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Hi Everyone,
Happy New Year! We hope you enjoyed the holidays and are having an amazing start to the year!
I hope that you liked our first episode of our most recent podcast series with Mr. Andres Martinez and Mrs. Judith Gomez and that it provided a personal and relatable perspective of what it is like to grow up in a multicultural household with indigenous roots and spiritual diversity.
In the next segment of this podcast, Mr. Martinez and Ms. Gomez expand on their personal experiences, especially those relating to family traditions over the years. The episode is packed with interesting narratives around the exploration of heritage, the preservation of traditions amidst an ever-changing social environment, inherent matrilineal roots, the role of women in both households, and finally the underlying spiritual meaning within family activities.
Mr. Martinez shares that for many people with indigenous backgrounds, the lack of access to elders who may have passed can require exercising a great degree of academic understanding and logical reasoning to bridge informational gaps. In order to formalize some of the indigenous traditions, people use academic reasoning and historical imagination to help recreate their understanding of their heritages and traditions to reconnect with their roots. This process, though challenging, has been a fascinating journey that has enabled many people to develop a deeper understanding of their indigenous heritage, its current expression, and its evolution.
Ms. Gomez discusses how female-centric practices of her indigenous heritage faced existential challenges while integrating with colonial male-centric religious practices and how the melding of western religion in indigenous societies created a new dynamic in these cultures. She also highlights that in her experience, religion has become a conduit that has helped preserve indigenous heritage within families, as many female elders took upon the strict practice of preserving religion and passing it down to subsequent generations in her family. She further discusses her family experiences to elucidate the complexities of indigenous identity, the integral role of female elders, and their family traditions both past and present.
I have only scratched the surface of this episode in this blog and encourage you to watch the podcast if you like learning more about indigeneity through real life experiences.
We hope you continue to enjoy the podcast series, and I promise to post the next segment very soon! Have a great weekend!
Gabby