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The Politics of Memory

Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes

Duke University Press

Introduction: Interpreting the Past

In Losfunerales de la Mamá Grande, Gabriel Garcia Márquez declares that he must tell his story "before the historians have time to arrive." But in reality, the historians arrived long ago, and the novelist is righting the wrongs of Colombian historiography by giving life and breath to long-forgotten incidents which should have been at the center of the Colombian historical consciousness, but were omitted by historians. Throughout the Americas indigenous peoples are working toward these same ends, revalidating their own historical knowledge as an arm against their subordinate position in society. For them, history is a source of knowledge of how they were first subjugated and of information about their legal rights, the beginnings of a new definition of themselves as a people, a model upon which to base new national structures (Barre 1983). For them as for Garcia Márquez, Western historiography has severed the Indians from their past by neglecting to mention them except as exotic beings or as savages. Western historiography thus justifies the European invasion. Nevertheless, from the perspective of aboriginal peoples, the writings of historians are more legendary than accurate (Wankar 1981: 297-81). European myths of the Americas have served as tools for dominating Native Americans by denying them access to a knowledge of their own past so necessary for organizing in the present. In the words of one native writer: "The whites block our road toward the future by blocking our road to the past" (Wankar 1981: 279).

This book will trace the process by which the Nasa of southern highland Colombia have revalidated their historical vision since the eighteenth century by defining, stating, reformulating and acting upon their own notion of their place in the historical process. I will examine their process of historical definition, highlighting selected periods in which native historians elaborated on their past in a form accessible to us, and tracing the continuities in narrative themes that link late-twentieth-century storytellers to their colonial counterparts.

Although Nasa narrative exhibits a clear continuity from past to present, it is also the product of the historical conditions under which it was elaborated. The historical consciousness of the people of Tierradentro is most clearly understood when interpreted in conjunction with an analysis of the changing relationship of the aboriginal population to the State, both the Spanish colonial state and the modern Colombian nation. Since the advent of European rule Nasa political action has always aimed at defining and empowering the group in relation to the dominant society. Nasa history incorporates the memory of the various junctures at which the community confronted the Crown and the State. Nevertheless, neither whites nor the State are the center of these historical narrations. Instead, the Nasa historical vision dwells upon indigenous activities in the past, documenting the successes and failures they have encountered in their struggle to maintain themselves as a people. History is a double-edged sword for the Nasa. The eighteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts available to us are written: thus, they were originally aimed at literate non-Indian audiences or at future generations of literate Indians, employing literary conventions to convey indigenous principles as well as to empower the community. Nevertheless, much of their argumentation uses Nasa images, making allusions to topographic sites and mythological occurrences which would only be understood by other Indians. Moreover, they are not organized chronologically. Thus, in a sense, the examples we have of Nasa interpretations of the past are, like their Peruvian counterparts, "chronicles of the impossible," indigenous attempts at integrating their own brand of historical and cosmological thought within Western-style discourse, both of which are effaced in the process because they contradict each other (Salomon 1982).

THE NASA

The Nasa live on the slopes of Colombia's Central Cordillera in the northeastern corner of the department of Cauca (Maps 1, 2, 3). Linked to the Colombian nation by commerce, transportation, technology, wage labor, religion and political process, as well as by a common historical experience, their everyday lives are also charged with a history of their own. The villages that dot the landscape (Plate 1), connected until recently by bridle paths and today by roads in varying states of disrepair, were established in the seventeenth century by Spanish authorities who hoped thereby to control the Indians as a source of labor and of tribute; the communities themselves only came into existence when the Nasa were forced to ascend the Cordillera, after having been uprooted from the warmer valleys to the east around La Plata, and after the Spaniards founded new villages following the depopulation of conquest. The 200,000 people who today identify themselves as Nasa do not live in these villages, but in dispersed homesteads in the high mountains, and visit town centers only infrequently to attend festivals or on their way to the regional market centers of Silvia or Belalcazar (Plate 2).

Most Nasa are members of resguardos, political and territorial units that communally own lands granted them by the Crown in the eighteenth century; individuals enjoy usufruct rights to parcels, and cannot sell their lands to outsiders. Although the Indians trace a connection between modern-day resguardos and their colonial forebears, in reality the institution has changed considerably in the past 300 years. The resguardo's land base was diminished with the expansion of great estates in die nineteenth century, it now includes colonization zones settled by mestizos and is smaller and weaker than its eighteenth-century progenitor as a result of post-Independence legislation that changed councils, or cabildos, from being independent political audiorities into intermediaries between communities and the State (Plate 3).

The Nasa cultivate coca and manioc, maize or potatoes, depending upon the elevation at which they live, ranging from 1,000 to 3,500 meters above sea level. But cash crops have also been introduced, including coffee at the turn of the century and hemp since the 1970s, and coca cultivation has diminished as a result of Colombia's anti-cocaine policy. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a substantial layer of resguardo residents spent time working on Spanish plantations surrounding Popayán, while in the nineteenth century, many were absent from their communities extracting quinine from the forests for the Colombian and international markets. Today, they periodically abandon their homes to engage in wage labor on nearby coffee and sugar plantations, and some have no land at all, but live as tenant farmers on mestizo-owned haciendas.

Although they no longer engage in the internecine warfare that characterized sixteenth-century Nasa chiefdoms, the Nasa heartland of Tierradentro has been a stage for violent confrontation since then. The dominant Colombian society promotes a warlike image of the Nasa, and outsiders seeking to achieve change through violent means have harnessed a presumed Nasa ferocity over the years, first during thenineteenth-century civil wars, later in the wave of violence that swept the nation in the 1950s and most recently in the political persecution that has cut down over 100 Indian leaders since the early 1970s (Plate 4).

The Nasa tradition of resistance finds its roots deep in the past. The people of Tierradentro have encoded their history of struggle in their sacred geography, so that past meets present in the very terrain on which they live, farm and walk. Memory has built upon memory, connecting events of the distant past, the more recent past and the present in the topography of Tierradentro. Many contemporary Indians belong to one of a number of ethnic rights organizations established during the past two decades to confront the dominant society through land claims, the proclamation of sharecroppers' rights, the strengthening of cabildo authority and the revitalization of culture and language. Indian rights activists are fully conscious of the lessons they must draw from the memories of precolumbian battles with aboriginal enemies, the military resistance their ancestors offered in response to the Spanish invasion of 1572, the judicial battles that established the resguardos and that assured their existence until today. Of all the fighters of yesteryear, those who occupy the center of the historical memory are the eighteenth-century chiefs, or caciques, who created resguardos and left behind land titles. Their example has been revived countless times since their deaths, most prominently by nineteenth-century Nasa politico-military leaders who commanded Indian battalions in the civil wars and by Manuel Quintin Lame, whose early-twentieth-century pan-Indian organization lay the basis for today's ethnic demands.

The historical consciousness of the people of Tierradentro is founded on a moral link with the past that is operationalized in the interests of achieving political goals in the present. As we shall see, Nasa history has its own internal logic embodied in time-worn patterns that are regenerated, century after century, to confront new political conditions. In other words, the Nasa historical vision can be legitimately studied as a symbolic system internal to the community. But this is only half the equation: the moral history articulated by contemporary Nasa activists is operationalized at the interface of the native community and the broader Colombian society, and must address both internal and external ideological needs. Consequently, Nasa historical consciousness must be examined within the context of historical developments in the broader society, including the transformation of political systems, the changing nature of historical evidence in the legal system and the history of Colombian historiography. In order to comprehend the internal logic of Nasa history, then, we must also understand the history of Colombia.

NON-WESTERN HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

To what extent have anthropologists developed the analytic tools needed to examine Nasa historical consciousness? Let us look at how ethnohistorians have studied native histories, a task most notably undertaken in recent years by historians of Africa (Vansina 1973; Miller 1980; Cohen 1989) and Afro-America (Price 1983), and which is also catching on among students of Asian (Errington 1979; Rosaldo 1980) and Pacific societies (Harwood 1976; Morphy and Morphy 1985; Borofsky 1987; Parmentier 1987). Students of indigenous societies of the Americas have made their own mark upon this literature, examining the writings of colonial and nineteenth-century indigenous historians (Bricker 1981; Salomon 1982; Zuidema 1982; Adorno 1986) or contemporary Native American historical interpretation (Rivera 1986; Fowler 1987).

Most of these scholars agree that while non-Western histories are about the past, they do not generally isolate earlier events from contemporary concerns. In Morphy and Morphy's words (1985: 462), these accounts are images of the past and not from the past, reflections by inhabitants of our own time on what might have occurred earlier. Instead of documenting "what really occurred," they bring up images of "what should have happened." Many times non-Western historians employ mythic images or metaphors to represent and explain historical events; mythic vehicles frequently overshadow the events themselves, making it difficult for us to locate them in time and in space. Studies of classical memory techniques demonstrate that striking images were frequently used in the Greco-Roman world as mnemonic devices for remembering more commonplace referents (Yates 1966). Building upon classical scholarship, Harwood (1976) and Miller (1980) suggest that symbols play a similar role in non-Western myth: fantastic images are mnemonic devices for generating more scantily clad historical facts which would otherwise remain inaccessible to the oral memory.

Native histories differ most markedly from our own in their narrative structure. A number of current writers have suggested that they cannot properly be called "narratives," since they are frequently not stylized and are brief or episodic, taking forms ranging from proverbs, to references to former house-sites, to songs (Rosaldo 1980; Price 1983; Cohen 1989). Allen (1984) and Cohen (1989) maintain that historicity is not lodged in a static text, but in an ongoing process of interpretation whereby accounts are constantly assembled and reassembled; Allen speculates that this process is to a great degree determined by aesthetic norms. Poole (n.d.) finds Andean narratives to be diffuse and confusing to the non-Andean, precisely because they cannot be understood as isolated texts, but only in conjunction with a whole range of activities, including ritual, pilgrimage and dance which clarify, elaborate upon and provide keys to the reinterpretation of narratives.

Many of these accounts are not chronological. Their creators juxtapose timeframes, omitting causal explanation, refraining from narrating events in linear form, or locating them outside of chronological time. This does not mean that native historians have no notion of causation. Linear notions of historical process are understood by the narrator and listener, perhaps discussed by them in another context and in a different mode, but not necessarily conveyed within the narration itself. Finally, much of this history is encoded in physical space, and geography does more than carry important historical referents: it also organizes the manner in which these facts are conceptualized, remembered and organized into a temporal framework (Harwood 1976; Rosaldo 1980).

If historical knowledge is bound to the present through its non-linear expression in space and in ritual, this is because it has practical uses. 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, indispensable in the maintenance of autonomy in the face of European domination (Rosaldo 1980; Price 1983; Cohen 1989; Lederman 1986; Fowler 1987). The non-narrative, non-stylized and episodic nature of the historical vision is fundamental to its usefulness: flexibility and ambiguity permit knowledge to be used in a variety of forms across a broad array of situations.

THE PROBLEM OF CLASSIFICATION

Although it is useful to outline the general attributes of non-Western historical traditions, it is less productive to classify them in distinction to our own historical canons. We commonly define historicity as embodied in chronological or linear narratives, without accepting that these are characteristics of the European theory of time, inextricably bound up in the process of the European conquest of the globe (Cohn 1981: 227-29). As an outgrowth of these circumstances we have come to accept our own temporal framework as natural and given, according second place to the historical schema of the conquered.

Anthropologists have drawn upon classical studies in their development of classificatory schemes, consequently de-emphasizing the cultural, social and historical specificity of the Euroamerican historical vision. This is played out par excellence in typologies that label our own construction of the past as "history," while alien modes are called "myth." Seminal to this discussion is M. I. Finley's "Myth, Memory, and History" (1965), which traces the development of historical thought from Greek myth. For Finley, the distinction is very clear: history is chronological, organized on the basis of a coherent dating scheme and using evidence derived from documents that are then formulated into a systematic presentation; myth is the antithesis of history: non-linear, atemporal, fictional, non-systematic. Goody (1977) has expanded upon Finley's argument by suggesting that the potential for historical thought exists exclusively in literate society where objective, analytic and chronological thinking is fostered through the distancing that is only possible when a range of conflicting reports about a single event can be read and ruminated over. When transported to native South America, the myth-history distinction was transformed into the supposition that our own society is "hot" and has history, while primitive society is "cold" and timeless (Lévi-Strauss 1966; Kaplan 1981). Using this sort of formulation, detailed analyses were undertaken of native texts in order to demonstrate that Andean peoples do not think in historical terms, but integrate the memory of events into a mythical framework reflecting mental structures more than temporal process (Ossio 1977; Zuidema 1982).

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Excerpted from The Politics of Memory by Joanne Rappaport. Copyright © 1990 Cambridge University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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