The Uitoto Nation and the Indigenous People of the Amazon Basin

Rember Yahuarcani, the main subject of this film, is a member of the White Heron clan of the Uitoto Nation. The Uitoto (also spelled Witoto or Huitoto) are one of the many indigenous nations from the area along the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers within the Amazon Basin. Their densely forested territory, called the Amazonías region, is south of what is now Colombia and north of the border of what is now Peru. Since ancient times, these territories have been populated by the Uitoto and many other Indigenous peoples, such as the Ocaina, Nonuya, Bora, Miraña, Muinane, and Andoque. Indigenous clans of the area, many of which traditionally lead nomadic and hunter-gatherer lifestyles, created richly diverse communities shaped by their evolved relationships with the land and their distinct cultural cosmologies. Today, there are many uncontacted tribes in this region that still practice their traditional ways of life.

Some Uitoto clans like the White Heron refer to themselves as the “People of the Center” or the “Children of Tobacco, Coca, and Sweet Yucca” (Hijos de Tabaco, la Coca y la Yuca Dulce in Spanish). Honoring the natural environment was and is central to their ever-evolving way of life. They held an important connection to the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis)native to the Amazonías region. They used liquid latex tapped from the tree to construct important tools, such as shoes, bags, clothes, bouncing balls, sports accessories, waterproofing material, and other everyday items. Although European settler colonialism reached the Amazonías region as early as the 17th century, it wasn’t until these trees’ economic potential was discovered by Europeans in the 19th century that Indigenous tribes such as the Uitoto experienced a major disintegration of their societies.

The Tragedy of Rubber Mining

When the rise of industry and commercial manufacturing in Europe and the U.S. created a high demand for rubber within the emerging global market, the Caquetá-Putumayo region became the target of barbaric rubber barons who settled there seeking to establish an economic monopoly using indigenous slave-labor. This time period is known as the rubber boom era and saw what has been labeled one of the worst population declines in world history. Many clans in the region were violently displaced, forced into slave labor, or murdered at the hands of the rubber barons or by the waves of epidemics they brought.

Much of what we know about what happened during the rubber boom era comes from the oral histories of survivors’ descendants and the stories and myths they have passed down through the generations. There are also written accounts from the travel logs of those who explored the area during that time, such as that of American engineer Walter Hardenburg and British consul Roger Casement.

Walter Hardenburg came to the Putumayo region to work on railroad construction and join in the rubber boom in 1908. Before making it to his destination he was captured and imprisoned by a group of men who worked for Julio César Arana, the owner of Casa Arana, an infamous British-Peruvian rubber company in Putumayo. Because political control had yet to be established for a centralized government, entrepreneurs like Arana were often encouraged to protect the area from foreign invaders as Peruvian and Colombian political leaders engaged in border wars. At the time, this granted rubber barons like Arana impunity in their criminal endeavors in the Amazonías, and they justified their behavior with white supremacist logic and twisted notions of social Darwinism.

After spending a year in captivity at Casa Arana, Hardenburg was finally set free in 1909. He then made his way to London with the goal of exposing the brutal treatment he had witnessed. That same year, he published some of his accounts in a periodical called Truth and described in great detail the horrors that the enslaved Indigenous people endured. He noted the sadistic ways in which indigenous tribes were treated in comparison to his own treatment as a prisoner. From inhumane working conditions to grotesque torture and murder tactics, extreme violence toward clansmen was the norm—as was punishment for unmet rubber quotas or simply as heinous entertainment for the rubber barons.

When this information entered the public eye in Britain, it caught the attention of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society, which then lobbied the British government to investigate. Because Casa Arana was technically a British enterprise, the government felt pressured to determine a course of action. In 1910, British consul Roger Casement was sent to the Putumayo region to collect more accounts about the overseers who worked for Arana. He spent time surveying the dynamics in La Chorrera, the territory where Casa Arana had set up shop, and the surrounding Putumayo region. Upon returning to Britain, he published a report in July 1912 that went into further detail about the horrifying reality of the operation and confirmed Hardenburg’s personal accounts.

In 1913, the House of Commons responded with a committee on the Putumayo region. Julio César Arana was summoned to be questioned about the allegations about his company. Although he attempted to justify himself by claiming his company was helping to “civilize” natives and encourage economic development, Casement and Hardenburg testified against him, and the details of the atrocities at Casa Arana came to light. After this hearing, he quickly liquidated the company in an effort to avoid being held accountable for his crimes. It was around this time that the rubber tree seeds that had been smuggled out of the Putumayo region and planted in British Asian colonies reached full maturity and became available to the global market, marking the end of the rubber baron regime. During the six years that Arana’s company operated (1907 through 1913), he raked in 75 million dollars in profit, all the while devastating the social infrastructure of Putumayo tribal communities, drastically reducing their overall population, and leaving them with an open historical wound.

Contemporary Concerns for the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazonías

In 2012, the Colombian government made a public apology for the nation’s complicity in the rubber boom. The president of Colombia, Juan Santos, vowed to prevent this violence from being repeated and to protect Indigenous peoples and lands. Yet, as the Indigenous tribes of the Amazonías seek to rebuild from the atrocities of the colonial past, they continue to face new forms of environmental violence that prevent a full recovery. The effects of settler colonialism in the region continue to perpetuate destruction and exploitation of Indigenous nations and lands, continuing the patterns of social stress and cultural degradation. Contemporary environmental threats like coca fumigation, oil mining, and mineral extraction, combined with more sustained threats like climate change and human trafficking, still pose significant challenges for all Indigenous people of the Amazonías region.

One pressing contemporary concern that is still being debated today is that of aerial fumigation. In an attempt to decrease cocaine production and trafficking in Colombia, aerial fumigation was funded by the United States and Colombian governments beginning in 1996. The toxic herbicide glyphosate was haphazardly sprayed over suspected coca farms, causing contamination and health concerns for the Indigenous peoples and their lands. The program was eventually discontinued after health concerns were raised by the World Health Organization in 2015, but by that time 242,065 of Putumayo’s 363,967 residents had been forcibly displaced from their homes, primarily as a direct result of the aerial spraying. Coca is a plant of both spiritual and practical use for the Uitoto and other Indigenous tribes of the area. Mambé, or mashed, roasted coca mixed with the ashes of yaruma leaves, is a staple medicine also used as a storytelling tool and for protection. This is an example of how Indigenous worldviews and traditional ways of living are not honored by the governments and NGOs that create policies that directly affect them.

As globalizing capitalism continues to push for industrial development projects in these territories, there is an urgent need to respect indigenous peoples’ demands for autonomy and self-determination. There are still many unanswered questions stopping them from making a full recovery from these historical wounds, and these peoples and lands are still being threatened by the environmental violence of modern extractive economies. Only when Indigenous sovereignty is centered in approaches to healing, recovery, and the rights to ancestral homelands and territories and resources are respected will the historical wound of displacement, genocide, cultural destruction, and marginalization fully close.

Art and Indigenous Resurgence

There is a need for community-based and culturally safe forms of resistance and revival that don’t solely depend on the state for justice— a concept known as Indigenous resurgence. In recent years, this has been the phrase used for the processes of cultural regeneration for Indigenous people who seek pathways to liberation and self-determination outside of the structure of colonial nation-states and their associated epistemologies. Artistic practices open up decolonial pathways to Indigenous resurgence by using the body as a site to (re)produce modes of being, knowing, and doing that are outside of the patterns of colonial marginalization. Because of this, art can play an important role in the process of healing from historical wounds and can transform how Indigenous communities respond to violence.

Art has always played a central role in the creation and expression of cultural practices and worldviews, and it has the capacity to liberate, educate, and heal. This process is never static, but rather always in a constant state of change and adaptation. In 2015, Jarrett Martinueau described the resurgent potential of Indigenous art-making:

Colonialism is an invasive structure that orders but does not define our reality. Although it works to dispossess us of our lands and bodies and to colonize our consciousness, it is not a totalizing system. We have always resisted; and our resistance shapes both howwe imagine and whatwe create. Indigenous creativity provides us with inventive forms of decolonizing praxis: methods of resistance, techniques of resurgence. To consider Indigenous art in relationship to decolonization, then, is to consider the potential for creativity to be brought into direct relationship with political struggle. In this view, decolonization becomes more than a political commitment; it becomes an art of creative combat, a collective practice of freedom. As we move defiantly into the twenty-first century, Indigenous existence must be continue fought for—and art-making continues to be a necessary strategy for our survival. As we struggle to reclaim, regain, and revitalize the land-based practices and knowledge that have sustained us for generations, our nations are increasingly threatened by shape-shifting forces of Empire produced at the nexus of global capitalism and settler colonialism. While admitting the ambivalent necessity of confronting colonialism, we are now also challenged to navigate the new terrain of the technologized present, evolving networked landscapes of the mediatized, the digital, and the virtual…. In conjoining conscientization, cultural action, and revolution, Indigenous resurgence works to overturn the dominating conditions of colonial oppression, while reasserting the integrity and validity of Indigenous knowledge systems, cultural forms, and aesthetics. In this sense, resurgence can be understood to support anticolonial struggle insofar as it is conceptualized and mobilized from within Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies.

Against the backdrop of a deep history of exclusion, misrepresentation, appropriation, and assimilation, art allows Indigneous people and other marginalized identities to disrupt the normative order of colonial oppression. Artists can strip off the many layers of censorship imposed upon them by the modern-colonial world, carve spaces of social critique, and/or hold the space from which counter-hegemonic realities can come into being.