So many of us have benefited from Indigenous wisdom. We honor the perseverance, resiliency, and courageous commitment of Indigenous people to keep their traditions alive despite the insurmountable challenges they have faced throughout history and to this day.
Without the fierce commitment of the Indigenous in the Americas to guarding their traditions, we ourselves wouldn’t be benefitting from a medicine as sacred as cacao.
So, how do we honor this day? How can we show our reverence and respect?
It begins with our relationship to the land we inhabit and the traditions we learn or benefit from.
One place to start is learning the original name of the land you live on. Check out this map to learn about the Indigenous Territory where you reside. This might inspire you to dig deeper and learn about the people who stewarded the land before you arrived.
A resounding message keeps coming back as a powerful teaching: listen to the elders and respect the ways in which they work with their medicines; in this way, we can honor the Indigenous and their traditions.
In the ancestral traditions of the Maya Yocotan, who hold a strong connection to cacao as medicine, they share with us that cacao is a medicine that implores us to create community, to drink it within community for the good of all, and to listen to its message of becoming caretakers not just of ourselves and each other, but of the Earth and all her sentient beings.
Learn To Connect To Cacao As Teacher & Guide
If you feel called to honor this national holiday, before you take your first sip of cacao, we invite you to raise your cup in gratitude to indigenous lands and Indigenous peoples and then go outside and offer the first sip of your cacao back to the Earth in solidarity.
For more resources, this is a wonderful article about how we can each stand in solidarity on this day and can continue to do so moving forward.
Let’s continue to learn how to be in right relationship with the wisdom, traditions, and medicines of Indigenous people - not just on a designated national holiday but as an intention we weave throughout our lives.
