01 June 2009

The Global Conversation

Indigenous People Today: An Interview with José Barreiro

José Barriero, a leading expert on indigenous peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, is himself of Taino descent.

Scholar José Barreiro is director of the office for Latin America and assistant director for research at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington. Born in Cuba, he is of Taino heritage. He has spent his academic career researching indigenous peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean and is a leading expert in the field. Before joining NMAI, Barreiro was professor of Native American studies at Cornell University. Besides his many academic publications, he has been a journalist, editor and novelist.

Question: How strong are the links forged between indigenous peoples around the world?

José Barreiro: One of my most instructive experiences happened when I was a young reporter and part of a delegation that went to a meeting at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1977. I went with the Mohawk Nation delegation, for whom I worked at the time, as a reporter for the newspaper Akwesasne Notes. My wife is a Mohawk, and we lived on her reservation. It was a small conference in the U.N. context, but it was a huge conference for Indian people, to gather for the first time and meet each other. Many people came from very remote places. For the first couple of days the discourse was around the human rights problems that people were having in different countries. The unity was around what people have suffered: loss of land, problems with cultural retention, and those kinds of assaults. I remember an old chief of the Seneca, Corbett Sundown, who was trying to talk to this Mapuche elder from Chile. I speak Spanish, so I was translating, and the Mapuche elder said to him, “Why are we not talking about who we are as Indians?” Corbett’s response was to invite him to an early-morning tobacco burning — his own ceremony, a version of the Iroquois thanksgiving address. The word spread, so many other people came. It is a beautiful, comprehensive oration, an expression of appreciation for the natural world, placing the human being in the circle of creation and giving thanks to the underworld, Mother Earth, and all of creation. It says, “In thankfulness we put our minds together,” then drop tobacco on the fire, and that smoke carries the oration to all creation, to the world. The Mapuches, the Mayas, the Hopi, the Maquiritari, and the Aymara and Quechua, everybody could resonate to it. This is it, they said. This is why we are here. Our unity is really about this, because we have something similar to express.

Q: What are the shared difficulties?

Barreiro: There is the forced introduction of an alien culture and attempted destruction of indigenous cultures. The boarding schools had a “kill the Indian and save the man” mentality. [In the early-to mid-20th century in the United States, as in Canada and Australia, children of Native tribes were forcibly removed and sent to boarding schools for a Western-style education. They were forbidden to speak Native languages and, often, to see their relatives. There is a social pathology — poverty, alcoholism — worse in some places than in others, but it’s there and needs to be combated, and there is a lot of activism around it, from educators to health workers.

If modern technologies come in very forcefully, there is a definite loss of the other culture, and sometimes that’s the intent. That was the problem with the early boarding school education. It didn’t admit there was something in that child. It assumed the child was empty, and we are going to pour civilization into that brain, and create a new person. That never worked. It created a lot of social pathology. You are told everything about your people is wrong. You cannot have your people as a model. That is a serious dysfunction creation in the mind of a young person.

But where people have been relatively strong, when satellite dishes, or the car, or whatever, comes in, adaptability is a lot more to the forefront. You hunt with a rifle instead of a bow and arrow. You drive a car instead of using a horse, often without the other being completely given up. Or it becomes more of a cultural icon or symbol. If you go to the Crow tribal fair every August, you’ll see a huge number of Plains Indians, in some 1,500 tipis, with a herd of five to eight thousand horses. Parades, rodeo, pow wow. This is not for tourists, this is for the tribes. The tourist is welcome but incidental. The horse is a central feature. The arts are rich — the way they deck out those horses, the beadwork. This is true among many Indian peoples. I’ve been to high mountain tops in Guatemala where the Quiche Indians have similar things. People, when they get together in their own cultural context, want their old traditions. You see it all over the hemisphere.

Q: How did your own Taino tribe fare?

Barreiro: We had a lot of the intermarriage early on with the Spanish and the African population that came initially as slaves. There was serious population loss due to war and disease, but also centuries of relative isolation as guajiro, mountain and plains farmers. So there has been a continuity of family knowledge that is largely indigenous knowledge. That family culture, the medicinal traditions, herbology, living on the earth, identification of nature spirits — all that stayed. Today, 50 years after a socialist system, which is supposed to be completely atheistic, Cuba has more spiritual elements than anywhere in the hemisphere. It’s amazing how people have sustained these things, now in many different manifestations. This is true also of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and in terms of the Taino base, the Greater Antilles, the big islands, much less so on Jamaica and Haiti. You see it still in the fashion of country homes, agriculture, herbal medicines, prayers, many things.

Q: What are the chief issues of Latin America and the Caribbean today?

Barreiro: Economic issues are very strong generally. There has been disruption. Modernity, a lot of the new, fast and furious communications, transportation, have entered these communities. The most important disruption has been to local agriculture. I remember those Indian markets in Southern Mexico and Guatemala in the early 1970s — you could be in the most remote place in the mountains and you would run into an Indian market that was at least abundant in local food. The people could eat.

Most of the time, indigenous communities have a deeper attachment to place. Once depredation of forest and letting go of local food production begins to happen, people begin to migrate. There are no jobs. Somebody comes in with the idea if you plant asparagus here for the market in the United States, Europe, or whatever, that’s going to make you the money, and people can work as rural workers. But the process destroys local production of food that people actually eat. It creates a product that is only sold outside of where those people live. The people cannot afford to buy the canned food from the outside. Those Indians coming north from Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras are village Indians, people who would not leave their areas except for dire economic conditions. That’s a little bit of a simplification, but by and large when you still have strong local agriculture, the traditional culture is strong, the marriages last longer, the children come up without the pathologies attending the poverty, and you have a better life. From there people can be educated to be whatever they can be, but still the bulk of folks will do something successful on the land. The dream of the land is still strong. And that’s the dream of being able to make a life from direct interaction with the land. In a way, it’s what defines primitive. Primitive is used as a denigrating adjective, but all it really means is people have a primary relationship with the land. They know the difference between this tree and that tree. Each has its own purpose. There is a level of knowledge of ecology and local geography that creates a successful life. That’s what traditional culture created, a successful life. That’s how it’s remembered.

Q: Indigenous people have a spiritual connection to the land, which is a different perspective from the Western view, isn’t it?

Barreiro: There is a worldview difference, and there are two central elements to it. One is that everything in this world has spiritual resonance, even those things we consider to be dead, inanimate, or even manufactured. The earth itself is alive. This is the source of life. Everything in this earth has a communicative spirit that can be dormant or awakened. So that is a transcendent principle of indigenous philosophy.

The second is that everything in this world needs to be appreciated, whether it’s the moon, a little bug, or a tree. Of course, it’s true for human beings as well, so if you look at the ceremonial traditions, it’s all about that. It’s all about giving thanks, appreciation. And in appreciation there is reciprocity. Reciprocity is the basis of respect. You give, you take. A gift begets a gift. Respect begets respect. And the reciprocity is extended not only to other human beings, but is extended to these other elements of the world that sustain our lives, what Mother Earth gives us as a gift. We work with her. The sun helps. The rain helps. And mother earth provides for her children.

Q: The tribal community has a deep bond, doesn’t it?

Barreiro: Indigenous people are always looking for “where do you fit?” Individuals do not exist, really. We are social animals; we are spiritual, connected co-communities. So that element is central. That is why businesses often have a tough time on reservations. Cousin Joe starts a gas station, but he has a lot of poor relatives, and he can’t refuse them a tank of gas, so the business goes bankrupt. It’s a true story oft repeated. But if you give away today, two weeks later the cousin comes back, was lucky hunting and you get a side of deer. When it’s working properly, that reciprocity is always part of the equation. And you always learn something. There is always the person who takes advantage as well, but they get a reputation for being that way.

Q: Do institutions such as the museum, and other organizations, promote effective dialogue and partnerships?

Barreiro: There being here at the Smithsonian, NMAI, a museum germinated and guided by Indian people, means a lot to indigenous people across the hemisphere. They like it that there is an Indian museum here in the middle of the Mall, 400 yards from the U.S. Congress. There is a lot of strength in an institution like this. There is an element of our culture and identity that can supplant the problematic things that get in the way of real discourse. Perhaps we are entering into an era for the country and for the world that after so much conflict and hatred there can be a way of helping that out, in the indigenous traditions of pact making, of peacemaking.

I do believe that if we find the proper basis in which to establish this dialogue, it has the capacity to be a central, core dialogue in the world. It’s not just America, there are indigenous people around the world, and very ancient cultures that retained strong pieces of their own indigeneity as it came through their own civilizational pattern. They are like the elders of the human family. Those guys on Wall Street, they aren’t the elders. They are kids and they are driven by very tunnel-vision activity. There is more to life than that. I know it because I have walked into some extremely poor places in the middle of nowhere, a hut with an old woman or old man in there that can impress you for what they know and their level of intelligence and human capacity. Those are also true teachers. I know they are my teachers. And there are people like that who are also professors — it’s not like education knocks that out of you. I think, ultimately, it’s the discourse that we are driving at.

In the creation of this museum, there was a process of partnership-building. In 30-some years’ process, in the United Nations and nationally, the most valuable thing for Native people has been the networking — these very remote communities sending out two or three people to New York or to Geneva or Washington. And in the course of that they meet human rights lawyers. They meet foundation people, they meet each other — environmental and human rights activists, people with sound business ideas, educational organizations — and out of that work has surfaced a tremendous energy of partnership. The partnership of the American public, itself, has been very important. The tribes would not have survived without the strong sector of the American public that kept having sympathy for what happened and some intelligence around it. Today, there is a whole range of potential and active partners. We hope the museum can be a crossroads of global discussion and Native discourse. Indian people need it, and the world needs it even more.

Mr. Barreiro was interviewed by Lea Terhune, managing editor for this eJournal USA.

The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.