[From Canada to Colombia, protests erupt against legacies of
violence, exploitation and cultural erasure] [[link removed]]

INDIGENOUS AMERICANS DEMAND A RECKONING WITH BRUTAL COLONIAL HISTORY
 
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John Bartlett, Natalie Alcoba, Joe Parkin Daniels, Leyland Cecco
July 27, 2021
The Guardian
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_ From Canada to Colombia, protests erupt against legacies of
violence, exploitation and cultural erasure _

Peruvian Indigenous women holding banners when thousands of Latin
American left wing activists conducted an anti-imperialist march
against the Americas summit in Lima., Fotoholica Press/LightRocket via
Getty Images)

 

As statues of queens
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and conquistadors
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are tumbled amid protests across North and South America, Indigenous
people are pushing for a region-wide reckoning with colonialism’s
bitter legacy of massacre and cultural erasure.

From the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego, Indigenous Americans have
taken aim at the Catholic Church, national governments and other
powerful institutions.

In Canada, the horrifying discovery of the unmarked graves of
Indigenous children
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Catholic boarding schools has prompted widespread calls for a
reassessment of the country’s colonial history
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and the structural inequalities that persist today.

In Chile and Colombia, uprisings over social inequity
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have also been accompanied by demands for a reconsideration of
national narratives and the lingering aftermath of conquest.

And while contexts and histories vary drastically across the region, a
common experience of marginalization, poverty and low life expectancy
has prompted many Indigenous people to draw parallels across colonial
borders.

After her election last month as president of Chile’s new
constituent assembly
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Elisa Loncón, a member of Chile’s largest Indigenous group, the
Mapuche, expressed solidarity with First Nations and decried
Canada’s residential schools
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where thousands of children died over the course of a century. “It
is disgraceful how colonialism has attacked the future of the original
nations,” she said.

Loncón will preside over the drafting of a new Chilean constitution
to replace the Pinochet-era document, which does not even recognise
the existence of the country’s Indigenous people, even though they
make up around 12.8% of the population.

“It is possible, brothers, sisters, and friends, to found Chile
anew,” she said.

Across the Andes in the Bolivian capital of La Paz, feminist activists
recently marched to the defaced statue of Christopher Columbus,
denouncing the genocide perpetrated on Indigenous communities.

It was something they had done many times before, said Adriana
Guzmán, an Aymara member of the Communitarian Antipatriarchal
Feminism of Bolivia group, but the discovery of the graves in Canada
added fuel to their rage.

“One assumes, because of colonialism, that Canada is perfection,”
she said. “But that’s colonial logic. It erases the memory of our
communities [and] it erases its own crimes.”

Canada’s residential schools were part of a policy to forcibly
assimilate Indigenous children into colonial society, under which at
least 150,000 children were taken from their families over the course
of a century.

“The point of residential schools was to disrupt Indigenous
communities, to attack the very heart of our culture, and to
assimilate our people into a settler body politic. That was necessary
as part of the colonial project that is Canada. Canada had to
establish itself by destabilizing Indigenous communities,” said
Courtney Skye, research fellow at the First Nations-led Yellowhead
Institute.

“Part of that was taking children from their families, displacing
Indigenous peoples
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these policy tools that dispossessed Indigenous people of their land.
From there, Canada was able to more easily exploit natural resources
and build its economy.”

The recent discovery of more than 1,300 unmarked graves at the sites
of former schools sparked an outpouring of revulsion in which
protesters threw paint at churches and pulled down statues of Queen
Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II
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Such incidents mirrored protests across the Americas, where Indigenous
people have increasingly pushed back against the routine veneration of
colonisers
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When Chile erupted in protest in 2019, statues of Spanish
conquistadores were torn down
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and, in some cases, replaced with representations of Indigenous
heroes.

Similarly, as Colombia [[link removed]]
was convulsed by anti-poverty demonstrations this year, statues of
colonisers were again targeted by protesters, who said the statues
represent an invading class of warmongers and tyrants.

“These [are] symbols that represent slavery and oppression,” said
Tata Pedro Velasco, a leader of the Misak people from the Cauca
province. On the first day of a nationwide strike Misak protesters in
Cali pulled down a statue of Sebastián de Belalcázar, a Spaniard who
founded the city (as well as the Ecuadorian capital of Quito) but has
long been despised by many Andean Indigenous communities.

In late June, a monument to explorer Christopher Columbus was toppled
in Barranquilla, a major city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
Authorities also removed a statue of the South American independence
hero Simón Bolívar, worried that it could also come tumbling down.

“As Indigenous people, it’s important to start to re-evaluate
‘official history’ – and to understand that the colonisation of
Indigenous peoples continues five centuries later across the Americas
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Lourdes Albornoz, a social worker and member of the Diaguita community
in Argentina’s Tucumán province, said events in Canada made her
recall her own people’s experience.

Just a generation ago, wealthy landowners in Tucumán would routinely
take young Indigenous women to work in their homes, she said. “They
would take half the cows, half the harvest – and the young women,”
she said.

The girls were given religious names, new birthdays to correspond with
those of Catholic saints, and were signed up as members of their
abductors’ preferred political parties. “They lost their identity,
worked for free, were exploited, sexually abused,” said Albornoz.
Even today, such experiences are largely denied or ignored, she said.

“We are embracing our brothers and sisters in Canada, because it
must be a very tough moment for those communities,” she said.
“They are not alone. We are embracing them and suffering with them.
But from that pain, and those tears, we will be reborn.”

Canada’s government has asked for forgiveness from Indigenous
peoples for its actions, but Albornoz said that its colonial practices
continue across Latin America, this time in the form of mining
projects – often in territories claimed by Indigenous people and
which have contributed to environmental degradation, forced
displacement and human rights abuses
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Across the Americas, Indigenous people fare significantly worse in the
vast majority of indicators, from multidimensional poverty to life
expectancy and employment prospects.

Beyond symbolic measures and feeble declarations of solidarity, many
are now demanding concrete, tangible improvements to their lives after
centuries of seeing their demands marginalised or dismissed.

“Despite the various phases of colonisation Latin America has
endured, the cultural fabric of the founding nations has not been
destroyed,” said Fernando Pairicán, a Mapuche historian at the
University of Santiago.

“For every act of genocide, there needs to be economic, political
and social reparation. Only then can we move towards
self-determination, equality and the restitution of lands to
Indigenous peoples across the Americas.”

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