Marisol de la Cadena

“This Padre Antonio doubted, probably after his training in modern theology or as a practitioner of Catholicism. He argued that those practices were spurious; they did not derive from a true belief in earth-beings. “They do it for money, it’s not real,” he repeated stubbornly. But for Nazario, beliefs are a requirement with Jesus and the Virgin. They are part of faith, or iñi, a Quechua word (and a sixteenth-century neologism).6 Faith, he explained, is not necessary with earth-beings; they require despachos, coca leaves, and words and are present when respectfully invited to participate in runakuna lives—always. They are different, always there and acting with plants, water, animals. Their being does not need to be mediated by faith, but Jesus’s does. And just as Padre Antonio and I talked about Nazario, Nazario and I commented about how our dear Padre thought practices with earth-beings were like religion, like belief or kriyihina—another combination of a Spanish verb (kriyi is the Quechua form of the Spanish creer, to believe) and a Quechua suffix (hina, or like) used to express a condition that Quechua alone cannot convey. Nazario thought earth-beings and Jesus were different, but he was not sure that Antonio was wrong: could they be the same? And finally, neither Nazario nor I were sure that Padre Antonio’s relationship with earth-beings was only like his relationship with Jesus. We speculated that having been in the region for so long, and having been a close friend of Mariano, Padre Antonio must have learned from Mariano’s relations with earth-beings. I still think so; Padre Antonio is a complex religious man, and so are the other Jesuits who live in the region. Some of their Catholic practices may have become partially connected with despachos, and thus less than many and still different. I liked, and still do like, having these priests as friends.”
― Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds