Exploring Latin American Indigeneity: My Reflections Throughout LAST 303

Final Blog Post and Wrap-Up Thoughts! From starting with the Popol Vuh and ending with Davi Kopenawa's text, I really enjoyed exploring Latin American indigeneity through various authors, texts, time-periods, and events; I don't think I would have found/read some of these books if I hadn't taken this course, so I'm very happy that I did! I loved learning about the cosmovisions, culture, and knowledge systems of different Latin-American indigenous groups, and about their differences but also the overarching similar themes/concepts between all of them. For the most part, I think that the similarities are that the communities are founded in/most highly value community, nature, and true knowledge; from the Maya K'iche to the Yanomami, indigeneity was tied to common group functioning both within families but also within the community as a whole. It was cool to explore this in the Popol Vuh , a pre-colonial text, where there was never a focus on the individual; Hunahpu an...

  Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (second half) Throughout this week's sections of the reading, there were two recurring themes that although were applied to specific examples, I think really contributed to the overall message of the text that if the Amazon is destroyed, everything else will be too.  The first of which was making clear distinctions that white people are completely different from the Yanomami, and that the white people don't understand the forest and don't want to try to understand the forest. Kopenawa refers to white people's knowledge of his community and the Amazon as claims, and explicitly distinguishes at times that their words are false and outright lies, such as the perception of the Yanomami as warlike; he especially denounces this narrative, and says that if our elders had actually killed each other like white people say, then the war raids would've never ended and no-one would be here today. He also highlights the frustrating hypocr...