Indigenous Peoples, Memory and Envisioning the Future. A Brief Multidimensional Study

Abstract

This paper offers a brief overview that seeks to make a series of approaches to an undeniably complex topic: the struggle of indigenous peoples in the context of colonialization processes at the worldwide, national and local scales. In this survey we will first characterize, systematize and relate the efforts made by some 350 million people around the world (including over 15 million indigenous people from Mexico), to safeguard their unique historical and cultural identity in the face of their respective mainstream society over the past sixty years. This will provide us with a basis to then look at the challenges that a country like Mexico faces to preserve not only the spatial or territorial matrix that guarantees the sustenance and survival of these peoples, but also their beliefs, traditions, ways of life and deep knowledge regarding the conservation and regeneration of natural resources for the benefit of all of human society. At this level of analysis we will seek to gain deeper insight into certain strategies for preserving and regenerating habitat used by an ancestral Zapotec community living in the Chinantla region, in the northern mountain ranges of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The paper concludes by highlighting the strengths of a historical memory that hews to epistemological categories that are utterly different from those prevailing in Western culture, in the day-to-day engagement of these cultures with their land and their natural surroundings.