WILD12 Delegate Spotlight: Anita Sanchez

“My grandmother used to say, when I was a little girl stomping around, hija [child] walk softer, like you’re kissing your mother. And I think to have that mentality, to have that understanding of your place in the world, there’s not human supremacy.”

Anita Sanchez is Nahua (also known as Aztec) and Mexican-American, and has recently returned from trips to the Arctic and the Amazon to bridge movements of Indigenous peoples and the land. She speaks about the erasure of peoples who have been in relationship with the land for millenia, like those who could conduct burns in grasslands so that the buffalo and seeds can spread. She says that in the mentality of sufficiency and reciprocity that comes from these relationships, there is no language for conservation. That we are a part of the Earth, we are nature, and this carries a responsibility. This means that we must be careful about the human supremacy that assumes decision-making power about regeneration.

“When it’s not done in a way with the heart and the conscious, then people end up doing this segmentation again instead of the ecosystem as a whole.”