TILANGTONGO Conversations from Indigenous Mexico FALL 2025
The basic humanity of our Western societies is unraveling in an explosion of hate, division, greed and violence. We seem to be unable to stop the currents that drag us to war and genocide around the globe, and to a mad consumerism that threatens to destroy the planet’s ability to sustain us. Is this inevitable? Is this the unavoidable result of the character of the human creature?
Twenty five years living as part of an indigenous community in the mountains of southern Oaxaca, Mexico has convinced Kathy and Phil Dahl-Bredine that our Western created crises are not inevitable but the result of cultural choices. Here in the communities of indigenous Oaxaca people have made a different choice. In the mid 1990’s, across the more than 500 municipalities of the state, communities chose to return to their ancestral democracies, governed by village assembles charged with creating harmony within the community and between that community and the “brother and sister” creatures that make up the richness of the Earth Mother that sustains us all.
They call this goal “communality” and the new and ancient form of governing, “usos y costumbes”, uses and customs.
Today we talk with Eliseo Reyes Miguel from the community of Monte Negro, Tilantongo. Eliseo explains how the return to indigenous governance systems of “usos y costumbres” not only reasserted communal values of this ancient people but also helped communities reassert their cosmic vision of a relation of harmony with the Madre Tierra and how little by little the relation among equals is being re-established both in terms of gender but also in terms of the respect due to all the creatures of the cosmos who also are our sisters and brothers.
