I thought I would start my final reflection by returning to my first introduction blog post for this class. Here are some things I wrote back in January:

• “I am excited to learn about indigenous peoples of Latin America in relation to concepts like sovereignty, political systems, and governance.”
• “I am also looking forward to analyzing the means of communication and literature that we will be examining, and how different modes of transmitting stories, history, and information can themselves carry certain values and biases.”

The second bullet point here was definitely something I learned a lot about this term. One thing that I didn’t realize going into this class was that so many important texts about Indigenous peoples in Latin America have such complicated relationships surrounding voice, authorship, language, and legitimacy. While I figured we would discuss these topics, I didn’t anticipate how important they would be in analyzing every text we read. Looking back, it makes a lot of sense: all of the texts we read were written on paper, and in English, which necessitates some kind of intermediary process. One significant thing I learned in relation to how communication types can carry values and biases was about how people and texts are so intertwined. When I wrote that question originally, I was thinking about oral storytelling compared to writing, or videos and poetry, that kind of thing. What I wasn’t necessarily thinking about was how certain groups of people have stronger ties to some of these modes than others. Our most recent text illustrated this point, with all of Kopenawa’s discussions of white people writing on paper skins, and the permanency of the written word compared to the dynamic nature of oral communication.

The first bullet point is also something I learned a lot about, but in a very different way than I expected. One thing we talked a lot about in this class that I appreciated was how studying Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples in the context of colonization is very different from looking at Indigenous peoples in their own right, rather than in a comparison. As an International Relations student, I think I was thinking about Indigenous peoples in a very colonial context when I wrote that. Sovereignty and political systems are all concepts that often tie back to colonization, and are primarily used to frame Indigenous ways of governing and maintaining community through a lens of how it is done in Western systems. While we did talk about legal elements somewhat in the novels that discussed stealing land, like Yawar Fiesta or Guaman Poma’s text, we also discussed how this framing is itself problematic in some ways. For example, Guamon Poma’s legal framing kind of required him to speak in a narrative that was similar to what you would expect from a colonizer.