The History of the Vanquished: Indigenous Peoples and Afro-descendants

Summary

1 A History “Seen from Below”

2 Towards an Advocacy Historiography of the “Excluded from History”

3 Indigenous “History”: Memory and Ethnohistory

4 Afro-descendants and Their Territories

5 Bibliographical References

1 A History “Seen from Below”

In October 2014, Pope Francis delivered a historic speech to the participants of the World Meeting of Popular Movements. There, he spoke about the “historical protagonism of the poor” or those “excluded from history”: “(…) The poor not only suffer injustice, but also struggle against it! (…) You feel that the poor no longer want to wait and want to be protagonists, they organize themselves, study, work, claim, and above all, practice that very special solidarity that exists among those who suffer, among the poor, and that our civilization seems to have forgotten or, at the very least, is eager to forget.”

Indeed, historiography has only recently begun to focus on these “anonymous protagonists of history” (VAINFAS, 2002). In 1988, French historian Michelle Perrot compiled a series of articles written between the 1970s and 1980s and published a book entitled The Excluded from History. Women, prisoners, and workers were considered fundamental subjects of analysis. Similarly, in 1985, History from Below: Studies in Popular Protest and Popular Ideology (KRANTZ, 1988) was published in honor of George RudĂ©, one of the pioneering historians in the exhaustive study of rural and urban workers’ protest forms. The authors sought to assert the importance of individuals who had been forgotten for decades and to raise possible questions, presenting research findings and showcasing the fruitful theoretical and methodological dialogues of their time. The daily lives of ordinary people, systems of values and identity customs, existing solidarities and conflicts, as well as their differences, were increasingly investigated. A space that had remained unexplored in academic production was being claimed. According to Jim Sharpe, this perspective immediately attracted those historians eager to expand the boundaries of their discipline, open new areas of research, and above all, explore the historical experiences of those men and women whose experiences are so often ignored, tacitly accepted, or mentioned only in passing in the “mainstream” of history. (SHARPE, 1992, p.41)

Among Church historians, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean, this research “subject” – the “excluded from history” – also gained strength in the 1970s with the project of writing a Church History in Latin America “from the people’s perspective”, a project led by Enrique Dussel and the CEHILA team (Commission for the Study of Church History in Latin America). The fundamental criterion, the hermeneutical locus par excellence of Church history adopted by this team, was the “poor.” All interpretative judgment of the facts revealing Church reality would be carried out from its relation to its essential mission: to evangelize the poor.

2 Towards an Advocacy Historiography of the “Excluded from History”

A longtime member of the CEHILA-Brazil team, missiologist Paulo Suess (1994), in a renowned article, presented some requirements for a “History of the Others Written by Us” and for a “History of the Others Told by Them”, using the category of “otherness” as a central point.

Who is the other? The other here refers specifically to those called the “excluded,” not only from history but often from the social system itself. The category of otherness (the other) alone is not enough to characterize the issue. For indigenous peoples, the colonizer was also an other. In this context, according to Suess, what matters is not the other in itself, regardless of their social condition, but the other as “excluded from history.” What matters is the social issue within the cultural issue. The category of otherness adds to the generic “excluded” something essential: their cultural condition, which gives them identity and situates them in geographical space and historical time. In the history of humanity, otherness precedes social exclusion, although in the history of the individual and social groups, both may coincide.

According to Paulo Suess, when the past of a people or social group is approached from its own perspective, historiography can become “good news,” thereby contributing to the viability of that group’s life project. However, it can also become “bad news” by reducing the past of that people to a prehistory, ethnography, or archaeology. The damage of this approach lies in the shrinking of the utopian perspective or in the total blockage of that group’s viable-yet-unrealized future. A “dwarfed” past casts its shadow over the future. A strangled past chokes the future.

Otherness and exclusion of the colonized do not necessarily ensure proper access to one’s own history. The history of a people or social group is, in a way, always told by others, not only across generations, diachronically, but also synchronically. The history of the genocide of the Nambikwara and Yanomami peoples is told by the survivors, by others, by neighbors and witnesses who become “the voice of the voiceless.”

But even the other, when telling the story of their own people, does not escape the ambiguity of being a representative, an advocate, and someone with vested interests. The other may be an internal oppressor within their “tribe” or an instrument of external domination. The other may only represent themselves, not their people. Otherness in itself does not legitimize the historiographical discourse, nor does solidarity alone. Even when dealing with the other/excluded, one must ask on whose behalf they speak and whose interests they represent. The reference to ethno-cultural otherness (Black, Indigenous, mixed-race) does not guarantee “true history.” Nor does the fact that someone writes about their own social class or participated in the reported event ensure “true history.” A Guarani does not necessarily write the history of the Guarani people better than a non-Guarani. This raises the question: what does an excluded Guarani need in order to be a trustworthy historian of their people’s history, if neither their ethnicity, poverty, nor eyewitness testimony is sufficient? They need, in addition to the historian’s heuristic tools, to respond with loyalty, insight, and skill to the trust and delegation of their people. Loyalty means returning that history to the people in a way that strengthens their historical project. The “true” history, from a hermeneutical perspective of the other/excluded, is always the one that, based on the past, strengthens the historical project of the respective people or social group. The “life project” provides the key to interpreting and organizing historical sources. Under these conditions, the excluded Guarani has multiple advantages over the “organic intellectual” who is committed to the place and perspective of the other/excluded without actually sharing their ethnic condition. Sharing real life experience surpasses merely intellectual solidarity.

The historian’s practice is not neutral, as is well known, nor is it merely technical. The historian is an inventor and an agent of change. Like a sculptor, the historian can carve very different statues from the “raw stone” that emerges from historical sources. Advocacy historiography, by brushing “official” history against the grain, is intentionally an anti-systemic history. Just as a lawyer defends a “marginalized” person using the tools of the central/dominant system, advocacy historiography can also defend the “excluded” from official history within the structures and with the tools of the dominant historiographical system.

In order for solidarity historiography to remain true to its purpose, without dual loyalties, it must constantly assess—rather than merely assume—the alignment of its professional practice and perspective with the life project of the others and excluded.

3 Indigenous “History”: Memory and Ethnohistory

Solidarity historiography must engage with ethnohistory; the future of historiography on these “emerging themes” lies in the ability to raise, follow, and articulate the multiplicity of contradictory facts and life projects across our multiethnic continent. A Latin American and Caribbean advocacy historiography cannot mimic evolutionist patterns—from inferior to superior, from backwardness to progress, from nomadism to high cultures—nor reproduce the ossified dichotomies (prehistory vs. history; myth vs. rationality; circular time vs. linear time) of European Enlightenment thought.

Thus, anyone working with ethnohistory needs to be aware of some fundamental conditions. According to Patrick Menget (1999), in Brazil, for example, over the past three decades, most Indigenous claims have initially focused on safeguarding or reclaiming territories of ancient or recent occupation. To substantiate these claims, the state requires an investigation into the duration of land possession by Indigenous peoples, but experts face an unexpected difficulty: their interlocutors do not possess chronological references that can be easily transposed into our historical framework. For Indigenous peoples, entering our history represents, beyond the often-described shocks, the violence of being stripped of their past in the face of the canonical versions of the conquerors’ history. There is no documentary possibility of writing an “official history” of Indigenous peoples, firstly due to the absence of ancient records and even more so because forest societies do not base their existence on an oriented accumulation of events that moves from an origin point to the present. They do not stratify their past according to genealogical succession, nor do they, in general, organize their accounts of past events according to any chronological order—not even a relative one. In these societies, the relationship with the past is traditionally very distant from what we call “historical consciousness,” although the development and intensification of interactions with Brazilian society have fostered an increasing awareness of the surrounding history and the “ethnic” categorization that distinguishes them. What Terence Turner states about the KayapĂł, recent protagonists in land conflicts, applies in varying degrees to many other forest peoples: “If, originally, they saw their society as a creation of mythological time, the KayapĂł are learning to see themselves as agents of their own history. This new vision does not replace the old one but coexists with it (…)” (CUNHA & CASTRO, 1993, p.59).

In any case, according to Menget, the fundamental characteristics of Indigenous societies—contrary to most discourses linked to current struggles for the recognition of the right to exist within the modern nation-state—point to a distinct historicity.

If it is true that reconstructing Indigenous history according to the canons of documentary and monumental history is a current political necessity—and often the only honest response a researcher can offer to Indigenous communities’ demands—essentially, it remains a reorganization of a maximum number of memory elements from a society according to external references and a logic foreign to it, where the chronological framework defines, in and through duration, the core of identity. Calling such products “Indigenous history” is perfectly legitimate and may even faithfully reflect the position of certain leaders and excluded communities. However, it only serves to mask the impoverishment when the goal is to understand the Indigenous cultures’ own way of organizing knowledge of the past.

It might be tempting—albeit at the cost of a violent simplification—to reduce the “cosmological” or cosmogonic memory that rituals update and that myths ceaselessly repeat to internal group matters, and the “historical” or historicizing memories to the relations with modern surrounding society. This would be to freeze mythology into an unalterable corpus, an Indigenous “bible” reverently written by the ethnohistorian. Just as there are not truly two disconnected sectors in the global economy, the narrative economy also cannot separate stories of the first times from accounts of recently lived events.

Myths are far from immutable—they evolve as Indigenous peoples expand their network of relations and as the intensity and violence of contact with white society increase, redefining the place and role of the latter.

Thus, Menget concludes, it is undeniably necessary—for the exercise of Indigenous peoples’ legitimate rights—that ethnohistorians provide them with tools for resistance. But today, Indigenous peoples are also expected to assert themselves by rewriting their past, as if their survival—after what have been centuries of iron and fire for them—were not already remarkable proof of their resilience, resistance, and will to live.

4 People of African Descent and Their Territories

According to JosĂ© Oscar Beozzo (1987), the presence of Black populations in Latin America and the Caribbean does not merely constitute a historical fact to be aligned alongside others, such as the Indigenous and European presences. The forced transfer of millions of Africans to the Americas under the regime of slave labor imposed upon Latin American social formation, in various areas, a new character—not only colonial but also slave-based. Indigenous peoples also experienced forced labor and slavery, but not in the same way that entire societies in the Caribbean, the southern United States, and Brazil were organized around African slavery and aimed at its maintenance and reproduction as slave societies.

From the perspective of a History of Christianity, it is not the same to study the evangelical mission to Indigenous populations—where missionaries fought for their freedom—and the forced integration of enslaved Black people into societies that called themselves Christian, in which ecclesiastical authorities and religious orders themselves owned and exploited African slaves. For a History of Christianity in Latin America and the Caribbean, it is therefore crucial to open a theoretical, methodological, but also practical and pastoral debate about the past and present of people of African descent and their religious experience within Christian communities—in their resistance and the resurgence of their spiritual traditions, and in the slow weaving of mutual influences between Christianity and African religions.

The inclusion of the Indigenous worldview and, to a lesser extent, the Black worldview in the investigation of Church history—the acceptance that a profoundly mixed religion was forged here, symbolized by the Indigenous Virgin of Guadalupe, the dark-skinned Virgin of Lujan in Argentina, or the Black Virgin of Aparecida in Brazil—does not resolve crucial issues such as the Church’s role in integrating Indigenous and African labor into the productive process, or the coexistence, within the evangelizing process, of the fight for Indigenous freedom and the acceptance of African enslavement, or even the relationship between white Christian cultural domination and the survival of Indigenous and Afro-American religious practices.

Thus, alongside the resurgence of Black movements in society, the vitality of Afro-Brazilian religions, and the growing body of historical and social studies on slavery and the role of Black people in society, there has also been a pastoral renewal within the Catholic Church regarding this large segment, which is overall the majority among the popular classes. This renewal stems both from the Ecclesial Base Communities (CEBs), where debates on the social and religious situation of Black people have taken place, and from the APNs (Pastoral Agents for Black Communities), organized in parishes and dioceses. At the regional and national level, the CNBB (National Conference of Bishops of Brazil) has convened meetings and gatherings that reveal the necessary but difficult path toward the Church’s reorientation in Brazil. This reorientation is directed toward these historically oppressed and silent majorities within a Church that is racially and culturally European in its leadership and mentality. Nevertheless, in recent years, the number of Afro-descendant bishops has grown significantly, and each year, during the CNBB General Assembly, they preside over and concelebrate a Mass in memory of the Black people.

Furthermore, we must not forget that Afro-descendants, like Indigenous peoples, have also been striving to safeguard their traditional territories: the quilombos. In studies of quilombola communities throughout the Americas—across its three continents—it became evident that, as soon as they set foot in the New World, Africans who managed to escape fled inland, to the “sertĂ”es,” where they began to coexist with the Indigenous societies inhabiting those areas. As discussed by Richard Price (1996), those who refused slavery and the loss of their humanity—upon being treated as someone’s property—sought and found places not contested by either Indigenous peoples or colonizers. They sought to construct structural barriers to prevent contact with the slaveholding society while allowing interaction with urban or rural populations. These structural barriers were natural, such as flooded areas or malaria-infested zones, steep hills, deep forests, ravines, and caves. Social barriers consisted of areas with no economic value, thus abandoned for various reasons, and which became “no man’s land.” It is worth noting that this initial process of “isolation” later turned into a process of “invisibility” during the slavery era, and the quilombos came to be established near farms, villages, and towns, as shown by Almeida (2002). Nonetheless, the structural barrier remained a strategy frequently employed.

With the end of the slavery system, many quilombos (also called mocambos or calhambos) welcomed a significant number of freed people, leading to the formation of other small settlements around them due to the availability of unoccupied public land (terras devolutas). Thus, Afro-descendants formed the communities that today claim their constitutional right as descendants of quilombo communities and seek official land recognition of their territories.

All of this Afro-descendant population, which became and remains invisible, has continued to fight to maintain their freedom and human dignity, even after one hundred years since the abolition of slavery.

SĂ©rgio Ricardo Coutinho. IESB. Original text in Portuguese.

 5 Bibliographical References

 ALMEIDA, A. W. B. Quilombos and the new ethnicities. In: O’DWYER, E. C. (ed). Quilombos: ethnic identity and territoriality. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. FGV/ABA, 2002.

BEOZZO, J. O. The Black Americas and Church History: methodological issues. In:

CEHILA (ed). Black Slavery and Church History in Latin America and the Caribbean. PetrĂłpolis: Vozes, 1987.

CUNHA, M. C. da; CASTRO, E. V. (eds). Amazonia: ethnology and Indigenous history. SĂŁo Paulo: NHI/USP, 1993.

KRANTZ, F. (ed). The Other History: ideology and popular protest from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1988.

MENGET, P. Between memory and history. In: NOVAES, A. (ed). The Other Margin of the West. SĂŁo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1999.

PERROT, M. The Excluded from History: workers, women, and prisoners. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1988.

PRICE, R. Palmares as it could have been. In: REIS, J. J.; GOMES, F. S. (eds). Freedom by a Thread: history of the quilombos in Brazil. SĂŁo Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996.

SHARPE, J. History from below. In: BURKE, P. (ed). The Writing of History: new perspectives. SĂŁo Paulo: UNESP, 1992.

SUESS, P. The History of the Others written by us: notes for a self-critique of historiography on Christianity in Latin America. In: CEHILA (ed). Twenty years of CEHILA’s historiographical production. Critical assessment. In: CEHILA Bulletin, São Paulo, no. 47–48, Mar/1994.

VAINFAS, R. The Anonymous Protagonists of History: Micro-history. Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 2002.

 Further Reading

 LEÓN-PORTILLA, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico, Mexico City: Ed. Universidad Nacional AutĂłnoma de MĂ©xico, 2008.

RIVERA CUSICANQUI, Silvia. Oppressed but Not Defeated: Struggles of the Aymara and Quechua Peasantry of Bolivia, 1900–1980. Geneva: UNRISD, 1986.

WACHTEL, Nathan. The Vanquished: The Indians of Peru in the Face of the Spanish Conquest, 1530–1570. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1971.