Introduction: Interpreting the Past

In Losfunerales de la Mamá Grande, Gabriel Garcia Márquez declares that he must tell his story "before the historians have time to arrive." But in reality, the historians arrived long ago, and the novelist is righting the wrongs of Colombian historiography by giving life and breath to long-forgotten incidents which should have been at the center of the Colombian historical consciousness, but were omitted by historians. Throughout the Americas indigenous peoples are working toward these same ends, revalidating their own historical knowledge as an arm against their subordinate position in society. For them, history is a source of knowledge of how they were first subjugated and of information about their legal rights, the beginnings of a new definition of themselves as a people, a model upon which to base new national structures (Barre 1983). For them as for Garcia Márquez, Western historiography has severed the Indians from their past by neglecting to mention them except as exotic beings or as savages. Western historiography thus justifies the European invasion. Nevertheless, from the perspective of aboriginal peoples, the writings of historians are more legendary than accurate (Wankar 1981: 297-81). European myths of the Americas have served as tools for dominating Native Americans by denying them access to a knowledge of their own past so necessary for organizing in the present. In the words of one native writer: "The whites block our road toward the future by blocking our road to the past" (Wankar 1981: 279).

This book will trace the process by which the Nasa of southern highland Colombia have revalidated their historical vision since the eighteenth century by defining, stating, reformulating and acting upon their own notion of their place in the historical process. I will examine their process of historical definition, highlighting selected periods in which native historians elaborated on their past in a form accessible to us, and tracing the continuities in narrative themes that link late-twentieth-century storytellers to their colonial counterparts.

Although Nasa narrative exhibits a clear continuity from past to present, it is also the product of the historical conditions under which it was elaborated. The historical consciousness of the people of Tierradentro is most clearly understood when interpreted in conjunction with an analysis of the changing relationship of the aboriginal population to the State, both the Spanish colonial state and the modern Colombian nation. Since the advent of European rule Nasa political action has always aimed at defining and empowering the group in relation to the dominant society. Nasa history incorporates the memory of the various junctures at which the community confronted the Crown and the State. Nevertheless, neither whites nor the State are the center of these historical narrations. Instead, the Nasa historical vision dwells upon indigenous activities in the past, documenting the successes and failures they have encountered in their struggle to maintain themselves as a people. History is a double-edged sword for the Nasa. The eighteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts available to us are written: thus, they were originally aimed at literate non-Indian audiences or at future generations of literate Indians, employing literary conventions to convey indigenous principles as well as to empower the community. Nevertheless, much of their argumentation uses Nasa images, making allusions to topographic sites and mythological occurrences which would only be understood by other Indians. Moreover, they are not organized chronologically. Thus, in a sense, the examples we have of Nasa interpretations of the past are, like their Peruvian counterparts, "chronicles of the impossible," indigenous attempts at integrating their own brand of historical and cosmological thought within Western-style discourse, both of which are effaced in the process because they contradict each other (Salomon 1982).

THE NASA

The Nasa live on the slopes of Colombia's Central Cordillera in the northeastern corner of the department of Cauca (Maps 1, 2, 3). Linked to the Colombian nation by commerce, transportation, technology, wage labor, religion and political process, as well as by a common historical experience, their everyday lives are also charged with a history of their own. The villages that dot the landscape (Plate 1), connected until recently by bridle paths and today by roads in varying states of disrepair, were established in the seventeenth century by Spanish authorities who hoped thereby to control the Indians as a source of labor and of tribute; the communities themselves only came into existence when the Nasa were forced to ascend the Cordillera, after having been uprooted from the warmer valleys to the east around La Plata, and after the Spaniards founded new villages following the depopulation of conquest. The 200,000 people who today identify themselves as Nasa do not live in these villages, but in dispersed homesteads in the high mountains, and visit town centers only infrequently to attend festivals or on their way to the regional market centers of Silvia or Belalcazar (Plate 2).

Most Nasa are members of resguardos, political and territorial units that communally own lands granted them by the Crown in the eighteenth century; individuals enjoy usufruct rights to parcels, and cannot sell their lands to outsiders. Although the Indians trace a connection between modern-day resguardos and their colonial forebears, in reality the institution has changed considerably in the past 300 years. The resguardo's land base was diminished with the expansion of great estates in die nineteenth century, it now includes colonization zones settled by mestizos and is smaller and weaker than its eighteenth-century progenitor as a result of post-Independence legislation that changed councils, or cabildos, from being independent political audiorities into intermediaries between communities and the State (Plate 3).

The Nasa cultivate coca and manioc, maize or potatoes, depending upon the elevation at which they live, ranging from 1,000 to 3,500 meters above sea level. But cash crops have also been introduced, including coffee at the turn of the century and hemp since the 1970s, and coca cultivation has diminished as a result of Colombia's anti-cocaine policy. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a substantial...