Production, Development and Environmental policies. Paradoxical Geographies in the ex- Aboriginal Reserve of Napalpí

SALAMANCA VILLAMIZAR CARLOS

The International Indigenous Policy Journal

Western Libraries

Lugar: Ontario; Año: 2019

1916-5781

This paper centers on an experience of an Indigenous Development Plan carried out between 2005 and 2010 in Colonia Aborigen Chaco, an indigenous settlement located in the Chaco province, Argentina, originally established in 1911 as the Aboriginal Reserve of Napalpí, a reserve where the natives were compulsively forced to settle down as the nation-State advanced over their traditional territories. Here I propose a critical reading of this experience from the ethnographic description and the long historical process inhabitants of Colonia Aborigen went through, that systematically subjected them to alimentary, educational, productive and religious routines aimed at transforming them culturally. I intend to demonstrate it is necessary to review a series of assumptions, quite patent in indigenous policies, about what an indigenous subject, an indigenous territory, and an indigenous development are supposed to be. I emphatically assert it is necessary to have an approach at these historical processes of constitution to understand the diversity of expectations indigenous themselves have about their reality and their development.