BiblioVault - Books about Indians of South America

Undoing Multiculturalism

Resource Extraction and Indigenous Rights in Ecuador

Carmen Martínez Novo

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021

President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens’ Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism examines why these intentions did not become a reality, and how the Correa administration undermined the progress of Indigenous people. A main complication was pursuing independence from multilateral organizations in the context of skyrocketing commodity prices, which caused a new reliance on natural resource extraction. Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other organized groups resisted the expansion of extractive industries into their territories because they threatened their livelihoods and safety. As the Citizens’ Revolution and other “Pink Tide” governments struggled to finance budgets and maintain power, they watered down subnational forms of self-government, slowed down land redistribution, weakened the politicized cultural identities that gave strength to social movements, and reversed other fundamental gains of the multicultural era.

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Unsettling Brazil

Urban Indigenous and Black Peoples' Resistances to Dependent Settler Capitalism

Desirée Poets

University of Alabama Press

Analyzes favela, quilombola, and indigenous communities’ responses to settler colonialism in urban Brazil. Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the author tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Belo Horizonte

Unsettling Brazil offers a powerful account of five urban Indigenous and Black communities and movements in Brazil that illuminates their struggle for land, dignity, and their ways of life amid historic and ongoing settler colonialism, marked by militarization and dependent capitalist development. The in-depth case studies are the Indigenous movement Aldeia Maracanã and the quilombola community Sacopã in Rio, the Quilombo dos Luízes in Belo Horizonte, the Indigenous movement behind the Pindorama scholarship program in São Paulo, and the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio. For each, Poets vividly documents the intersectional and transnational structures of power that perpetuate the erasure, dispossession, and exploitation of nonwhite populations and the creative ways that Black and Indigenous communities have mobilized to unsettle these structures.

Drawing on the knowledge produced by Black and Indigenous organizers and thinkers, Poets argues for an interdisciplinary framework that prioritizes the voices and experiences of these communities. Addressing increasingly salient calls for decolonization, Poets ponders the paradoxical role of rights, citizenship, and the state in the fight for freedom and justice. Unsettling Brazil urges readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about the nation's history and stands in solidarity with those fighting to reclaim their heritage, identity, and land.

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Upriver

The Turbulent Life and Times of an Amazonian People

Michael F. Brown

Harvard University Press, 2014

In this remarkable story of one man’s encounter with an indigenous people of Peru, Michael Brown guides his readers upriver into a contested zone of the Amazonian frontier, where more than 50,000 Awajún—renowned for their pugnacity and fierce independence—remain determined, against long odds, to live life on their own terms.

When Brown took up residence with the Awajún in 1976, he knew little about them other than their ancestors’ reputation as fearsome headhunters. The fledgling anthropologist was immediately impressed by his hosts’ vivacity and resourcefulness. But eventually his investigations led him into darker corners of a world where murderous vendettas, fear of sorcery, and a shocking incidence of suicide were still common. Peru’s Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s forced Brown to refocus his work elsewhere. Revisiting his field notes decades later, now with an older man’s understanding of life’s fragility, Brown saw a different story: a tribal society trying, and sometimes failing, to maintain order in the face of an expanding capitalist frontier. Curious about how the Awajún were faring, Brown returned to the site in 2012, where he found a people whose combative self-confidence had led them to the forefront of South America’s struggle for indigenous rights.

Written with insight, sensitivity, and humor, Upriver paints a vivid picture of a rapidly growing population that is refashioning its warrior tradition for the twenty-first century. Embracing literacy and digital technology, the Awajún are using hard-won political savvy to defend their rainforest home and right of self-determination.

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Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia

Tales of Alterity, Power, and Defiance

Fernando Santos-Granero

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Urban life has long intrigued Indigenous Amazonians, who regard cities as the locus of both extraordinary power and danger. Modern and ancient cities alike have thus become models for the representation of extreme alterity under the guise of supernatural enchanted cities. This volume seeks to analyze how these ambiguous urban imaginaries—complex representations that function as cognitive tools and blueprints for social action—express a singular view of cosmopolitical relations, how they inform and shape forest-city interactions, and the history of how they came into existence.

Featuring analysis from historical, ethnological, and philosophical perspectives, contributors seek to explain the imaginaries’ widespread diffusion, as well as their influence in present-day migration and urbanization. Above all, it underscores how these urban imaginaries allow Indigenous Amazonians to express their concerns about power, alterity, domination, and defiance.

Contributors
Natalia Buitron
Philippe Erikson
Emanuele Fabiano
Fabiana Maizza
Daniela Peluso
Fernando Santos-Granero
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen
Robin M. Wright

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The Use and Development of the Xinkan Languages

By Chris Rogers

University of Texas Press, 2016

Once spoken only in Santa Rosa Department, Guatemala, the Xinkan language family is unique within Mesoamerica, comprising four closely related languages that are unrelated to any of the other language groups used within the region. Descriptions of Xinkan date to 1770 but are typically only sketches or partial word lists. Not even the community of indigenous people who identify as Xinka today—the last speakers—have had access to a reliable descriptive source on their ancestral tongue. Preserving this endangered communication system in accurate, thorough detail, The Use and Development of the Xinkan Languages presents a historical framework, internal classifications, and both synchronic and diachronic descriptions, incorporating all elements of grammar based on extensive unpublished data collected in the 1970s by Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman. This valuable contribution is enhanced by author Chris Rogers’s emphasis on contextualizing the findings. Introducing the languages, Rogers presents important information regarding the social and cultural milieu of the speakers. He also traces a phonological reconstruction of Proto-Xinkan and reconstructs historical morphology and syntax. These revelations are of particular interest because the development of Xinka and the many aspects of Xinka morphosyntax have not been well understood. A sample text, “Na Mulha Uy,” is included as well. Solving numerous complex, centuries-old linguistic puzzles, The Use and Development of the Xinkan Languages unlocks new potential for the rediscovery of a rich cultural history.

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