THE FIRST NATIONS 1492-1992
COMMON WISDOM HOLDS THAT NATIVE American cultures are relics of the past, destined to survive only as museum pieces. Underlying this unfortunate meeting point of many on the Left and Right is...
...Native peoples are hardly passive...
...They constitute clear majorities in Guatemala and Bolivia, close to half the population in Peru and Ecuador, and large minorities in Mexico, El Salvador and elsewhere...
...As expressed in the Andean concept nayrapacha, the ancient past may be our best bet for redeeming the future...
...As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui puts it, Indian movements link "the struggle for liberation to the defense of a symbolic order, a cultural world-view expressed in ancient rituals and customs...
...Indigenous peoples place culture at the center of political struggle, not as an end in itself, and not only as a refuge from oppression...
...The cases of Guatemala, Bolivia and Nicaragua are particularly poignant...
...The tension between "peasant/proletarian" and "Indianist" tendencies has threatened to tear many Indian organizations apart...
...In 1990, a nationwide indigenous uprising paralyzed Ecuador...
...COMMON WISDOM HOLDS THAT NATIVE American cultures are relics of the past, destined to survive only as museum pieces...
...Paradoxically, visions of an alternative society rooted in the pre-Columbian past may prove more appropriate today than the nineteenth-century notions of statehood and modernity which still mesmerize most of us...
...Liberals who view Indian culture as an obstacle to entrepreneurial individualism and Marxists who see it as an impediment to class consciousness have often tried harder to assimilate native peoples than conservatives who simply ignore it...
...In this regard, indigenous movements are grappling with a central question faced by "modem" society everywhere: If we are to have democratic, multi-ethnic and multi-class societies, what sort of social and political organization can ensure equality and mutual respect...
...Indigenous peoples have not been assimilated nor have they died out...
...A NY DISCUSSION OF INDIAN MOVEMENTS must take up the age-old debate over the relative importance of ethnicity and class as the basis for identity and political organizing-that is, whether indigenous struggle should be viewed as part of a broader class struggle, or as a culturally-defined national liberation movement...
...Beyond the evident implications for alliances with non-Indians, the entire question raises an issue pending since the Conquest: to what extent should Indians participate, if at all, in "national" life...
...In Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, indigenous leaders have found ways to make ethnic identity a rallying cry for class demands, rather than an obfuscator of class interests...
...Hardly irrelevant to modern life, these movements may be articulating the political struggles of the future...
...This report-the third in our series marking the fivehundredth anniversary of the arrival of Columbus-reveals the error of these assumptions...
...they see culture as the vehicle by which economic and political self-determination can be achieved...
...In Bolivia, Aymara militants turned the "official" peasant movement into the vanguard of Indian activism...
...Like the economy that buffets us all, Indian movements are bound neither by national boundaries nor even the notion of nation-states...
...Quite organically, this latter movement has embraced the concept of autonomy, not as a step toward breaking away, but in order to delineate an alternative vision for the entire country...
...In several countries, for example, Indians seek to revive traditional forms of communal landholding and labor as a new basis for economic development...
...Nearly forty million are alive today, by most estimates significantly more than in 1492...
...A multi-national coalition of Amazonian Indians bypasses national governments to take their concerns directly to the World Bank, the IMF and the United States...
...That same year in Canada, Indian activists blocked a constitutional accord and used armed confrontation and civil disobedience to thrust their demands into the center of national debate...
...Mixtec Indians from Mexico working in this country struggle simultaneously for workers' rights here and economic development at home...
...EVERAL OF OUR AUTHORS ARGUE THAT the influence of the Left, which has traditionally favored"class" over"ethnicity," has limited Indian movements, subverted their agenda, even exposed them unnecessarily to state repression...
...In Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia and Brazil, indigenous organizations have grown increasingly influential...
...Underlying this unfortunate meeting point of many on the Left and Right is the belief that Indians are bound to abandon their ethnicity as modernity spreads its tentacles into the outer reaches of the Western world, eradicating the rural, the peasant, the illiterate...
...The answers they propose eschew both the separatist nationalism now ascendant in Europe, and the seizure of state power that until recently inspired Latin America's revolutionaries...
Vol. 25 • December 1991 • No. 3
