What happened to indigenous people during the pandemic?
If there is an element in the collective memory of lowlanders, those living in towns with remarkable population density and especially those in the cities, it could be the enforced lockdown that separated us from each other. But the degree of separation was never the same. In fact, the idea of locking down people in neighborhoods was immediately rendered absurd. Walls were nonexistent between homes; gates were rare.
When the concept of “social distancing” was floated, there was confusion. There has always been “social distance” in the country, the sociological kind. This refers to the distance between individuals or groups, which are occasioned by race, age, social class, gender, etc. To Georg Simmel is attributed the concept of the hypothetical “stranger” to groups of people—how far or close do we situate ourselves to that person we barely know?
But what about those human groups already isolated? The farming communities in far-off agricultural areas where roads have not been built yet? Or the landless that lived in mountainous areas? Or the indigenous people isolated or detached from the rest because of their cultures?
In the documentary made by Arbi Barbarona, the filmmaker explores the isolation of a group of Manobo people who flee from persecution only to be caught by the pandemic. A population called “bakwit,” a term that is derived from “evacuate,” the Manobos have to contend with masks and face shields, contraptions that look odd on us, lowlanders in touch with Western medical ways, and are even more intrusively terrifying on this cultural community.
The arrival of the virus and its spread created a place to escape and this was identified as found in the homes and lands of the “gentle savage,” a term that is so loaded one needs to debunk this concept before one even embraces it.
In Barbarona’s documentary, people are talking about how they are going to be saved because they are far from civilization. They also discuss keeping their communities pure.
Histories are replete with viruses and epidemics wiping a staggering number of people.
In the paper, Epidemics, indigenous communities, and public health in the Covid-19 era: views from smallpox inoculation campaigns in Colonial Guatemala, it notes the distinct relationship between health and history: “European participants in the wars of conquest and early colonization in the Americas, along with indigenous peoples who survived the waves of new infectious diseases that arrived in their wake, considered the mortality rates catastrophic. These events have led some scholars to argue that ‘the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were in all likelihood the scene of the greatest destruction of lives in human history’, while others have labeled these collective events as ‘the Great Dying’.”
Published online by Cambridge University Press, and dated November 6, 2020, the scientific paper notes how “Alfred Crosby identified infectious disease as a key component of the “Colombian exchange,” arguing that the intentional and unintentional exchanges of biological agents —plants, animals, and especially epidemic diseases—had profound environmental consequences for the Americas.”
The paper continues: “Among the most devastating were the so-called ‘virgin soil’ epidemics that included bubonic plague, smallpox, measles, influenza, and typhus, diseases to which indigenous peoples had no previous exposure.”
The commentary continues: “Wars, forced displacement, and violence were thus crucial additional elements that magnified the impact of epidemics.” It has been documented, in hindsight, how the disease wiped out multi-ethnic population not so much because of biology but because of economics: “As the waves of diseases persisted, so to the systemic abuses instrumental in colonization processes: “poverty, periodic food shortages, and the systemic violence of slavery and forced labor systems that structured the lives of Maya, African-descended, and multi-ethnic colonial subjects.”
As half of the world contended with the Colombian exchange, did we ever have the corresponding phenomenon, a Magellanic exchange?
Were we of different make that our forebears did not feel the impact of any virus introduced by the European bodies? As our limited histories make it appear, there was no dramatic decimation of our population due to diseases coming from across the ocean. There are, however, sketchy accounts of a million inhabitants dying from hunger and disease, but the correlation was always with the war.
Minnie Degawan, director of the Traditional and Indigenous Peoples Programme at Conservation International, said: “The global health crisis has highlighted the resilience of some indigenous communities. But above all, it has revealed the fragility of these populations—whose poverty, malnutrition and poor access to health care makes them particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases.”
Protecting the indigenous communities means protecting native knowledge and traditions.
In data from the Unesco Courier, we are informed how indigenous peoples have a keen knowledge of isolating themselves from the outside world when certain conditions warrant said decisions. It mentions our very own Cordillera communities where “such a practice—known as ubaya or tengaw—is regularly observed at specific points of the agricultural cycle, to allow for the earth and the people to rest.” This concept of “rest” or “cycle” is vanishing, if not lost, among us who live in a world of 24/7, of cities that never sleep, and of works that continue on and on so long as the technological connectivity is provided.
The indigenous notion of isolation in the Cordillera can be astounding: “No one is allowed in or out of the community, including community members who happen to be outside when the lockdown was announced. A knotted clump of leaves is placed at various entrances and exits to signify that the community is on ubaya. It is taken very seriously by community members and neighbors alike—to violate it is to invite disaster for the entire community.”
The strategies are around us, native, but we have become foreign.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com
Image credits: Jimbo Albano