Raising Awareness and Understanding of Traditional Timekeeping

EARTH TIMEKEEPERS

Raising Awareness and Understanding of Traditional Timekeeping

Welcome to Earth Timekeepers

As the crises of civilization and planetary crises accumulate, Indigenous Peoples around the world – and particularly in the Americas – have been organizing to welcome the new time – expected with the arrival of 2012.

The purpose of this initiative is to bring together indigenous leaders and timekeepers from Tortuga Island-North America, Anahuac-Mexico and Central America, and Tawantinsuyo-South America.

We want to ensure that our community leaders share their concerns about how we can achieve a good life when rainy seasons are so irregular and unpredictable and when development and investment initiatives disrupt the tranquility of the ecosystems in our territories.

The timekeepers will promote the principles and values ​​of wisdom contained in the ancestral understanding of the cycles of time for life. This type of wisdom is called Living in the Cycle of Life.

Organization

Our group has been able to congregate academics, leaders of the community and researchers from all of America, from Canada to Chile, and expanding beyond.

Achievements

As a growing community preparing for the New Dawn, we have held many meetings and ceremonies in sacred biocultural territories to recover and strengthen ancient alliances and re-kindle sacred continental fires.

Projects

In order to disseminate the wisdom and teachings of our ancestral cultures, we carry out workshops, meetings and conferences in academic and community spaces. Since 2022 we have begun to develop immersive experience content for domes, planetariums, museums and educational institutions as part of our curriculum building, using a versatile pass pricing system in our revenue model.

Learn about our new and innovative project, which seeks to rescue ancestral knowledge of Good Living, represented in sacred sites around the world.

Mission

The mission of Earth Timekeepers is to support communities that are reclaiming the philosophies, knowledge, and practices of the Cycle of Life by sponsoring on-site, cross-cultural dialogues and teachings that combine traditional and modern modalities of information exchange.

The mission of Earth Timekeepers is to support communities that are reclaiming the philosophies, knowledge, and practices of Living with the Cycles by sponsoring on-site, cross-cultural dialogues and teachings that combine traditional and modern modalities of information exchange.

To fulfill this mission, we will inspire communities to revitalize original thought houses, sacred sites, temazcal/ticta, traditional festivals, traditional markets, traditional food, regenerative food production systems, and the maintenance of healthy forests, mountains, lakes, wetlands, cenotes, rivers, streams, and mares. Mutual support between communities will contribute to the recovery of practices of timekeeping, weather forecasting, family and community healing, traditional regenerative agriculture, food gathering, beekeeping, fishing, and hunting. We will also foster the recovery of indigenous organizing principles based on natural cycles of time and space.

To fulfill this mission, we will inspire communities to revitalize original thinking houses, sacred sites, temazcal/ticta, traditional festivals, traditional markets, traditional food, regenerative food production systems, and the healthy maintenance of forests, mountains, lakes, wetlands, cenotes, rivers, streams, and seas. Mutual support between communities will contribute to the recovery of practices of time counting, weather forecasting, family and community healing, traditional regenerative agriculture, foraging, beekeeping, fishing, and hunting. We will also foster the recovery of indigenous organizing principles based on natural cycles of time and space.

These organizing principles will allow for the development of leadership that embodies the premises and values ​​of the New Dawn.

These organizing principles will enable the development of leadership that incorporates the premises and values ​​of the New Dawn.

Vision

By 2026, when the 13-year transition period towards the New Dawn has been completed, the Earth’s Timekeepers will have become a consolidated network of wise indigenous guardians of ancestral and contemporary knowledge about sacred time-space, with the capacity to support processes of territorial protection and defense of the rights of Mother Earth and Nature.

Our History

  • 2010-2012. Supporting the fulfillment of the vision of Jake Swamp: the Peacemaker, headwaters of the Mississippi River, welcomed by the Ojibwa.
    Discussions began to more closely address the notions of the New Dawn, Indigenous Calendars, Original Principles, and the protection of Sacred Places and the connections between them. 
  • The first meeting of Timekeepers was held at Hopi in Hotevilla, Arizona.
  • 2013-2015. Documentary research on original Mesoamerican calendars and dialogues of knowledge with Yucatecan language students from universities in Yucatan and Quintana Roo.
    The second meeting of Timekeepers was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
  • 2016-2017. Writing scripts for two films.
  • 2016-2017. Creating an animated promotional video on the line of research on original timekeeping in Mesoamerica.
  • 2016-2018. On-site research in Mayan communities in southern Mexico (Yucatan Peninsula, especially Felipe Carrillo Puerto in Quintana Roo and communities surrounding Valladolid) and Guatemala (Tecpán, communities around Lake Atitlán and Cubulco, Baja Verapaz) on the recording of time.
  • 2016-2020. Visit to traditional authorities and sacred sites that are visited on dates marked on the original calendars.
    Research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of the Government of Canada, with principal investigator Jennifer Wemigwans.
    Grant from the National Science Foundation, with lead investigators Mark Palmer and Joanna M. Hearne, from the University of Missouri.
  • 2023 We finished a full-dome production on the Otomi worldview, with permission, advice and participation from authorities of Otomi communities in the State of Mexico and Guanajuato.