Abstract
This chapter presents a sociohistorical, political, and religious exploration of the decolonizing effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Canada and Guatemala. The indigenous communities in each country, despite their geographical, religious, and cultural differences, are successfully rejecting historically imposed Eurocentric forms of knowledge. The chapter presents a study of how the indigenous communities are reclaiming their own traditions, customs, and ancestral forms of knowledge amidst systemic state-sanctioned violence and cultural genocide. These movements are a sampling of the growing number of social and religious movements which, while not drawing on the categories of decolonial thinking, are by definition decolonizing.
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Notes
- 1.
I use 1492 in order to resituate the focus of this conversation, insisting that it marks the effective erasure of the histories and the stories of the originary peoples of the region prior to the arrival of the Europeans. Moreover, while 1492 is an important date, I agree with Felipe Fernández Armesto that when viewed in light of multiple other events that took place in Europe the same year, it was not an extraordinary year. What was/is extraordinary was that the encounter between indigenous peoples and Europeans gave birth to an entire multifactorial ideology of European self-perceived superiority that shaped such encounters. See Felipe Fernández Armesto, 1492: The Year Our World Began (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2009).
- 2.
Abya Yala is a term from the Kuna nation (they are located in the North region of Colombia and Southeast region of Panama) which means “land in full maturity” or “land of vital blood,” and which rejects ideas of the Americas as the “New World.” Aztlán is the Nahua word used to identify the ancestral land of the Aztec people. Aztecah is the Nahua word that means “people of Aztlán,” which refers to sections in the north of Mexico and the southwest of the United States of America. Turtle Island refers to the way the Ojibway and other First Nations of Canada speak about the creation of the world. There are also other names related to the origin of the world, for example Weesakajack, which emphasizes how today’s Anglo North American region came to be.
- 3.
E. Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1995), 12. See also Chap. 2 in this volume.
- 4.
In order to avoid any kind of essentialism, it is important to highlight the internal differences between Indigenous peoples. When speaking about Indigenous peoples I refer to the richly diverse mosaic of languages, traditions, cultures, genealogies, histories, mythologies, and forms of knowledge. It is important to also acknowledge that among some of these people there were internal disputes and strife, which often resulted in violent exchanges, even wars. For example, the formation of empires like the Nahua or the Inka are important referents which help avoid any type of romanticization of these diverse peoples. Moreover, consistent with the decolonial critique and what Anibal Quijano identifies as “coloniality of power,” I want to emphasize that Indigenous peoples in Guatemala and Canada are diverse, multiethnic, multicultural, and multilingual. My use of terms like “Indigenous,” “originary peoples,” or “aboriginals” is not intended to homogenize these groups. I reject totalizing notions that lump these communities together and give the wrong impression that all of them are the same without noting their profound differences. See Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” in Pensar (en) los intersticios: Teoría y práctica de la crítica poscolonial, ed. Santiago Castro-Gómez, Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, and Carmen Millán de Benavides (Santa Fe de Bogotá: CEJA: Instituto Pensar, 1999), 99–109.
- 5.
Guatemala has a long history of corruption and militarization at the highest levels of government. At the beginning of the 1930s Guatemalans began to experience foreign influence and interventionism from the United States of America, specifically through the United Fruit Company, a corporation to which dictators like Jorge Ubico Castañeda (president from 1931 to 1944) granted enormous parcels of land. During the presidential tenure of Juan José Arévalo Bermejo (democratically elected in 1944), the office of human rights and labor reforms were set in place. His successor and friend, Jacobo Árbenz, started an agrarian reform that targeted the interests of the United Fruit Company and resulted in the military coup on June 27, 1954, organized by the State Department of the United States of America and financed by the United Fruit Company, who accused him of being Communist. These series of events were followed by a long list of military juntas and dictatorships that benefitted the economic interests of United States-based and -owned corporations and multinationals (e.g., the Murphy Pacific Corporation of California). These developments and tensions contributed to the emergence of armed resistance movements, which culminated in the formation of the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP) (Guerrilla Army of the poor), with the purpose of protecting the interests of farmers and Indigenous peoples, and to protest against military dictatorships. The armed conflict increased and became a civil war which lasted 36 years (1960–1996).
- 6.
While they were in operation, about 150,000 native children were placed in residential schools of which up to 6000 died because of abuse—children were handcuffed, beaten, locked in cellars and other makeshift jails or displayed in stocks—poor sanitation, or lack of proper medical attention in the case of contagious or deadly diseases. Residential schools were centers of child labor undertaken to subsidize the ongoing operation of the schools. See The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Canada: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), vi–viii, http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Survivors_Speak_2015_05_30_web_o.pdf (accessed June 14, 2016).
- 7.
(Case 1944, Quiché). Guatemala, Never Again, trans. Gretta Tovar Siebentritt, Recovery of the Historical Memory Project, The Official Report of the Human Rights Office and Archdiocese of Guatemala (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1999), 31.
- 8.
Guatemala, Never Again, 31.
- 9.
Years later, the British North America Act and the Gradual Enfranchisement Act were consolidated with the proclamation of the Indian Act (1876).
- 10.
“Memorandum,” Department of Indian Affairs, Ottawa, July 1897, page 14 (RG 10, Volume 6039, file 160–1, part 1).
- 11.
“Indian and Eskimo Residential Schools,” Popular Information Series No. 12, Missionary Society of England in Canada (September 1939): 2, 4.
- 12.
Lucas García was the director of the Franja Transversal del Norte project during the presidency of Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García (1974–1978). The project was designed for the systematic extraction and exploitation of minerals in the regions with the greatest concentration of the indigenous population. Without consideration of this history of systematic discrimination and exploitation, Amy Sherman wrote that the Indigenous peoples and the poor sectors of Guatemala are responsible for their own impoverishment. She claims that their poverty is the result of the “culture of poverty” which they reproduce and which impedes them from “advancing” and “contributing” to the development of the country. See Amy L. Sherman, The Soul of Development: Biblical Christianity and Economic Transformation in Guatemala (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997).
- 13.
Ver Guatemala Nunca Más; La Memoria del Silencio, y Testigos del Tiempo.
- 14.
Guatemala Never Again! was produced by the Human Rights Office of the Guatemalan Archbishopric (ODHAG) and the Commission for the Recovery of the Historical Memory Project (REMHI). The government forces, the police, and the army did everything possible to impede the naming and punishing of the perpetrators of Girardi’s assassination by the laws of the country. In 1999 the official report of the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) was published with the title: La Memoria del Silencio (The Memory of Silence).
After 36 years, the Guatemalan armed conflict ended in 1996 when the government signed a peace accord (the Oslo Accords) with the insurgent group, the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG). Part of the accords directed the United Nations to organize a Commission of Historical Clarification (CEH ). It began working in July 1997, funded by a number of countries, including the United States of America. In February 1999, it released its report, “Guatemala: Memory of Silence,” which stated that a governmental policy of genocide was carried out against the Mayan Indians. The CEH concluded the army committed genocide against four specific groups: the Ixil Mayas; the Q’anjob’al and Chuj Mayas; the K’iche’ Mayas of Joyabaj, Zacualpa and Chiché; and the Achi Mayas.
In November 1998, three former members of a “civil patrol” were convicted in the first case arising from the genocide. In September 2009, the courts sentenced Military Commissioner Felipe Cusanero to 150 years in prison for the crime of enforced disappearance of six members of the Choatulum indigenous community. In June 2011, General Héctor Mario López Fuentes was caught and charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. In August 2011, four soldiers were sentenced to 30 years for each murder plus 30 years for crimes against humanity, totaling 6060 years each for the massacre in a village of Dos Erres in Guatemala’s northern Petén region. See https://www.hmh.org/la_Genocide_Guatemala.shtml (accessed June 15, 2016).
- 15.
Thaddee Andre, who attended the Sept-Îles, Québec, school in the 1950s recalled how as a student he wanted “to resemble the white man, then in the meantime, they are trying by all means to strip you of who you are as an Innu. When you are young, you are not aware of what you are losing as a human being” (The Survivors Speak, 56).
- 16.
Albert Southland, the Rector of the Gordon Reserve School in Saskatchewan in 1957 believed that the goal of residential schooling was to “change the philosophy of the Indian child. In other words since they must work and live with ‘whites’ then they must begin to think as ‘whites.’” Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Canada: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), 6, http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Exec_Summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf (accessed June 14, 2016).
- 17.
The Survivors Speak, 51.
- 18.
For a discussion on Indigenous spiritualities, see Chap. 4 by Sylvia Marcos in this collection.
- 19.
The official reports from the Commissions in Guatemala speak about the role of the evangelical sectors in the country. According to those documents, Evangelicals tend to neutralize/depoliticize the indigenous communities by redefining spirituality (and I would add morality) as an internal/private personal aspect. The internalization of spirituality has the effect of de-emphasizing the nature of the repression and discouraging any type of involvement to change their situation. See Guatemala, Never Again, 22.
- 20.
Key here is the government of Efrain Rios Montt from El Verbo Evangelical Mission, who during his one year as president used the expansion of the gospel as an excuse to counter the advance of Communism in the country. See Néstor Medina, “The New Jerusalem Versus Social Responsibility: The Challenges of Pentecostalism in Guatemala,” in Perspectives in Pentecostal Eschatologies, ed. Peter Althouse and Robby Waddell (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publishers, 2010), 315–39; Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efrain Rios Montt 1982–1983, Religion and Global Politics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011); Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Living in the New Jerusalem: Protestantism in Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).
- 21.
A good example here is Garcilaso de la Vega. See Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Diario del Inca Garcilaso (1562–1616), ed. Francisco Carrillo Espejo (Lima, Perú: Editorial Horizonte, 1996). Another more recent example is the field work of Marta Elena Casaús Arzú, who found in her numerous interviews among the Guatemalan elite many who by any account should be considered mestizas/os (i.e., with Indigenous and European ancestry) but rejected their Indigenous ancestral connections and self-identified as white. See Marta Elena Casaús Arzú, Guatemala: Linaje y Racismo (Costa Rica: Editorial FLACSO, 1992).
- 22.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Chhixinakax utxiwa. Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos descolonizadores,” in Modernidad y Pensamiento Descolonizador, ed. Mario Yupi (Bolivia, La Paz: U-PIEB/IFEA, 2006), 3–16.
- 23.
R Radhakrishnan, “Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity,” Callaloo 16, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 750.
- 24.
Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the De-colonial Option: A Manifesto” (2007), Waltermignolo.com/txt/Epistemic_Disobedience_and_the_Decolonial_Option_a_Manifesto.doc (accessed August 5, 2011). This de-linking with modern rationality is one of the ways in which decolonial thinkers differentiate postcolonial thinking from decolonial discourses. The former operates within the spheres of modern rationality drawing from Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, while the latter insists on the need to draw from their own wells of knowledge, as an alternative to Western European Anglo North Atlantic intellectual tradition.
- 25.
Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience and the De-colonial Option,” 5.
- 26.
Known as “Mayab Nibatijob” in the Quiché language, the university was presented officially on September 10, 2004 by the Mayan National Council of Education (CNEM). It is directed and administered by Indigenous faculty. Although still using certain Western parameters in terms of division of fields and disciplines such as agronomy, education, astronomy, architecture, the arts, and community development, the curriculum also includes subjects such as Mayan medicine, law, and mathematics. One fascinating piece of information is that the faculty of these latter subjects are elders who know the Indigenous cultures and traditions, but who do not necessarily possess institutional academic degrees in order to teach their subjects. Led by a council of elders, the university seeks to highlight, preserve, and expand the millenarian Mayan culture. See “Guatemala: Universidad Indígena para preservar la cultura Maya.” Terribelere December 21, 2004, http://www.terrelibere.org/490-guatemala-universidad-indgena-para-preservar-cultura-maya/ (accessed June 30, 2017).
- 27.
The University Ixil is not recognized by the Guatemalan Ministry of Education, but it is recognized and endorsed by the University Martin Luther King in Nicaragua. The university began its activities in 2011.
- 28.
The University Maya Kaqchickel started in the town of Santo Domingo Xenacoj in the Department of San Pedro Sacatepéquez. It has branches in the municipalities of ChiXot-San Juan Comalapa, B’oko’-Chimaltenango, and Xena Koj-Santo Domingo Xenacoj, Department of Sacatepéquez. See http://universidadmayakaqchikel.weebly.com/uploads/4/2/7/2/42729367/umayakaqchikel-briefinformativo.pdf (accessed June 30, 2017).
- 29.
One of the first apologies offered to the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples was by the United Church of Canada in 1986.
- 30.
Honouring the Truth, 6.
- 31.
Honouring the Truth, 6. The Commission report adds:
A just reconciliation requires more than simply talking about the need to heal the deep wounds of history. Words of apology alone are insufficient; concrete actions on both symbolic and material fronts are required. Reparations for historical injustices must include not only apology, financial redress, legal reform, and policy change, but also the rewriting of national history and public commemoration. (Ibid., 263).
As one of the witnesses in the Commission in Guatemala said: “I do not want revenge, because otherwise there is no end to the violence … what I ask is their repentance.” (Guatemala, Never Again, 25).
- 32.
In the words of one of the witnesses to the Commission for the Recovery of the Historical Memory: “Some say that we have to put it behind you - I can’t” (Case 9014, Massacre - Quiché). Guatemala, Never Again, 17.
- 33.
Honouring the Truth, 12.
- 34.
Popol Vuh: las historias del Quiché, trans. Adrián Recinos (Guatemala: Piedra Santa, 1990).
- 35.
Memorial de Sololá, Anales de los Kaqchikeles: Título de los señores de Totonicapán, trans. Adrián Recinos (Guatemala: Piedra Santa, 2003).
- 36.
Abya Yala, Una visión indígena, prologue by Evo Morales (La Habana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales y Letras Urgentes, 2011); Emilie Smith-Ayala, The Granddaughters of Ixmucané: Guatemalan Women Speak, trans. Emilie Smith-Ayala (Toronto, ON: Women’s press, n.d.).
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Medina, N. (2019). Indigenous Decolonial Movements in Abya Yala, Aztlán, and Turtle Island: A Comparison. In: Barreto, R., Sirvent, R. (eds) Decolonial Christianities. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_8
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