Lessons in Alienation
School enjoys an excellent reputation among well-meaning Westerners, but its implementation has dealt a decisive blow to Indigenous cultures. The indoctrination has been effective: no one wants to resemble their grandfather anymore—you have to be a professional, dress well, own a car.
The universalization of schools in Indigenous societies has been a decisive factor in their assimilation into the dominant society.
Text and photos by Carlos Suárez Álvarez
Originally published in issue 194 of Cáñamo magazine, February 2014.
“The first thing they did was get rid of the wise elders, because the old ones were the ones holding the war together: you have to kill those elders, you have to take the children and put them in a training place to turn the culture around.” Don Rogelio, the old Cocama ayahuasquero from the Amazon River, perhaps refers to the first reducciones, established by Catholic missionaries in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, where they concentrated scattered populations from the forest to evangelize them and subject them to a particular moral and labor discipline. The Catholics seduced with iron and convinced with gunpowder, but the forest was so vast that their penetration remained partial.
The Bible went out of fashion; Spain lost its gloomy splendor. The West set a new trend with the Universal (Divine) Declaration of Human Rights (Duties). It was the year 1948 when in Paris Eleanor Roosevelt and her followers composed the moral code that seeks to govern us eternally and absolutely. There were no delegates from any of the hundreds of Amazonian ethnic groups of the time. Since the “savages” were not consulted, it is not surprising that the Declaration threatens from beginning to end their political, social, economic, and philosophical integrity: Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available; higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
Everyone has the right to education and if they don’t want to exercise it, well, too bad, it’s a mandatory right. Everyone must be integrated into a particular productive system (complex, industrial, specialized). The Declaration (a moral code) promotes the universalization of a way of producing, ergo that way of producing becomes morally good.
Flag tributes, anthems, martial parades—common in secondary schools—help foster a nationalist sentiment among Indigenous peoples, who lived practically on the margins of Peru until the mid-20th century.
education, yesterday and today
When Shipibo families lived autonomously along the banks of the Ucayali, Amelia’s now bony and twisted fingers learned to spin cotton, weave and embroider skirts, shape clay jars, paint designs, prepare natural dyes, grate cassava, and clean fish. Her grandparents would wake her with the rooster’s crow, before dawn, and together with the other children she would bathe in the river while receiving counsel: she had to be hardworking, one day she would have a husband, children; she should not lie; she should not steal. She spent the day alongside the women of the household, learning from them, through practice, the various tasks proper to women. There was no lack of scolding, even punishment, either in the form of unpleasant herbal remedies or painful lashings. When her menstruation came, she was prepared to sustain the biological and cultural reproduction of her society, a society of abundance: game and fish, wild fruits and traditional crops, clean water, ancestral remedies, vast territory, just as it had been for centuries. Amelia, who has spent eighty years in this world, works with the same constancy as her grandmother. It doesn’t matter what time one visits her at her home on the outskirts of San Francisco de Yarinacocha, she is always busy, spinning cotton, weaving skirts, painting designs she tries to sell to tourists. Her knowledge will not endure; there are no young people at her side; they want to become professionals. In the transition between the society of abundance and autonomy in which Amelia was born and the one of scarcity and subordination in which her great-granddaughter Karla lives, the establishment of schools has played a fundamental role.
Summer Institute of Linguistics—it sounds like a youth camp but was a “missionary organization whose express purpose was to prepare the conditions for the second coming of Christ to the world, through the translation of the New Testament into all the languages of the Earth.” So plainly stated by researcher David Stoll. “Vast financial resources and a dense network of air transport, radio communications, and computers have been placed at the disposal of its 4,300 members around the world to penetrate nine hundred languages of tribal and peasant groups, in what constitutes the largest linguistic intervention enterprise ever known in history.”
Founded by an American Bible salesman, the SIL established itself in dozens of countries across five continents, although its main field of expansion was Latin America. Among all its operations, the most significant took place in the Peruvian Amazon, and coincidentally its operations center was established on the Yarinacocha lagoon, the heart of Shipibo territory. The Peruvian state, lacking the means (or will) to provide schooling for the Indigenous population, entrusted SIL with the implementation of the bilingual education system: the training of native teachers, the design of school curricula, and the production of didactic materials. It was also to eradicate “vices by all possible means” and translate books “of great patriotic and moral value,” such as the Bible. In 1955, when SIL opened the first school concentration centers in the jungle, the Director of Rural Education of Peru celebrated the conversion of Indigenous people into “progressive subjects, knowledgeable and lovers of the homeland,” an initiative “of great social content,” a “transcendental work of culture” aimed at “national integration.”
And the schools changed the world.
Amelia, the matriarch, continues to weave bags just as she learned in her youth.
NAtion and oil
The first custom to fall was semi-nomadism; schools could only be established where a sufficient number of children lived permanently. By the mid-20th century, with few exceptions, there were no Shipibo villages. People lived dispersed: small family groups outside the reach of any law or higher power who, thanks to inherited knowledge, were able to obtain from nature—without degrading it—everything necessary for a good life. This vital philosophy was systematically dismissed inside school classrooms.
When in the 1950s Ida Ramos, Amelia’s daughter, began attending school, she learned that Peru was her homeland and San Martín its liberator. “Peru is free and independent by the general will of the people and for their cause, which God defends. Long live Peru! Long live freedom! Long live Independence!” the teacher made them recite. By that time, the road connecting the city of Pucallpa with Lima had already been inaugurated, and settlers were beginning to take over the land, which was no longer ancestral but Peruvian, and landowners were extracting timber and buying animal skins and employing Indigenous people. The time had come for the Shipibo to be integrated into the Nightmare of the Market.
The education system presented itself (and still presents itself) as a great moral advance, but it was (and is) nothing more than technical training for inclusion in a highly hierarchical industrial economy. The ILV primers with which Ida learned to read taught a productive doctrine in which nature was presented as an economic resource and people as servants of the market.
There was the parable of Pepe and the rubber trees: Pepe will plant a special field with rubber trees.
–Why will you plant rubber? –people ask him–. There’s plenty of rubber in the forest. Why would you want to make a rubber field?
Some people laugh at Pepe; they’ve never heard of such a thing. Pepe explains his idea to them.
–I’ll do it near my house. After a few years, I won’t have to go far into the forest looking for rubber. I’ll have my own way of making money from rubber with less work.
Some people laugh at Pepe; they’ve never heard of such a thing. Pepe explains his idea to them.
–I’ll do it near my house. After a few years, I won’t have to go far into the forest looking for rubber. I’ll have my own way of making money from rubber with less work.
The sermon on jungle products:
The main products of the jungle are: rubber, wood, and bananas. The products of each region are brought to the other regions. Each region helps the others. We all help one another in our homeland, Peru.
And the ultimate commandment of the modern world:
Petroleum belongs to the mineral kingdom. Kerosene and gasoline are made from petroleum. It is believed that there is a lot of petroleum in the jungle, but it has not yet been found. They are looking for petroleum in the jungle. Whoever finds a place where there is petroleum can help the homeland. Often petroleum is found in places where the ground and ponds are greasy and black, or near waters that always have a bad smell.
Ida Ramos, daughter of Amelia, born in the early 1950s, belongs to the first generation that attended bilingual school organized by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
INTEGRAtion
School also provided the tools to participate in the emerging system (Spanish to meet bureaucratic demands, arithmetic to conduct simple transactions) and trained students to obey a boss, compete with peers in a non-familial environment, or adhere to a specific bodily discipline within the context of an urban-style schedule and calendar… Elements that pushed to the margins of childhood daily life such activities as fishing, hunting, working the orchard, building canoes, cooking, weaving, caring for younger siblings… all fundamental to the reproduction of their society (their system), and which boys and girls had always learned through practice, by watching and imitating within the family from the earliest age.
The relationships between parents and children were profoundly altered. Before school, the mentors were the elders of the family, their authority unquestionable and their presence constant. With school, students became subject to an external power and to a model of success embodied by the Shipibo teacher, admired for the money and possessions his position allowed him to have. At the same time, school attendance required the acquisition of consumer goods that could only be obtained with money, so parents were forced to integrate into the market in order to buy pens, backpacks, notebooks, or uniforms.
Ida Ramos, sensible and beautiful, would have liked to finish primary school, but her mother had other plans: she married her off to the teacher, a maternal prerogative that would also disappear over time.
Roger López was born in 1968 from the marriage between Ida and Daniel, the teacher, but he was raised by his paternal grandfather, an ayahuasquero who passed on the knowledge of a world in retreat: with him, Roger learned to hunt, fish, and work the chagra (traditional plantation). The grandfather was visited by many mestizos from Pucallpa—then a bustling urban center around the timber industry—seeking healing and spiritual protection. In his adolescence, Roger saw the children of the bosses arrive with colorful clothes, clean sneakers, sunglasses, eating candy and drinking soda, and he compared them with his own people: “Why are the mestizos like that? They have their stores, their engines, their tricycles, good houses. Why doesn’t a Shipibo have that? What is missing? What’s going on? Or are we not capable of being on their level? I know I am capable. I’m not lacking intelligence. I’m just like them, only I need to be trained, I need to learn technology, scientific knowledge, I need to get a higher education.”
Roger, who had begun the path of shamanism under the guidance of his grandfather, intuited the importance of academic education, and when one of his grandfather’s mestizo patients offered to take him to the city to study secondary school, he didn’t hesitate. Years later, he graduated as a bilingual teacher and worked in various villages in Ucayali, but that wasn’t the end—ayahuasca opened up new visions: a center of natural medicine that would welcome visitors from around the world: Suipino. Today Roger sees himself as much a businessman as a shaman, and talks business as if he had never done anything else. “Ever since I was a child, I had this idea of doing business.” He has turned shamanism into a way of accessing the market economy. “I saw that my culture—its designs, plants, dances, wisdom… was a very rich knowledge for making money. But the thing is, everyone was giving away our knowledge to the gringos.”
The Shipibo shaman Roger López, son of Ida, seized his opportunity to study in the city and became first a teacher and ultimately a businessman, enjoying material well-being and admired by his neighbors.
EDUCATIONAL DEFICIENCIES
In villages like San Francisco de Yarinacocha, near the city, there are no options. The community’s territory is literally devastated, the land barren, the lagoon no longer provides protein. Autonomy is impossible; one must undergo a long academic training process to perform a (subordinate) role and earn money. All young people want to be professionals and reject the activities that only a few decades ago constituted their grandparents’ identity. In more than seven months living in San Francisco, I have not seen a single young person working in the chagra. Producing one’s own food is associated with poverty, with people who have not been able to “improve themselves,” and it is outright rejected. The dominant political discourse is thus replicated: development, professionalism, consumption. However, despite the religious fervor with which they devote themselves to this chimera, the academic level is very low. “One of the main problems has been the language,” explains the principal of the San Francisco school. “There are many words used at university that they do not understand. The students who best master Spanish get the best grades. There you can clearly see how language influences the learning process.”
To try to alleviate this “deficiency,” the use of Shipibo, widely spoken in the community, has been banned in secondary school. Math is even worse. During a review class, several young people aged fourteen to fifteen went up to the blackboard one after another, and none were able to perform operations like multiplying seven by four, dividing five by five, dividing twenty by four, or subtracting sixty minus thirty-two.
Students of the San Francisco de Yarinacocha educational institution.
NO MORE SHIPIBO
But limiting the role of the school to the dissemination of certain technical knowledge is to underestimate the purpose and power of this institution. In Peru, an ethnically and territorially heterogeneous state, arbitrarily created on maps by the Creole elite, it is necessary to generate the illusion of a nation. And that goal is achieved by raising flags, singing anthems, giving speeches, marching militarily, and, in history classes, offering a very particular version of the genesis of the republic: the one given by the Creoles still in power, descendants of Spaniards, white, Catholic, who after breaking ties with the metropolis established a racist, deeply unequal regime. This type of sociopolitical organization is not questioned at school, even though the ancestors of the students, the original owners of the territory, practiced another. Since the mid-20th century, not only has Shipibo territory been alienated due to colonization carried out by “the Peruvians,” but schools have also produced systematic cultural and historical alienation.
Karla, Roger’s daughter, is in her third year of secondary school. She arrives at the classroom with several books under her arm. The covers have been decorated with photos of famous American actors and blonde models. Inside the back cover are the coat of arms and the anthem of Peru and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Karla wants to study architecture to design the houses for her father’s natural medicine center, although so far she has shown no interest in taking ayahuasca. On Sundays, she attends an evangelical church where her father’s practices are not well regarded. Karla also does not wear the traditional clothing of Shipibo women, nor has she shown any inclination to inherit the herbal knowledge of her grandmother Ida Ramos, who knows this and laments it: “Now she’s changed. Woman… Nothing like it. She doesn’t know. With pants, with a cap… There are no more Shipibo!” “No more Shipibo?” I ask, surprised. “It’s over!”
