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The Barbados Declaration
Regarding Missions Read Down
This Declaration Was Made In 1971
Imagine What Has Been Lost Since Then!
And NOBODY Is
Listening!
Declaration of Barbados
Barbados 30 January 1971
World Council of Churches
Programme to Combat Racism PCR 1/71 (E)
The Barbados Symposium was sponsored
jointly by the Programme to Combat Racism and the Churches Commission
on International Affairs of the World Council of Churches, together
with the Ethnology Department of the University of Berne (Switzerland).
The views expressed are those of the members of the Symposium,
and not necessarily those of the co-sponsors of the Symposium.
For the Liberation of the Indians
The anthropologists participating in
the Symposium on Inter-Ethnic Conflict in South America, meeting
in Barbados, January 25-30 1971, after analysing the formal
reports of the tribal populations' situation in several countries,
drafted and agreed to make public the following statement. In
this manner, we hope to define and clarify this critical problem
of the American continent and to contribute to the Indian struggle
for liberation.
The Indians of America remain dominated
by a colonial situation which originated with the conquest and
which persists today within many Latin American nations. The
result of this colonial structure is that lands inhabited by
Indians are |judged to be free and unoccupied territory open
to conquest and colonization. Colonial domination of the aboriginal
groups, however, is only a reflection of the more generalised
system of the Latin American states' external dependence upon
the imperialist metropolitan powers. The internal order of our
dependent countries leads them to act as colonising powers in
their relations with the indigenous peoples. This places the
several nations in the dual role of the exploited and the exploiters,
and this in turn projects not only a false image of Indian society
and its historical development, but also a distorted vision
of what constitutes the present national society.
We have seen that this situation manifests
itself in repeated acts of aggression directed against the aboriginal
groups and cultures. There occur both active interventions to
"protect" Indian society as well as massacres and forced migrations
from the homelands. These acts and policies are not unknown
to the armed forces and other governmental agencies in several
countries. Even the official "Indian policies" of the Latin-American
states are explicitly directed towards the destruction of aboriginal
culture. These policies are employed to manipulate and control
Indian populations in order to consolidate the status of existing
social groups and classes, and only diminish the possibility
that Indian society may free itself from colonial domination
and settle its own future.
As a consequence, we feel the several
States, the religious missions and social scientists, primarily
anthropologists, must assume the unavoidable responsibilities
for immediate action to halt this aggression and contribute
significantly to the process of Indian liberation.
The Responsibility of the State
Irrelevant are those Indian policy proposals
that do not seek a radical break with the existing social situation;
namely, the termination of colonial relationships, internal
and external; breaking down of the class system of human exploitation
and ethnic domination; a displacement of economic and political
power from a limited group or an oligarchic minority to the
popular majority; the creations of a truly multi-ethnic state
in which each ethnic group possesses the right to self-determination
and the free selection of available social and cultural alternatives.
Our analysis of the Indian policy of
the several Latin American nation states reveals a common failure
of this policy by its omissions and by its actions. The several
states avoid granting protection to the Indian groups' rights
to land and to be left alone, and fail to apply the law strictly
with regard to areas of national expansion. Similarly, the state'
sanction policies which have been and continue to be colonial
and class oriented.
This failure implicates the State in
direct responsibility for and connivance with the many crimes
of genocide and ethnocide that we have been able to verify.
These crimes tend to be repeated and responsibility must rest
with the State which remains reluctant to take the following
essential measures:
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1. guaranteeing to all the Indian
populations by virtue of their ethnic distinction, the
right to be and to remain themselves, living according
to their own customs and moral order free to develop
their own culture;
2. recognition that Indian groups
possess rights prior to those of other national constituencies.
The State must recognise and guarantee each Indian society's
territory in land, legalising it as perpetual, inalienable
collective property, sufficiently extensive to provide
for population growth;
3. sanctioning of Indian groups'
right to organize and to govern in accordance with their
own traditions. Such a policy would not exclude members
of Indian society from exercising full citizenship,
but would in turn exempt them from compliance with those
obligations that jeopardise their cultural integrity.
4. extending to Indian society
the same economic, so economic, social, educational
and health assistance as the rest of the national population
receives. Moreover, the State has an obligation to attend
to those many deficiencies and needs that stem from
Indians' submission of the colonial situation. Above
all the State must impede their further exploitation
by other sectors of the national society, including
the official agents of their protection.
5. establishing contacts with
still isolated tribal gro-ups is the States' responsibility,
given the dangers - biological, social and ecological
- that their first contact with agents of the national
society represents.
6. protection from the crimes
and outrages not always the direct responsibility of
civil or military personnel, intrinsic to the expansion
process of the national frontier.
7. definition of the national
public authority responsible for relations with Indian
groups inhabiting its territory; this obligation cannot
be transferred or delegated at any time or under any
circumstances.
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Responsibility of the Religious Missions
Evangelisation, the work of the religious
missions in Latin America also reflects and complements the
reigning colonial situation with the values of which it is imbued.
The missionary presence has always implied the imposition of
criteria and patterns of thought and behaviour alien to the
colonised Indian societies. A religious pretext has too often
justified the economic and human exploitation of the aboriginal
population.
The inherent ethnocentric aspect of the
evangelization process is also a component of the colonialist
ideology and is based on the following characteristics:
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1. its essentially discriminatory
nature implicit in the hostile relationship to Indian
culture conceived as pagan and heretical;
2. its vicarial aspect, implying
the reidentification of the Indian and his consequent
submission in exchange for future supernatural compensations;
3. its spurious quality given
the common situation of missionaries seeking only some
form of personal salvation, material or spiritual;
4. the fact that the missions
have become a great land and labour enterprise, in conjunction
with the dominant imperial interests.
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As a result of this analysis we conclude
that the suspension of all missionary activity is the most appropriate
policy on behalf of both Indian society as well as the moral
integrity of the churches involved. Until this objective can
be realized the missions must support and contribute to Indian
liberation in the following manner:
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1. overcome the intrinsic Herodianism
of the evangelical process, itself a mechanism of colonialisation,
Europeanisation and alienation of Indian society;
2. assume a position of true
respect for Indian culture, ending the long and shameful
history of despotism and intolerance characteristic
of missionary work, which rarely manifests sensitivity
to aboriginal religious sentiments and values;
3. halt both the theft of Indian
property by religious missionaries who appropriate labour,
lands and natural resources as their own, and the indifference
in the face of Indian expropriation by third parties;
4. extinguish the sumptuous and
lavish spirit of the missions themselves, expressed
in various forms but all too often based on exploitation
of Indian labour.
5. stop the competition among
religious groups and confessions for Indian souls -
a common occurence leading to the buying and selling
of believers and internal strife provoked by conflicting
religious loyalties;
6. suppress the secular practice
of removing Indian children from their families for
long periods in boarding schools where they are imbued
with values not their own, converting them in this way
into marginal individuals, incapable of living either
in the larger national society or their native communities;
7. break with the pseudo-moralist
isolation which imposes a false puritanical ethic, incapacitating
the Indian for coping with the national society - an
ethic which the churches have been unable to impose
on that same national society;
8. abandon those blackmail procedures
implicit in the offering of goods and services to Indian
society in return for total submission;
9. suspend immediately all practices
of population displacement or concentration in order
to evangelize and assimilate more effectively, a process
that often provokes an increase in morbidity, mortality
and family disorganization among Indian communities;
10. and the criminal practice
of serving as intermediaries for the exploitation of
Indian labour.
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To the degree that the religious missions
do not assume these minimal obligations they, too, must be held
responsible by default for crimes of ethnocide and connivance
with genocide.
Finally, we recognize that, recently,
dissident elements within the churches are engaging in a conscious
and radical self-evaluation of the evangelical process. The
denunciation of the historical failure of the missionary task
is now a common conclusion of such critical analyses.
The Responsibility of Anthropology
Anthropology took form within and became
an instrument of colonial domination, openly or surreptitiously;
it has often rationalized and justified in scientific language
the domination of some people by others. The discipline has
continued to supply information and methods of action useful
for maintaining, reaffirming and disguising social relations
of a colonial nature. Latin America has been and is no exception,
and with growing frequency we note nefarious Indian action programmes
and the dissemination of stereotypes and myths distorting and
masking the Indian situation - all pretending to have their
basis in alleged scientific anthropological research.
A false awareness of this situation has
led many anthropologists to adopt equivocal positions. These
night be classed in the following types:
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1. a scientism which negates
any relationship between academic research and the future
of those peoples who form the object of such investigation,
thus eschewing political responsibility which the relation
contains and implies;
2. an hypocrisy manifest in the
rhetorical protestation based on first principles which
skilfully avoids any commitment in a concrete situation:
3. an opportunism that although
it may recognize the present painful situation of the
Indian at the same time rejects any possibility of transform
ing action by proposing the need "to do something" within
the established order. This latter position, of course
only reaffirms and continues the system.
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The anthropology now required in Latin
America is-not that which relates to Indians as objects of study,
but rather that which perceives the colonial situation and commits
itself to the struggle for liberation. In this context we see
anthropology providing on the one hand, the colonized peoples
those data and interpretations both about themselves and their
colonizers useful for their own fight for freedom and on the
other hand, a redefinition of the distorted image of Indian
communities extant in the national society, thereby unmasking
its colonial nature with its supportive ideology.
In order to realise the above objectives,
anthropologists have an obligation to take advantage of all
junctures within the present order to take action on behalf
of the Indian communities. Anthropologists must denounce systematically
by any and all means cases of genocide and those practices conducive
to ethnocide. At the same time, it is imperative to generate
new concepts and explanatory categories from the local and national
social reality in order to overcome the subordinate situation
of the anthropologist regarded as the mere "verifier" of alien
theories.
The Indian an as an Agent of his own
Destiny
That Indians organize and lead their
own liberation movement is essential,\ or it ceases to be liberating.
When, non-Indians pretend to represent In- . Indians, even on
occasion assuming the leadership of the latter's groups, a new
colonial situation is established. This is yet another expropriation
of the Indian populations' inalienable right to determine their
future.
Within this perspective, it is important
to emphasise in all its historical significance, the growing
ethnic consciousness observable at present among Indian societies
throughout the continent. More peoples are assuming direct control
over their defence against the ethnocidal and genocidal policies
of the national society. In this conflict, by no means novel,
we can perceive the beginnings of a pan Latin-American movement
and some cases too, of explicit solidarity with still other
oppressed social groups.
We wish to reaffirm here the right of
Indian populations to experiment with / and adopt their own
self-governing development and defence programes. These policies
should not be forced to correspond with national economic and
socio-political exigencies of the government. Rather, the transformation
of national society is not possible if there remain groups,
such as Indians, who do not feel free to command their destiny.
Then, too, the maintenance of Indian society's cultural and
social integrity, regardless of its relative numerical insignificance,
offers alternative approaches to the traditional well-trodden
paths of the national society.
Miguel Alberto Bartolome
Guillermo Bonfil Batalla
Héctor Daniel Bonilla
Gonzalo Castillo Cardenas
Miguel Chase Sardi
Grünberg
Nelly Arvelo de Jiminez
Esteban Emilio Mosonyi
Darcy Ribeiro
Scott S. Robinson
Stefano Varese
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