Indigenous Peoples, Memory and Envisioning the Future: A Brief Multidimensional Study

Abstract

This paper offers a brief overview that seeks to make a series of approaches to an undeniably complex topic: the struggle of indigenous peoples in the context of colonialization processes worldwide, national and local scales. This survey first characterizes, systematizes, and relates the efforts made by some 350 million people worldwide (including more than 15 million indigenous people from Mexico) to safeguard their unique historical and cultural identity in the face of their respective mainstream society over the past sixty years. This will provide a basis to look at the challenges that a country like Mexico faces in preserving the spatial or territorial matrix that guarantees the sustenance and survival of these peoples, and their beliefs, traditions, ways of life, and deep knowledge regarding the conservation and regeneration of natural resources for the benefit of all of human society. At this level of analysis, this study seeks to gain deeper insights into strategies for preserving and regenerating habitat used by an ancestral Zapotec community living in the Chinantla Highlands region, in the northern mountain ranges of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The paper concludes by highlighting the strengths of a historical memory that hews to epistemological categories utterly different from those prevailing in Western culture in the day-to-day engagement of these cultures with their land and their natural surroundings.