Indigenous peoples in Colombia are caught in the midst of an armed conflict that has lasted for more than fifty years. Despite an elaborate protection architecture, the state has so far been unable to effectively protect them. Hence, in order to survive, indigenous communities have had to devise their own self-protection strategies. Not only do these strategies encompass the physical and psychosocial dimension of security, but they also draw on ancestral spiritual and cultural practices that both strengthen the indigenous communities’ physical protection and reaffirm their self-determination. However, these practices are often misunderstood by the state structures, which fail to implement support strategies to support them.
This project seeks to understand how ancestral spiritual and cultural practices protect indigenous communities in the midst of armed conflict and what coordination mechanisms could be put in place to ensure that these practices are effectively supported by the state. The project seeks to generate a conceptual and visual representation of these practices through a collaborative visual ethnographic study of the Nasa people of the Resguardo Indígena de Huellas Caloto, an indigenous community situated in the North of the Cauca Department in one of the areas worst affected by the armed conflict.
Research team
- Piergiuseppe Parisi, Centre for Applied Human Rights / York Law School, University of York, UK
- Ana Deida Secue Rivera, Co-Investigator
- Lehidy Carolina Baltam Salazar, researcher, Popayán, Cauca, Colombia
- Nicolás Braguinsky Cascini, Filmmaker
- Pippa Cooper, Researcher
- Resguardo Indígenas de Huellas Caloto, Colombia
Research findings
The key research findings can be summarised in the following points:
- The Nasa indigenous people understand protection holistically. Spirituality and ancestral cultural practices are key to understanding protection because they relate to their cosmovision and stem from a culturally specific understanding of risk and harm.
- The performance of protection rituals according to the spirituality and cultural practices of the Nasa people reaffirms and reinforces their self-determination and contributes to their survival (pervivencia) as a people.
- The exercise of protection rituals represents a form of psycho-social and emotional self-care in the midst of the Colombian armed conflict.
- Spirituality – and specifically the performance of rituals – signals belonging to and generates acceptance by the Nasa community. It promotes cohesion within the community. State protection officers who refuse to participate in rituals generate mistrust within the community and around the beneficiaries of state protection schemes.
- The recruitment base of armed groups or criminal gangs operating locally include indigenous (Nasa) peoples. Spiritual leaders – such as traditional medics and elders – command respect within the Nasa community but also among indigenous recruits of the armed groups. This partially explains both why key Nasa figures are targeted by armed groups and the negotiating power of Nasa traditional authorities.
- The state protection architecture is underpinned by an elaborate regulatory framework, which if applied comprehensively would accommodate ancestral forms of protection. However, in practice, the design and implementation of protection schemes – even those that are meant to strengthen indigenous forms of unarmed protection – fail to meaningfully include the Nasa people.
- In order to better support self-protection practices rooted in the Nasa spirituality and culture and to provide culturally adequate protection schemes, Colombian authorities should ensure the active participation of Nasa communities in the design and delivery of protection.
By unpacking the notions of risk and harm from an indigenous Nasa perspective, the research has conceptualised an understanding of protection (and, more broadly, security) that complements that of physical protection offered by UCP (Oldenhuis, Furnari, Carriere, Wagstrom, Frisch, and Duncan 2021: 29-31). In particular, the research focuses on the notions of cultural and spiritual risk and harm, and it regards the exercise of protection practices rooted in culture and spirituality as necessary to holistically protect indigenous Nasa communities in the midst of the Colombian armed conflict.
The research centres the voices of the Nasa people, thus emphasising the protection needs of the communities. It offers avenues to strengthen local self-protection infrastructures by, on the one hand, formulating actionable recommendations that state authorities should consider in the design and delivery of protection schemes (Parisi and Cooper, forthcoming) and, on the other hand, facilitating the reappropriation and strengthening of certain neglected spiritual and cultural practices by the community themselves (through five tulpas de pensamiento convened by the indigenous community of the Resguardo de Huellas Caloto, the project partner).
Project website:
https://www.ritualisingprotection.org
Find out more:
The project has produced a short film, ‘Survive among violence. Stories of the Nasa people in Colombia’. The film was shown as part of the WOW Film Festival.
