Full transcript of “Pueblos originarios. Programa cero.”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:06 If we knew, if we had the chance to rethink history with these other protagonists facing the Spanish, our conception of the past would be infinitely richer, full of elements of pride. To think they had extraordinary figures with brave peoples who fought with every possible weapon, strategists who deployed alliance tactics. Not everything was struggle, not everything was the "wild Indian" and the raids. This generalized ignorance about these events is also part of that process of imposition. It is time, then, to start
0:54 revising this history. Today we call
1:49 them indigenous peoples. Before, we called them aborigines or natives or Indians. The term does not matter. What matters is that we discover that these are actually peoples with diverse, very rich, unique cultural traditions that give a specific mark to what the American continent is. A continent that has an extraordinary history to offer, full of events worth recognizing and appreciating. Ame 500 years. Map. The
4:28 arrival of the white man in America, of the European, implies installing a set of pressures, exercises of power, compulsions, each accumulating over the others like an intensifying and progressive effect. And perhaps the first of these, which we must mention, is the occupation of territory, which will now be disputed by a new people, the European, very fierce and bringing a concept that did not exist in America : private property. For us, for our
5:14 mentality, that is it. There are no, uh , divisions. The political divisions were made by the white people. We didn't have a fixed place like that. For example, if the fishing or hunting in this place ended, we would move. The field is all divided with four or five strands of wire. You can't enter because it says, "uh, private property" or "no trespassing." And we didn't have that before. There is a pressure that is very well known, the one most spoken about, and it is the fact that Europeans, when they arrive in America, also bring with them a set of diseases
5:59 that were unknown on this continent. Like the flu, measles, smallpox. They will wreak havoc on the population. The demographic decline is extraordinary. After this, other compulsions begin to mount, which have much to do with the Western will to impose itself on the populations: the exploitation of labor to the point of exhaustion and even the physical annihilation of people. So you will find that in parts of Spanish America, for example, where crops were grown for the community, now that cultivation must be for the Spanish. Who do you imagine is going to run out of food? Obviously, the indigenous communities. They are also going to run
6:46 out of men who will march off for the encomienda, the mita, the llana congo, perhaps never to return. This then creates a terrible imbalance, because the indigenous people of childbearing age do not have their partners to guarantee the physical reproduction of those communities. I have been living here for two years, and we are looking for land as well. And God willing they will give us some, that the Spanish owner of this place won't take it from us; we want to plant something because
7:32 sometimes we go to another farm and we cannot plant, we just have to look after the boss's farm and there's nothing for us to eat. The decline of the indigenous labor force leads to the need for its replacement. This is the reason why the system of slavery is reactivated for America. It is in this way that contingents of the Black population arrive in Latin America to work in the most grueling way, and so their useful time is shortened under these conditions. a week of the indigenous
8:40 poles of every year. So, how interesting, I mean, very important scratching, scratching because society bathing, own values because very important, very important, hangs different The Indian is a European creation. There were no Indians in America before their arrival. There were Ambicuara, Bororo, Cadubeo,
9:25 Tapieté. There were an infinite number of peoples, but no Indians. The Indian is constructed as a uniformity, as an amorphous mass by the European. Under ideological compulsion, that Cadubeo, that Guarani begins to think of himself as an Indian, empty of culture, empty of content, ugly, lazy, prone to alcoholism; that is, he accepts for himself all those prejudices with which he is condemned by the dominant European society. During the 20th century, that category had an unexpected result for the dominator, which is that it finally managed to be
10:12 a horizon of alliance, of common struggle, for the indigenous peoples who recognized themselves by their ancient identities, but also recognized the common situation that bound the now again Cadubeo, Tapieté, Guarani: Indians all fighting as such. against the society that oppresses them. The businessmen come from the south or the north and they come to harm us, they start setting up fences and that is all they do to us. We have to pressure a little bit harder , don't we? We are not going to give up because I know that our land is what we
10:58 need. The long historical process of building urban centers was not at all peaceful or mild. The aboriginal peoples did not surrender the territory so easily; they put up a fight and resistance, sometimes for decades. In other words, we have a magnificent, ignored history, hidden away, of an
11:44 extraordinary struggle by native peoples to defend that which they ultimately ended up losing. Caño as a reserve, let's call it a colony, right? Because a reserve is something else, keeping something conserved or something of that nature, isn't it? It
12:31 used to have that name, and now it’s a colony. Fifty-something in total, between kids and adults. The oldest is Manco, then comes Carenate. Mario Manco , who still lives there at the Cañadón; as for the rest, they are all in town because they left due to a lack of work or housing, they've gone to town. In the end, many of them were defeated. Most were defeated, and some were even annihilated; in other words, physical destruction, genocide. What is
13:21 surprising is that between the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we are witnessing something else: the rebirth of those peoples we thought had disappeared. They hadn't disappeared. They can say today, "We were made invisible." The power that oppressed us was so great that we didn't even recognize ourselves as what we now have the desire, the chance, the strength, and the courage to acknowledge today. But now we are in a position to show ourselves once again. Here we are, this is who we are, these are our traditions , and with all our dignity, we want to present ourselves again and say, "It is
14:07 us, respect us." That's fine, we aren't pure, because we aren't pure. But we are here; our blood keeps running. Our Ona blood keeps running. When we in Argentina celebrate National Tradition Day, we do so through a figure known as the gaucho. The gaucho is the mestizo,
14:54 let's say, the product of the meeting between Spaniards and Indigenous people . Rarely did that meeting occur between a Spanish woman and an Indigenous man; rather, it was the other way around. The mestizo is the child of a generally violent encounter, of the violent appropriation of the Indigenous woman's body by the barbaric Spanish man. It is the child of a rape. And well, when they arrived, they started to kill, to travel from place to place, and they killed Machis, they killed in Pín,
15:40 they killed Loncos; the Lonco who fought, who stood up to defend, well, who was lucky enough to defend themselves, they defended themselves, managed to survive, and that is how the people were saved. They killed women and men. Boys, girls, they raped them too. That is the ugliest part. Just as they raped, they also kidnapped. Kidnapping, that would be it, right? Taking Mapuche women or Mapuche boys or girls—what did they take them for? I don't know. In this imposition of the
16:26 gaucho as the paradigm of tradition, there are two issues to develop. On one hand, an urgent demand to reexamine the foundations of violence, abuse, and barbarity upon which that paradigm is built. On the other hand, there is a paradox here because the figure of the gaucho will be contradicted by a hypothesis of whitening that will prevail over Argentine identity. And upon what ideological and political foundations the national State will be constructed. On one side, we have the men of the generation of '37, extraordinary theorists and statesmen.
17:14 But for these people, that entire population, that native population, that history makes us definitively unfit to enter into progress, city life , the railroad, the telephone. For this , it is necessary to make a demographic contribution that we do not have. They say civilization is grown from a cutting, and that cutting must be sought in Europe. It must be grafted onto this local population that is useless, which in itself lacks the ability to develop all these characteristics of those who want to enter modernity. This is what the generation of '37 thinks, but the generation of '80 will actually carry it out. pi The hypothesis of whitening
18:45 also operates with a strong ideological apparatus over our heads. We believe ourselves to be the late fruit of the importation of that European population , and by believing this, we are denying that we are also the significant result of these traditions prior to the immigration of the late 19th century. We are also the fruit of our indigenous roots, of our mestizo roots, those that remained invisible in this extraordinary process of cultural and ideological imposition. This sets narrow limits for what we believe to be
19:30 the epitome, the consecration of what it means to be Argentine. And within these narrow margins, there is no room for the elderly, no room for the young simply for being young, no room for rebels, no room for the overweight, no room for the disabled; that is, all of us who always remain on the fringes of what is acceptable as pure, authentically Argentine. We are always citizens under a condition of suspicion . We had a very arduous struggle for the return of the land, and well, we had to make many trips there. We were insulted, mistreated in Río Grande and everywhere, told: "Why do you have that ? A bunch of shitty Indians, what are
20:15 you going to do?" Of course, many of the authoritarian governments that we Argentines have also suffered have been built upon this ideological construction. Authoritarian governments in which we have been told precisely what the margin is within which our expression is permitted, and where our authentic expressions that aspire to be heard have no place, have no space, because they are considered as deniers of tradition, deniers of Argentine identity. quer Today, indigenous
22:04 peoples do not reject the nation-states that house them, but they want to be recognized within their nation-states with their own social identity—that is, as peoples. And this is what has generally happened in all Latin American nation-states. They have constructed a "we" based on the abstraction of a sum of desirable traits, leaving out undesirable ones, and in doing so, have built a group of "them" who are, in reality, also citizens of the nation. This "we"
22:50 includes urban lifestyles, it includes light skin, and a specific way of speaking Spanish. The "them" consists of all those who fall outside, who slip toward choices not approved by this way of thinking about the "we." My mom comes from a generation that was very very battered in this area. They didn't mark her for not letting her be herself in school. She was discriminated against because of that. They call her "the street girl,"
23:35 stuck-up, you know? So our grandfather protected them, right? The Mapuche people have been very intelligent about that, too. Even though my mom might not speak Mapudungun well, I have all the tools intact to go out and argue anything, but I have the knowledge more firmly in place. What we should do is understand that we are not monolithic reproductions of an abstract idea, that we are one and multiple simultaneously, that the "Argentine-ness" contained within us can exist in very different
24:22 ways in other fellow citizens, in our children, and in those who preceded us. It is a "we" that multiplies in mirrors that reflect different images back at us. We can partially recognize ourselves in all of them. We are not the same in all of them as we imagine ourselves to be. They show us different faces of who we Argentines are. There has been a lot of talk about unity in diversity. I don't know if we are that close to the possibility of unity, but the fact that we allow ourselves to
25:09 recognize that diversity is a trait that characterizes the identity of Argentines—one and multiple simultaneously—is indeed an important step we are taking toward a more open, more comprehensive humanity, more inclined to incorporate the other as a fraction, as representing a part of what we are, but a part that has the right to manifest itself just as it is.
26:52 that
