Stella: Tierra para los vínculos es tierra de resistencia

Y en Italia… ¿hoy ustedes tienen todavía algunos pueblos indígenas?31 –Comunero, informal conversation at the XV CRIC Congress

What does it mean to be indigenous, today, in the southwest of Colombia? How many differently articulated indigenous peoples exist, struggle, and thrive behind this simplistic and colonial category?

What I recount in the following pages are episodes that mainly took place during the XV CRIC Congress in Rio Blanco at the end of June 2017. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: on the one hand, I want to suggest the complexity behind the indigenous politics of Cauca, and, on the other, I will introduce a few themes that I will return to in the conclusions of this work.

For the first time, in 2017 the congresses of the two main indigenous organizations of Cauca—CRIC and ACIN—took place just a couple of weeks apart from each other. The fortunate proximity of the two events was partly motivated by the exceptional moment that Colombia was experiencing after the signature of the Peace Accord. The same conjuncture was also revealing itself to be highly problematic in rural Cauca: many resguardos have been targeted by novel and renewed extractive projects; the illicit crops (coca, marijuana, and poppy seeds) continue to be an increasingly important economic activity in rural and indigenous territories; and finally, the unceasing presence of armed actors has been just shifting the geographies of war toward unforeseen but increasingly dramatic developments.

Funds and programs for peace building and local development have increased in recent years. The peace agreements have been the crux of many local arguments as they are seen as a double-edged sword by indios and peasants. The “post-conflict” has been challenging the autonomic discourses and strategies that the Nasa and other indigenous peoples of Cauca have been developing for decades. The 2017 ACIN and CRIC congresses have been crucial sites of discussion and internal debate about emerging and deepening contradictions, and of redefinition before the challenges of the present moment and of the nearest future. These events are

complex, hybrid, but they are also assemblages of long-standing and traditionally established practices, such as the public assemblies usually held in veredas [local communities under the administration of a town hall] and cabildos.

Indigenous congresses such as the ones that I witnessed are also exposing political, juridical, and spiritual entanglements that are producing the diverse and plural indigenous pathways and networks in the Cauca region. I will not attempt to describe these events in detail, but I will instead recall just a few encounters and insights, predominantly using a narrative register.

Welcome to the cosmopolitical wonderland of Cauca!

“Nosotros, los indios”

In their public speeches at the indigenous congresses that I witnessed, or in private interviews, Nasa political leaders refer to themselves and to their people as nosotros, los indios [we, the Indians]. They defiantly use this expression, especially when referring to their own victories and deeds before what they call los blancos [the whites] or la ley blanca [the whites’ law] (Valencia and Santos, 2017, video) or even el colonizador [the colonizer], especially when referring to state bodies and apparatuses. In spite of this, the word indio—Indian or indigenous in English—was born as a colonial category and term, it is the name that the colonizer gave to the colonized in the Americas. It is a word that initially marked a crass differentiation between “us” and “them,”

between those in colonial times who were considered the fully legitimate humans and the “sub- human” subspecies (Mignolo 2009). Indigenous were not really the “people of India,” but rather the “colored,” the savages, the dominated, the expelled, the deported, displaced, and

exterminated. In much of Latin America the preferred and more politically correct label used in the public advocacy arena is pueblos originarios, native people. Nevertheless, the word indigenous has also entered the field of worldwide acclaimed human rights endeavors with the UNDRIP [the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples] (United Nations 2007).

Indigenous, Indian, or indio in Latin America, is a complicated and also political identity that has been creatively and differently re-signified by multiple grassroots and native groups and

organizations.32 _{The inscription at the head of this chapter is but one revealing example of the} plural layers of meaning and understanding that may have been embedded in this term.

I was rendered speechless, and slightly puzzled, when a comunero genuinely asked me such a question in the midst of a light-hearted exchange about our respective different attires. It took me a while to realize at least a few of the implications of that tricky enquiry: “And in Italy… today, do you still have indigenous people?”

Most indigenous people have been—until recently—using the lenses and the categories created by the colonizers, both to look at themselves and at the rest of the world. This has been framed and described mainly by Latin American scholars as coloniality of knowledge, or as epistemic and ontological colonization (Escobar 1995, 2018; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2003; Quijano 2003; Santos 2014, 2018). Nevertheless, the question that had been posed to me implied more than that. If minority ethnic groups exist and struggle in Cauca, and in Colombia, why should something similar not be happening to other “indigenous brothers and sisters” in the distant and exotic Italy? The Andean comunero was projecting and flipping—maybe naively, or

32 _{See: Adamson 2012; Allen 2002; Clifford 2013; Fraser 2018; Hardt and Reyes 2012; Jung 2008; Kusch 1977; Lame}

and Gnecco 2004; Mitchell 2000; Niezen 2003; Rappaport and Gow 2002; Reyes and Kaufman 2011; Rozental 2015; Warren and Jackson 2002.

maybe colonially? —his native’s point of view onto the faraway imaginary land of the white colonizer. I believe that a hint of the proud claim of “nosotros, los indios” was also lingering between the lines of: “And in Italy, today, do you still have indigenous people?”

I shamelessly confess that for a few minutes I asked myself if the ancient Romans or the Etruscans may be labeled as part of my indigenous ancestry! or if I could by any chance define myself as a contemporary indigenous Italian! What is today Italy, in fact, has been repeatedly conquered and looted in subsequent attacks, invasions, and new settlements of people and armies from the north of Europe, the Ottomans and the Greeks from the East, and even the Arabs from Northern Africa. In Modern times, even Napoleon and the Spanish had taken hold of and ruled on significant parts of the territories and people that would only later become Italy. In a broad sense, the land that today is called Italy has also been repeatedly “colonized”.

But, do these past waves of “colonization” make a few isolated contemporary Italians an odd kind of hybrid indigenous people? Of course not, unless as a provocation (Adamson 2012). If Italy is not the best place to search for what we may imagine as the proper Indian, I must recognize that my friend’s question was surely generative and puzzling. This sudden enquiry also pointed to the limits of ethnic-based identities and epistemic translation.

Was the curious comunero looking for hidden patterns of similarity, networks of belonging and solidarity, or just for a flipped projection of “we, the proud indigenous” in an imaginary colonial North? What did the word indio really mean to my curious interlocutor? What are the more concrete characteristics of the generically undefined indigenous that he was

hypothetically expecting to find in Italy?

The categories, concepts, and the labels used to define, classify, and describe indigenous people are not fixed and ahistorical. The term indigenous has recently been redefined and re- signified in differently articulated discourses, and Nasa people have been championing this creative endeavor, at least since the 1970s. Joanne Rappaport, paraphrasing DuBois, wrote about what she called a double consciousness of the indigenous Nasa people: “looking at one’s self

through the eyes of others” (Rappaport 2005: 49). An example of this—in the political speeches that I witnessed—was the continuous reference to a double-edged and generic term indio,33 _rather than to a specific ethnic group. Indio as a broad category indicates a degree of ethnic, cultural, and political kinship, but also, as a useful fiction, it can mobilize a wider range of ethnic groups on the Colombian and international political arenas. Nasa people often call themselves

“millenary warriors” for their long history of struggle over land against the Spanish and then mestizo invaders and settlers (Bonilla 2015). In recent times, they articulate the discourse on their ancestral presence in Cauca as a precise political strategy. The ancestral element is transformed and used in the contemporary period, and the contemporary can open to the ancestral (Escobar 2015; Escobar 2018: 204).34 _{In Cauca, as in many other regions in the} Americas, the “development of indigenous discourses is a product of intercultural dialogue and confrontation” (Rappaport 2005: 260). La Guardia Indígena,an unarmed voluntary corps of social control and self-defense, and the Saakhelu (see Annex I), currently the main annual “sacred rite” of Nasa people, are the two main examples of recent formations and

transformations of structures and rites that have very quickly assumed a central role as current markers of cultural and political identity. La Guardia and the Saakhelu both have been

“invented” by Nasa people only in 2000, with the intent of strengthening their intentional process and discourse for an increased cultural recognition and political autonomy (Yulucx, Drexler and Tocancipá-Falla 2017). Nevertheless, in common speech they are often referred to as markers of ancestral Nasa identity. We cannot deny that these two recent formations serve very well the discourse of a certain “strategic essentialism.” Notwithstanding, they also respond

33 _{Indio has been and remains the main term used by the white or criollo middle and upper middle class urban citizens}

to scorn the indigenous “second-class” rural citizens. In the urban context in Colombia, but also in other parts of South America, it can still be very common to hear racist comments, referring to the “indio” in a pejorative or offensive way.

34 _{Escobar quotes here a young Colombian anthropologist, Patricia Botero, “a reflection of ancestral wisdom, is not}

an issue of essential identities, but rather signals the possibility of widening the meaning and practices of togetherness within a process of collective weaving” (P. Botero 2013: 50).

to long-standing relational and social dynamics that were already part the evolving Nasa social practices and agentive imaginaries.

“Cuando te pagan por ser indio”

In most postcolonial countries, self-representation of indigenous people has also become the bargaining chip for recognition before nation-states and their brokers.35 _{“Cuando te pagan por} ser indio” [when you get paid to be indigenous] is the common saying in the critical comments and objections to the current and often slippery discourses of the two main indigenous councils of Cauca (CRIC and ACIN). The acknowledgement that “legalizing identities is a fraught affair” (Middleton 2015: 94; French 2009) is not new in anthropology, and has also been at the core of discussion at the ACIN and CRIC congresses.

When writing about indigenous political actors in Cauca, a distinction needs to be made: a cautious discernment between authorities and movements is in order.36 _{In their discourses, the} principal leaders of CRIC and ACIN refer to these organizations as “el movimiento indígena

Caucano” [the Caucan indigenous movement]. In fact, this is how they have been referred to during the first decades of CRIC’s activities and endeavors. Nevertheless, since 2000 CRIC and ACIN have transformed consistently their working organization and structure. This structural and organizational change started during the last Álvaro Uribe administration. Today, these organizations are well structured, articulated, and state-related in much of their work; they have offices and staff who are managing programs and budgets and following precise funding and management procedures. In the current post-Agreement time, the internal disagreements and ruptures arising among the indigenous authorities of Cauca are often explained by the increased

35 _{Almendra 2016; Barker 2005, 2011; Blaser et al. 2010; Di Giminiani 2018; Escobar 2008; Esteva 1998; Fraser}

2018; Hale 2002, 2004; Hernandez Castillo 2016; Middleton 2015; Povinelli 2002; Rappaport 1996; Sandt 2012; Warren and Jackson 2002.

36 _{I owe this distinction mainly to the generous and enriching conversations with Prof. Axel Rojas, from Universidad}

institutionalization and NGO-ization of CRIC and ACIN and by the injection of public and private funding into indigenous territories in the form of local development and peace-building projects and initiatives. According to some of my interviewees, both indigenous organizations often work according to the priorities and the development plans of the national government in Bogotá. Projects, programs, and plans often arrive to the indigenous resguardos as pre-arranged and organized proposals rather than involving local communities and cabildos starting with the design and planning phase. According to afew of my local interviewees, both CRIC and ACIN have transformed from bastions of genuine indigenous resistance and struggle for autonomy, to simple unidades administrativas [administrative units] designated by the state to manage externally controlled funds according to externally determined logics.

In contradistinction to this logic, Nasa gobernadores explicitly articulate locally designed and driven political and livelihood plans and programs in their resguardos through programmatic documents that they call Planes de Vida [life projects].These Planes de Vida constitute the

roadmap of the daily practice of governance of Nasa resguardos. Conversely, they are a manifest example of the hybridization of contemporary indigenous politics: these documents are often the result of assemblages of practices, funds, and interests by different and heterogeneous

stakeholders. Often it is local NGOs and urban institutions that fund and accompany the drafting and planning process of these documents.

Both ACIN and CRIC congresses took place in huge modern pavilions that had been sponsored by private donors with a clear interest in the political stances and outcomes of both congresses. During the CRIC congress, a delegate of one of the main private donors—a Colombian oil company with an egregious record of environmental violations—was invited on stage to say a few words before a plenary session with thousands of comuneros and comuneras in attendance. That visible and public space had likely been agreed to by a few of the organizers of the congress, in return for generous financial and logistic support for the congress.

After a few seconds, his voice was silenced. His very presence on stage incited the crowd: whistles, hisses, and shouting did not stop until he gave up his attempt of a public address to the assembly. I was also in the crowd when a few people commented on the harebrained ideas of their leaders, who allowed a representative of such an “evil corporate exploiter” to speak. That was one more sign of the recent changes in the leadership of CRIC, and of the plural and

generative contradictions among the different stances within the indigenous authorities of Cauca. Once again the refrain “Cuando te pagan por ser indio” emerged, and I was also able to witness a relatively independent attitude of the majority of the popular assembly, separate from that of its sometimes-co-opted leaders.

This incident is just one revealing aspect of the multiplicity within indigenous organizations such as CRIC. This episode shows just a few jagged edges of these internal differences. It hints at some of the thorny reciprocal influences, interferences, and collisions between the indigenous movements and authorities, the state and its plans in the resguardos, and other external actors. The entire XV CRIC congress could be read in fact as an articulated stage of the struggle and debates between the different co-existing souls in the plural indigenous platforms of Cauca.

Figures 7 and 8. The XV Congress of CRIC – Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca, including nine indigenous ethnic groups inhabiting the Cauca region. Rio Blanco, Cauca, June 2017. During the congress—which lasted five days—the official absolution of the previously incarcerated Nasa political leader Feliciano Valencia (sentence ruled by the Colombian Constitutional Court) was publicly announced. The news was greeted as an “epochal victory” of the indigenous people and of the “Justicia Propria”—in the form of Justicia Especial Indígena, JEI—over the Ordinary Justice (figure 8, Feliciano, in white, standing in the upper-left corner).

“Un punto para fuera, y un punto para dentro”

In the midst of the CRIC congress, I was told by an elder comunero that “good politics” is similar to weaving, both are a meditative and productive practice, both a prosaic and a spiritual activity: “one stitch outward, followed by one stitch inward.” In my effort to approximate and explain the metaphor of weaving, the outward stitch represents the political action in the public sphere, in the dynamics moving the community and its livelihoods, and the inward stitch stands for the connection with the intimate, spiritual and ritual dimension of life. According to this cosmovision, the imbalance between the mundane and the spiritual, the detachment from the territory or from the everyday rituals that connect the community with its territory, can result in the corrupted, careless, and even harmful games of contemporary politics implemented in the same dangerous style of the “white conqueror” (Valencia and Santos 2017, video).

Weaving—especially crochet—is a daily practice that I found everywhere in the rural communities, indigenous congresses, and social gatherings in rural Cauca. I also wove myself a small chuspa—a little crochet bag—while listening to the many long talks in the huge canopy or in the intimate tulpa, the tent of the fire. Weaving became my own meditative practice while listening, and my way of “learning by doing” during the long hours and days at congresses and assemblies. It became one more field research strategy and a way to start a conversation with everyday comuneras, and even a few younger comuneros, often attentively weaving their colorful bags while sitting in the assemblies.

The cosmogonic image of indigenous worlds being woven out of lagoons, mountains, and rivers is a common theme all over the Andes, and it has often also been commodified and popularized in different ways. The indigenous people of Cauca, and Nasa people of northern Cauca in particular, have gone one step further by bringing the iconic act of weaving into their institutionalized practice of governance. ACIN’s programmatic areas and offices are designated as “tejidos.” This name refers to the precise political project that attempts to maintain the connection between the institutional planning and its underlying cosmological roots and