Amerrique: orphans of paradise
From the introduction to the book Amerrique, Orphans of Paradise
Listen to the clamor 

Namandu, True Father, the First
Around our few fires
We, very few orphans of your paradise
We encourage each other
To continue living in this Earth, your Home.(1) 
On October 12, 1492, a new cycle started that changed the history of the world. Some  expansionist European nations invaded the American continent taking over territories, wealth and people.
This invasion was followed by a complex and systematic operation of elimination of peoples, environments and cultures. It was an extermination of a magnitude never seen.  Millions were enslaved or died, the forests were burned or logged, many animal species extinguished, the water poisoned, the Earth attacked without mercy.
We are at the gateway of the third millenium. More than 500 years have elapsed after that day. Still today, degradation, looting and genocide continue. Mother Earth is in agony facing the aggresion that does not cease. The few surviving groups wonder without direction, subjected to robberies, disrespect and servitude
Their rights are being still allienated. Although a Universal Chart of Human Rights has been approved, its rules are not applied to protect the rights of the First Nations of the American continent.
The native inhabitants are not real subjects of law.
They are only Indians.

Great Powers, listen to me
The people is destroyed and scattered
Let the wind blend the seeds
To grow again, strongly, in a beautiful new place (2)
Hundreds of nations, which occupied vast expanses of territory and used nature respectfully and effectively were slaughtered, disappeared, destroyed.
The survivors of the Great Massacre are hiding in remote locations or disguise their condition throughout the land.
They are not allowed the right to preserve their identities, they are invaded by new missionaries of various religious and sects, loaded with messages of alienation propagated with copious resources.
In the criollo societies they are depreciated, their right to self-government is denied, even at the strictly local level. Their languages are underrated, their ceremonies are ridiculed, they are forced to change their ways of life, their productive systems, their social practices, their clothes, their names. Among the thousand nations that existed in America in the fifteenth century, very few have survived. They are still threatened by impending extinction. The genocide continues.

I was born in vain
In vain I exited from the House of Tlalteotl
The Lord of the Earth
Naked and poor
I am unfortunate!
Better not to be born
Nor arrived to the Earth (3)
When the old cultures disappear their systems of relationing with nature are gone with them. Lost is their profound respect for the plants, for the animals, for the rocky hills...
The spirits that take care of the nature’s elements, the caa iya, the qwani, the curupi, the guardians of the forest, the salamancas  than watch the waters, the nuke-mapu who look after the Earth and its beings... they have been forgotten, underestimated, characterized as superstitions of primitive people.
In the meanwhile, logging continues, fires extend down to the last corners of the land, the rivers are loaded with sediments and poison, the air has become toxic to breath and even the solar radiation has become hazardous.
These blunders are the result of a style of using the land that is immoral and harmful.
Who are the barbarians, the primitive people?

Peace... gets into the souls of human beings when they realize their unique essence, with the Universe and all their powers, when they understand that in the centre of the Universe there is Wakan-Tanka and that this centre is in reality everywhere, within each one of us. (4)
Today we can barely understand to what extent we are affected and lost. The creole states are well established, globally legitimated. Nobody dares to dispute their sovereignty.
The contemporary  American nations are the inheritors of that history of plunder and depredation. Spain, Portugal, England, France and Holland invaded other peoples’ lands and established systems based on this legacy of violence.
They introduced the property of the land, but they did not allow it to the native peoples who were in that land from immemorial times. Instead they dedicated their energies to distribute the territory among themselves, displacing the legitimate inhabitants or simply forcing them to remain as slave labor in the new encomiendas, plantations, haciendas and mines. The rights of the land owners in America are based on this fraudulent origin.
When the Europeans arrived, the people of the native American nations enjoyed their individual freedom in a manner completely unknown beyond the ocean. In a few decades, the foreign domination was going to finish with it.

We are born free brothers and united, each one is as Lord as the other, while you are all serfs of one man. I am the master of my body, I dispose of myself, I do as I wish, I am the first and the last of my nation.... subject only to the Great Spirit. 
In many sites of America there are communities that are inheritors of the ancient cultures.(5)
In the coldest zones of the continent, illuminated by the Northern Lights; in the arid deserts, in communion with the Forefather of the Land; in the slopes of the volcanos, sustaining an existencial dialogue with the inner dimensions of the planet; in the tropical forests, recreating visions of light; and in the Southern Forests, building stairs to upper levels of wisdom .
For us, Americans of today, who grew up without knowing many things, is time of learning.
Little by little, we will be able to recuperate the forgotten knowledge.
And when we know it, share it with others.
For everybody to know that this continent, America, ancient Amerrique, possesses histories of dignity, rich and profound.
History that is nurtured in the heart of the brothers that were witnesses of the Old Times of Paradise.
They feel alone.
Those, who, have, as once Artigas  said, the principal right.
This book wants to invite you all, to accompany them.

1  Reproduced from “El Canto Resplandeciente”  M’bya Guarani prayers, from Ramos, Lorenzo and others, p. 28.

2 Song that Small Wolf sang when his Cheyenne community decided to come back to the ancestral land from the reservation where they had been confined in 1878 (quoted from the book “Cheyenne Autumn”, of Mary Sandoz)

3 Poem to shortness of life, Canto XXXVI, Los Cantos de Nezahualcóyotl.

4 Black Elk, quoted by Joseph Epes Brown. Ref. Ed McGaa, Eagle Man in the Rainbow Tree, p.161.

5 Comments that a Huron made to Baron de Lahontan, ref. J.Weatherford, Indian Givers, p. 123.  
Reproduced from the book Amerrique, Orphans of Paradise, Danilo Anton, Piriguazú Ediciones