Feliz Machaq Mara

Happy New Year! Or Feliz Machaq Mara for Bolivia’s Aymara indigenous, who celebrated the beginning of their new year, number 5517, on June 21. While we've been ushering in the summer with barbecues and beach trips, for the Southern Hemisphere is busy marking its seasonal opposite. It's their winter solstice, the day when the sun is farthest from the planet, the shortest day of the year, and for the Aymaras, also the beginning of a new planting season.

This year, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, who is an Aymara and the country’s first wholly indigenous president, decreed that the willkakuti, or the return of the sun, is now a national holiday. Officials said the new holiday, in which both public and private activities are to be suspended throughout the country, is to recognize indigenous traditions in the country as part of the "growing spirit of de-colonization." About 70 percent of Bolivia's 9 million population are considered indigenous, coming from 36 different indigenous nations.

The new year for the Aymara officially begins with the return of the sun at dawn. According to tradition, the Aymaras, who mostly live in an extensive mountain plateau known as the Andean Altiplano, gather at the sacred archaeological complex Tiwanaku, built in A.D. 700 by the Tihuanaco people. The festivities begin well before dawn with music played on traditional flutes and other instruments, toasts with the Bolivian liquor Singani mixed with hot tea, and an Aymara priest making sacrifices of llama and other offerings to Pachamama, or mother earth, over a large bonfire. When the first rays of the sun arrive through the Puerta del Sol, or Gateway of the Sun, those gathered for the event raise their hands in the air to receive the cosmic rays.

Other indigenous peoples also celebrate the new year on winter solstice, such as the Mapuches in southern Chile and Argentina. Though, for the Mapuches, the ceremonies took place on the morning of June 24, when they greet the new sun by first purifying themselves by bathing in a nearby river or stream.