Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress ( 2007) DOI 10.

1007/s11759-007-9036-6

a, Universidad Nacional Alejandro F. Haber, Escuela de Arqueolog nez 464, Catamarca, K4703BKJ, Argentina de Catamarca, Salas Mart E-mail: afhaber@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
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Indigenous is a colonial category, and it is always related to particular colonial configurations of diversity and in relationship to particular colonial/ national states. In this paper, the many historical configurations in which the terms Indian and Indigenous have figured are traced, including the Spanish colonial state and the Argentine state. The ways in which these successive systems of categorization are juxtaposed is described. Finally, post-Western understandings of what it could mean to be Indigenous are explored.
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sume : Il ny avait pas dindige `nes dans les Ame riques avant larrive e des Re rants espagnols. Il y avait bien des peuples divers et varie s sur tout conque le continent, mais aucun deux ne se nommaitou nommait les autres `ne , pas plus quils ne savaient quils seraient ainsi classifie s. Etre Indige `ne signifie faire partie du peuple pre sent dans cette partie du monde Indige e sur une ide e e piste mologique avant les colons, une notion base gorie Indige `ne en implique une autre, non-Indige `ne. En rationnelle: la cate de outre, les peuples autochtones nont pas vraiment eu lopportunite ` la de finition de ce qui serait conside re comme Indige `ne. Leur participer a a ` re fle chir ne fut pas sollicite e dans le de bat sur la question de capacite `ne ? Le statut dIndige `ne au de but du vingtie `me sie `cle qui est Indige tre ennemi potentiel de lEtat, e tre confine dans des re serves, signifiait e tudie et expose dans des muse es. Dans ce processus, larche ologie a eu, e che de transformer le temps selon lequel la phrase entre autres, la lourde ta tre Indige `ne devait e tre conjugue e : lobjectif de larche ologie e `ne en temps que science e tait alors (et reste toujours) de formuler Indige pnce au plus-que-parfait a ` la question qui est Indige `ne , et de une re velopper des syste `mes de classification qui contingentes cette ide e. de sentations acade miques de lidentite Dans cette perspective, les repre `ne ne sauraient e tre interpre te es comme une image de la discipline, Indige t comme un point de vue politique impliquant directement des mais pluto

RESEARCH

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quences sociales, intimement lie a ` la fois a ` la notion du soi et de conse lautre .

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rmino ind gena es una categor a colonial, y siempre esta Resumen: El te n a relacionada a particulares configuraciones de diversidad y en relacio culo, se rastrean las estados coloniales/nacionales particulares. En este art ricas en las cuales se ha categorizado lo indio diversas configuraciones histo gena, incluyendo el estado colonial espan ol y el estado argentino. y lo ind Se describen las maneras en las cuales esos sucesivos sistemas de n se yuxtaponen. Finalmente, se exploran comprensiones postcategorizacio gena pueda significar. occidentales de lo que ser ind
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KEY WORDS Indigenous identity, Colonialism, Relationality

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Introduction: Locality and Relationality

n, one of the local papers in Catamarca, demonstrated in a La Unio somewhat curious way the politics of Indigenous identity in this region in its April 21st 2006 issue:
n, are offended by the Descendants of the Diaguita community, from Poma n, seventieth to nineteenth centuries, that book Towns of Indians of Poma will be launched soon by the National University at Catamarca, due to its description [of them]. In a note to the author, Gabriela de la Orden de Peracca, they asked that the title be modified by replacing the name Indians . The text reads as follows: POMAN-Gabriel with Diaguitas Calchaqu n, Antonio Ferreyra, descendant from the last chief Chasampi from Mutqu n department, said that without knowing the volumes contents, in the Poma we understand that they fail to acknowledge our roots as Diaguitas Calc. For this reason they presented a note to the Dean of the Faculty of haqu Humanities, Licenciado Luis Eduardo Segura, asking for the title of the book to be modified. The book will be launched at an academic gathering next April 27th, in the UNCa Yellow Room. Even acknowledging that what he asks for in his petition is almost impossible as the book will already be printed, [he said] we want to establish our opinion as descendants of chief Chasampi before the launching of the book. He said that the old inhabitants tribe, descendants of the great Diaguita of this town were from the Calchaqu

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nation, acculturated by the Inca Empire since about 1400; during 200 years of which the Quichua language was spoken. These people were named Mutn. This is offensive quy, meaning odour, changed afterwards into Mutqu n was never a town of Indians. The surface ceramics, to us, because Mutqu from the so-called La Aguada [period], dated from 300 to 600 years (A.D.), show that we have been here more than 1,400 years, and for that reason they cannot treat us with a nickname given to us by Columbus, when he arrived n de Catamarca, April 21st, 2006). to the Guanini island, he said. (La Unio

While Diaguitas was the term given to local Indigenous peoples1 by the Spanish colonizers, and used by archaeologists and others until at least the mid-20th century, one could wonder how the term Indian could have stirred up such a reaction; and how a history book could carry that name in its title. In fact, the historian in question repeated a long-lasting tradition of the historians guild, that is, to uncritically reproduce the categories found in their sources, as if they were self-evident. Town of Indians was an administrative colonial category intended to designate a place where the usually dispersed Indigenous population was concentrated, forced to live near the local chapel to facilitate better control by ecclesiastic personnel and by the encomenderos (Spanish people to which a certain group of indigenes were entitled by the Crown). The people were forced to live in Towns of Indians, not because they were under trial or because of anything they had done, but simply because of who they werefrom this perspective, we could call Towns of Indians concentration camps. The term Indian was used generally by the Spanish colonial administration, and was still in use during the 19th century by the Argentinean state administration, for example, in laws and in censuses. But the fact that a particular category was used for some centuries by the administrative apparatuses of the state need not imply that this term had, or has, the same use, and or senses, at a local level. The term Indigenous in the sense that it is presently used has its origin in colonialism. As colonialism has had different histories in different areas of the colonized world, the categories that designate the colonial identities are also diverse. This does not mean that colonialism is a fragmented and unrelated phenomenon, but that colonialism, as capitalism, is a worldwide process that has local conditions of production and reproduction (Thomas 1994). The poetics and politics of colonial discourses and categories can be read from a global perspective, but the reading has to retain a local scope if it is to disentangle the mechanisms of production and reproduction of present day colonial relations. That an understanding of colonial categories is local is evident in the fact that an academic book published in the city of Catamarca can be read with unanticipated connotations, just on the

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other side of the Ambato mountains, a couple of hours away. Local resistances always inform the diversity of colonialism and colonialist categories. It is quite common to hear, both inside or outside the country, that the contemporary Argentinean population is mainly of European descent, and that Indigenous populations were exterminated in early colonial times. More than a description of the history of assumed and ascribed identity categories, such assertions can be read as descriptions of individual and collective self-understanding. In strict historical terms, the only period when the category Indian can be said to be non-existent is before colonialism (Bonfil Batalla 1972). Nevertheless, any account of even that period such as archaeology professes to writeis of necessity uttered from inside a matrix of colonial relations. If we are to accept the meaning of Indigenous as referring to the people who lived here before the colonizers arrived, a relational consideration of that term is unavoidable (Ingold 2000). This means that there is nothing in itself to be considered Indigenous or nonIndigenous. Instead, these are positionssometimes quite mobilethat are embedded in networks knitted by colonial relations (Bonfil Batalla 1972; Reissner 1983; Todorov 1987). Moreover, a relational framework is not limited only to the people who could be categorized as Indigenous or Non-Indigenous, as it also encompasses those who categorize. Each of the characters are caught in the same web of colonial relationships of otherness; it is from that web that to be or not to be Indigenous can be assigned or assumed. To ask, or for that matter, to answer, the question Who is Indigenous? is not a simple act of inquiry about something that is there to be known, as if it had no relation to the one who is here, wanting to know. I am not implying that identities are simply assumed or assigned as a matter of contextual convenience; I am saying that categories of identity are representations of subjectivities that are built as part of lived experience; subjectivities that are formed in the course of relations to other subjectivities and objectivities in life. This article is about the politics of identity implied in acts of language such as that used in the case of the Indians of Poman. To disentangle such questions could seem a highly abstract theoretical endeavor. But, like colonial projects and their immediate and concrete consequences, the politics of identity are always local. I am writing this article in Catamarca, a small city in the Andean region of Argentina. This paper, like every other discourse, is locally produced and self-referenced, and, in that sense, also slightly autobiographical and parochial. While this text can be read with different eyes in different places, the particular colonial historicity of the reader partly determines how it is read. This can be true even for different readers who are geographically close: People from Mutquin, which Mutquin founded as a colonial concentration camp during the 17th century.

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Today are contesting an academic representation of themselves as an Indian town because they do not call themselves Indian, but Diaguitas.

Historicity and Juxtaposition

Early Spanish colonizers extended the term Indian to the inhabitants of the Antilles, and Central and South America, because they assumed, in sailing westwards from Europe, that they had arrived in India. It was not until the ller mapped what is now known early 15th century that Martin Waldsemu as South America and named it in honour of Amerigo Vespuci, who had already realized that this was a new continent. Even so, the term Indian remained. Early in the 15th century priests and theologians discussed whether the eda 2001; Tellkamp Indians could be considered creatures of God (Castan 2001). The idea behind these discussions was not to specify a different class of humanity, in terms of race, nation or culture. Rather, as part of Renaissance colonialism, it was to consider the question of humanity in relationship to Christ. Christians, the best example of whom were the Spaniards, were the epitome of humanity, ideal creatures of God. Any deviation from this ideal was to be corrected or eliminated. Muslims, and soon also Protestant Christians, were to be eliminated, while Indians were considered as objects with the potential to be converted to Christianityas long as they did not reject conversion outright. As established by Pope Paulus III in 1533, the conversion of Indians to Christianity justified colonization in the name of saving the Indians from hell. Even if most Spanish colonizers were much more occupied in exploiting Indians and their resources than in spiritual matters, the importance of the Catholic Church ensured that conversion was an ever-present colonial project. The administrative language of the colonial state considered three kinds of humanity: Spanish people who were agents of political power and property; negroes kidnapped in Africa and sold as slaves, i.e., objects of property; and Indians, to be reformed, educated and transformed if allies, or destroyed if enemies of Christ. Either way, to be Indian was to be an object of violence and appropriation. If conversion was the goal, then the Indians had to pay for that service through heavy taxes; for elimination they had to pay the costs of war. The assimilationist ideology of Renaissance colonialism had nothing to do with either ameliorating the effects of colonialism or with decreasing levels of violence. What I am underlining here is that the category of Indian was coined within this worldview, one that is quite different to the segregationist (and evolutionist) worldview developed since the 18th century, and which characterized most of colonialism since those times.

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Rather than being a simple description of ethnic or cultural features, the categorization of people, including that of Indians, was part of the political system of colonial exploitation that was oriented towards assimilation. In fact, Indigenous peoples were supposed to abandon their culture, language and, above all, religion. The practicing of Indigenous rituals was severely punished, by prison, torture, and also death, even after 300 years of colonialism (Duviols 1977). One of the most suppressed rituals was offerings to the antiques, that is, to what we nowadays call archaeological sites. Andean people do not believe past peoples to be dead, and believe them to be living in another dimension of the world. It is essential for living peoples to maintain good relationships with these ancestors, for they are the seeds of life. If these relationships are not correctly attended, there are negative consequences for the living community. The Catholic Church, through institutionalised terrorist campaigns as the Extirpation of idolatries and the Inquisition, repressed Indian rituals and punished their practitioners with torture, imprisonment, and death (Duviols 1977, 1986; Farberman 2005). Indians themselves had little chance to take part in defining what was considered to be Indian. Individuals and/or groups envisaged several strategiesif the context can be said to admit strategiesin order to escape or minimize the effects of violence. One of these was to avoid being categorized as Indian, and to identify instead with any of the groups of mixed descent. Another strategy was to flee from their original communities in which the state had them recorded as tributaries, even if this action involved a loss of communal rights and relationships, including rights to land and the participation in cults to local deities. Other resistances were more overt, as with the one displayed by the Diaguitas and Calchaquis of n district. The strength of the armed Diaguita resistance perthe Tucuma mitted some members of this group to retain certain levels of autonomy over almost one and a half centuries, but resulted in extreme violence and conditions of exploitation once they were defeated in the mid-17th century (Lorandi 1997). During the late 17th and 18th centuries Enlightment and evolutionist ideas started to change the Spanish colonial conceptualization of Indians as a social category. While these later frameworks challenged the assimilationist ideas of Renaissance colonialism, the categories themselves were not replaced. Instead, a somewhat contradictory juxtaposition of systems of categorization gave way to ever more complex ways of imagining society. A picture in the National Museum of Mexico shows the physical appearance of each type of person of mixed descent, who were not classified by core identity criteria, but only according to their genealogical distance from the Spanish. A Spanish man fathered a mestizo or a mulato with an Indian or a Negro woman. The mestizo man fathered a castizo with a Spanish

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woman, and the offspring of a castizo and Spanish woman became assimilated Spanish. A directionality of categories was implied in the name of several castes. A morisco, the son of a mulato man and a Spanish woman, had a chino with a Spanish woman, but a chino man and an india woman s (literally translated as jumps back) (Reissner 1983:21). had a salta atra This indicates clearly that Indian was not an isolated category, but a position within a system of relationships, and that the diverse positions were graduated according to their distance from the Spanish colonizerthe author of the classification system. With independence from Spain in the early 19th century (18101825), the republican states did not abolish this classificatory system but layered their own colonialist categories over these foundations. In some republics at the end of the 19th century, such as Bolivia and Peru, the state financial system was still based on Indian tribute. In other republics, such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Brazil, the white (European descendant) elites encouraged European immigration, while the national armies were fighting against Indian peoples in their own colonial expansion.2 In Pampa, Chaco and Patagonia (more that one half of the present area of Argentina), the government assassinated Indians, including their leaders and spiritual chiefs, confined Indian families in reservations, stole their lands, and created huge properties and agricultural colonies for Europeans (that were finally appropriated by the already established bourgeoisie). In those days and sometimes by those same individuals when they were participating in military campaignsacademic disciplines such as history, anthropology and archaeology had their genesis and early institutionalization. At the beginning of the 20th century to be Indian meant to be a potential enemy who should be confined in reservationsagain the concentration campsand to be studied and represented in museums. Indian was understood in anthropological terms, as a different type of humanity. The La Plata Museum of Natural Sciences included, as part of the exhibition of a national nature, past (archaeological) and present (ethnographical) objects from Indian populations, and even Indians themselves, both dead (physical anthropology) and alive (captured in military campaigns and included in the exhibition). At the same time, and serving to naturalize the classificatory schema, national history (not nature) was being developed and exhibited in history museums, conceptualized as dealing exclusively with Europeans, from the Conquest until the consolidation of the national state (Haber 1994). When Pampa, Chaco and Patagonian Indians were defeated and their territories incorporated into the Argentine state during the late 19th century (1879), the Indian populations of the former Spanish gobernaciones of n and Buenos Aires (formerly Paraguay province) had already been Tucuma the objects of more than three centuries of active assimilationist policy.

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The two different modes of categorizing Indianseither as converts or a different kind of humanitywere juxtaposed. Perhaps this was one of the reasons for the disappearance of the term Indian as an administrative cat n and Paraguay were conegory. Indians from formerly Spanish Tucuma flated as citizens, silencing the particular cultural practices, beliefs and languages of a great majority of the local Argentine population, and transforming them into a permanent underclass of dark-skinned people, cabecitas negras (black heads).3

The Vector of Otherness

Pedagogical discourse within the school system was strategically devised by the Argentine state as a mode of self-representationin other words, it presented the image of European, and rejected anything related to an Indian origin. The school under the Argentine state, as was formerly the case with the Church under the Spanish state, was instrumental in the forging of a non-Indian identification. People went on practicing their own ways, however, retaining local languages until they were no longer spoken, and then retaining isolated words, conserving semantic associations, and preserving the many diverse local accentuations of Spanish, as well as conducting local rituals. Those practices, words and beliefs were increasingly represented as regional or provincial folklore, and only marginally as Indian ways. Archaeology had the huge task of transforming how the verbal tense to be Indigenous was phrased. The goal of archaeology was (and still is) to answer in past perfect the question Who is Indigenous? Putting the Indigenous in the past, and the European immigrants in the present and future, school systems did their best to create and reproduce the image of a European countrya people who went down from the ships, as the middle-class Argentinean saying goes (Haber 1994; Haber and Scribano 1993). Archaeology, and its cognate academic disciplines participate in epistemic colonialism (Lander 1993) by way of the very division of their respective object domains, reproducing a vision of history as founded on the European Conquest that divided time and created space, literally giving birth to history. As history is seen as a consequence of a metaphysical gap in time, so, too, are colonial subjectivities split between local worlds of life intimately attached to land and the representations of such identity as foreign, between life and the eyes with which life is seen, between cultural practices and colonial languages (Bhabha 1993; Memmi 1993). This metaphysical gap is uncritically reproduced by academic discourses and assumed by the disciplines in their institutionalized frameworks (Haber 1999). As both a consequence and cause of the metaphysical gap, historical

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archaeology hardly deals with Indigenous populations, and even when it does, acculturation and loss of culture are the preferred topics of archaeological narratives. This amounts to a rhetoric of Indigenous culture as lacking, and its concomitant Argentine identity as a process of transformation from an Indigenous to a Western one (Haber 1999). The progress from Barbarism to Civilization was the explicit colonial project of the late 19th century elite, as exposed by Domingo Sarmiento, who also created the school system as the main instrument of civilizing citizens (Weimberg 1988). This Argentinean colonialism, though phrased under evolutionist rhetoric, recapitulates the kind of categorization of people and production of otherness central to Renaissance colonialism. Recently colonized peoples were reduced to, and isolated as, Indians. The remainder of the local population, mainly non-whites until the organization of the national state, were considered potential citizens to be transformed by the School, much as their predecessors were considered potential Christians to be transformed by the Church. An anthropological kind of categorization of otherness, where Indigenous peoples were essentially classifiable as different, was juxtaposed by the 20th century Argentine state into an assimilationist categorization that transformed the Indigenous population into an underclass. Being physically, linguistically and geographically marked, due to their dark skin and hair, accented Spanish and their provincial origin, the social structure of capitalist development was built on colonial structures of categorization of otherness. In this context, it is not true that Indians were exterminated and replaced by European immigrants. What disappeared was the use of the term Indian as an administrative category. Indian, or its n, continued to be local equivalents, such as kolla in the former Tucuma used by the population as markers of a position of subordinate otherness. The duplicity of the colonizer/colonized subjectivity is illustrated by a directional categorization of Indian or Kolla along an imaginary vector line that begins in the port of Buenos Aires and ends in the Andean high plateau. Such a vector aligns almost all of the Indigenous population along the same colonial string of assigned identities. Not surprisingly, this was reflected in the academic geography that determined its representation. History, the narrative of the self, was mainly about what happened near the port. Archaeology and anthropology, both classic narratives of the Other, were written at the port about either end of the vector line. Time also had a geographical distribution, for anthropology was conducted in the Patagonian and Chaco regionswith the recently defeated, or true, n region, Indianswhile archaeology had its focus in the former Tucuma where to speak in past tense about Indians was entirely concordant with their disappearance from official discourse. The same region became the preferred centre for the development of Folklore (with a capital F): a discipline that depicted Indigenous culture as somewhere in the middle of the

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line, in a limbo between the desired self and the imagined Other. Historical archaeology was an uncomfortable field in-between the metaphysical gap and was largely avoided until recently. When it was conducted, it focused on the Spanish people, not the Indigenous populations (Haber 1999, for a critical review of the literature; Haber and Lema 2007, for a case study of Indigenous historical archaeology).

Categories of the Self

The terms Indian or Kolla were seldom used by the middle-classes in reference to underclass peasants. By contrast, national identity was (and still is) built upon the category of criollo. What is to be understood by criollo is again a matter of relatedness. The term has a similar origin to the term Indigenous, both meaning the one being raised (criollo comes from the verb criar, i.e., to raise) or born (Indigenous) in the locality. Criollo was first applied in the Spanish colonies as a qualifier of Spanish, to distinguish Spaniards born in Spain (peninsulares) from Spaniards born in the colonies (criollos). During the years of the Independence Wars against Spain, the Criollo Spanish elite who led the political and military movement represented themselves as americanos (Americans), probably as a way of diverting their proximity from the other Spaniards, while conflating themselves with the dark classes. Once the war was over and the task became one of re-establishing colonial relationships of domination over Indians, Negroes and the general under-class, the criollo category came back into use. Instead of qualifying Spanish, however, it became a noun of general whiteness. Criollo was elaborated and re-elaborated as an indefinite category, and was very useful for the assimilationist policies of 19th and 20th century national colonialism. Only Indians and European immigrants were clearly non-criollo, but, under the Argentine state (particularly the school system) becoming criollo was only a matter of time. As the Church had done before with evangelization, so, too, did the school system work towards the actualization of criollo Argentine identity.

Multicultural Policy and Renewal of Colonialism

In 1994, a Constitutional reform was implemented in Argentina. After 140 years of considering Indian peoples as the object of war and treaties, the new constitution acknowledged the pre-existence of Indigenous communities, and their communal rights to land (National Constitution of the Argentine Republic, reformed in 1994. Article 75, Clause 17). The multiculturalism implied in the new legislation includes notions of respect for

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cultural difference and afirmative discrimination, but it recapitulates colonialist relations, itself being juxtaposed with former colonial categories. In the new legal context, hundreds of communities have declared themselves as Indigenous. They are undergoing a process of self-assertion, cultural reconstruction and empowerment, usually presenting themselves to the state under the terms of the law to gain official recognition. In the last decade, to be Indigenous is starting to be an assertive self-ascription and not just a classification for oppression along a vector of discrimination. But unlike the Pampa, Patagonian and Chaco regions where Indigenous populations retained their languages, religions, and ethnic identities as part of the anthropological colonialist categorization used during the 19th cen n and Buenos Aires regions lack the same kind of tury, the former Tucuma neat delineation between identities. Because of the multiple and diverse colonial histories, and the different local effects of general colonial projects (such as Evangelization and State obligatory schooling), the result is a multiplicity of local understandings of related subjective identities that is only partially glossed by multiculturalist policies. There is no general agreement as to what is considered to fall into one or another labeled category. Every categorization is locally contextualized, flexible up to a point, and conditioned on the particular relationship between the author and the object of the categorization. The complex historicity of colonialism in different parts of the country has produced a diversity that cannot be covered by general legal categories but, once again, the self-representation of the authorship of the state is constructed in opposition to Indigenous peoples, as if whiteness was a self-evident category. In that context, the academic representations about Who is Indigenous? cannot be understood as a description of the field, but as political statements with direct social consequences. For example, a recent book written by two archaeologists from Buenos Aires is dedicated to ethnic a and Rolandi 2004). The title of identity on the Atacama plateau (Garc the book is Who are we?, referring not to the authors but to the local people who, by reading this book, can find an answer to their identity written in the first person by others. Thus the content of the book lies along the same line of colonialist politics. Because local people tend to call themselves criollo (in the local sense of the word as someone who has been raised in the locality), the authors consider that the local people are not Indigenous but criollo (in the elite sense of the word as white). To ask Who is Indigenous? implies a politics of the self, because it is oriented towards the demarcation of the limit between self and other. The present Indigenous political identity of communities and leaders is taking advantage of the legal framework that seems to introduce a new platform after five centuries of colonialism. But it is still a colonialist category. This

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is why Indigenous leaders have to explain yet again that to be Indigenous is not just a matter of culture or of descent, but of life and territory.

Colonial Epistemology
Classifications of peoples operate through the presence or absence of a particular feature: lack of the true religion, lack of language, lack of dress, possession of dark skin or hair, a wide nose, thick lips, language or accent, culture or ritual. The features lacking in the Others are the same as the ones present in the self, and those present in the Others are absent in the self. Since the classificatory ontology of natural history was transposed on to humanity (by Buffon in the first place, see Duverney-Bolens 1991), and an evolutionist framework was expanded through the authoritative discourse of anthropology, those criteria have come to be seen as essential constituents of the peoples classified within each category. Once represented in discourse as essentially different from other beings, the appropriation of those beings can be recast as resources (land, animals, minerals, labor force), and can be legitimized. Racial, cultural and ethnic categories gain lives of their own, as if they were fetishes, and determine the lives of the people thus classified. Once people are understood in essential and not relational terms, they can be thought of as people assimilated to the classificatory system and isolated from their relationships. Dominant discourses on land, natural resources and cultural heritage and other actions of appropriation (archaeology seldom being one of them), are based on the assumption that land, natural resources and cultural heritage are just there, unrelated to particular people, and therefore of interest to anyone. The naturalization of colonialist categories formerly introduced by the colonizers but progressively adopted by the entire population through mechanisms of reproduction in school and academic discourses, in turn produces a situation in which the self is narrated through the words of others. The epistemology operating in colonial categorization is the same as the objectivist epistemology assumed by colonial academic disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology. These are supported byand supportthe fiction of a world full of objects unrelated to the subject. In archaeology, a field in which material objects stand as objects of knowledge, objectivism recapitulates the metaphysical gap: objects, the past, the others, the Indians, the original owners of the land, are on the other side of the gap. On this side is the self, subjects, the authorial voice, the present, the West, the nation, the land. In this sense, archaeology constitutes the typical relationship across the gap, but always in the direction of knower to known, researcher to researched, digger to dug, and subject to object.

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Life, Relationship and Visible Authorship

To ask who is Indigenous? implies a colonialist language and a colonialist categorization of people. One asks about the other, and, in the process, describes and determines what the other is. Why not start from the question who am I? instead? What are my relationships to the world? A person who feeds the land with coca leaves and alcohol considers that act a Catholic ritual. Rituals conducted in archaeological Indian sites, on the other hand, consisting of offerings and prayers, are seldom conducted during Catholic Easter or identified with the Virgin Mary. Neither Indian nor Indigenous have anything to do with marking this kind of activity, but they are probably attached to local, provincial, or even Kolla identity, none of which are seen as contradictory with Catholic and Argentinean identities. Inside the current of life subjectivities are not labelled in oppositional or directional categories. Life is not based on essential features understood in reified terms. Everything in the world is alive; everything has intention and acts on other beings. There is no being that can be secluded from its relationships with other beings, without giving way to dramatic consequences. Life is contained in seeds. Everything comes from a seed. Thoughts come from their seed. Seeds should be cared for, treated with love and respect. Good relationships between beings are relations of love, care and respect; the aymara a means to be raised. To raise other beings (children, aruni term uywan plants, animals, the house, the dead, antiques, the mountains, the springs) is part of the reciprocal relationship of being raised by those same beings. That explains why being criollo is so important to the Indigenous way, perhaps conveying a synonym for Indigenous but only when uttered from the perspective of the self, not the other. The category of being Indigenous refers to some essence separated from life, and it has the aim and/or the consequence of separating people from their labour force, land and resources. In the last decade of legislation, to be Indigenous has been reconsidered by thousands of communities. From the criollo (Indigenous) perspective, to be Indigenous is just a category one is forced into by state policy. The legislation states that for a community to be considered Indigenous, it has to declare itself as Indigenous. Thus, to be Indigenous means to be part of a self-determined community of people who enunciate their life project in a community of relational beings (including people, land, water, the dead, antiques, animals, etc.). My friend Miguel Ramos, a young member of the recently self-declared Indigenous community of Antofalla, put it in clear and simple words when asked by a middle-class white girl Why do you say you are Indigenous? Miguel, in his first experience of a university class to which I had invited him to teach my archaeology students about Indigenous archaeology,

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answered: That is what I always asked myself. Now I know that to be Indigenous does not stain, to be kolla does not stain. And now I am happy to be Indigenous. Miguel, himself in the process of learning about Indigenous politics, underlines the importance of being Indigenous as a matter of relational identity in a colonialist world. For Miguel, to be Indigenous is to say I am Indigenous; to create the authorial fact of self-determination. He himself, having spent his childhood as a peasant boy, knowing how to raise the water in the canals to make the water want to raise the plants in the plot, to make the Mother Maize and the Mother Potato want to raise the family, is the one teaching me to identify the hardly visible 2000-year old irrigation networks on his community lands. He says: to make a canal one has to make the water want to go to the plot. This sense of life is the one sustained from an Indigenous perspective, and it is in that sense that the term criollo (raised in this place) is understood. The question Who is Indigenous? implies that it can be determined by another through the application of some criterion. This draws the understanding of Indigenous into the game of language of classification on the basis of the criteria applied (race, language, religion, culture, ethnicity, etc.): someone who is not Indigenous refers to someone else as Indigenous. From there, to be Indigenous can be described without reference to the world of life: knowledge gives way to government; anthropology gives way to the State; discourse on others gives way to colonialism. The question Who is Indigenous? implies a colonialist politics of the self. And it is the politics of the self that has to be reworked if a non-colonialistor better an anti-colonialist practice is to be developed. From an Indigenous perspective, being consists in raising life. From this perspective, the question who is Indigenous? is nonsense. Everyone is already re-defined by colonialism, and to speak the language of colonialism is not a matter of choice, even if one speaks against it. To be Indigenous can be assumed to be a strategy of empowerment resisting the state, but the self is already being raised and raising life, in reciprocal relationships of care, love and respect to other beings in the world. The question Who is Indigenous? is not about the person who answers, but about the person who asks. It cannot be asked from archaeology or any other academic discipline. It is a matter of self-determination in the context of struggle for liberation from oppression. The question who is Indigenous? should be replaced by the question who are we? Subcomandante Marcos, from the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, answers: We are this. The one who grows between fences. The one who sings. The one who cares for the old word. The one who speaks. The one who is of corn. The one who lives in the mountain. The one who walks the earth. The one who shares an idea. The true us. The true person. The ancestor. The person of the web. The one who respects history. The one who dresses humbly.

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The one who speaks flowers. Who is rain. Who has knowledge to give. Who hunts with arrows. Who is the river. Who is the desert. Who is the sea. The different. The one who is a person. The one who walks faster. Who is the people. Who is the mountain. Who is painted with colour. Who speaks the truth. Who has three hearts. Who is father and elder brother. Who walks the night. Who works. The man who is man. The one who walks among the clouds. The one who has words. The one who shares blood and ideas. The child of the sun. The one who goes one and another way. The one who walks in the mist. The one who is mysterious. The one who works the word. The one who orders in the mountain. The one who is brother, sister.4

Acknowledgements
I read a previous version of this text in the session Who is Indigenous?, in the Second Indigenous Inter-Congress of the World Archaeological Congress. I owe to Sven Ouzman and Joe Watkins the kind invitation to participate in their session at the Waipapa Marae, University of Auckland, in November Aotearoa. A second version was given as a lecture at the Faculty of Humanities Symposium on New Identities, September 2006, n, Pedro Funari, Cristo bal Gnecco, Adria n Catamarca. Armando Farfa n, Steve Hemming, Gary Jackson, Des Kahotea, Lacho Machado, Guitia rez Golla n, Elsa Ponce, Sally May, Jorge Nahuel, Sven Ouzman, Pepe Pe Miguel Eliseo Ramos, Claire Smith, Joe Watkins, H. Martin Wobst, Jose Yuni and two anonymous Archaeologies reviewers shared their ideas with generosity.

Notes
1. Following Indigenous authors, such as Smith (1999), I use the term indigenous with a capital I, to emphasise the political autonomy of Indigenous groups. 2. While a comparative study of the way otherness is constructed in different Latin American countries is beyond the scope of this article, both similarities and differences with the Argentine case are to be understood on the basis of common colonial past (and present) histories, and diverse national state building and elite consolidation. 3. One of the authors is the main State Official for anthropology in the country and decides such things as what is archaeological heritage? For that reason, they are subject to archaeological heritage legislation rather than Indigenous legislation. rcito Zapatista de Liberacio n Nacional, 4. Words of Subcomandante Marcos from the Eje calo of Me xico, D.F. March 11th 2001 at the Zo

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