Prophets walk barefoot - Pope Francis, the South and the dignity of indigenous peoples

At the end of the southern summer, in early March 2013, I came to Navarino to interview the “last” surviving Yagan. Just outside Puerto Williams, we met her in the morning where she was waiting for us, almost in darkness, in the dim light of her humble home. A few eloquent words testified to how the extinction of a culture, even if natural, is always a serious defeat for humanity. A few days later in Rio Grande, on the Argentine side of Tierra del Fuego, we had just enough time to get out of a car to watch the live election of Pope Francis on a TV at a bus station. On 13 March 2013, the new pontiff's first words sent shivers down our spines when he said, “I come from the end of the world”. This immediately made me think of that elderly indigenous woman with a face furrowed by the wrinkles of age, who made sounds instead of words, guttural whispers that she must have learned to make by listening to the wind. Alone in that house without a television or electricity, she could not have known that the new pontiff not only belonged to her own land, but would soon declare himself to be her sole authoritative representative, hers and that of all the forgotten peoples who survive on the margins of the earth. The last survivor of the Yaganes people, an indigenous ethnic group known for hunting and fishing, dressed only in skins in the icy waters of the southernmost part of the southern hemisphere, which, with her disappearance, would become extinct.

We must remember what Francis said, words that are not just abstract thoughts but steps, traces of a journey. A man who knew how to read the world aloud. This was evident when he spoke of indigenous peoples without doing so from a distance: after calling them one by one, name by name, he listened to them, made himself small to enter into their stories, and in that humble gesture lies all the strength of the Church that remembers it is a mother. Precisely because the forest is never completely silent, it is there that one always hears some background noise that refuses to succumb to silence. It may be the flow of a river, the rustling of leaves, the creaking sounds coming from underground: “a sign of the active life of trees when they stretch their roots”, an Achuar Indian told me with a laugh. Francis knew how to distinguish sounds from noises, recognising in them the living Gospel, both in the atmosphere of an arid, sun-scorched land and in the songs sung in languages that the world has tried to erase. That is where the essence of the Gospel lies, not preached but lived. A Gospel that smells of wood and smoke. Of sweat and ancient respect for the earth. A Gospel that is not taught but contemplated.

At the Synod for the Amazon, he asked that we stop looking at indigenous peoples as “a problem” and recognise them for what they are: a part of humanity endowed with spiritual wealth and embodied wisdom. He said that the tears of those who have seen their land invaded and plundered deserve not only compassion but justice. Furthermore, he was categorical when he stated that the Church cannot be complicit with the power that destroys, but must be a refuge, an open home, a healed wound. Indigenous peoples, with their slow pace and long memory, remind us that the future is not built by stepping on the accelerator, but by respecting the care and patience of the life cycle as the seasons do.

Never mind if he was not entirely explicit, but perhaps this is precisely what Francis wanted to tell us: today's prophets no longer wear tunics, they live in remote and distant villages, they talk to the earth, they grow cassava, they walk long distances barefoot. For us, this means not getting lost in the jungle of today's life, but seriously starting to walk with them.


Luca Periotto
NP May 2025