¿Conquistar indios o evangelizar almas? políticas de sometimiento en las provincias de las tierras bajas del Pacífico (1560-1680)

Abstract

This article analyzes how changes in subjugation policy impacted the different indigenous nations inhabiting the Pacific lowlands and under the judicial jurrisdiction of Santafé, Quito, and Panama. In their eagerness to obtain riches, colonial authorities, along with the vecinos (neighbours) of Andean urban centers, constructed a series of negative discourses about the Indians that legitimized a brutal war lasting almost a century. The failure of this policy in the mid-seventeenth century permited the establishment of a series of missions in this territory that sought to dominate the indigenous population, but now through evangelization, a seemingly "softer" technique. Despite the differences between these two policies of subjugation, both sought to include indigenous peoples in part of the colonial economic system.

Crafting electricity through social protest: Afro-descendant and indigenous Embera communities protesting for hydroelectric infrastructure in Utría National Park, Colombia

“…That the Embera community protested to silence their own waterfall may seem counterintuitive; that they should wish to demonstrate their capacity to refuse what was being imposed from Bogotá is, however, understandable. Colonization is still present in the memories of Embera and the exclusion of the waterfall from their legally designated territory is in keeping with a long tradition of selective appropriation by colonial occupiers in the Americas (Montoya Guzmán, 2010; Williams, 2004). Among older participants, stories contained in social memory include those of Spanish slavers who came to occupy their lands, and who murdered and enslaved the Embera people.…”

“…The waterfall was a passageway between worlds and was valued by the Embera for its potential as a space for healing. To understand how the community could come to demand it be silenced, this indigenous status must be set into context, contrasting it with a development status that is bound up with centuries of colonial and postcolonial rule, including the interventions of Christian missionaries, disrupting the lives and traditions of these communities, as reflected in Jorge’s words (see Montoya Guzmán, 2010). The complexity and ambivalence of the Embera’s position reflects the defining of their own terms of development, where, as Escobar (1995) exposes, it is not simply a continuation of colonialism but a historical process in its own right.…”

“…The members of the Embera community whom we interviewed often describe themselves as a peaceful and easy-going people living in a thick and plentiful forest, while their communities successfully defended indigenous territories from European colonization until the mid-17th century (Montoya Guzmán, 2010; Ulloa, 1992). Their neighbors, descendants of both escaped and freed slaves, are part of the culturally distinctive Afro-descendant communities of Colombia’s Pacific Coast (CCGLR, 2007; Escobar, 1995, 2008; Wade, 2009, 2016).…”