ABOUT SACRED TAINO HEALING
Joining one of Irka Mateo’s Taíno ceremonies, you learn two things very quickly: hahom is “thank you” in the Taíno language and to have your own rattle ready if available. This testifies to how the bohutio, meaning Taíno medicine woman, and singer-songwriter guides her sessions in gratitude and makes it as interactive for her audience, Taíno or not, as possible. As she performs Indigenous sound healing through “spontaneous chanting,” Irka’s passion radiates as she dons a headdress of parrot feathers and begins ceremony with a prayer and rattle of the maraca. Sacred Taíno Healing is not only a spiritual service, but a community established during and outside sacred ceremonies and healing sessions.. Mateo’s healing practice also includes areítos, or Taíno ceremonial celebrations. One of the Taíno’s oldest forms of cultural expression, the areíto The areito is about sharing of the members of the community passions more lighthearted but no less vital to community-building. Like ancestral Taíno practice, Sacred Taíno Healing provides space for friendship, celebration, and connectedness. Inspired by the traditions of Indigenous Kiskeya, or what is today known as the Dominican Republic, and South America, she incorporates animism, spontaneous sacred chanting, and pre-Hispanic Taíno and South American shamanic instruments in her ceremonies and healing sessions.
As a Taíno akutu, or “grandmother,” Mateo approaches her healing practice with the nurturing and loving “energy of the mother.” Originally for friends and family, she has made her practice accessible to anyone willing to learn, engage, and decolonize their own spirituality. Enriched by her 25 years as a sacred sound healer and the multiculturalism of her Afro-Indigneous heritage, her practice as a ceremonialist decolonizes spirituality by returning to Taíno and Indigenous South American ways.
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