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c h a p t e r 2 The Catechist and the Quishuar Tree Religious Transculturation in the Andean Contact Zone Indigenous culture today is the result of cultural encounters and historical processes, but the trajectory of those processes must be understood locally. In this chapter I show how the colonial religious projects of Spain and the indoctrination policies of the Catholic Church after independence affected indigenous society at the local level. The official instructions regarding sacraments, preaching, extirpation of idolatries, and indoctrination had far-reaching but variable effects on local communities. I focus here on interactions between historical actors, and I show how Salasacans in the early twentieth century shaped their ritual practices and attempted to control some aspects of their ongoing evangelization. There are several studies of the history of the Catholic Church in Ecuador, including a critical analysis by Oswaldo Albornoz (1963) and the studies found in the three-volume Historia de la iglesia Católica en el Ecuador (Lara 2001), but little has been written about church-indigenous relations in Ecuador in specific cultural contexts, especially from the point of view of indigenous actors in the early twentieth century (Hamerly 2000; but see Lyons 2006). My goal here is to understand how the general policies of Catholic indoctrination affected the development of ritual life in the specific cultural context of Salasaca. Salasacans to some extent determined how Catholic evangelization would affect them, even traveling to Quito in 1885 to ask church authorities to return a statue of their patron saint and preventing priests from cutting down a sacred Andean tree. In this chapter and the next, I analyze the religious history of the Salasacans based on documents, letters, and oral testimonies that show the interactions between individual actors, including Catholic priests, indigenous festival sponsors, governors, and chapel caretakers. After independence, church officials replaced the old colonial caciques 26   c h a p t e r 2 (the traditional indigenous authorities) with indigenous governors and alcaldes. These actors both mediated relations between the Salasacans and the outside authorities (Carrasco A. 1982) and maintained a sense of collective memory and identity within their community. Salasacans shaped the fiesta-cargo system of sponsorship of Catholic feast days into a ritual form for sustaining indigenous memory. The analysis presented here lays the foundation for understanding the subsequent chapters that focus on modernday rituals. I have not found colonial church documents that refer specifically to Salasaca, but I will briefly describe evangelization in the Audiencia de Quito based on the Itinerario para párrocos de indios, a guide written by Archbishop Alonso de la Peña Montenegro in 1668. The New World posed new dilemmas for priests working in indigenous parishes. The vicars of the Ibarra, Cuenca, and Guayaquil dioceses asked the archbishop of Quito to write a standard guide for priests serving indigenous populations, in order to resolve the many questions posed by their new situation. In response to these requests, Archbishop de la Peña wrote the Itinerario. This guide provides information on both indigenous ritual practices in the early colonial period and church policy toward dealing with “idolatry.” De la Peña condemned the oppression of indigenous people and emphasized the duty of the clergy to protect parishioners from abuse and exploitation, but he also advised certain punishments for idolatry. In the guide de la Peña discussed specific aspects of Andean religious practices, such as the use of a guinea pig in curing rituals and the veneration of sacred hills. Salasacans continue to use both of these native Andean spiritual practices, and there are several personal testimonies about the results of mountain offerings and guinea pig diagnosis (presented in chaps. 7 and 8). De la Peña mentioned the worship of sacred places several times, and noted that even those who had converted to Christianity continued the practice of leaving mountain offerings. Idolatry ranks second among the vices and sins he described (after sodomy and bestiality): “the Indians, even after being converted, have their places of worship, shrines [guacas] and idols in the refuge and caves of the mountains to worship and venerate them more freely, without suspicion of the priests, whom they fear” (Peña Montenegro 1995 [1668]:337). According to de la Peña, even 135 years after Catholic evangelization the native Andean practices remained The Catechist and the Quishuar Tree    27 strong. Again, de la Peña mentioned mountain worship: “they have tall mountains in their view, large stones, snow-covered mountains, and they...

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