A Quechua guardian from Cusco argues rivers and rocks should be treated as rights-holders

Atop the Cape, where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean, Quechua guardian Hipólito Peralta Cama held an initiation ceremony with his son between the two waters. Born on August 13, 1959, in the Huancarqui community, Yaurisque district, in the Cusco region of Peru, he is one of the indigenous voices who took part in a gathering of elders held by the World Tribal Alliance on the Cape Peninsula, in South Africa.

The video, published on the organization's channel, shows Peralta alongside South African filmmaker Pippa Ehrlich, co-director of the documentary "My Octopus Teacher" (2020), winner of the 2021 Academy Award for best documentary feature. In the available footage, it is Peralta who speaks; the conversation does not include lines from Ehrlich.

A poncho of many colors

Peralta uses the image of a poncho woven from many colors to say that no single tradition is "the" truth: the diversity of peoples, woven together, is what makes something whole. For him, his generation's task is to prepare good seeds — today's children — so they do not repeat the same stumbles.

Rivers and rocks as rights-holders

He rejects the idea that nature was given to humans by a god to use as they please. In the view he presents, rivers, rocks, animals and plants are "rights-holders" — which is why one would not burn a forest or poison a water source, any more than one would do that to one's own family. He cites the Quechua language, runasimi, "the language of man," to recall that, in his grandparents' tradition, there would also be the language of rain, of rock and of wind, spoken by those who know how to listen.

Spirituality for sale

Peralta criticizes what he calls the commercialization of spirituality in Cusco, where titles have come to be sold. For him, training a spiritual guide takes decades under a teacher: he himself was only authorized to walk on his own at 33, after following his father and grandparents since childhood.

What remains after the last blink

At one point in the conversation, he sums up life as something brief: "la vida es solamente dos pestañadas" — life is just two blinks, one at birth and one at departure. For him, nothing accumulated materially goes with anyone after that; what remains is what he calls a backpack of tenderness, the caring gestures offered to others.

Claims about "rights-holders" and about nature's "languages" express a Quechua spiritual worldview, not a recognized legal concept: in Peru, rivers and territories generally do not hold legal personhood. Peralta also blends, in his account, lived episodes — such as the ceremony between the two oceans — with broader impressions about humanity, with no independent verification of the dates and names mentioned. What remains, overall, is less a fixed doctrine than an invitation: to treat what surrounds us as kin, not as a resource.