Chapter 08: Santiago Atitlan

In the southwest of Guatemala’s highlands is a lake that formed in the crater of an immense volcano: Atitlán. The largest community on its perimeter, Santiago Atitlán, is home to the world’s largest concentration of ancestrally Tz’utujil Mayan Indigenous people. Santiago is a Spanish word, and Atitlán is a Nahuatl word that means ‘between the waters’. Nahuatl is the language of the Aztecs, not the Mayans, and they did not get along, so you might guess that the Indigenous Mayan inhabitants of Santiago Atitlán don’t call it that: to them it was known as Chuitinamit, which is a name more connected to the clan that controlled the area than its geology or geography.

I have found that it is generally a good idea to refer to places by the names that their Indigenous inhabitants give them, because indigenous languages generally come up out of the earth, and so their names for things tend to be how the things know themselves. Indigenous languages, in their beginnings, are generally not drunk on power or delusion, and so peoples didn’t go around high on their own supply, pretending to be The Creator, and taking the naming of Beings upon themselves. I’ll call this one So-and-So, I’ll name that one such-and-such, as though the world were filled with so many pets in one’s own private zoo. It seems rather, with a high degree of consistency, that the origin of most Indigenous languages was a profound listening, and an attempt to replicate in mouth-sound what the earth told people things were called. It seems that Indigenous peoples had both the humility and the wherewithal to ask places their names, to ask animals how they were known to themselves. This seems to me to be an intrinsic awareness of the sovereignty of others; an anti-imperial impulse; the expression of a kinship worldview.

Most indigenous origin stories would be appalled by the lines in Genesis that suggest that God gave man dominion over the Earth. From Genesis 1, verses 26-28: