Tag: history

Chile's relationship to Rapa Nui

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In the article “Issues on Land and Sovereignty: The Uneasy Relationship Between Chile and Rapa Nui”, anthropologist Riet Delsing focuses on the Rapa Nui, also named Easter Island (or Isla de Pascua), and the way it has been administrated by Chile for the past 150 years. Delsing gives a general historical overview of the history common to the island and the mainland, and examines the successive laws that had an impact on the population and the landownership of Rapa Nui. 
Chile gained independence from Spain in 1818, but was still consolidating its territory in the 1880s: the integration of the Mapuche territory in the south and the annexation of former Bolivian and Peruvian territories in the north were the context in which Chile annexed Easter Island in 1888. Policarpo Toro Hurtado signed the Agreement of Wills with the Rapanui leaders. From this date, Rapanui ancestral customs, specifically regarding landownership, were disrupted. After the annexation of the island, and especially because of the civil war of 1891, the Chilean nation-state lost interest in Rapa Nui. Everything changed in 1917, when the Chilean Republic started to consolidate its hold on the island by sending the navy as a colonial agent applying strict military rules on Rapa Nui. 
The history of Rapa Nui is intrinsically linked to landownership. Before Chilean colonization, the kainga as a form of collective landownership was exclusively applied. With the arrival of Chilean settlers and moreover with the passage of the Ley Pascua of 1966, private landownership was introduced. It was reinforced by the Ley Pinochet in 1979. In opposition to those laws, the Ley Indígena of 1993 established norms of protection, promotion, and development of Chile’s indigenous people, and recognized land as the lifeblood of indigenous cultures. Nevertheless, Rapanui people were not spectators in this process of assimilation. They often fought the Chilean government, organizing themselves into a Council of Elders in 1980 and creating a Rapanui Parliament with demands of autonomy. Eventually, in 2007, the island was granted a Special Status, thanks to a constitutional reform. 
Delsing’s article highlights the evolution of the relationship between Chile and its Pacific colony through a detailed examination of landownership on Rapa Nui. It identifies the specificities of Rapa Nui, both its peculiar indigenous social organization and the policy of the Chilean government towards it, as opposed to mainland indigenous territories.
 
Delsing, Riet. “Issues of land and sovereignty: the uneasy relationship between Chile and Rapa Nui (Easter Island)” in Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.
https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/515052

Native anthropology and Native historiography

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Alongside with political under-representation, denied social rights, and sometimes deprivation from their lands, indigenous in Latin America have often been excluded from the academic sphere. To overcome this lack, some scholars have recently advocated for a Native anthropology and historiography. 
Native anthropology
Native anthropology would develop “a set of theories based on non-Western precepts and assumptions in the same sense that modern anthropology is based on has supported Western beliefs and values” [1]. Indeed, most ethnographic works are written by academics who use a particular frame and a Western conceptualization of indigeneity. Indigenous theorizing then results from a combination of the appropriation of academic anthropology and indigenous patterns of narration. 
On this matter, one issue is translation. Translating the Colombian Constitution of 1991 from Spanish into Nasa Yuwe, the language spoken by the Nasa people in Colombia, is a way to liberate the Spanish version from its original limitations. Nevertheless, it is no more the translation than the process itself that is important here: translating the Constitution needed the collaboration of a team gathering authorities of Mosoco indigenous community, bilingual teachers, indigenous and national linguists, and professionals from the national society. This collaborative work leads to autoethnography, which Rappaport and Ramos define as “[the appropriation of] external concepts within an indigenous political matrix with the aim of introducing new strategies for cultural survival.”[2] The dialogue between indigenous activists and academics takes the form of interculturalism, as opposed to multiculturalism, which promotes a simple tolerance of ethnic minorities, instead of integrating them in the national discourse. 
Native historiography and the example of the Nasa
Joanne Rappaport gives a formidable overview of Nasa history — a community in the Colombian Andes — from the point of view of Nasa historians. Native history has been ignored for many years because it was not considered academic by Western or Western-oriented scholars; Rappaport highlights its legitimacy and offers to read it as a tool to understand political events in a different way. Rather than truth, she emphasizes the presence of a particular point of view when historians write history. In other words, history is a subjective construct.[3]
Conveying the work of three Nasa historians — Don Juan Tama y Calambás, Manuel Quintín Lame, and Julio Niquinás — Rappaport highltights the incorporative character of native histories.[4] Nasa historians’ goals were not to deconstruct the history they were taught, but to incorporate their own stories to it. In other words, creating a new native history meant to create a mix of interpretations, that did not exclude each other. 
Considering the telling of history as a series of choices allows Rappaport to consider history in terms of power. When the Spaniards conquered what is now Colombia, one of the way to take control over the Nasa was to deprive them from their own history.[5] This situation lasted for centuries, before indigenous activists like Juan Tama started to access the academic sphere and began to write indigenous history in their own terms. Nevertheless, rather than a complete rejection of Western historical methods, Tama’s, Lame’s, and Niquiná’s works are a syncretism between Western historiography and Nasa storytelling. This methodology falls into what Rappaport and Ramos call “autoethnography” and allows indigenous historians to talk about the past without separating it from the present. In The Politics of Memory, Rappaport successfully highlights the work of indigenous historians/storytellers, and guarantees them posterity. Citing the work of Juan Tama, Quintín Lame, and Julio Niquinás, she contextualizes the voices of indigenous people that continuously rose up since the Spanish colonization. Rappaport’s work falls into a recent consideration of indigenous perspectives on history, and especially the way indigenous communities conceptualize history. 
Native Americans have been excluded from academic dialogue for years, but their discourse is now brought into it. Native historians, scholars, anthropologists, are now blurring the Western line between past and present, the line between the actual and the mythical.Their work not only acknowledges the interest of Native history and methods, it empowers our own understanding of history by adding — but not replacing — another perspective to it.
[1] Ramos Pacho, Abelardo and Rappaport, Joanne. “Collaboration and Historical Writing: Challenges for the Indigenous-Academic Dialogue”, in Mallon, Florencia, ed. Decolonizing Native Histories: Collaboration, Knowledge, and Language in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, 122.
[2] Ramos Pacho and Rappaport, 126.
[3] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998, 13.
[4] Rappaport, 168.
[5] Rappaport, 1.
https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/515055

Decolonizing History: Past, Present, Power

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Historiography is the study of history itself. It is a systematic study of what history is, how people have “done” history, and what role history plays in social systems. In other words, historiography is looking at the forces that determine how history has been told, what is told, and who gets to tell it. So, why is it important to think about historiography? How does it relate to decolonizing history? To Indigenous rights?
When we study history itself, we see its relationship to power and politics. History is a dynamic and subjective system by which communities remember the past and relate it to the present; history can serve to either enforce or dismantle systemic inequality. This is because, as scholar Joanne Rappaport writes, “Knowledge of the past is a fundamental component of land disputes, political agreements and arguments over inheritance. It is also central to efforts at strengthening a communal identity’ [1]. Here, Rappaport points out the inherently political aspect of history that is often made invisible. Many people tend to think of history as a fixed and objective account of the past that, because of these qualities, exists outside of socio political structures.
However, material and immaterial concerns are inextricable from history both in its production and its effects. What I mean is that material resources — such as money and access to formal education — impact who gets to be part of history telling processes. Similarly, immaterial concerns — like societal attitudes — play a role in who is included in telling history. This is the production side of things. In terms of history’s effects, materially, how history is told may impact the way that land and resource disputes are settled; immaterially, how we understand the past has an effect on forming identities and ideologies.
What does this all have to do with colonialism and decolonization? When we think of colonialism, we often think specifically of the political rule of one community over another. Colonialism, in this view, is a political and economic structure that terminates with the material “liberation” of the subaltern. However, when we consider the intimate social and ideological legacies of colonialism — how it fundamentally disrupts native conceptions of gender, of ethnicity, of history — we see coloniality as an ongoing problem.
One colonial legacy is the disruption and erasure of native-storytelling in favor of European tellings of history. When history is colonized in this way, it often throws a veil over the systemic violence that Indigenous people have faced. It also deprives Indigenous communities of the power to tell history in a way that accurately reflects their identities, experiences, and values.  
However, history can be transformed from a colonial legacy into a tool of resistance. Knowledge of the past can be “indispensable in the maintenance of autonomy in the face of European domination” [2]. When Indigenous people have the space to tell their own history, it can become an important means of forming and strengthening identities, making claims to land, and unlearning the European histories which often diminish Indigenous experience. What might this look like in practice? How might Indigenous knowledge systems differ from European ones?
For the Nasa (also called the Paez) people in Colombia, history is “difficult to locate […] in time and space” [3]. Nasa storytelling is non-linear, it includes mythic elements, and is episodic. This is not out of an inability to tell history in a European mode — “It is not that indigenous peoples have no sense of the flow of time, nor that they are unable to distinguish fact from fiction, […], but that fictive and fantastic images may help them to reflect more fully upon the real” [4].
This all might demonstrate why historiography and decolonizing history are so important when it comes to indigenous rights. If we do not study how history has been made, we cannot understand how history has been used to perpetuate inequality — or how it can be used to challenge that inequality.
Notes
[1] Rappaport, Joanne, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1998), 11-12.
[2] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 11-12.
[3] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 11.
[4] Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory, 18.
Works Cited
Rappaport, Joanne. The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1998.
 

Political Activist in 20th century Peru: Manuel Llamojha Mitma

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(photo credits: Llamojha, Concepción, 2013. Author photo.)

Summary:

Born on May 3rd, 1921, Manuel Llamojha Mitma fought without the use of violence for the land rights and national inclusion of campesinos. Llamojha preferred the term campesinos to Indigenous because it allowed people to feel more connected to their Quechua ancestry and got rid of the labels given to them by the Spanish and higher officials in Peru. His captivating story is organized through Jaymie Patricia Heilman’s own writing using a mixed range methodology including excerpts from documents written by Llamojha, testimonials from Llamojha and his family members, and archival records. Throughout his life, Llamojha recalls the immense struggles faced by him and members of his community including the lack of sufficient, good quality land and the discrimination and mistreatment from hacendados and the Peruvian government. One persistent struggle Llamojha faced was being accused of being part of the Peruvian Communist Party- Shining Path in the 1980s which was responsible for the deaths of 69,000 Peruvians. These accusations forced Llamojha and his family to flee their home and live in the city of Lima for almost two decades. Nevertheless, Llamojha continued his work as an activist. His ability to read and write, which was not common among campesinos at that time placed him in a position of leadership among other campesinos in rural Peru.  

Quotes:

“Campesinos have fought so much and suffered so much, during colonial times and republican times, too. We need the future world to know about this, the suffering of the campesinos.” ((Jaymie Heilman and Manuel Llamojha Mitma, Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016),14.))

“We used to write ‘indigenous campesino community’ because representatives of the high authorities came and said ‘you are an indigenous community.’ So we accepted that and started to write documents and memos, always writing ‘indigenous campesino community.’ But later, we wanted to suspend use of that word. ‘Why should we write that?’ we asked.”((Jaymie Heilman and Manuel Llamojha Mitma, Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016),12.))

“Because I was the only boy in the pueblo who knew how to read, no one else, the kids followed me around.” ((Jaymie Heilman and Manuel Llamojha Mitma, Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016),25.))

“I organized a tenants’ union and we began the struggle. I started to draw up documents. I went with my typewriter. I drew up documents and got peasants to sign them. I always walked around with my typewriter, I wrote petitions, and got all the people to sign.”  ((Jaymie Heilman and Manuel Llamojha Mitma, Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016),49.))

“You have to struggle. You have to organize the masses well and not abandon them. You have to continue the struggle until you attain all the peasantry’s goals, until you attain the goals of the pueblo, which needs to liberate itself from the clutches of tyranny.” ((Jaymie Heilman and Manuel Llamojha Mitma, Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016),188.))

Timeline:

                   

Published Work:

Now Peru Is Mine: The Life and Times of a Campesino Activist  by Jaymie Heilman and Manuel Llamojha Mitma

https://www.amazon.com/Now-Peru-Mine-Campesino-Narrating/dp/0822362384