Mayan perspectives on 2012

that's a good one Anistara!

I don't personally have much to say regarding the qabbalistic/maya relationship, or christian/maya tensions and love affairs...a bit out of my range of knowledge...

but I did enjoy your synchronistic fiesta there with the mayan chocolate ice cream...humorously I thought that to keep with the impetus of this thread...maybe it's not legit unless the maya elders churned it themselves!! :+) as Davi would say, snarksnark

so it is PMS gals?? or is there some shit kicking transit going on that's got all of us ladies in the throes and angst of the 'ole body processing mechanism...'cause lots of my women friends reporting heavy duty physical symptoms this week, to go along with lots of emotional challenges to deal with...

maybe three

I have some Lakota and Toltec blood.

Well, Costa Rica is a complicated case. There are several traditional ingenous communities where people still speak Chibchan languages, but these tend to be visited by outsiders even less frequently than the Indian reservations without casinos in the U.S.

Recent genetic studies have shown that a much higher percentage of Costa Ricans have indigenous ancestry than their own oral traditions admit. For the data, see:

Barrantes, R. and B. Morera (1999) Contribución del genomo amerindio en la formación de la población costarricense. Vínculos 24(1-2):85-94.

Costa Rica's indigenous populations have, like most groups, a sad history. They gave Columbus and his crew a warm welcome in 1504, only to be rejected, insulted, and later attacked. There were multiple Spanish visits up through the early 1620s, but it took much longer for the conquistadors to establish a permanent colony given the dispersed nature of the population and their hostile response to domination. The ferocity of the indigenous resistance was met with brutal repression and genocide. When it was finally possible to "pacify" the native people and establish missions, the Catholic church supported a systematic process of removing indigenous children from their homes, relocating them to mission settlements, forcing them to speak Spanish, and teaching them a Europeanized culture. This is how it started.

Later, in the late 19th century, Minor Keith and the United Fruit Company took over vast areas of indigenous land in order to plant bananas. There was a continued resistance by the native people, but eventually they lost out. The United Fruit Company then promoted the "white myth" of Costa Rica, asserting that--unlike neighboring Nicaragua and Panama--it had a predominantly European population.

There is a tremendous amount of disinformation about Costa Rica's indigenous heritage. Just last month, I found a historical blurb in an Information Please almanac that repeated the myth that Costa Rica's indigenous population at the time of the arrival of the Spanish was only 28,000 people. Historians and anthropologists now feel that the number was actually closer to 400,000. I contacted the almanac people, and they agreed to change the erroneous text.

Dig a little bit, and you'll discover the depth of the problem.

There are no Mayan communities of significant size in the US. Just individuals who moved away from their homeland. I have no doubt some Mayan people moved up to Northern mexico, but there are no distinct traditional Mayan communities, reservations, or villages that are specificly Mayan in the same sense that there are distinctly Mayan villages in Guatemala.

Anyway, the Toltec people were invaded by the Aztecs..they existed as a subculture within Aztec society, mixed genetics with the Aztecs and other tribes, and became more of a secretive sub-culture bassed more on philosophy and religion then DNA. I suppose that means I am a mix mash of European, Lokota, and various tribes of Northern Mexico, southwestern US.