Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology

Afterword

Afterword y With Ecuador’s indigenous organizations deposing two presidents in the last decade, and with Aymara Indian Evo Morales’s election to the Bolivian presidency in 2006, much scholarly discussion has centered on the relation between indigenous movements and the state. The state and the Colombian constitution of 1991, which acknowledges the pluricultural makeup of the nation, are also the major referents in the study of Colombian indigenous movements, together with their negotiation of the violent civil war between guerrillas, paramilitary and government troops, and the U.S. war on drugs.1 Bridging social sciences and political theory with cultural studies, one might also look at indigenous movements as part of a newly configured multitude shaped by piqueteros and factory takeovers in Argentina, by the Movimento Sim Terra (Landless Movement) in Brazil, the Zapatistas efforts to create another campaign in Mexico, and by organizations in the urban barrios of Caracas that support Chávez. Indigenous movements here would appear as one among several social groups constituting a New Left.2 In this book I have argued, in contrast, that the cultural politics of indigenous movements in the Andean countries are effecting long-lasting and profound changes that transcend election policies and the state. I have sought to illuminate the use of video as part of a politics of knowledge designed by indigenous organizations. These indigenous cultural politics share affinities with native and aboriginal efforts to decolonize knowledge in North America , Australia, and New Zealand. Working with Creole/white and mestizo collaborators, indigenous media activists have constructed audiovisual communication networks that reframe the way indigenous subjectivity, culture, and systems of knowledge have been represented in mainstream literature and media. My study suggests that in the Andean-Amazonian region this audiovisual knowledge production becomes sustainable for the villages and peoples linked through video networks. In other words, indigenous media fterword 213 invest the philosophical and religious knowledge that was hidden or deemed as superstition with new value. The video fiction Angels of the Earth, a 2001 CEFREC-CAIB production, and Secret Nation, made in 1989 by the Ukamau Group, differ markedly in their visual aesthetics, yet both highlight the loss of family ties and community solidarity as the painful cost caused and suffered by urban migrants who desire to become recognized as mestizos and integrated into Western society. Indigenous media activists across the region speak of a trend toward assimilation brought on by exposure to state education that is no longer affecting only those living in the city. As Alfredo Copa puts it, “Many old people say to me, ‘Interview me, tape-record me with music. I want to leave something that my children never asked me, that my grandchildren never asked me.’ I worry about what they are not being asked. Education in my country does not concern itself with this. They teach us the history of ancient Greece and Rome, but not our own history. So more and more memories are being lost. Video demonstrates that you have to remember. . . . Video is a motivation; people who are losing their culture can strengthen themselves in this way” (Flores 33). Copa insists that indigenous media counters the prevailing tendency toward assimilation. It fosters pride in indigenous identity and traditions . The video makers thus contribute to a process of decolonization that begins with indigenous and peasant self-perceptions. Many people living in indigenous and peasant communities today have interiorized the dominant national cultures’ inscription of Indians as poor, backward, and destined to integrate into Western society. Indigenous cultural politics, in contrast, highlight histories of survival, ongoing resistance to colonialism, even emerging alternative modernities. Here I have argued that indigenous movements are indeed enacting a revolution of a new kind and that indigenous media partake in this struggle. It is a revolution of knowledge politics. Media activists foster pride in local traditions, agricultural systems, and medicinal knowledge. They vindicate religious beliefs that have survived since precolonial times as part of a greater ethos that sustains indigenous alternative visions of modernity across very diverse cultures. As Copa argued, indigenous media strengthen local technologies of transmitting these forms of memory, knowledge, and social relations. Storytelling, song, dance, weaving, bodily performance, and rituals are all represented on screen, but they are also enacted for the camera, and, most important, they become part of community reflection 214 ndianizing ilm and discussion. In other words, the media...