Indigenous communalizations in Patagonia in Post-genocidal Contexts (1885–1950)

Abstract

In Argentina there exists nowadays a National Register of Indigenous Communities which is, at the same time, copied by provincial registers. In order to become part of these records, the government establishes a series of requirements that each community must follow to achieve official acknowledgment. The communities are expected to fill forms, choose authorities, make a council of elders and submit a portfolio with the “history” of the community and the foundations that probe that they belong to an indigenous People. Then, Government agencies determine the validity of each request seeking to certify the accuracy of the information submitted. These agencies tend to stress, first, the legitimacy of the indigenous people based in the continuance of territorial occupation, second, the cultural practices over the territory and, finally, the ties of affiliation of the members in a historical dimension. These three issues allow the group to officially ascribe as part of a recognizable and recognized people/tribe. This process started since the constitutional reform of 1994 and many things have changed since then on. A variety of different demands have argued against homogenizing State’s policies which often act in these processes of State recognition of indigenous peoples. However, the processes of indigenous community building have always been paradoxically related to the State. This paradox reveals sometimes as a political tension, others as an opportunity for politics and some others also as obstacle or limit. On the one hand, the (national and/or provincial) State requires the cultural and social continuity of the indigenous communities when, at the same time, we can identify a century of State policies aimed at the extinction of indigenous communities and peoples. On the other hand, from the indigenous peoples’ point of view, been part of a community – as a marked population – has enabled, both, the possibility of expropriation and the denial of some rights, and at the same time, the official recognition of membership has enhanced other rights and it has become practically the only way to be acknowledged as members of an indigenous people. These essentialist requests of social and cultural continuity of the indigenous community are another dimension of the process of subaltern status construction of the indigenous peoples as an internal-other within the nation-State-territory matrix. Our aim here is to analyze different ways of understanding indigenous communalizations in relation to that process. Especially considering post-genocidal contexts in northern Patagonia between 1880–1950s. This temporal and spatial selection allows us to study the particular and complex relationships among three dimensions articulated by the concept of indigenous community in this context: first, the affiliation with a broader socio-political group (people / nation); second, the identification with certain socio-cultural life and an imagined unity; and, third, the relationship between the individual and the collective.