Google "Mayan" and "Belize" and the results are depressing though not surprising: a past-tense reference to Indigenous
ingenuity but with little regard for Indigenous survival and what it says about the relations we keep.
That's been my take as I've been navigating the country while thawing out from an Alaskan winter. Soaking up some sunrays, I've also been absorbing a deeper understanding of modern Mayan affairs
and in a way that rarely makes headlines in Belize let alone in the United States.
From the time I touched down, I've intentionally charted a path to connect to a people and place that for too long has been labeled a "lost civilization" by western scholars. Today's Mayans,
however, declare otherwise: "Weyano'one - We are here."
That was the gist of my conversation I shared with a man named Ku (rhymes with "shoe") at the foot of Jaguar Temple on his ancestral lands of Lamanai in northern Belize. I didn't have to ask about his opinions of Mayan invisibility. He just kinda blurted it out, particularly over
some hard memories he holds about scientists who discounted his Indigenous knowledge for years.
"They started to rewrite our stories," said Ku, whose anglicized name is Jose Nazario. "In the schools, the only stories we were told were always telling us that we were barbarians killing each other," he said. "Savages!" That last word hung in thick silence.
Ku grew up in the nearby river community of Indian Creek when only looters and amateur archeologists visited Lamanai, one of the largest original Mayan cities in Belize dating back to 700 B.C. And he had heard his fair share of
stories about the site, especially the ones elders told about crocodiles. Lama'anayin, afterall, means "submerged crocodile" in Yucutac Mayan, a direct reference to the spiritual creatures living along the banks of the New River.
