A contribution by Carolina Botero of the Karisma Foundation in Colombia:

“In 2010 UNESCO recognized Colombia’s Amazon traditional indigenous knowledge as “intangible cultural heritage” (http://www.gaiafoundation.org/content/highlights-2010-and-path-ahead).

Without a doubt the latter represents an invaluable move towards the community’s establishment of their own legal framework; empowering them with new tools to fight pounding threats (such as mining projects, a fashionable trend in Colombia). Most importantly it contributes to the building of the traditional indigenous community’s history that we will read about in a few years time. However, one must acknowledge that indigenous community’s legal framework is a historical process that needs time and space to fully develop.

“History belongs to those who write it” a true statement which exemplifies society’s where the written form prevails over oral traditions and that is suffered by indigenous peoples inhabiting countries like Colombia regarding their own history. However, when listening to indigenous people, it can be seen that these communities have built and “write” their own history through their oral tradition, one to which the new context (legal, social, technological, etc.) allows us to glimpse today.

The change towards indigenos is also evident in Colombia’s constitutional reforms. In the new 1991 Constitutional Chart the nation is defined as multiethnic and multicultural, in contrast to the policy contained in the 1886 Charter that embodied the idea of a Colombian nation under a Unitarian Hispanic rule: predominantly white, Spanish speaking and Catholic.

Indigenous communities cultural production has been ignored and devaluated. This community production has been considered as public domain, in fact, Colombia’s Lew 23/1982 states that indigenous art is in the public domain. Labeling indigenous communities production as “public” carries with it the social negative connotation of “public” as worthless, as well as, not deserving protection. Parallel to this situation and with the complicity of a legal framework that has until recently ignored them, over the past century the community’s exploitation extends beyond their lands to their biological and genetic resources, art, culture, etc.

However, developments in the twentieth century have shed a light on the injustices that these communities have had to endure. Thus constitutional reforms are beginning to recognize and accommodate other views; international emerging concepts like “cultural heritage” seek to give substance and value to these items beyond the idea of public domain with the intention to develop them on a local level; and, of course local characters have emerged from these communities and began to place their own history over the carpet.

I personally believe that concepts such as “cultural heritage” are falling short: they are built on individual logics; they are usually associated with the State (not the community) and in general they conflict with local legal structures that may not allow them to develop beyond a well-deserved recognition. The historical process is a slow but sure process that will change the legal framework for good.”