“All Hail the Glacier Gods”: El Fotografo’s MSNBC Pix of Qoyllur Rit’i
Back in December, msnbc.com published a photo story on Qoyllur Rit’i and global warming, with photos by El Fotógrafo and captions by yours truly.
I neglected to provide the link to that slide show, which includes some of EF’s strongest images of the dangerous (and endangered) glacier pilgrimage, so here it is, belatedly: “Peru’s Disappearing Holy Glacier.”
This photo, above, of a veteran ukuku is one of my favorites. The guy must be about 40 years old, but exposure to the harsh Andean elements has made his face a craggy moraine field.
Most of the ukukus at QR are in their late teens and early 20s; you don’t see a lot of old-timers like this guy. He lived through the crises in the 1990s when the glacier started melting and breaking up, and ukukus began falling into crevasses and dying.
Back then, the religious group that organizes the pilgrimage didn’t know about global warming and its effects on glaciers. They didn’t realize that their seemingly sturdy glacier was becoming a major hazard and couldn’t support the weight of hundreds of ukukus at a time. So they would ascend to the glacier at midnight to perform their rituals, as they had always done, and then the accidents started happening.
One veteran ukuku we interviewed in 2008 told us that he saw nine of his fellow ukukus die on the glacier in 1995. He was about the same age as this ukuku. Both were survivors of and witnesses to the hazards of extreme climate change.
BTW: I swiped the title of this blog post from an entry in the Cabinet of Wonders. COW’s entry provides an excellent introduction to the rituals of Qoyllur Rit’i and to the surreal atmosphere that surrounds this ancient event rooted in pre-Hispanic traditions.
The title reminds me of these lines about glacier worship from “The Threshold,” by Rudyard Kipling. The speaker starts by recalling the days of early cave-dwelling humans, who lived in the shadow of receding glaciers and were starting to make sense of their place in the world:
The close years packed behind them,
As the glaciers bite and grind,
Filling the new-gouged valleys
With Gods of every kind.
Gods of all-reaching power–
Gods of all-searching eyes–
But each to be wooed by worship
And won by sacrifice.
Barbara
I am an American writer who lived in Lima for seven years (2007-2014), where I covered Andean traditions, melting glaciers and daily life in the capital for Miami Herald, MSNBC and Huffington Post. I now live and work in northern Florida where I champion climate change advocacy and compassionate, affordable eldercare.
4 Comments
Holly
This is really amazing… I had no idea that elders were dying from the change in glacial ice.
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Barb
Thanks, Holly, for the Just Post nod. Yes, the ukukus started noticing that the ice was becoming precarious back in the 1990s and then there was this spate of deaths that made the issue critical for them, back in the mid- to late’90s. It took a number of years after that for all the ukukus to agree not to go on the ice in large numbers — and there are still ukukus who sneak up there, largely because the ice is considered to be so important for their community’s welfare. Risking death has always been part of the ukukus’ role, however. They are the ones who are supposed to protect the pilgrims. Ironically, more pilgrms are getting hurt nowadays than are ukukus, not from stepping on the ice itself but from falling rocks that have been stripped of the ice that once held them together.
Rapidly melting glaciers are extremely hazardous for these reasons, as the people of the high Andes and the Himalayas know firsthand.