INTRODUCTION

The coodinating team of the Continental Meeting asked me to present a short relation on the socio-economic, political and organizational reality of the IMC area of evangelization.

In order to do what I was asked, I first read the answers to the questionnaire by members of the two groups, Consolata Missionaries (IMC) and Consolata Missionary Sisters (MC) who at present do their missionary work in Indigenous areas of countries in Latin America. I afterwards looked for bibliographical material. I found an article by Javier Ullán de la Rosa very interesting: “Indígenas de Latinoamérica: una visión panorámica de la situación actual y la proyección futura de los pueblos indios del continente” (“Native Peoples of Latin America: A Panoramic View of the Present Situation and the Projection of their Situation in the Future”) – in Misiones Extranjeras, No. 165, May-June, 1998, pp. 230-257.

I am conscious that mine will indeed be a rather general and limited kind of work, for I know personally only a little slice of the Indigenous reality. Consequently, I run the risk of generalizing. And I will present only some general comments that may help us to better understand the reality of the Native peoples of Latin America.

1. THE PAST

I believe that we cannot understand the present reality without keeping in mind the past history of the Native peoples: the conquest and the colonization deeply marked their lives.

At the moment of the conquest, the native peoples lived in a very fragmentary way. They had different levels of development. But they possessed well-organized cultural and social structures that made it possible for them to form real empires, such as the Aztecs, the Maya, the Incas… Other peoples were farmers who led a pretty good level of life. Some others were hunters, fishermen, or simply gatherers of the fruits of the earth.

In many cases, the conquest and the successive colonization destroyed these peoples (genocide). In other instances, they blocked all possibility of autonomous development. Very few peoples managed to keep their roots alive in some sort of resistance that was sometimes active and sometimes passive, a resistance that consumed all their energies without giving them the possibility of imagining or building up their own development. Before the conquest, they did not live in any sort of paradise, no: there were conflicts and injustices already among themselves. But the conquest threw them into hell.

Unfortunately, the Church too was guilty of this tragedy. Yes, there were persons who lifted up their voices and defended the Amerindians. Soon these voices were eliminated. The Church accepted and justified the conquest, and evangelization became a spiritual conquest.

As a consequence of the conquest and of the colonization, the free Native peoples became subjects. They were taken as cheap loborers. These natives became non-existig or invisible peoples: Native America became Latin America. To the injustice of the conquest, the lie of non-existence was added.

This lie marked also the history of the Church in Latin America. The Church established and organized itself in the Latin or the Mestizo world. From there, in accord with the Spanish or Portuguese Government, and afterwards with the assent of the Creole Governments, missionaries were sent to the Native peoples, not to make them visible or existing and to defend their rights, but to make them Christians and Latin, working for their integration in the culture of the dominating society and to maintain them in a condition of inferiority.

Besides, the Church, by declaring America as the Catholic continent, knowingly or unknowingly reinforced the political lie with a religious lie, since, in practice, it did not recognize the native reality as existing but considered it as totally insignificant.

The path trod by the majority of religious institutes in Latin America is emblematic: in the beginning, they settled among the the Latins and the Mestizo, or approved of the colonization. They afterwards opened up to the Natives using the Latins and the Mestizoes as the point of departure, with the intention of integrating them into the Church and the civilization. Only later did some missionaries assume the cause of the Indians in the name of the liberating gospel of Jesus, and set the defense of the rights of the native peoples and their visibility in the Church and in the American and world society as a fundamental point of evangelization. Only lately have the native peoples acquired visibility in the national and continental society as well as juridical recognition in the constitutions of the various American countries.

However, this new reality is the fruit of the awakening or “levantamiento’ (“rising up”) of the Indians and of international pressure, rather than the fruit of a the ripening of the conscience of the dominant societies.

In this sense, globalization favored the native peoples: Global attention and the weakening of the United States allowed invisible realities such as the Indians to come to light. On the other hand, since this is not the fruit of the ripening of the conscience of the dominant society, the dominant society denies in practice the new safeguards that the law guarantees for the native peoples. In fact, the fight of the indigenous peoples for their land, their education, their rights to justice goes on in the entire continent. The only difference is that previously the fight was illegal, now it is legal and constitutional.

And so, the tragedy continues in America: although it is considered a pluri-ethnic and multi-cultural continent, in practice it is dominated by a minority of people that identifies with one culture only and denies the existence of others.

More or less, the same thing goes on in the Churches: sometimes I think that the new words about the indigenous or about acculturation do not change anything and do not work for the liberation of the native peoples.

2. THE PRESENT REALITY

a) Homogeneity in heterogeneity

When you approach the indigenous world, what stikes you first is the diversity, the heterogeneity, of the situatons. I also noticed that in the answers to the questionnaire. The anthropologist Javier Ullán de la Rosa presents the indigenous reality as a kaleidoscope, or a puzzle – and rightly so. The indigenous population of America does not resemble a monolithic socio-cultural category of people. Because of its continental dimensions, the reality of the native peoples appears as a fragmented entity, an infinite kaleidoscope of linguistic, ethnic, cultural, ecological, technological and religious divisions… that combine to produce an infinity of diverse situations.

• The indigenous peoples of Ibero-America speak more than 1,000 different languages, most of them incomprehensible to one another. They form more than 1,000 diverse ethnic identities. They belong to groups that haven’t as yet entered into contact with the western societies (zero acculturation), or to groups having acculturated themselves to a certain degree to the western societies and to an insertion into the contemporary processes of globalization.

• They live in deserts in the inner areas of the countries or near the sea coasts; in plateaux or in cold, temperate or hot mountains; in luxuriant forests or in grasslands; in tropical islands or in Patagonian tundras; in the countryside or in the cities.

• They are hunters or gatherers of the fruits of the earth; garden tillers (‘cut and burn the trees’) or farmers who produce cereals; fishermen, breeders, miners, industrial workers; soldiers or guerillas; crafstmen or traders; tourist guides, teachers, public employees; or beggars in big cities.

• They form a marginal sub-proletariat; are proletaries with a conscience of some social class; little or middle-of-the-road bourgeois; or, in some cases, part of the leading classes.

• They belong to ethnic groups that number millions of members, or to indigenous nations that have important clout in the “social and political life” of the countries; or to ethnic groups of average size, or groups of small size that count only hundreds or dozens of members.

• History made them citizens at least citizens de iure (by right), citizens of more than twenty countries – countries that really are external political units that distinctively condition their existence as peoples, countries whose frontiers divide many of their ethnic groups in two or three different states.

• Some of these Indian peoples keep their traditional religions. Others live in a sort of religius synchretism. Still others are Catholics or Protestants of various denominations, or went on to enlarge the groups formed by the new religions or sects that spring up in the continent every year.

The heterogeneity of this tableau, which is made up of such diverse situations, is not contradicted by the existence of a certain sociological homogeneity at the level of the continent that justifies speaking about “Latin American Indians” – not forgetting all the mentioned differences – as if we were talking about one social entity possessing common characteristics. Even if they seem a puzzle of isolated pieces, the reality of the problems faced by the diverse indigenous peoples allows us to classify them as one great entity.

The word “Indian” designates the multicolored amalgamation of pre-Colombian peoples who lived in America before the arrival of the Europeans as well as their contemporary descendents. It also assumes other generalizing characteristics of the sociological type and applies to a list of peoples that, notwithstanding their cultural diversity, find themselves united by a series of problems derived from the Latin American social structures: The history of both conquest and colonization; the denial of the existence of such an ethnic differentiation; the situation of social marginalization; the economic exploitation and the cultural domination…: All these things together change the diverse and fragmented reality of the Indian world at all levels (political, organizational, economic, social…) into a sociological unit because of the problems they live through.

Progressively, the native peoples became aware of their common problems. They are now taking advantage of today’s means of communication, of the present-day processes of globalization and of the support they get at the world level. They also began developing a class conscience, a consciousness of an indigenous ethnicity whose meaning is contained in the word “Indian”, a word that has become like a banner that goes beyond the frontiers of countries, the ethnicities or the concrete situations. Thus it becomes logical to speak of the indigenous of America as a political reality united in the fight for the defense of their rights.

What happened in Mexico (Chiapas), in Guatemala, in Bolivia is meaningful, and so is the attention and the support given to them and their fight by the international federation of laborers, the UN and other world organizations.

In conclusion:

Notwithstanding the variety of differentiating factors that fragment them, the indigenous peoples make up a structural homogeneity because they are peoples that are subject to marginalization processes, exploitation, subordination, acculturation and globalization under the dominant Latin American societies and by transnational socio-economic agents. The intensity of the domination its relative aggressions to the rights that the indigenous peoples have of being the protagonists of their own destiny, can take various forms of aggressions that continue to repeat themselves as is attested to yearly by the international organizations of the defense of human rights. This aggression is clear in the invasion of territories by oil companies, mining groups, lumber companies, ‘garimpeiros’ (gold and diamond seekers); military repression and invasion by para-military groups, drug traffickers, guerrilla, breeders, big land owners; judiciary discrimination, low salaries; denying them the right to own their own land; transmission of diseases to people who have no immunization defenses; imposition of an acculturating education…

All these forms of unjust treatment are the product of the same structural relation of inequality that places the indigenous peoples in the lowest degree of marginalization and subordination in the Latin American societies.

The indigenous peoples are now becoming aware of their own existence as a global reality, aware of their problems, of their common enemies and of their need to organize themselves and fight together for the defense of their rights.

It seems that the indigenous have understood that in order to fight against domination they must change their strategy. Their future and their possibility of surviving as peoples and as cultures is not to live in isolated areas, nor does it consist in resisting individually only. They must organize themselves. They have to continually increase the number of their relationships. They must build up a historical project that is based on a positive and clear identification of themselves, which must, however, be open to new challenges.

b) The Awakening of the Indian Peoples

For 500 years, as a consequence of the conquest and of the colonization afterwards, the Latin American society used every means to render invisible and non-existing the indigenous peoples of Latin America.

Today, the indigenous peoples have woken up, have made themselves visible and strongly affirmed their existence and diversity. At the side of Latin America appears now Indian America.

In fact, the indigenous peoples had never disappeared. Even if disavowed, they continued to exist and to maintain their diversity. Silently, in the shadows, they prepared themselves to make their voice heard, to make themselves noticed.

It was a long process which began in the first quarter of the past century with the Indigenist Movement promoted by the White and Mestizo intellectuals, especially by anthropologists. This movement became concretized in the ‘40s in paternalistic State politics of protection and guardianship of the indigenous via official organizations created for that purpose.

Although it had a paternalistic attitude, the Indigenist Movement was for the defense of the Indians, it demanded protection for them, it required that they not be exploited. It also emphasized the value of the indigenous culture and set up programs of development for them. A chance of liberation which the Indians had been denied up to then was now offered by that same dominant monolithic and feudal society. This movement caused the first crack in the granitic walls of domination: from then on, the indigenous people saw that it was possible to dream and to build up a different reality for themselves in which to live as adults and protagonists of their own destiny.

The concretization of this dream was not, and is not, easy: It was and is a continual fight that enjoys successes and suffers defeats. Often, the intellectuals and politicians who sustained the movement and leaned on it as friends became all of a sudden enemies of it when the indigenous people claimed for themselves the right to be protagonists in the fight for their rights.

The greatest fruit of this process is the acknowledgment of their existence and of their rights that the indigenes have acquired in the new political constitutions of the various countries of Latin America, even if the states deny the concretization of what they concede by law.

The Indigenist Movement is the father of the Indianism, even if the son doesn’t always recognize its paternity.

c) The Process of Cultural Change

The process of awakening and organization of the indigenous people and the consequent hate/love relationship with the modern and globalized dominant society is producing a process of cultural change in the indigenous peoples.

Their economic culture is changing. The agricultural economy of subsistence is no longer enough for the needs of their communities. It is now yielding to new economic forms such as agrarian industry, small crafts, industry and commerce – all done with the industrial and globalized world.

Their political culture is changing. The traditional organization of their communities no longer corresponds to the new political reality. It is now giving its place to new forms of organization. New forms of authority are being formed, new relations with the institutions of the State and of society in general are created.

Their symbolic culture is changing. This is brought about by the means of communication, by contact with other cultural areas, by the very education in the schools. A new world is being enjoined on their communities, especially among the young. New values are springing up and the traditional values are lived in different fashion.

It is not easy to say how deeply this change is taking place, how much capacity of resistance their traditional culture possesses, and what kind of new culture will theirs be. For now, the change is taking place among many contradictions. It is evident that it is necessary to form a synthesis of tradition and modernity, of their own dynamics and the dynamics coming from outside, to arrive at a theoretical and practical reformulation of their identity.

3. A PROJECT FOR THE FUTURE

All indigenous peoples live, more or less, the problem of acculturation and insertion in a contemporary world that every day becomes more and more globalized, that changes at a very fast pace.

The greatest challenge confronting the indigenous peoples today is how to face the reality of an accelerated cultural change brought about by an unstoppable immersion into a globalized modern society that follows the logics of the market and the hegemony of western values.

The intensity of this process, and the results and answers that it brings about on the indigenous societies, vary from one indigenous group to another, even if we can detect in them a tendency towards homogeneity, at least in the short run.

As far as their relation with the processes of acculturation, we can at present divide the indigenous people into three groups:

a) The populations that are indigenous ethnically speaking but that have been totally or in part assimilated to the dominant society. These have practically lost all their major cultural characteristics (identity, language, internal collective structure), even if they still preserve some minor vestiges that are, basically, fossilized in folchloristic expressions.

The number of indigenes that belong to this group is higher than one could think, even if it never appears in official statistics because in the census they are simply entered as part of the “country’s population”. However, in Brazil, the word “caboclos” is used to describe this group of people.

b) Then we find those people who belong to the group called “not-yet-contacted indigenous groups” who do not interact with the external world. They live forms of life that have been little influenced by the western civilization: there are only a few of these groups. They dedicate themselves to hunting, fishing, the horticulture of “tala e quema” (“cut and burn”). They usually live in areas of difficult access, especially in the Amazon jungle. The largest group of this kind are the populations of the Alto Xingù, in the Parco Nacional Indígeno (National Indigenous Park), which is under the authority of the Brazilan Government and to which access by westerners is very limited.
These groups are probably the most vulnerable to the threat of globalization because if it happened there, it would have traumatic consequences on these little societies that possess a very simple kind of technology and do not have adequate mechanisms to defend themselves from cultural and physical invasions. For this reason, some states, backed by anthropologists, have taken upon themselves the responsibility of defending these indigenous by enclosing them in areas that are protected against contact with the external world. At the same time, these states offer them the possibility of adapting themselves progressively, and help them familiarizet hemselves with the new situations of interaction with the globalized world.

c) The majority of the ethnic groups of the continent are in an intermediate process between these two extremes, in stages more or less intense of acculturation and integration in the national societies of the countries where they live. The integrationalistic politics that the Latin American states developed by imposing on the indigenous their politico-administrative organizations, especially through education and globalization, accelerate more each day the process that began 500 years ago at the times of the conquest and of the colonization.

At present, the majority of the indigenous peoples are totally or partially bilingual. They depend on western manufactured products and are integrated in the world of the monetary economy, even when remaining in a state of marginalization. They have integrated Christian elements into their religious life and follow western systems of life in their school systems, their health care...
Considering this situation and looking at the future, the indigenous peoples seem to have only two alternatives:

• To assimilate themselves more or less rapidly and totally disappear into the national societies, and take on themselves the modern forms of globalized culture;
• or to survive as a people and as a culture by knowingly accepting a process of social transformation and a modernization that implies a ‘reformulation’ of their own ethnic identity under new forms that are compatible with an integration in which they are active agents in the building up of new national societies in a future planetary and globalized society.

In other words, the indigenous peoples can save themselves if they build up a new historical project which begins with a ‘reformulation’ of their identity and accepts to integrate itself in the globalization processes and to play by their rules in order to stop their ethnocidal effects.

In fact, if we look at the praxis of the most meaningful indigenous peoples, we see that they have assumed many elements of modernity and of the dynamics of globalization. This forced them to begin a process of ‘reformulation’ of their identity and, at the same time, allowed them to become protagonists of their life and to begin the gestation of an organization on a continental scale.

All this means that the new historical process of the indigenous peoples regarding their future consists in organizing themselves on a continental level in order to defend their indigenous identity (or their indigenous identities) from the menace of globalization by using globalization’s instruments.

This historical project is being built among many contradictions. One of them touches the essence and is related to strategy: Some indigenous ideologists, belonging to the Maya, Quechua and Aymara peoples, propose that all the indigenes enter a common alley, Pan-Indianism. Its purpose would be to ransom their own culture and to establish their own types of society both from the present and for the future: its basis, their ancestral inheritance.
The Pan-Indianism is a nationalistic ideology, formulated by indigenous ideologists. It wants to establish a reconciliation between tradition and modernity. It starts off by revendicating the right of self-determination for the indigenous peoples or nations. The reasoning of the Pan-Indianism has traits of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, is based on a super- ethnic identity of the Indians and has many traits of dogmatism and utopia.
The fundamental elements of this ideology are:

a) the acknowledgment of a common indigenous philosophy based on a holistic vision of knowledge (all the paths of knowedge, such as religion, art, science… are equally valid and inseparable).
b) The need for a lingua franca common to all the indigenous in order to be able to express a common philosophy.
c) Collectivism and communitarianism in opposition to capitalistic individualism.
d) Indian homogeneity within the plurality.
e) A primitive ecological system spiritually harmonious with the whole cosmos.
f) A horizontal organization of society in oppostion to a vertical and classifying one.
g) Harmonious complementarity in the relation man-woman.

It is evident that this ideology presents an ideological image of the indigenous societies, an utopia they want to build, rather than a concrete reality. But, since it is an ideology, the Pan-Indianism try to impose it with authoritarianism and assume an aggressive attitude against all elements that are not inner to the tradition, and against all those who do not accept that ideology.
Luckily, the Pan-Indian ideology does concretize itself in more pragmatic and concrete political projects, such as the demarcation of the land, bilingual formation or education, participation in political and electoral groups, assumption of public offices… This ideoloy had its departing point in the “Declaration of Barbados” (January 1971), which was the work of some anthropologists, and brought about the formation of the “Consejo Mundial de Pueblos Indios” (World Council of Indian Peoples) in 1975, of the “Consejo Indio del Sud America” (South American Indian Council) in 1980. These organizations became instruments that gave a sense of organization and voice to Pan-Indianism.

There are others who propose a more realistic path: Ideology is not their starting point. Present-day reality is, along with the needs of the indigenous peoples. They propose a process of reformulation of their own identity in a continuous dialogue or interchange with other groups or popular cultures that share similar conditions of life and the same dream of one America and a different world. They do not deny their own diversity, as a matter of fact they endeavor to strengthen it. They do not consider it an obstacle but rather a condition for authentic dialogue in union with other popular forces. They do not deny the symbolic dimension of culture, but they emphasize its political and economic dimensions. They underline the authority and the participation of the community rather than the power of the leaders.

It is not easy to foresee which of these two ways will prevail in the future. Whether one or the other direction will be followed, the indigenous peoples will have a strong protagonism in the future of America. In the future, there will not be a one-dimensional continent only, the Latin dimension, but rather a continent with several dimensions. This fact will be the basis for a new historical project at a continental level. Whether this will happen in a peaceful way and without grave conflicts or not depends not only on the indigenous peoples, but also, and especially, on the behavior of the Latin society which, at present, is the dominant one and which wrongly considers itself the national society.

This process will not take place at the continental level only, but at the world level, because globalization will carry the world to a planetarian society and culture. In the latter, the indigenous peoples must find their place as indigenes, and, at the same time, as part of a global world.

4 THE CHURCH IN THE PRESENT AND IN THE FUTURE OF THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

As conclusion of this brief reflection on the reality of the indigenous peoples in the context of evangelization, I would like to say a word on the presence of the Church at present and in the future of these peoples.

a) The Present

No one can deny that the Church during the last thirty years has become aware and has spoken a new discourse on the reality of the indigenous peoples. This happened because of an internal awakening in the Church itself and because of outside pressure. And this can be seen in the documents of the Bishops assembled in Puebla and Santo Domingo, in the talks by the Pope to the Indigenes during his visits to Latin America and in the documents of some Episcopal Conferences, especially in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama… To the new discourse corresponded often a new presence too.

There also are pockets of resistence in the Church, ambiguities, contradictions that are, perhaps, the fruits of history and of the privileged relationship accorded to the Church in the Latin culture and society. This is shown by the fact that many people who are engaged in the cause for the indigenes are looked upon in a suspicious way not only in the dominant society but also in the Church – people such as Bishop Samuel Ruiz Leonidas Proaño and others. There is an aggressive and disliking attitude in some sectors of the Church towards the indigenistic movement and its fights. In certain indigenous sectors, especially in the Pan-Indigenistic ideologists, there also is an aggressive attitude towards the Catholic Church, a climate of reciprocal diffidence. Something that should be studied in depth is why many indigenous communities abandon the Catholic Church and easily join evangelical sects, especially the Pentecostals.

b) The Future

It is not easy to foresee what attitutde the indigenous peoples will have towards the Catholic Church, and what will be the attitude of the Catholic Church towards them. Probably, in some sectors the reciprocal diffidence and the aggressive attitudes will develop, especially on the part of the Pan-Indigenists who advocate for the Indians a religion ‘proper’ to themselves in open opposition to the Catholic Church. The same will happen in certain sectors of the Catholic Church that are directly connected, knowingly or unknowingly, to the interests of the dominant society that falsely calls itself Catholic. I think that we must maintain certain criteria very clearly in mind in order to direct our presence and our activities among the indigenous peoples:

• Never to accept the dynamics of the controversy and of the religious contradictions.

There will certainly be controversies and religious contradictions. We must not let ourselves get involved in these dynamics which might assume aggressive, offensive and fanatical tones.

• To continually do a biblico-theological re-reading of the historical indigenous project.

It is important to do a continuous socio-political reading of the new indigenous project. However, this is not sufficient. We must also do a biblico-theological reading in order to discern God’s presence and action in this project, the presence of ‘grace’ and ‘sin’. This is a necessary step for a true praxis of liberation.

• To make a harmonious synthesis between theology and the praxis of acculturation, and between theology and the praxis of liberation.

We must continue to deepen our theology and our praxis of acculturation without falling into the easy temptation of emphasizing the convergences, especially the ritual ones, with the risk of creating confusion and controversies, but recognizing diversity as a basis for an authentic religious dialogue.
It is also necessary to continue to deepen the theology and the praxis of liberation understood in their political, pedagogical, sexual, material and spiritual globality and to give a special attention to the dimension of solidarity-consolation towards the least defenseless, all those that are left behind or lie at the margins of the communitary process.
Here takes place the harmonious synthesis between the two kinds of praxis and the two theologies: it is in the dimension of solidarity-consolation that God’s face “inculturates” itself and makes itself visible, a “compassionate and merciful” God, full of compassion and tenderness, who defends the cause of the “widow and the orphan and the stranger”. Using this as a starting point, we can move into cooperating in a development that is integral and impregnated with the values of the Gospel.

• Promote processes that are integral and communitary, rather than projects

Normally, it is necessary to promote projects in the groups where we are present. But it is dangerous to promote projects that are not inserted in an integral process of the whole community. Consequently, it is important to set up processes that have as their foundation the conscientization and the participation of the community. This way, the programs and the projects will be born out of the conscience and the decision of the community, and not only from a need or, even worse, from a decision made by us. Only this way can the community grow in an integral way, can it strengthen its autonomy and protagonism and avoid the risk of “materializing” itself or the danger of creating a group of privileged ones who might become bosses and exploiters of the community.

• Always keep the Kingdom of God, rather than the Church, as the objective.

The Kingdom of God and its values are the objective of our presence and of our action.

• The Kingdom of God must be announced by witnessing to it with actions rather than with doctrine.
• The Kingdom of God must be built progressively and patiently, using God’s pedagogy, coherently accompanying the people’s march.

• The Kingdom of God must be incarnated in the history, in the hopes and the anguish of the community.

The Church, as sacrament (sign, instrument) of the Kingdom, will be built progressively by the community.

Thus shall we be true servants of God and of the community. We will avoid our protagonism, and will do a real evangelization and avoid the risk of promoting a false christianism or, even worse, a Catholic ‘sect’ that walks in the wrong direction in relation to the historic project of the indigenous peoples, creating divisions instead of developing a Catholic-planetarian unity in diversity, based on the values of the Kingdom of God – a Kingdom that we must build upon history and that will find plenitude beyond history.

Fr. Anthony Bonanomi, IMC