IRKA MATEO
Sacred Taino Healing
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 our relationship with the land, the spirits, and the ancestral traditions and stories carried through generations — practices still alive in our communities today. 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.
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 — 2026
Welcome:
Welcome to this space of connection, ceremony, and creative expression — a place to honor ancestral wisdom, the cycles of the earth, and the living spirit within each of us.
My work moves through many channels — healing, ceremony, teachings, music, and ceramic art — each nourishing the other and carrying the voice and living memory of our ancestors. My healing is guided by intuition and divination — an intimate dialogue with spirit — and I offer shamanic divination, power animal retrieval, and pattern-breaking journeys to those called to explore their path of connection and restoration. I welcome one-on-one clients to experience these practices in a personal, guided way.
After five years and 152 moon circles, December 4, 2025 marks my final moon ceremony — a cycle lovingly completed, held with gratitude for the community it nurtured, the prayers shared,
and the healing carried through the hardest times, including the pandemic. From here, my ceremonial focus turns to the equinoxes and solstices, the Day of the Dead, and gatherings in Kiskeya that celebrate culture, artistry, and spiritual connection, honoring the cycles of the earth and the living heritage of our ancestors. Dates and details for upcoming gatherings in 2026 will be shared soon.
Music has always been a heartbeat in my work. I continue guiding the virtual Songkeepers program, a circle devoted to preserving and revitalizing ancestral Taíno ceremonial rhythms and songs, honoring the rural elders of Kiskeya who carried these melodies across generations, and teaching both the traditional countryside songs and my own ceremonial compositions.
I remain in service to the community while also honoring the artist within me. In 2026, I am devoting special care to creating a new body of ceramic work for exhibition, alongside writing new songs for recording and release — allowing the creative path to stand fully and visibly beside my service work.
I am grateful to serve on the Abya Yala Council of Elders of Kako Earth and to be part of Heartland Gathering — including its first two years as OR — offering ceremony, healing, and exhibiting my ceramic art across the United States and beyond.
Invitation:
If your spirit feels called, you are welcome to join a healing session, ceremony, or in-person gathering in Kiskeya — to experience my ceramic work, listen to the music, and connect with the ancestors, the land, and the creative currents that flow through us all.
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.”
ATTEND A CEREMONY
Equinoxes and Solstices
Day of the Dead
Final Full Moon Ceremony — December 4th, 2025
This December 4th, 2025, the community is invited to join her for the final Full Moon Ceremony — a closing gathering under Grandmother Moon.
Rooted in Indigenous earth-honoring traditions, Akutu Irka guides ceremonies on the solstices and equinoxes, recognizing these seasonal shifts as teachings on planting, growing, harvesting, and resting.
The year comes full circle with the Day of the Dead ceremony, when the community gathers to welcome the ancestors and receive their presence and blessing.
BOOK A HEALING SESSION
Power Animal Retrieval ︎︎︎
Some of our indigenous relatives from the Amazon give a power animal to every child that is born in their villages. This is a belief and tradition that has been passed on for centuries.
Shamanic Divination ︎︎︎
The Akutu enters into a non-ordinary state of consciousness to get the help of her compassionate spirit guides to bring the answers to the questions requested by the person.
Breaking Patterns ︎︎︎
From a shamanic point of view, when a person experiences a trauma or harsh difficulties in life it creates a pattern that will lodge in specific places of the body. Once there, this outdated and unwanted feeling and behavior will inform the responses to the current life situations.
CERAMICS
Irka Mateo is deeply rooted in her heritage from Kiskeya/Ayiti, now known as the Dominican Republic, where her passion for exploring the ancestral wisdom of the Arawak Taino heritage runs deep. At the same time, she honors the profound African contributions that have shaped their shared identity. Irka’s calling is to share this rich cultural legacy and play a role in the evolving Caribbean identity that fully embraces both Afro and Indigenous origins. Her ultimate purpose is to preserve and nurture these values and traditions as part of their cultural and spiritual heritage.
For over 40 years, Irka has documented Afro-Taino ceremonial music and spirituality, drawing inspiration for her original songs. She has also woven the spiritual knowledge passed down by tradition bearers in her country and other Indigenous groups into her work, leading ceremonies and traditional healing practices that honor these ancient teachings. This journey into ancestral ceramics, sparked by her work in ceremonial and healing practices, has led her to create contemporary Taino art. Now based in Los Angeles, California, Irka remains deeply dedicated to this meaningful path, continuing to pour her heart and spirit into keeping these traditions alive.
MEDIA
VIDEO LIBRARY
MUSIC
In today’s streaming world, artists are rarely compensated for the depth of their creative labor. When you listen — and especially when you purchase the music — you help sustain the songs, the ceremonies, and the ancestral work that gives birth to them. Your support keeps this living tradition alive.
These ceremonial recordings were created to accompany inner work, ancestral tending, and personal journeys. One features Akutu Irka playing the mayowakan — the Taíno ceremonial drum — and the other carries her spontaneous ancestral chanting woven with the pulse of the ceremonial rhythm.
Each song is a prayer in sound, offered for those seeking to reconnect with the land, the spirits, and the ancient memory held in our Afro-Taíno lineage.
Support ceremonial and ancestral music.
Akutu Irka's Shamanic Music
These ceremonial recordings were created to accompany inner work, ancestral tending, and personal journeys. One features Akutu Irka playing the mayowakan — the Taíno ceremonial drum — and the other carries her spontaneous ancestral chanting woven with the pulse of the ceremonial rhythm.
Each song is a prayer in sound, offered for those seeking to reconnect with the land, the spirits, and the ancient memory held in our Afro-Taíno lineage.
Support ceremonial and ancestral music.
Irka Mateo’s Music
Irka is a performer and recording singer–songwriter with a thirty-five-year career rooted in Dominican spiritual folklore. Her contemporary music honors Afro-Taíno rhythms, stories, and carries Abya Yala music influences, shaping a sound that bridges tradition with new creative expression.
These albums and singles continue the work of carrying forward the voices of our people — through drums, story, rhythm, and prayer.
Support independent Taíno creative work.
May every song you bring into your home open a doorway — to memory, to presence, and to the living breath of our ancestors.