NATIVE POLICY.

Before Europeans from a variety of countries began arriving on the shores of the two continents of the western hemisphere in the late fifteenth century, there were no "Indians." At that point in time, millions of human beings, members of hundreds of distinctive societies speaking mutually unintelligible languages, inhabited the lands between Alaskaand Patagonia. The category of person called "Indian" resulted from the imposition of colonial rule by Spain, Portugal, France, England, and Holland upon the diverse societies the Europeans encountered on these two continents. Following European colonialism, the creation of independent republics in what came to be known, by another misnomer, as "the Americas" was also marked by dynamic relations between states controlled by elites of European descent and the peoples called Indians. First colonial regimes and then independent nation-states in Latin America and in North America have been concerned with the classification and regulation of who is Indian and what constitutes "Indianness." We can call the operationalization of these systems of classification "Indian policy."

Such a perspective, of course, is necessarily also a historical phenomenon itself. Historians and anthropologists have alternately ignored or obsessed over the indigenous peoples of the Americas that by convention are still called "Indians," and have gone from understanding Indianness as an identity entirely tangential to the histories of nation-states, to the contemporary approach described above, in which Indianness and state policy are intertwined. Thus, at the same time that we review contemporary anthropological approaches to understanding Indian policy, we must simultaneously reflect upon those perspectives as substantially different from pre-1970 anthropological understandings of Indianness. This entry will discuss how Indian policy has developed in colonial and post-colonial nation-states of Latin America, and compare the evolution of Indian policy in Latin America as a whole with its evolution in the United States, acknowledging that this comparison increasingly parallels the pan-hemispheric struggles of indigenous peoples who themselves are engaging in such comparisons. Finally, describing indigenous struggles within and against the nation-states of the Americas in the twentieth century prefigures where those controversies are headed in the twenty-first.

Anthropology's Changes

Up until the 1970s, most anthropologists approached Indian communities as discrete cultural units (a classic example would be Redfield and Villa Rojas), and were particularly fascinated by and drawn to those aspects of cultural practice and belief that appeared least influenced, distorted, or destroyed by European colonialism. Anthropologists were spellbound by the mystique of pristine, if not always primitive, Indian cultures—the more isolated and removed from the mainstream of nation-states, the better. Even attempts to move anthropology beyond an obsessive focus upon an "Other" that contrasted with "the West" did not necessarily conceptually reconnect Indians to the world system to which they had historically been joined since the fifteenth century. For example, Eric Wolf's early taxonomy of peasantries, and much subsequent ethnography of Indian communities as peasant communities, also characterized such communities as discrete and bounded units, albeit in a different analytic light.

A major breakthrough was achieved by June Nash in her study of Bolivian tin miners, who in her work appeared clearly as simultaneously members of the industrial working class and as Indians. Nash elaborated an analysis that did not downplay the distinctively Indian religious and cultural practices of the miners, their complex political ideological relationship with the Bolivian state, or their emplacement within the capitalist world system. After Nash, it became possible to study Indian communities not only as part of global economic and political systems, but also as part of Latin American nation-states. Describing the policies that such nation-states were developing in response to Indian communities was a logical next step in anthropological work.

Perspectives on Colonialism and Postindependence Latin America

In the 1980s and 1990s, historians and anthropologists alike elaborated new analyses of the colonial and early independence eras in Latin America. These analyses made clear that from the beginning of the Spanish colonial era, ruling elites legislated and implemented policies for governing Indians that consigned them to an exploited, subaltern class position, and distinguished Indians from the non-Indian population. Many scholars also emphasized that the peoples who became known as Indians were not simply passive recipients of the brutalities colonial conquest wreaked upon them. Such scholars portrayed Indian peoples as dynamically responsive to the national and global political and economic systems. This latter point is still controversial, and Orin Starn has shown that well into the 1990s many anthropologists working in the Andes remained wedded to views of Indians that emphasized their cultural discreteness and isolation from nationalist ideologies and identities.

While the conquest indeed precipitated a demographic collapse among all indigenous groups, caused by massacres, enslavement, and pernicious epidemics, many Indian peoples survived through their own efforts. Acknowledging Indians as active makers of their own destinies draws attention to the key differences in how different Indian peoples negotiated the policies imposed upon them by colonial authorities. In the urban centers of the old indigenous empires in Mesoamerica and the Andes, colonial authorities were eager to utilize the labor afforded by their domination of Indian societies, while using the markers of Indian identity to signify subaltern status. These regimes wanted to diminish distinctive Indian identities by converting Indian peoples to Christianity, eliminating their native languages, and controlling Indian lands and resources. Yet they also wanted to maintain a large mass of servile, exploitable laborers. The dual motivations behind colonial Indian policy likely made it possible for Indian communities and leaders to at least partly subvert the intentions of colonial regimes.

Roger Rasnake elaborates the creation of postcolonial Indian authorities and social systems in the regions that became Bolivia, showing that Indians were able to manipulate state policies to achieve forms of local political and cultural autonomy. In colonial Mexico, Claudio Lomnitz-Adler has shown that the semiautonomous communities referred to as the "Indian Republics" of the eighteenth century ultimately "meant that the Spanish system recognized the existence of two nations with political representation within the Spanish state" (p. 267). In the collection edited by Carol Smith, authors writing about colonial Guatemala agree to a certain extent, arguing that the segregationist policies of the Spanish colonial state helped to establish strong Indian communities. In another quite different region, Joanne Rappaport's work in the Cauca region of colonial Colombia shows that Indian communities subverted the Spanish resguardo institution, intended to concentrate and manage the supply of coerced Indian labor to the Spaniards' haciendas (plantations), resulting in the creation of regions of refuge for Indian communities.

Florencia Mallon, a historian, established similar dynamics in the early independence period in both Mexico and Peru, emphasizing the dynamic role of Indian and non-Indian peasants in the making of those two nation-states. By contrast, Smith argues that successive nineteenth-century state forms built the Guatemalan nation around Indian policies that decisively excluded Indians from national identity, even as Guatemala's economy was increasingly developed and incorporated into the global economy. In other countries, nineteenth-century Indian policy aimed to continue, in effect, the work of the conquest by ultimately eliminating Indian ethnic identities. This process of assimilating Indian peoples in Latin America through biological miscegenation and the suppression of sociocultural distinctiveness, which Les Field has elaborated in Nicaragua, has for centuries been called mestizaje.

Indian Policies of the Twentieth-Century Nation-States

Shifts in the ways that anthropologists have been analyzing contemporary state policies toward native peoples in Latin America are highlighted in two important anthologies published since the early 1990s. In Joel Sherzer and Greg Urban's collection Nation-States and Indians in Latin America (1991), contributors elaborated a galaxy of distinctive Indian identity formations, within the context of national identities. As in colonial times, these national identities have in the main excluded indigenous peoples from full citizenship as Indians, but instead utilized state policy to culturally assimilate Indian peoples to thereby gain full control over Indian lands and resources. In this collection, authors document how Indian identities have resisted state-sponsored assimilation, but also experienced marked transformations of the cultural traits, practices, languages, and symbols that demarcate Indianness.

Twelve years later, the publication of Kay Warren and Jean Jackson's Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America (2002) crystallizes the changes among Indian peoples in the interim, as well as the new anthropological responses to current conditions. Contributors in this collection have documented the importance of indigenous political movements as they marshal Indian cultural identities toward the twin goals of auto-representation (for local, national, and global audiences) and reordering the place of Indians in nation-states. The second goal signifies no less than the wholesale reconceptualization of national identities in Latin America, at the formal level of constitutions, political parties, laws, and leadership, as well as at the popular level. This anthology demonstrates anthropologists' commitment to even closer analysis of state policies and their multifarious effects upon Indian peoples.

Two other ethnographies demonstrate the vast differences evolving in state policy toward Indians in Latin America. In Charles Hale's exploration of "contradictory consciousness" among the Miskitu of the Nicaraguan Atlantic coast, an Indian identity coalesced around opposition to the integrationist policies of the revolutionary Sandinista state. Even though this opposition became the banner for a florescence of Miskitu language and culture, it was allied to the United States' war against the Sandinistas. By contrast, left-wing coalition politics in the Juchitán region of Oaxaca, Mexico, described by Howard Campbell, created the local political conditions for both opposition to the federal Mexican state and the opportunity for Zapotec cultural renaissance. In these ethnographies, it is clear that state policies are having unpredictable effects upon and interactions with Indian peoples and cultures.

Comparisons with Indian Policy in the United States

Comparing the history of Indian policy in Latin America versus that history in the United States is instructive, particularly with respect to the issue of cultural assimilation of Indian peoples through mestizaje. Mestizaje as an intrinsic part of Latin American state policy profoundly departs from Indian policies in the United States, as elucidated by Les Field and Circe Sturm. In North America, treaty-making between indigenous peoples that began with the British colonial regime and continued under successive U.S. administrations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ultimately created a category of officially acknowledged Indian people, the "federally recognized Indian tribe."

While the federal government has since the 1880s on at least three occasions attempted to disengage from the premise of federal recognition, which more or less accepts the indefinite existence of Indian peoples, these attempts have so far failed to put an end to this officialized status. Federally recognized tribes hold onto a sharply circumscribed, but nevertheless always potentially valuable, set of properties, that is, Indian reservations; furthermore, recognized tribes are authorized to make claims upon various parts of the U.S. federal bureaucracy. Indians who do not live on reservations but are members of recognized tribes can return to their designated reservations and make claims to resources. Even in urban areas, Indians from federally recognized tribes still maintain access to certain federally funded services, such as health and education. These resources are substandard in the estimation of Indians and non-Indians alike, and in no way compensate for the loss of immense territories, not to mention economic and political liberty. For this reason, Indian identities in the United States are closely policed by both federal and tribal authorities; tribal membership is substantiated via genealogy, or blood quantum, and the policies of both the tribes (acting as semiautonomous internal state forms) and the federal bureaucracy are obsessed with counting Indians and allocating resources.

Compared with the United States, state policy in Latin America is much less concerned with policing Indian identities for three reasons. First, whatever rights accrue to being Indian in Latin America are minimal, and wherever such rights exist, they depend upon residence in demarcated Indian communities. Second, popular genealogical theories in Latin America, that is, theories of "blood," encourage mestizaje as a means toward social mobility, rather than serving as legitimation for Indian identities as in the United States. Finally, nationalist ideologies in Latin America profoundly stigmatize Indianness, associating it with poverty, ignorance, backwardness, and powerlessness. In the last regard, nationalism in the United States, and state policy over the last two centuries, do concur with state policies in Latin America. Yet without the history of treaties, reservations, and federal recognition that exists in the United States, which with all of its problems still provides a basis for both establishing and maintaining Indian identities, Latin American mestizaje has acted as a powerful ideological force aiding and abetting state policies aimed at disenfranchising and disarticulating Indian societies and cultures. Indeed, the struggles of indigenous movements to reconfigure nation-states in Latin America discussed above are aimed precisely at creating political and economic structures that will support the survival of Indian peoples into the future.

The Anti-Quincentennial

The year 1992 marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus's fateful voyage that initiated the destruction of indigenous civilizations and the rise of nation-states dominated by elites of European descent. Pan-hemispheric organizing among Indian peoples mixed resistance to the plans by many countries in both North and Latin America to treat the anniversary as a cause for celebration, as well as an opportunity to express demands for profound changes in the relationship between Indian and national identities. Ecuador's indigenous confederation, CONAIE, which brings together diverse peoples from the Pacific coastal region, the Andean region, and the Amazon, formulated its demands during a series of uprisings in 1990, 1992, and 1994 (for a full description of the formation and politics of CONAIE, see CONAIE). CONAIE leaders called for a new kind of nation-state—el estado plurinacional —in which Indian identities would become by definition central to the nation, and for state policies explicitly intended to build the economic infrastructure for technologically advanced and politically autonomous Indian communities.

Such demands are mirrored in the post-1992 pan-Mayan movement in Guatemala described by Kay Warren. Similarly, since the beginning of Mexico's Zapatista uprising in 1994, many anthropologists have been concerned to show this movement as both indigenous and national in scope. The economic and political goals enunciated by these indigenous movements in some ways resembled but in other ways markedly diverged from the objectives of the Latin American left in the 1990s. The differences manifested in anthropological analyses as well, with some anthropologists deciding to act as advocates for Indian movements, while others critiqued the Indian movements from Marxist or neo-Marxist perspectives (see, for example, the critical analysis in Alcida Rita Ramos's Indigenism [1998]). One area of future anthropological research will likely focus upon what happens when Indian movements in Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere achieve even some of their political and economic goals. Will finding a political and economic place in reconfigured Latin American nation-states exacerbate class differentiation and inequalities within and among Indian communities? How will new state policies affect such outcomes?

Indianness, National Policy, and Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

Anthropologists sometimes exaggerate and sometimes underestimate the importance of their work and their ideas to "the real world"—the world of governments and families, health and disease, happiness and despair. But in the case of Indian policy, anthropological knowledge has buttressed and often been the accomplice to national "regimes of truth" about Indian peoples. In the United States, an "official anthropology" funded and sponsored by the federal government has been a historic partner to state Indian policy. In Latin America, such an official anthropology has generally not had the same effects historically, with the exception of Brazil and Mexico. However, the rise of indigenous movements demanding control over lands and resources will likely oblige Latin American governments to act as "gatekeepers" and to utilize anthropological knowledge much more in order to ascertain and legitimize Indian identities in the twenty-first century. Anthropological knowledge in this century will therefore be simultaneously yoked to forging new state–Indian relations and new kinds of Indian policies, while also being engaged in reflective and critical analysis of these new relationships. These often contradictory roles will unfold in both North and Latin America.

See also Anthropology ; Colonialism ; Empire and Imperialism ; Indigenismo ; Mestizaje ; World Systems Theory, Latin America .

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Les W. Field