Indigenous Genocide and the Ways We Portray History – Pilar Pérez

In this blog, 2023-2024 Center Research Fellow Pilar Pérez reflects on a painted blanket shown in testimony.

Have indigenous peoples in the Americas suffered a constant genocide over more than 500 years? Is there any specificity of genocide against indigenous peoples? I think the only way to answer these questions (and dismantle them) is through history. However, listening to the Guatemalan survivors’ testimonies in the Visual History Archive and watching the footage at the end of every interview, I came across a painting produced by Dolores Cú Ché (2015). The blanket was her prompt to retell through paintings her life experience spanned by la violencia. This painting showed the places and events she had lived and moved from in her struggle for survival during the internal armed conflict (1980s-1990s).

I noticed that although she had returned after the peace agreements in 1996 to Guatemala, the places she painted were all different. Her painted testimony went back and through what she had experienced. At a simple glance, it looked like a map, but it was not a regular map. Her memories were attached to these places and this provided movement. It wasn’t a historical line either, although a sense of chronology and process could be identified in the sequence of drawings. Dolores used this painting in meetings and gatherings to invite other women to tell their silenced stories. Dolores’ painting kept coming to me as a constant question. In what ways were her story and the territory linked? In how many different ways can history be told?

My name is Pilar Pérez, I’m from Argentina, and during my residency as Center Research Fellow of the Center for Advanced Genocide Research (2023-2024), I worked with the testimonies of the survivors of the Guatemalan genocide. My project was aimed to understanding the changes in the indigenous territorialization before and after the genocide. These questions came from my own research on the indigenous genocide in Argentina where the silencing of the crimes committed against the Mapuche and Tehuelche People by the late 19th century led to a permanent loss of territory and rights of the survivors.

After the military campaigns of occupation, Argentina was a built as a “white” country, that is, without “Indians”. Part of the success of this genocidal process was to create a discourse of elimination for the survivors. I grew up with people who couldn’t accept or didn’t know that they had an indigenous descent. People who would deny that origin or would not know the reasons behind the eviction of their families from rural areas in the past and who would even attribute that loss to their elders’ ignorance. This is a crucial difference with the Guatemalan history and its Mayan population. Their existence within the nation state cannot be denied.

But there is a risk in silencing historical processes. As Michell Trouillot has argued, the silenced past becomes a no-event and a no-event becomes unthinkable in history. The silencing, first, and the denialism, after, are two key issues to legitimize appropriation and exploitation of the territories in different historical cases. The territories in which the recurrent image of deserts, wilderness and the absence of peoples were the necessary arguments in Argentina to show development, progress and civilization. But in Guatemala, the highlands have always (or since the creation of the nation state) been acknowledged as indigenous territory. The destruction of these territories was perpetrated through the scorched earth campaigns during Lucas Garcia and Ríos Montt regimes and replaced by a new state sponsored capitalist territorialization.

Against this powerful rhetoric stands Dolores’ painting.

Resistance of silencing and genocide denial or oblivion flow in the interviews I’ve heard in many details. The landscapes chosen to show, the corn as part of the scenery, the documents and photographs that reveal agency and involvement. Some of these resistances come during the interview when the voices of children playing or other members of the families and communities can be heard as well as in the extra credits that come at the end of the interviews.

In my research I worked with non-indexed testimonies and this meant a challenge due to the number of existing interviews (around 600) from which I had to create a strategy of selection. However, this also meant the possibility of understanding the impact of la violencia to these people’s lives and futures. Even though the testimonies within this collection seek to understand the crimes, we can analyze the interview as any other document. We can hear between the expected questions and answers what people are really trying to convey of their own experience. And, of course, these interviews take place within the framework of a particular logic (the VHA) in a particular context (a democratic Guatemala with a significant social denialism) by a certain team (Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala or FAFG). Therefore, watching the interviews as a complete piece provided the possibility of getting closer to the person’s understanding, feelings and individuality. This is also important to bear in mind when we realize that, for example, most of these persons speak Spanish only as a second language and that they associate it with a specific power relation.

In Dolores’ painting the significant places of her memory are included. We can actually see the jungle, the mountains, the city, the international border, the killing fields and herself.

We can see the houses of the villages and the milpa. The aspects of nature that rule time and changes such as the sun and the migration of birds. Dolores is within this history in the present and on the territory. However simple this may sound, it defies the nation-state exclusion of indigenous peoples off their territories and exposes a social and cultural life built upon it. The painting shifts the focus from a victim of crimes against humanity towards the violence exercised against a way of life and at the same time it shows how the violence exercised by the State and particulars constrains options and possibilities for Dolores and her people. Despite the silencing and denialism perpetrated, Dolores’ painted testimony reminds us of the different forms of resistance to genocidal violence, a subject in which indigenous peoples have a long-standing tradition.