Most accounts of January 22, 2006, focus on the political first: Evo Morales, a former llama herder and coca union leader, becoming Bolivia's first indigenous president in a nation where indigenous people form the majority. This is correct, but incomplete. The assumption is that the transformation was sealed in the congressional chamber in La Paz. It wasn't. It was cemented earlier, on the windswept plain of Tiwanaku, the spiritual center of the pre-Columbian Aymara civilization.
Before the official state ceremony, Morales participated in a traditional ritual. Dressed in a brightly striped ceremonial poncho, he stood before indigenous elders and a crowd of thousands at the ancient Akapana pyramid. He was not called President. He was given the title *Apumallku*, meaning “supreme leader” in Aymara. The elders presented him with a wooden staff of authority, inlaid with silver. They blessed him with offerings to Pachamama, Mother Earth. They placed wreaths of coca leaves around his neck.
This was not symbolism. It was the assertion of a parallel, older source of legitimacy that existed long before the Spanish conquest and the modern Bolivian republic. The state inauguration that followed was, in a profound sense, a ratification of what had already occurred at Tiwanaku. The palace in La Paz gained an occupant, but the occupant brought with him the authority of the *ayllu* and the mountain. The event reframed the very concept of Bolivian power. It was not a man taking office, but a civilization re-entering its own house through a door it had built millennia before the house existed.