“I’m just trying to help save this endangered culture one bracelet at a time,” says Susana Valadez, founder of the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and owner of the superbly outfitted Galeria Tanana in the seaside village of Sayulita.
The breathtaking designer bracelets are just one example of the multitude of high quality artisanal jewelry pieces, fine art yarn paintings, collectibles and other handmade products in this storefront gallery-cum-museum shop.
As a fair-trade non-profit venture, all the gallery profits go toward the Center and its projects to help sustain the impoverished Huichol people, one of the very few remaining tribes in the Americas who remain intact, living in the remote mountains of Nayarit and Jalisco much as they did in pre-Columbian times.
Valadez, who made her way to Mexico in the 1970’s as an anthropologist from UCLA studying indigenous tribes and their plant medicines, fell in love with the Huichol, literally. She married into the culture and raised her three children in the tribal community around Huejuquilla el Alto, Jalisco, where she created the not-for-profit Center for Cultural Survival. The center, established in 1981, now teaches Huichol women survival skills through a program called “Handcrafts, Not Hand Outs.” During all this time, Valadez has recorded 40 years of the tribe’s history in a photographic archive at the center. She and her colleagues among the Huichol teach nutrition and self-sustaining permaculture techniques, which help to provide twice-daily meals for more than 50 children and adults. The team also runs a day school that instructs youngsters in their native Uto-Aztecan dialect first, before they learn the requisite Spanish.
“Our project is aimed at providing education in the children’s own language first, so they can identify their own culture as their first point of reference,” says Valadez. Her group is working to help these artists to continue producing their intricate yarn paintings, high-concept jewelry and an exclusive line of cards, each of which tells a unique story in colors and pictures that incorporate elements of the Huichol’s vision of their world, rooted in ancient shamanic traditions, folk medicine, and a playful, generous cosmic spirituality.
Every purchase at Galeria Tanana is a singular acquisition, as well as a donation. The center accepts additional donations and supplies information about volunteer opportunities at www.thehuicholcenter.org. Galeria Tanana is located at Revolucion 22, Sayulita. (329) 291-3889.