COMMON WISDOM HOLDS THAT NATIVE American cultures are relics of the past, destined to survive only as museum pieces. Underlying this unfortu- nate meeting point of many on the Left and Right is the belief that Indians are bound to abandon their ethnicity as modernity spreads its tentacles into the outer reaches of the Western world, eradicating the rural, the peasant, the illiterate. This report-the third in our series marking the five- hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Columbus-reveals the error of these assumptions. Indigenous peoples have not been assimilated nor have they died out. Nearly forty million are alive today, by most estimates significantly more than in 1492. They constitute clear majorities in Guatemala and Bolivia, close to half the population in Peru and Ecuador, and large minorities in Mexico, El Salvador and elsewhere. Native peoples are hardly passive. In 1990, a nation- wide indigenous uprising paralyzed Ecuador. That same year in Canada, Indian activists blocked a constitutional accord and used armed confrontation and civil disobedi- ence to thrust their demands into the center of national debate. In Bolivia, Aymara militants turned the "official" peasant movement into the vanguard of Indian activism. In Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia and Brazil, indig- enous organizations have grown increasingly influential. Hardly irrelevant to modern life, these movements may be articulating the political struggles of the future. Like the economy that buffets us all, Indian movements are bound neither by national boundaries nor even the notion of nation-states. Mixtec Indians from Mexico working in this country struggle simultaneously for work- ers' rights here and economic development at home. A multi-national coalition of Amazonian Indians bypasses national governments to take their concerns directly to the World Bank, the IMF and the United States. A NY DISCUSSION OF INDIAN MOVEMENTS must take up the age-old debate over the relative importance of ethnicity and class as the basis for identity and political organizing-that is, whether indigenous struggle should be viewed as part of a broader class struggle, or as a culturally-defined national liberation movement. The tension between "peasant/proletarian" and "Indianist" tendencies has threatened to tear many Indian organizations apart. Beyond the evident implica- tions for alliances with non-Indians, the entire question raises an issue pending since the Conquest: to what extent should Indians participate, if at all, in "national" life? In this regard, indigenous movements are grappling with a central question faced by "modem" society every- where: If we are to have democratic, multi-ethnic and multi-class societies, what sort of social and political organization can ensure equality and mutual respect? The answers they propose eschew both the separatist nation- alism now ascendant in Europe, and the seizure of state power that until recently inspired Latin America's revo- lutionaries. In Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, indigenous lead- ers have found ways to make ethnic identity a rallying cry for class demands, rather than an obfuscator of class interests. Quite organically, this latter movement has embraced the concept of autonomy, not as a step toward breaking away, but in order to delineate an alternative vision for the entire country. EVERAL OF OUR AUTHORS ARGUE THAT the influence of the Left, which has traditionally favored"class" over"ethnicity," has limited Indian move- ments, subverted their agenda, even exposed them unnec- essarily to state repression. Liberals who view Indian culture as an obstacle to entrepreneurial individualism and Marxists who see it as an impediment to class con- sciousness have often tried harder to assimilate native peoples than conservatives who simply ignore it. The cases of Guatemala, Bolivia and Nicaragua are particu- larly poignant. Indigenous peoples place culture at the center of politi- cal struggle, not as an end in itself, and not only as a refuge from oppression; they see culture as the vehicle by which economic and political self-determination can be achieved. As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui puts it, Indian movements link "the struggle for liberation to the defense of a sym- bolic order, a cultural world-view expressed in ancient rituals and customs." In several countries, for example, Indians seek to revive traditional forms of communal landholding and labor as a new basis for economic devel- opment. Paradoxically, visions of an alternative society rooted in the pre-Columbian past may prove more appropriate today than the nineteenth-century notions of statehood and modernity which still mesmerize most of us. As expressed in the Andean concept nayrapacha, the ancient past may be our best bet for redeeming the future.
