ABOUT SACRED TAINO HEALING
Sacred Taíno Healing was born from a lifelong devotion to remembering who we are as Taíno people and carrying that memory forward with integrity, beauty, and purpose. My path has unfolded through decades of ceremony, cultural reclamation, and the teachings of our elders, shaping a practice that weaves together the spiritual, the creative, and the ancestral.
My work flows through many channels — ceremony, guidance, teaching, healing, and the ceramic arts — all of them anchored in singing, the ancient ceremonial chants, our share wisdom, and the living memory of our people.
Rooted in Taíno cosmology and nourished by our earth-based traditions, Sacred Taíno Healing is a living space of remembrance. Here, we restore a relationship with the land, the spirits, and the stories that shaped our ancestors. Through ceremony, creative expression, and community
learning, we continue the work our people began long before us — tending the fire of identity, healing, and belonging. Here, we reconnect with the land, the spirits, and the inherited traditions and stories that our ancestors carried forward — practices that remain alive in our communities today.
Sacred Taíno Healing is both a homecoming and an offering: a place where ancestral knowledge meets contemporary need, and where each person is invited to return to their deeper self with dignity, clarity, and reverence.
ABOUT IRKA MATEO
I am Irka Mateo — Akutu — a Taíno elder, cultural and spiritual bearer, and ceremonialist rooted in the Taíno and Afro-Indigenous traditions of Kiskeya. My life is shaped by ancestral lineage, decades of research, and a calling to renew Taíno spiritual memory in our time. For ten years, I served as the Taíno Lead Teacher at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. My archival work in ceremonial music has been supported by the Grammy Foundation, preserved in the National General Archives of the Dominican Republic, and honored with Grammy album consideration.
My Work Today
My healing work is guided by intuition and divination — an intimate dialogue with spirit. I offer shamanic divination, power animal retrieval, and pattern-breaking healing journeys. In 2026, I continue to welcome one-on-one healing clients while deepening my role as a teacher and guide in group ceremonies, both virtual and in person.
After five years and 152 moon circles, December 4, 2025 will mark my final moon ceremony — a cycle lovingly completed. My ceremonial path now turns toward the equinoxes and solstices, the Day of the Dead celebration, and the cultural, spiritual, and healing gatherings in Kiskeya.
I continue guiding my virtual Songkeepers program, teaching Taíno mythology online and Indigenous earth-honoring ceramics in Kiskeya, while creating new ceramic works and writing songs for future recording and release.
I serve as a member of the Abya Yala Council of Elders of Kako Earth and as part of Heartland Gathering — including its first two years as OR — where I offer ceremony, healing, and exhibit my ceramic arts, work I continue to carry forward with them across the United States and beyond.
My Body of Knowledge
I guide others in Taíno cosmology, stories, ceramic arts, and songs as living practices of reconnection. I am a lifelong student and researcher of Taíno and Afro-Indigenous music, ceremony, and rural traditions in the Dominican countryside. I have learned directly from elders and other knowledge keepers — and from shamanic and ceramic arts wisdom keepers across Abya Yala — weaving these teachings into pathways of remembrance for our contemporary community, and deepening my understanding of earth-based spirituality and the arts through ancestral forms, time-honored techniques, and the sacred resonance carried within these practices.
Art, Music & Ceremony
Before founding Sacred Taíno Healing, I lived as an established performer and recording singer–songwriter, yet every song I created emerged from the ceremonial rhythms I learned from elders in the countryside — never separate from prayer. This foundation remains at the center of all I share — in ritual, teaching, healing, and in the creation of Taíno- and pan-Indigenous inspired ceramic arts.
Closing Thought
“May these songs, ceremonies, and teachings nourish our shared remembrance, and may we continue to walk together in healing, guidance, and ancestral connection.”