Mountain Lords, Ancestors, and Ethical Dimensions of the Climate Crisis among Q’eqchi’-Mayas

In the traditional cosmology of Guatemala’s Q’eqchi’-Maya people Tzuultaq’as – the Lords of the Mountain-Valleys— are important spirits who exercise sovereignty over the earth. These other-than-human beings are identified with specific mountains in the region and are figured as the true owners of the land who, as landlords are wont to do, demand payment for access to their property, which includes not just the landscape itself but also all the flora and fauna who live on it, as well as the resources needed to sustain that life. Those payments— which come in the form of incense, candles, cacao, alcohol, blood, and prayers—are understood as food for the Tzuultaq’a’s, and the rituals through which they are offered are explicitly framed as “feeding” these powerful beings. Tzuultaq’as and human beings this live in mutually sustaining (if not necessarily equal or equitable) relationships that adhere to a basic Q’eqchi’-Maya ethical principle of complementarity that holds that all things depend on exchange with each other to reach the fullness of their being, and that as such, one must both give as well take to live. That give and take is regulated through dialogue, and one must both ask permission and give thanks when availing oneself of the life energy of other things.

Of course, people don’t always live up to the responsibilities entailed by this core value of mutuality or complementarity, and those who don’t must suffer a punishment or make a payment (both known as q’oq) as a consequence of their ethical failure. A q’oq is meant to be punitive as well as corrective and edifying, and it will ideally both reestablish the broken relationship and teach the offending party to not do so again.

Q’oqs that result from human beings’ failure to live up to the ethics of mutual complementarity with the Tzuultaq’as often take the form of weather-related events that can significantly disrupt human economic production or generally imperil life. It is thus perhaps no surprise that the climate-related crises that Q’eqchi’-Mayas have been experiencing over the last twenty years (floods, droughts, soil erosion, etc.) are locally framed as not just material problems, but also ethical ones. A loss of ancestral values, my interlocutors in Guatemala say, is ultimately responsible for climate change, and there is little hope that the crises will abate unless younger generations refocus their lives around the values left to them by their "grandmothers and grandfathers,” who, despite no longer being corporeally present, continue to exercise influence on the lives of their communities as sources of both moral and practical knowledge as well as occasionally as agents in their own right by, for example, instructing people through dreams or shifting energies needed to accomplish projects.

Drawing on field data collected through participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and community history sessions between 2017 and 2024, this paper examines how Q’eqchi’-Mayas in Guatemala construct the climate crisis as a crisis of values. By focusing on the roles that Tzuultaq’as and ancestors play in Q’eqchi’-Maya people’s ethical-moral value system, this paper examines how human interaction with these two core categories of other-than-human shape their understanding of climate change. How do their commitments to place via the Tzuultaq’as and kin via their ancestors shape people’s diagnosis of change and what resources might they afford them for dealing with myriad social, economic, and culture changes precipitated by the climate crisis?