Customizing Indigeneity by Shane Greene

Author:Shane Greene [Greene, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780804771283
Google: OWzTAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2009-05-28T03:22:11+00:00

New Leaders and New Paths

Despite their ongoing ideological warfare, the Jesuits and SIL shared one fundamental aim. They both clearly intended to expand the missionary pacification campaign that Roger Winans had begun. As one Aguaruna author remarks, all the missionaries actively discouraged the customary practices related to the use of sacred hallucinogenic plants and vision quests (see Tii Ikam, 2000: 82).

Most contemporary Aguaruna activists I have met gloss over the biblical “truths” they were being taught during this period. Instead, they frequently emphasize the power of discovering what was hidden inside the written word, in gaining an ability to “talk to paper.” This is the skill that they believe released them from the exploitation of labor-debt merchants and complicit military officials. And indeed, the Aguaruna becoming literate, and thus school oriented, did irreversible damage to the system of debt-peonage. Gerardo Wipio Deicat, career bilingual teacher and political organizer, reflected on the significance of this transformation:

It began when the Spanish-speaking outsiders told the Aguaruna that the land where they lived did not belong to them but to the “State.” They used this as the justification for coming to work the land. They brought many things with them—guns, shells, cloth, mirrors, etc.—things which really impressed the Aguaruna. . . . Now at this time the Aguaruna were illiterate and did not know how to keep accounts. Thus, little by little the whole Aguaruna society fell under the power of the Spanish-speaking bosses because the Aguaruna went into debt to them.... The Aguaruna lamented, “If I could only read and write I’d know what my accounts really are! The boss is robbing me of my rubber and keeps asking for more.” . . . Because of all these problems, some Aguaruna began thinking about studying. They realized that if they learned to read and write and speak Spanish, they could claim their rights and sell their products without anyone deceiving them. (1981: 70–73)

At the time, uprisings such as the 1904 expulsion of rubber traders were still vivid in the social memory. But violent struggle and riotous rebellion became increasingly less attractive and less realistic alternatives.9 Finding themselves in new circumstances, many Aguaruna were forced to face their desire for and dependence on foreign goods. They were also confronted by a greater presence of military power and civil governmental officials trickling into the region with better firepower to impose the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Learning to read, write, and speak Spanish offered them a new kind of battle tactic and one that didn’t necessarily require violent confrontation or a simple retreat into the forest. The new plan was to take control of the very skills with which they were being civilized and convert them into weapons that would serve their own projects of customization.

Going down this new path, the path of talking to paper, produced a class of bilingual Aguaruna agents: not docile Christian subjects but politicized, interethnically conscious agents of Amazonian indigeneity. The bilingual teacher emerged as a new kind of indigenous authority figure previously unknown.

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