Postscript

"On the afternoon of Saturday, July 14 (1973), the roads which lead down to Guambia began to be filled with Indian companions. The first came from the nearby resguardos, from Jambalo, Pitayo, Quisgo and Totoro, from Paniquita and the neighboring hamlets, Then came the Inganos and Kamsa from Putumayo, and the representatives of the parcialidades of Narinio as well as the Aruacos of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, who had been traveling for four days, by foot, by train, by bus, eager not to miss the Meeting.

"And later came those en route from the West, and after midnight the Eastern comrades, from Tierradentro, who had passed through the Paramo. Already our numbers reached almost two thousand. As it was very cold and our comrades from the warm lands had not even a ruana to cover themselves, we built eleven fires to warm ourselves. Thus most of us spent the night, first in getting organized, then in getting warm, some chatting, some singing and playing their music.

"From time to time, we drank a little coffee to fool our hunger. Sunday, July 15, began bathed in sun and we in contentment..."*

"Some walked the whole night," adds the editor of the Letter "to all Indian comrades." They are en route towards another morning. No longer devoured by misery, as I knew them in Misiones (Argentina); no longer afflicted by those "crises which were at once mystical, social and political," previously discerned by Alfred Metraux in the pilgrimages towards the Earth-Without-Evil or in the solitary suicides of the Indians of the Grand Chaco,¹ but determined to create their own history "Recent actions have a new perspective: our objective today rather than to react against a threatened extinction, is to increase and develop."² The Meetings of tribes and the Assemblies of Chiefs aim at a reconquest. A peasant and India revolution is taking shape in deeds and in consciousness; it is already stirring up the depths, until now silent, in the Latin American countries.

MEMORY OR THE TORTURED BODY

However, the time of oppression is not ended. Quite the contrary, as they assert their rights on the land and organize self-governing associations, the Indians are meeting an increase in repressive measures. Recent events give ample proof destruction of the hamlet of El Cedro, in the Indian zone of Veraguas, by the National Guard of Panama (March 15, 1976) interventions of the troops who pillaged and burned hundreds of houses, expelled 2400 residents, injured and raped people, in the communes of Palenque, Ocosingo and Chinon (Mexico) (June 12-13, 1976); murder and imprisonment of Indians at Merure (Mato Grosso, Brazil), in an attempt to prevent the demarcation of an area reserved for the Bororo and to support the large landowners of the colonialist tradition (July 15, 1976). The list of wrongdoings which have found their echo in the national and international press would be long. And still these bloody tracks on the surface of the telecommunicated news transmit nothing of the daily regularity of violence. Moreover, the imprisonments, burnings, and even murders are doubtless less destructive than economic alienation, cultural domination and social humiliation-less dangerous than the entire trial of a daily ethnocide.

"You know," Russell Means used to say, "the Indian has a long memory." He does not forget his heroes killed by the foreigner and his lands occupied by the outsider. The Indians in their villages maintain a sharp consciousness of their colonization which has lasted four and a half centuries.³ Dominated but not submissive, they remember as well what the Westerners have "forgotten," a continuous succession of uprisings and awakenings which have left almost no written trace in the histories of the occupiers.⁴ This history of movements of resistance, punctuated by cruel repressions, is marked on the Indian body as much as and more than in the official accounts. This inscription of an identity experienced in suffering constitutes the equivalent of the indelible marking engraved on the bodies of the young by the tortures of initiation.⁵ In this form too, "the body is a memory. " It carries in written form the law of equality and refusal to submit which governs not only the relationship of the group with itself, but also its relationship with the occupiers. Among the Indian ethnic groups (about 200) which inhabit "Latin" America, this tortured body and this other body, the thirsty land, form the point of departure from which the will to build a political association is reborn once more.

A unity formed by misery and the resistance to misery is the historical space, the collective memory of the social body, in which is born a will that does not admit, but does not deny, either, this writing of history, a will which deciphers the scars on the body itself-or the fallen "heroes" and "the martyrs," which correspond to those scars in the narrative-as the indication of a history to be made. "Today, at the time of the awakening, we must be our own historians."⁶

The relationship of the "solar race" with "the spilled blood" which creates a moral "compulsion" and with the lost land which is awaiting its "masters" seems to link immediately the Indian political message to the effectiveness of rural associative strategies. In any case, ideology is regularly absent from the claims. In fact a common language would only provide the groups with a substitute body. It would finally replace the land by a doctrinal language; it would obliterate the federated ethnic groups under a unitary and global speech.

Here, on the contrary, the established alliance of each community with a body and with a land maintains the real difference between individual situations. Therefore the action is directed less towards the construction of a common ideology than towards the "organization" (this oft-repeated word) of tactics and operations. In this respect, the political relevance of a geographical distinction between separate places repeats, at the level of the association among ethnic groups, the distribution of the places of power and the refusal of any centralization which characterize the internal functioning of each one of them.⁷ Because of this, the Indian awakening takes on a democratic and selfgoverning form which may be recognized in the specific characteristics of its political organization and in the objectives which it draws from its analyses.

A POLITICAL AWAKENING

What is most striking in the Indian Manifestos is the distinction but at the same time the connection between two essential realities: on the one hand, a unique political form (which carries with it, for example, the refusal to participate in political parties, "foreign to our American reality,"⁸ declares the Indian parliament meeting in Paraguay in 1973); on the other hand, an economic situation common to a whole Latin American rural proletariat (agricultural workers or underpaid unskilled workers, without contracts or guarantees, indebted, victims of loans at exorbitant interest rates; overtaxed small producers, robbed by the middlemen who buy their products or by the businessmen.

The close relationship of politics and economics avoids two very frequent reductions: either the assimilation of "individuality" into a "cultural" identity frozen by the ethnologist (when he doesn't actually materialize it!), isolated from global society, withdrawn from historical development and destined to an almost mechanical self-repetition; or the erasing of specific ethnic and political differences under the generality of the concept of production and class conflicts. Rather than the excuse of a cultural identity (more or less prestigious and nostalgic) constructed by ethnological science, or rather than the loss of self under the domination (in effect imperialist) of socio-economic laws and conflicts imposed by the international marketplace,⁹ the Indians prefer a third political path: to change in accord with their own strategies, a reality which makes them interdependent with non-Indian peasant movements.

From that moment on, the specific difference may no longer be reduced to a fact, a past, a system of meanings, an object of knowledge (and/or of exploitation), but it is asserted in a group of procedures-a way of doing-within the field structured by a global economic system which also creates the bases for revolutionary alliances among the oppressed. Therefore speci fic "cultural" differences take on the form of a style of action which can be applied to situations created by capitalist imperialism.

This political determination of cultural differences is undoubtedly the result of a long historical experience, of a difference maintained, thanks to the anchoring of these ethnic groups in the land, and of their particular resistance to ideological seduction. These are three aspects to be emphasized.

On the one hand, the Spanish institution of the encomienda in the earliest colonial period, the establishment of private property and its transformation into capital by the occupiers, the Indian demographic breakdown which followed, the artificial regrouping of the remaining native population in reducciones (those city-factories of the seventeenth century) or the institution of forced labor for groups assembled on large domains or in mines,¹⁰ all these forms of colonization, and others as well, dissociate the labor force and the means of subsistence; they superimpose on the destructuration of preceding systems (which sometimes showed the basic outlines of a "feudal" organization, as in the Inca society¹¹) the installation of a paleo-technical capitalism of which the Indians are the first proletarians.

The manipulations, already commercial and industrial, made possible by the separation of a colonizing power and the ethnic separation of ruler and ruled had been tried elsewhere before being reproduced and perfected into divisions of labor and class struggles within colonizing nations. In this respect, we might say that the critique of capitalism in the recent Indian Declarations comes from its oldest witnesses, from those very people who have had more than four centuries of experience with it, and who, being survivors today of the catastrophes which capitalism has brought upon them, cannot dissociate the struggle for their political existence from a lucid analysis of that economic system.¹²

On the other hand, if the resistance of the survivors has a political appearance, it is because the surviving communities have continued to practice the periodic return to the village, to assert their rights to the land, and thus to maintain by this collective alliance in a land, an anchoring in the individuality of a place. Moreover this anchoring alliance is effective in spite of the granting of the best lands to the colonizers, in spite of the spatial reductions and distortions due to the geographical expansion of these colonizers and equally to the pressures placed on the Indian lands by the small-time adventurer-colonists (failures in the ruling system and condemned to flee in front of it), finally in spite of the movement (centrifugal as well, but in the opposite direction) which forced the Indians to leave lands too poor to sustain them and to take work elsewhere as farm workers or unskilled labor.

More than abstract images or beliefs (often hidden and fragmented under the systems of the occupiers¹³), this referential land has given weight to an "individuality" and protected it against all superimpositions. It was, and remains, a sort of palimpsest: the inscription of the foreign "gringos"¹⁴ does not wipe out the primary text which remains inscribed there, illegible for the transients who have manipulated these regions for four centuries, a silent sacrament of "maternal forces," tomb of the fathers and indelible seal of a contract between members of the community.¹⁵

The land "holds" an Indian secret, unreachable in spite of the alterations undergone by this testament, by this collective table of law which the land essentially is. It has always made and continues to make possible the identification of an individual place. It allows a resistance not to be scattered in the network of the occupying forces, and not to allow itself to be captivated by their imperialist or interpretive discourse (or by the simple inversion of this discourse, which remains within their logic). It "holds" a difference, rooted in a dimly discernible relationship of belonging which is inaccessible to violent appropriation or skilled recuperation. It is the silent foundation of affirmations which have political meaning to the very degree that they rest upon the consciousness of being from a "different" place (and not only opposite) from those places which omnipresent conquerors occupy.

Finally, the style of the Indian Resistance is linked to the very model of an internal social organization. The absence of coercive power in their communities, except in time of war, has often been pointed out (even to the point of making of it sometimes one of the "myths" of the ethnologist himself). "It is the lack of social stratification and of the authority of power that we should consider as the relevant trait of the political organization in the greatest number of Indian societies."¹⁶

The beehive would be the metaphor for the equalitarian societies.¹⁷ This structure refers to a society without an individual representation (the chief) of the power which organizes it, rather than to a direct rejection of the centralizing institutions. The law serves as a tacit coordination of accepted practices. It is the very functioning of the group-not an isolated authority but one that is rooted in practiced norms.

As the alliance with the land minimizes the role of a system of representations and is expressed in significant active relations between the body and the earth-mother, the conjunction of practices and social functions creates an order which no individual figure of power detaches from the group, or visibly represents to this group in order to impose submissive duties or to offer to everyone possibilities of control or of revision. "Societies of multiples,"¹⁸ the Indian ethnic groups do not give to their present claims a recapitulatory form nor an integrative organism such as a strategic plan would be, supposedly capable of governing individual actions, or a central power having as its role to cover local groups. A plurality of communities and practices remains their structural form. It reproduces, on the level of association between communities, the model of organization particular to each one of them. An ethnic difference is therefore asserted in a different political model, instead of aligning itself with ours in order to protect itself from it.

A REVOLUTION: FEDERATED SELF-GOVERNING COMMUNITIES

In drawing together the characteristics which may be seen in the Indian Manifestos, we have the following model: an associative fabric of socio-political micro-units, each one being characterized by a communal self-governing of wealth (essentially of lands), that is to say by a distribution of complementary rights and duties relative to the same article of wealth, which are attributed to different procedural authorities, no one of which possesses in its own right (as a physical or moral person), what we call the right of property.

Moreover, the method by which this model is formally enunciated in the present combination of circumstances-or we might say, the task of consciousness-raising which allows the political formulation of this model-follows procedures which are consistent with the structure that is being outlined: through a series of local, regional, national and federal councils, incessant returns to a "permanent consultation of the communities" are put into effect; in addition, the common orientations are constantly examined, confronted and enriched in the course of the visits, meetings, consultations, seminars and direct oral discussions (preferred to the radio), which bring the construction of the federation back to its pluralistic reality.

Thus, as the Constitutive Act of the Confederation of Natives of Venezuela declared in 1973, Indian communities "propose other social models for other development alternatives."

At a time when the idea and the effectiveness of Western democracy are everywhere undermined by the extension of economic and cultural technocracy, and are slowly crumbling along with that which was the condition for their being possible (a difference of local units and the autonomy of their socio-political representations),¹⁹ at a time when micro-experiences and the search for self-government are trying to compensate for this centralizing evolution by recreating a diversity of local democracies, now the Indian communities, oppressed and hidden from view by the Western "democracies," show themselves capable of offering self-governing models based upon centuries of history. It all appears as if the possibilities for a socio-political renewal were appearing to Western societies right on their borders, there where they have been the most dominating. From what they scorned, fought, and thought they controlled, there come political alternatives and social models which alone may enable them to change the massive acceleration and reproduction of the levelling and totalitarian effects generated by the structures of power and of technology in the West.

Already in 1971, Georges Balandier announced the fundamental practical and theoretical innovations which were being traced in the socalled "underdeveloped" societies, by taking as a basis his analyses of African countries.²⁰ The search for different models, he said, had to be oriented towards those very regions on which we had sought to impose the "benefits" of colonization. Since then, studies of this type are becoming more precise, for example in the area of economics, with the work of Ignacy Sachs on the politics of development,²¹ or in the field of ethnology, with the new "political anthropology" of which Pierre Clastres was making himself the leader.²² To these examples, we would need, to add the investigations into the origins of political power²³ or into the deepened insights which the examination of the structures of thought and political power in "primitive" societies introduces into the Marxist analysis of the concept of production.²⁴

That is precisely what Francisco Servin, Pai-Tavvytera, said before the Indian Parliament held in Paraguay in October 1974: "We were the masters of the land, but we have become true outcasts since the gringos arrived. . . . We hope that a day will come when they will realize that we are their roots and that together we must form, as it were, one large tree with its branches and its flowers."²⁵ The dawn of that day is in fact arising. The silhouette of that tree which has already signified revolutions for liberty and popular solidarities seems to stand out again with the Indian awakening and with its equivalents in Western experiences and research. An "age of self-government"²⁶ is perhaps inaugurated by these strange coincidences between the phenomena produced in the Eastern societies and those of the West, and by the different forms which a political assessment takes.

Only the preservation and accentuation of these differences will meet the needs of the project for self-governance which is taking shape. The political face of the Indian practices has no exemplary value. It would be nothing more than a hoax, an object produced by our discourse, if we transformed it into a utopian model, a dreamed-of solution for all our difficulties or an ideological substitute for the technical problems met by the project for self-government in our societies.

But the Indian Declarations are opposed precisely to this ideological exploitation. They preach a task of differentiation and of equalitarian cooperation, which has an equal value for the relationship between communities and for their relationship with foreign societies. By that very fact, however, paths which open and questions which become necessary, are made more explicit. To enumerate them rapidly is to indicate the reasons for the solidarity with the movement which is seen in these Declarations:

The passage from a micropolitics (of the self-governing communities) to a macropolitics (the federation), while in our societies this passage corresponds to a hitherto uncrossed boundary marked by the integrative structures of the State.
The collective contracts with the land under their dual aspect: economic (rural cooperatives) and ecological (harmony with nature), while Western development, by the double privilege granted to industrialization and social conflicts, has attributed to itself a "history" in which "nature" figures only as the object of work and the terrain for socio-economic struggles, without having any value other than that negative one of a peasant "resistance" to be overcome, of a biological limit to be endlessly exceeded or traditionalist anchorings, to be rejected. In this respect, the Indian propositions concerning a renewed knowledge of the land, the water, the forests (and also the teaching in school of traditional medicine and of medicinal plants) are as important as the projects for rural cooperatives: another relationship with nature is being jointly developed here and there.
Finally, essential also to a self-governing perspective, a cultural pluralism which, at schools placed under the control of the community and the wise men (amautas), influences the task of teaching the social procedures of a rural "cooperatism": the necessary agricultural knowledge, the history of relations with the West, the mastery of the maternal language as well as the national language, that is to say, the instruments which allow a person to use and to symbolize various practices, whereas the dominant culture and the "rural schools" established until now ("a catastrophe") have set up these practices on a hierarchical scale, devalued or crushed the differences and therefore deprived the democratic enterprises of cultural guideposts and technical means.

A space for exchange and sharing²⁷ is thus founded. Quietly, it is accompanied (is it surprising?) by references to the Great Spirit, but they are modest because the "day-by-day knowledge of the Invisible and the Eternal" is silent: "The morning sun, the sweet new earth and the great silence, each soul must meet them alone."²⁸ Around such silences, "corner stones" of the community, the exploits, the groups, the Indian federations form networks. On the frontiers of these Indian lands, another sort of silence seems to respond to that native silence: it is the militant but unspectacular activities of the religious or civil associations which, in Latin America,²⁹ United States³⁰ Germany,³¹ Sweden,³² Denmark³³ and in many other distant lands, dedicate themselves to the sharing of information and an active solidarity. Since Bartolome de las Casas, the sound of similar solidarities has tormented the colonizing West. We, readers, we too are invited to this labor born of caring for another, and destined to develop at the same rhythm as the Indian awakening.

Michel de Certeau
Department of Anthropology, Ethnology
(University of Paris VII)

NOTES

* Resuardos, lands reserved for the Indians by the Spanish crown, then by the Colombian republic. The Calibo (government of the Indians) distributes the land among the families who will then cultivate it, but the ownership of the land rests with the community. The names of the resguardos are from Cauca. Kansa: groups, tribes. Narino: province in the South, on the border of Ecuador. Santa Maria: in the north of Colombia, between the coast and Venezuela. Paramo: very cold zone situated about 3,000 meters altitude. As there are no season in Colombia, but only variations in the climate by altitude, the customary references are to warm lands, cold lands and the paramo, the three levels of Colombia. The Indian Meeting at Cauca, in Colombia, from the report made by the Regional Council of Cauca "as a contribution to our common struggle." The text was previously published in La Lettre (The Letter), no. 188, April 1974, pp.14-15.

1. Alfred MÉTRAUX, Religions et magies indiennes d'Amérique du Sud, Gallimard, 1967, especially chapters I and 6. Cf. M. de CERTEAU, "Terres lointaines," in Études, April 1968, pp. 582-590, and L'Absent de l'histoire, Marne, 1973, pp. 135150, "Religion et société: lea messianismes."

2. Declaration of ANUC and of the Native Regional Council of Cauca, Bogota, August 31, 1974.

3. Jean-Loup HERBERT, et al., Indianiné et lutte des classes, 10-18, 1972, pp. 227228.

4. Ibid., pp. 216-217, the series of resistances and rebellions which has been kept silent in Guatemala.

5. Cf. Pierre CLASTRES, La Société contre l'État, Ed. de Minuit, 1974, the chapter on initiation: "De la torture dans les sociétés primitives," pp. 152-160.

6. Speech of Justino Quispe Balboa (Aymará, Bolivia) to the first Indian Parliament of South America, October 13, 1974, before the Paraguayan authorities and the observers. J. Quispe Balboa was then 21 years old. DIAL Document No. 196.

7. Cf., after many others, Pierre CLASTRES, op. cit., Chapters 2 and 7, pp. 25-42 and 132-136.

8. Here "American" means whatever precedes colonization.

9. Moreover these two "reductions" go together: the ideological and fixist construction which ethnology produces as its object, the indigenous culture, reinforces and camouflages the loss of socio-economic autonomy which capitalist domination produces. Knowledge and power complement each other to impose Western representations, as well as laws, on societies which often end up by interiorizing both.

10. Cf. the analysis of Nathan WACHTEL, La vision des vaincus. Les Indiens du Pérou devant la Conquête espagnole, Gallimard, 1971, pp. 134-211: "the destructuration." On the historical effects of this destructuration, cf. Sakari SARIOLA, Power and Resistance. The Colonial Heritage in Latin America, Cornell University Press, 1972, pp. 266-292; and especially Stanley and Barbara STEIN, L'héiritage colonial de l'Amérique latine, trad., Maspero, 1974, pp. 34-58 and 167175.

11. N. WACHTEL, op. cit., pp. 103-133.

12. Cf., for example, the remarkable dossier, André GUNDER FRANK, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil, Pelican Latin American Library, Penguin Books, 1969.

13. Cf. J. E. MONAST, On les croyait chrétiens: les Aymaras, Cerf, 1969, and M. de CERTEAU, "Le danger de l'insignifiance ou l'évangélisation superficielle," in Spiritus, No. 44, 1971, pp. 86-90.

14. Gringo: the white, the European or North American foreigner.

15. T.C. McLUHAN and Edward S. CURTIS (éd.), Piede nus sur la terre sacrée, Denoël, 1974, pp. 14, 35, etc.

16. Pierre CLASTRES, op. cit., p. 26.

17. Pierre CLASTRES, Chronique des indiens Guayaki, Plon, 1972, p. 219.

18. Definition of "primitive societies" given by Pierre Clastres. Cf. "Entretien avec Pierre Clastres," in L'anti-mythes, No. 9, p. 5.

19. This "Research" concerning self-government remains to a large degree utopian. It is at the same time mobilizing and mythical, indicative of experiments and studies to be undertaken, and in that respect resembles the democratic utopias which in the eighteenth century prepared the great revolutions of the end of that century or of the nineteenth.

20. Georges BALANDIER, Sens et puissance. Les dynamiques sociales, PUF, 1971. Cf. as well, by the same author, Anthropo-logiques, PUF, 1974.

21. Ignacy SACHS directed an important study: Le changement technologique comme variable des politiques de développement et l'avenir des rapports entre le tiers monde et les pays industrialisés, IRED, 1974. Cf. his La découverte du tiers monde, Flammarion, 1970.

22. Cf. the works quoted above.

23. Cf. J.W. LAPIERRE, Essai sur le fondement du pouvoir politique, publication of the Faculté d'Aix-en-Provence, 1968.

24. Maurice GODELIER, Horizon, trajets marxistes en anthropologie, Maspero, 1973.

25. Cf. Document DIAL No. 196.

26. Pierre ROSANVALLON, L'âge de l'autogestion, Seuil, 1976.

27. Robert JAULIN, Gens du soi, gens de l'autre, 10-18, 1973, pp. 377, 427.

28. Pieds nus sur la terre sacrée op. cit., p. 42.

29. Cf. for example in Mexico, Eco, primer periódico Bicultural Bilingue de Información general en la Zona Mazahua, Temascalcingo Edo. de Mexico; in Brazil, the CIMI (Conselho Indigenista Missioñario) of Brasilia, and its Boletim; in Paraguay, the Coordinación pastoral de la Selva (Asunción) and its publications in Catequesis Latinoamericana (cf. especially the issue of July-September 1974); etc.

30. Cf. at Berkeley (California), Indigena and American Friends of Brazil, who published Supysáva: A documentary report on the conditions of Indian peoples in Brazil, 1974; the Akwesasne Notes, official publication of Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, New York; etc.

31. For example, at Hamburg, the GeselIschaft für Bedrohte Völker, which publishes Pogrom.

32. For example, the Syd Arnerikansk Chaski whose first number appeared in Stockholm, in June 1976.

33. Thus, in Copenhagen, the International Work Group for Indigenous World (IWGIA) which edits a remarkable series of documents.