indigenous

Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico

mandy — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

After the Spanish invasion of Mexico, the invaders converted the existing noble class of Indians to Catholicism so that the church could regulate the lives of its subjects and help the Spanish colonial administration. The noble class in colonial Mexico had special status and though never equal to the Spanish, they sometimes allied with them against the indigenous people. The nobles wanted to maintain their status and property, they had education and language, and the Spanish wanted to use them as intermediaries to govern the natives. Women lost power and authority under Spanish rule, but noble women tried to maintain their place, at least in the convent.

Many nobles quickly converted to the Catholic religion but women were unable to enter convents except as servants until 1724 when a convent was established specifically for noble indigenous women. Their lives were even more restricted than the Spanish nuns, and their regime in the convent resembles torture more than worship. Monica Diaz, author of Indigenous Writings from the Convent, argues that the women maintained their identity as Indians and nobles by defining themselves in opposition to the Spanish nuns, and when the Indian convent was threatened by allowing Spanish nuns to enter, the noble indigenous women used the tools of language that the colonial system had given them to their advantage.

The author’s stated intent was to focus on the structure of discourse and the agency of the Indian nuns during the battle to keep the convent for Indians. The nobles relied on the colonial focus of “otherness” that had been used to discriminate against them, to argue that the convent should exclude Spanish nuns, a separate but equal argument, but of course they weren’t equal. The argument put the church into a tough spot to claim on the one hand that the Indians were capable of being nuns but on the other hand that they were incapable of running their own convent. The church wanted to minimize the antagonism, because they wanted to continue to control the women and manipulate them as a model minority. Because the church insisted on hierarchy and ethnic difference, the Indian women could use those same arguments to their benefit.

Diaz compared the writings of nuns and priests to show how the priests re-wrote the women’s work and published it without attribution. However, few writings by noble Indians existed so most of the data was from Spanish nuns. A chapter about sermon writing illustrated that when priests talked about Indian nuns, they eliminated any personal history and portrayed their good behavior as a miracle and their main positive attribute as obedience.

Because the noble Indians could write in the style of the oppressor, the author argued that they had agency other indigenous women did not have. According to Diaz, they knew how to create and manipulate alliances, they understood hierarchy and power struggles, and they used this to defend the Indian-only convent. She claims that the elites found a way to maintain their political autonomy by creating a place in the new religious order. The point of the book is that the noble women adapted to new reality but maintained an Indian identity. Since few writings of the noble Indians survived, the sample is quite small and the author’s assumptions and deductions are not fully supported. Whether the actions of the women were positive agency or defensive survival and whether they maintained their Indian heritage is questionable. As with most academic books, one must stumble over the style of writing and use of words.

Written by: Dianne Post, February 16th 2011

12th Annual Allied Media Conference (6/18 - 6/20/2010)

admin — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Wayne State University

Detroit, Michigan

This weekend I attended my favorite conference: the Allied Media Conference (AMC) in Detroit. This year was way more subdued than the last two years I’ve attended. There were fewer people of color present; I didn’t go to very many sessions; I was on my period, feeling real low energy; and it was still amazing and transformative, and once again reminded me of what I’m here to do in this world. Even with its challenges, the AMC is the kind of conference that has me checking the calendar to make sure I’ve got it on deck for next year.

The most powerful part of the conference for me was being connected to the Creating Collective Access folks, organized in less than a month by some of the fiercest people I know. I was reminded how conferences themselves create a non-sustainable way of folks relating to each other, to themselves, and to their own needs. On some days the conference schedule was filled from 8am-2am. Being connected to the Collective Access folks allowed me to give myself permission to chill, to not push through exhaustion and inattentiveness to be at every session, and to not sacrifice a really good slow conversation to make it to a panel presentation on listening. I felt more in my body, more aware of my needs.

Creating Collective Access also had me questioning what collective space looks like and what to do when access may be so different for different people. I went to one of the sessions that was part of the Indigenous Media and Technology track, and the presenters were using smoke as a tool in the workshop. I was thinking about folks with disabilities that need scent-free spaces and how you hold those things together or, if you can’t, what do you do? Are we willing to do what it takes to create or use tools to share across real boundaries?

I was amazed by Adrienne Marie Brown’s Octavia Butler Symposium, people’s overwhelming interest as well as her awesome awesome facilitation skills. Adrienne is so fierce she had the notes up later that day! I was once again struck by folks' reluctance, and perhaps inability, to talk about trauma in our movement and how we heal or don’t from all these –isms that impact our lives.

I feel softer now, and sharper at the same time. I am refined and focused, recommitted to kindness with direction, and more prepared to speak up as an ally for the disability justice movement and the rights of indigenous peoples. I’m full and content and feel myself coming into a new era of myself. I’m hopeful and it feels really good.

Cross-posted at Crunk Feminist Collective

Written by: Moya Bailey, July 21st 2010

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance

admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Gord Hill

PM Press

We are all familiar with the smiling happy portrayals of pilgrims sitting down to dinner with Native Americans, or perhaps the slightly more critical viewpoint from many of our high school history books of the Indigenous people being simply helpless victims to European colonization. However, neither of these views is, in reality, very accurate.

500 Years of Indigenous Resistance was originally published in 1992 by Gord Hill, the native artist, activist, and at the time, member of the revolutionary Indigenous newspaper, OH-TOH-KIN. The book is in a pamphlet style with artwork throughout its pages. It starts with the arrival of Columbus in the Americas and goes up through history to chronicle native resistance in North and South America until after WWII, even up through the 1960s. It was originally published just before the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico in 1994, and so was extremely relevant and insightful both then and now.

Even though I was aware that the history of the Americas many of us were taught growing up was very skewed towards celebrating white European colonialism, I hadn’t read anything, until this, that so clearly shows all the various Native American resistance movements that have existed. Lacking from most of written American history of the past 500 years is a detailed exploration of the resistance of native peoples and how they influenced and limited the colonialism to which they struggled against. 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance fills in this gap in an extensive way. It also records all the horrendous and calculating strategies of colonization employed to destroy native people, wipe out whole cultures, and steal land.

While many people, including myself, could probably not give names of more than a few tribes, this book speaks of all the millions of indigenous people there were 500 years ago, an estimated 70 to 100 million people. Even now after hundreds of years of colonization there are still an estimated forty million indigenous people. The book chronicles the various resistance strategies that native peoples utilized: demonstrations, festivals, violent uprisings, the creation of alliances with other tribes or nations, protests, occupations, road blocks, forming organizations to oppose governmental policies, and most recently, organizing around international bodies.

In a country that still has offensive caricatures of Native Americans on display for sports team mascots, it is easy to get discouraged that there will be any real recognition of the magnitude of the American Indian Holocaust, the mass genocide of Native peoples that has run rampant the past 500 years and continues on today. But books such as 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance which don't glorify, romanticize, or just plain omit all the horrors that abound throughout this history of colonization, stand to give us some hope. For they just give us the facts, but, more importantly, the ones we most likely have never heard before.

It would be an amazing thing to make copies of this work and slip into every school in America and slide it into every history book for children to read. Well, it is no less crucial and eye-opening a book for existing simply on its own. It is a rare event to read books that really have the potential to change the way that you think about things, that help you unlearn many lies and find yourself faced with honest truths. It always gives me the chills to read something from a new perspective and to know that this information is being let loose in the world, seeking to help us to open our eyes, to learn from the past, and to ultimately change for the better.

Written by: Lesley Kartali, May 21st 2010

Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans

admin — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 12:44:00 +0000

By David Stoll

Westview Press

For those unfamiliar with 1983’s I, Rigoberta Menchu, or the controversy that surrounded the initial publication of David Stoll’s contentious academic countering in 1998, it would be best to revisit the debates that have raged for the last ten years. Rigoberta Menchu, an indigenous Guatemalan woman who won a Nobel Peace Prize for her now twenty-five-year-old testimonio and subsequently found her book added to the multicultural canon in colleges around the world, has drawn sharp criticism from both scholars like Stoll and her own country’s people, who do not believe their stories have been represented by hers.

As Stoll is a white, Western, male academic, his initial deconstruction of her story felt problematic for many. Yet, after conducting nearly 120 interviews with Guatemalan people who refute some of Menchu’s base claims, it becomes hard to remain optimistically objective, even if her story speaks to a wide range of real and existing experiences of oppression and revolution in Latin America and the Global South. In this case, Stoll’s criticisms also feel particularly significant as Menchu’s book has been lauded for its supposed authenticity, rather than as a literary masterpiece.

For the tenth anniversary reprinting of Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans, Stoll solicited a new foreword by Menchu’s original biographer, Elizabeth Burgos. Estranged from Menchu after Menchu’s dismissal of the book and Burgos in the years following Stoll’s criticism, Burgos does an admirable job of explaining her side of the story while remaining neutral about Stoll’s accusations and findings. Perhaps the best reason for buying this updated version of the book, Burgos’s introduction is an appropriate report of a story within a story—a deeply moving recount of the events leading to her help with I, Rigoberta Menchu and the fallout in her own life following accusations of inaccuracies in the narrative.

Despite appreciating Stoll’s in-depth analysis and research, and the supplementary back-story from Burgos, I caution anyone not already deeply familiar with the Guatemalan people’s revolutionary history or Menchu’s story to find better ways to ease into discussions about the legitimacy of her work. Having read I, Rigoberta Menchu nearly five years ago for the first time, I struggled with the details Stoll calls into question, and at times, I felt only a Guatemalan scholar would be able to keep up despite Stoll’s reasonable, clear explanations, maps, and timelines. The fault of Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans is not about Stoll or the actual text. It’s about what’s either a personal mental lapse of important details or the way our culture collectively misunderstands indigenous stories that we believe have no weight on our own existence.

A solid academic analysis of a once (and in some circles, still) widely accepted story about Guatemalan history, violence, oppression, and uprising, Stoll’s book is an excellent and necessary wake up call for privileged academics too ready to validate stories of oppression as total truth. Understanding how and why we readily accept the stories of the subaltern is its own interesting debate, and concerns about Menchu’s credibility aside, this book speaks to a host of issues including Western privilege, class bias, academic credibility, and what testimonio and memoir really mean.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, July 6th 2008

Grandmothers Counsel the World: Women Elders Offer Their Vision for Our Planet

admin — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:49:00 +0000

By Carol Schaefer

Trumpeter Books

The year is 2007. We can still see the impressive footsteps of Betty Friedman, Margaret Sanger, and Gloria Steinem in the sands of time, yet women, as a whole, seem more concerned with which pop icon has fallen from grace, or how their Coach bag stands up against the other soccer moms' Gucci one. I don't carry a handbag, and I don't watch much TV, yet this book was a sobering and gentle call to action. "Grounding" is the best descriptive word that I can place on this book.

At the beginning of the book, I was informed that “When the grandmothers from the four directions speak, a new time is coming.” The fulfillment began in 1986 with a sacred fire outside the United Nations Building, ignited by a chief of the Iroquois Nation. From that fire, a torch was carried through 62 countries in 86 days by runners. The fire now resides in New Mexico, continuously burning. It traveled once more in 2004 to spark the meeting of thirteen grandmothers, called the “keepers of their tribe’s teachings from original times.”

Each of the grandmother's give a personal account of their lives. These wise women saw some hard times, but it was throughout these times that they received great revelations. Their biographies resonate with warmth and compassion; their photos define true beauty. Their simple lives and passion for healing their people and the Earth are a loving call to action for every woman. Their "Guidance for Our Times" (Part Two of the book) includes chapters on "Prophecies," "Women's Wisdom," "Sacred Relations," "Our Mother Earth," "Oppression," "Nature's Pharmacy" and "Prayer." "Prayer is the greatest thing I have as I walk upon this earth," Grandmother Agnes says. "I am nothing without The Creator."

Author Carol Schaefer, a well-known journalist, has done well with this compilation. Not terribly poetic, but straight to the facts. The contents more than make up for that, however.

Can Grandmothers Counsel the World actually change the world? The concepts within the book could, but probably not anytime soon. If you take the time to read this book, I guarantee that it will press you to see the world through the eyes of indigenous wisdom, and perhaps ground you like it did me.

Written by: Gina Hobbs, April 26th 2007