two met in 2015. She’s a counseling psychologist and meditation facilitator whose ancestors died in 1890 at Wounded Knee, S.D. Fleury has dedicated much of her work to healing intergenerational trauma. At the 125th anniversary of the massacre at the Pine Ridge Reservation, she led a program called Healing Hearts at Wounded Knee.
Lane contacted Fleury upon learning about this event. The two began talking and realized they were related – both were Delorias. Since then, they have been collaborating.
A New Dawn for Humanity
Lane traces his connection with the Eagle and Condor Prophecy to another spring equinox journey in 1971 when he traveled to the ancient city of Tiwanaku and the sacred Islands of the Sun and the Moon in Lake Titicaca, Bolivia. He was in a ceremony with 16 Quechuas who had been his mentors and guides in the culture passed down from the Incas.
“When I was there, I saw and felt the very fulfillment of all these prophecies,” he recalled. “It was kind of like in the early morning when the sun is just rising and all the things are starting to wake up. That’s the feeling I had, spiritually. I could feel the rustling of the leaves, like when a big, big group of locusts take off, and people wonder, how does that happen? Just one locust rubs her wings against another. And boom, we all take off.”
The elders of Tiwanaku gave him the sacred duty of sharing the prophecy with the world and gifted him with an emblem of their people, a civilization that predates the Incas. And that is what he has been doing ever since. Lane served 16 years as an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, and has worked with Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Micronesia, Southeast Asia, China, India, Hawaii and Africa.
In 1982, Lane cofounded the Four Worlds International Institute with Indigenous elders and spiritual leaders. He is also president of Four Directions International and Compassion Games International. He’s hosted many events bringing together people worldwide to educate, lift, and practice Indigenous ways of life.
Fifty-two years after his experience in Bolivia, at the Spring Equinox of 2023, Lane, Fleury, and other collaborators in this work began a new cycle, this time in Chiapas — They named their new group the Union of the Eagle, Quetzal, Hummingbird and Condor, with the rare Quetzal representing the Mayan people, and the Hummingbird representing the peoples of the Amazon.
The people who helped organize the 2022 gathering in Mexico asked him to send six eagle feathers. Instead, he sent a whole eagle wing and asked Fleury to deliver it.
“The spiritual leaders knew this was something special,” said Fleury. “He entrusted me with that sacred task of taking the eagle wing to Mexico, and it was so moving that it generated a huge pilgrimage.” The pilgrimage traveled from Palenque to Bonampak, another archaeological site in Chiapas, and then across the border into Guatemala, where they made their way to Tikal, an ancient center of the Mayan world, and the lost city of El Mirador.
The Council of the