The Dei Shu Dancers (left) joined with Colombian spiritual leaders (center), visitors and locals to bless the water at Chilkat Inlet on Wednesday, June 26.
On June 26, a year to the hour of the death of 23-year-old Mario Julian Benassi, more than 60 out-of-town visitors, Alaska Natives from Chilkoot Indian Association and Klukwan, and indigenous South American spiritual leaders joined along the confluence of the Chilkat River and the inlet for a water blessing.
Aquasension, the three-day festival organized by the father, Mario Benassi, centered on spiritual activism honoring the Chilkat Valley watersheds, spurred by the tragic death of a son, musician, friend and yogi.
Benassi said growing up in Haines’ waters colored his son’s experience of the world, inspiring a job as a river guide and much of the music he wrote.
Last June, his son drowned in California’s Yuba River, right after saying a prayer for the water, a witness and friend said.
“He was the ultimate water blessing,” Benassi said of his son.
Ashtara Kukuk, who met the younger Benassi on the beach in Hawaii in 2014 and later visited him in Haines, said her friend was “always talking about the salmon.” This past January, Kukuk traveled to Peru, where she met indigenous elders from Colombia. She was planning a celebration of life with Benassi at the time and felt compelled to invite the shamans to the Aquasension.
“Usually they divinate, they ask the waters,” Kukuk said. “But there wasn’t even a pause for an inhale, it was just, ‘Yes, we’re going to Alaska.'”
Senchina, 60, and Sewigu, 32, are spiritual leaders, or Kogi people, from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in Northern Colombia. Sewigu is on the path of becoming a mama, or an enlightened one, (a process that begins as early as 3 years old, when children are selected to spend up to 18 years secluded in a dark cave to teach attunement to the earth) and acts as the spokesperson for the two, their translator said. The Kogi’s pre-Colombian society believes themselves to be the speakers of the Earth who, in 1990, first made contact with the outside world when they invited BBC to make a documentary warning of the potential impacts of industry.
When changing landscapes and warming seasons continued to plague their village, they knew that outsiders hadn’t heeded their advice.
“The whole reason that they leave their home is because the spirit of all the natural resources is hungry,” the Kogis’ translator said. “They require some sort of maintenance. (The Kogi) feel responsible to do this because the task has become so big now, because we are living in such an unbalanced time in the world. To teach people how to do these payments and to get people in that consciousness of contributing back to the earth is their goal, it’s the reason they leave their land.”
Donning the all-white garb from their region, the spiritual leaders traveled to Haines with funds donated by the Chilkoot Indian Association, Lynn Canal Conservation and the Benassi family and friends to educate “little brothers” – or westerners – on their tradition of pagamentos, or making payments to the earth as a tax on extraction.
“We think the water is free and that nobody owns the water, so we drink it every day,” Senchina told the crowd through a translator. “But for that very fact, we must pay the mother.”
Dancers from Chilkoot Indian Association and Klukwan joined with the Kogi to sing and dance for the water.
The Dei Shu Dancers began the ceremony with a canoe song. Member James Hart said the group uses as a harmonizing exercise that parallels the way they must work together when paddling.
“Water is a really big part of our culture,” Hart said. “This is what you might consider our highway, how we travel around to see each other.”
The Kogi played songs to the water using a flute and a shaker. “If you try to talk to the spirits with words, it’s like someone standing outside of your house and trying to talk to you,” Sewigu said. “This is the language they understand.”
Mario Julian Benassi’s friends came from across the United States and South and Central America for a water blessing.
“He collected people everywhere he went,” his father said. “I know none of these people, but every one of them knew my son.”
Cheryl Angel, an indigenous Lakota tribal member from Standing Rock in the Dakotas, was among a handful of people who had never met the younger Benassi but had a connection to someone attending the event and “felt called” to come.
“It’s time now for people to unite and create unlikely alliances because our mother is calling us,” Angel said. “There are things we can do to stop the destruction of the extractivism industry on this planet.”
Artists and dancers and filmmakers joined in the ceremony. Austin Queen, who befriended Benassi in “a hippie town,” Nevada City, California, said his death caused their tight-knit community to “walk the talk.”
“This gave us an opportunity to own up to what we preach about transcendence and the afterlife,” Queen said. For him, that has spurred work in cinematography, including a documentary he is making to honor his friend, and footage he shot in Haines commissioned by National Geographic for an undisclosed project.
Jones Hotch, of Klukwan, said he especially liked the timing of the event, at a time when working together to “wake up the silent majority” is desperately needed.
“Right on time,” he said. “It might be like how you see in the cartoons sometimes, a snowball starts and the farther it gets, the bigger it is.”