 you a little about our speaker today. His name is Ben Jimman, dongle, not dangle, dongle. He has a PhD in Latin American history from McGill University, a BA in writing from Bard College. He teaches journalism as a lecturer of public communication at the University of Vermont. Dongle has worked as a journalist around the world covering social justice issues, protest movements, and politics for dozens of outlets, including The Guardian, Vice, The Nation, and Al Jazeera. He's the author of The Price of Fire, Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia, Dancing with Dynamite, Social Movements in States and Latin America, and The 500-Year Rebellion, Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia, which won a Nautilus Book Award. His most recent book is A World Where Many Worlds Fit. He lives in Burlington, Vermont with his family. Please welcome back Dr. Benjamin Dongle. All right. Can everybody hear me now? Okay. Okay, great. Well, thanks so much for having me here. It's really nice to see everyone. I live here in Burlington, or I guess we're not officially in Burlington, but I live in Burlington. Let's see, is this, maybe I'll put this mic closer to my mouth, just to make sure. Is that better? More consistent? Okay. Great. So I live in Burlington with my family. I've worked as a journalist off and on for about 20 years, focusing on Bolivia. And as was mentioned in the introduction, I teach journalism at University of Vermont. And I'm really happy to be here with you all today to talk about this research that I've worked on. This material that I'm going to share today came out of my dissertation research at McGill University. And I did work in Bolivia for a number of years on this topic of Indigenous movements in oral history. And I'm happy to share this with you today. So what we're going to talk about today is our Indigenous movements in oral history in Bolivia, with a focus on how Indigenous movements have used oral history and grassroots historical research as a tool for organizing, for building up their movements and winning political demands. And this came out of, as I mentioned, my doctoral research. But it also has to do with a book that I turned, my dissertation, which I turned into a book. This book is called The 500-Year Rebellion, Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia. This book, as well as my other three books, are available here for sale, if anybody's interested, over on the table over there. So before I get started with the details of this topic, I just wanted to mention where Bolivia is located, some fundamental geographic details. The audio is okay, folks in the back. Okay. So Bolivia is located in the center of Latin America, in the heart of Latin America, it's the green country in the middle there. It's a landlocked country. Population, they have about 11 million people in the country, primarily Indigenous people. Guarani, Quechua, Aymara, Indigenous communities. So about 60% of the population are Indigenous. It's a country with a lot of geographic diversity. You can see here in this map that there's the Andes, they're cutting through the country. And there's also part of the Amazon goes into Bolivia, there's deserts in the country. So it has a lot of geographic diversity where, so you have a little bit of everything. You have high lands and high deserts, very high Andean mountains, jungle and lowlands. So there's a lot going on. The main area that I'm going to be talking about is La Paz, which is right next to Peru. It's the capital of the country. And it's next to Lake Titicaca, which is the highest freshwater lake in the world. And that's where the blue part is where Peru is. So it's a mountainous area. The area that I'm going to be talking about is in the Andes and particularly around La Paz. So just so you know geographically where things are situated. So this question of Indigenous movements and their uses of oral history and historical references is it came about for me as a topic when I worked as a journalist in the country in the early 2000s, when a conflict emerged called Bolivia's gas war. And this is a picture of this conflict where people had actually taken train cars off of their track off the tracks with the bare hands and pushed them off the road into the off the tracks into this highway here to block the road. So blocking the road in this way was a form of protest. And this just represents the power, the people's power in this moment and their ability to move these train cars, but also their rage and how upset they were regarding the conflict. So what was happening in this period in 2003, I was working as a journalist in the country at this time 20 years ago, actually this month, 20 years ago, it's crazy to believe it was that long ago. But during this time, I was working as a journalist interviewing people. I just got out of college. And so I was familiarizing myself with what was happening in the country and educating myself. And I was going around during this conflict to understand what was happening. And basically, this was a conflict around a plan to export Bolivian natural gas reserves to the US for a very low price. It was going to continue a lot of what Bolivian saw as neocolonial exploitation of the country to take away these natural resources for the foreign benefit of foreign corporations. They wanted to take out Bolivia's natural gas reserves and privatize it. Bolivians during this conflict were saying, no, we want the gas to be used for national development, to build hospitals, schools, and fun programs that helped the impoverished indigenous majority of the country. So that's where the conflict emerged. It was against this corporate looting of natural gas reserves. So I was reporting on this conflict as a part of the conflict. People were creating road blockades to generate attention to their demands and basically bring the country to a standstill through these blockades. And so I would go around to the blockades and say, why are you doing this? Why are you using these techniques, these blockade techniques? And just general journalistic interviews. But my biggest question was, where did all of this momentum and this historical knowledge of how to protest and what was the role of historical legacies in this protest? And as I listened more and more to people's speeches and people's responses to my questions, I found that historical consciousness had a big role in a lot of these protests, that people weren't just protesting coming out of nowhere. They were actually participating in a long tradition of social movement organizing and particularly indigenous revolt against the state, against colonialism, against the elite that ran the country. And so that's what kind of piqued my interest in this topic of the roles of oral history and the roles of grassroots historical research within these movements, because I asked, where does this come from? Where do these histories come from? Because during the speeches that I heard and the interviews that I did during this time, people would say, well, we are carrying on a tradition that is 500 years old. We are doing these protests to carry on the tradition of Tupac Katari. He was an indigenous leader in the late 1700s in Bolivia. He led a revolt in 1781 with his wife, Bartolina Cisa. And they laid siege to La Paz, the capital city of the country, which is in a valley. And they organized roadblocks and basically laid siege to the whole colonial city of La Paz at that time when the Spanish were in control of the country. And they were almost successful, but they ended up being crushed after about 90 days of the siege. The Spanish crushed the rebellion, but this rebellion was so popular, so powerful that it was forever etched in the memory of indigenous people in the Andes as a symbol of revolt against colonialism to the extent that in the early 2000s, when I was talking with people, and I asked them why they were protesting, they would say, we're carrying on Tupac Katari's traditions of revolt. We're using some of his same tactics and they would reference Tupac Katari and other indigenous rebels and other forms of organizing that went back centuries. And so this really struck a chord with me as a journalist. And years later, I kind of picked up the threads of these historical questions and did my PhD dissertation on this topic. And that's what my book came out of. That's what the focus of today is. But really what I found in my research was that these struggles, these oral histories had been carried on for many centuries. And particularly in the 20th century, that's where I focused a lot of my research on, which is how different groups organized in the 20th century leading up to these revolts in the 2000s tracing some of these historical lineages of insurrection. So that's the premise. And so what led me to this, this is what led me to this, but then I ended up conducting research on this topic for a number of years. And it ended and I used oral history. I went out and did a lot of interviews on this topic. I did a lot of archival research in Bolivia. And it led to these topics. So the other piece of this is the role of Indigenous President Abel Morales. This is a photo of Abel Morales, Indigenous Socialist President of Bolivia. He's the former president of Bolivia. But so in the early 2000s, a number of protests merged against the extraction and exploitation of natural resources. People protested against the privatization of water. They protested against dispossession of land, demanding more Indigenous representation in the government. And out of these series of protests, it led to eventually the election of Abel Morales. So Abel Morales was elected for the first time in 2005 in Bolivia, coming out of these movements. He was a member of the movements as a coca farmer, as a union leader himself and a congressman. And out of this period of revolt in the early 2000s, Abel kind of rode that wave and ended up being elected in a landslide victory in 2005. And he began ushering in a lot of policies that had basically been won in the streets, but he institutionalized with his government. For example, he ended up nationalizing a lot of the country's gas reserves and using those gas reserves as a demand from the gas war to say we want to use these gas reserves for national development, to lift up the impoverished Indigenous majority. He led a constituent assembly to rewrite the country's constitution to make it more progressive and inclusive. He enacted his own, his government's own land reform across the country. So it was a quite a progressive government. They were also anti-imperialists. They ended up kicking out the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and kicking out US military bases in the country and US military collaboration in the country because of he was an imperialist and he wanted to create more political sovereignty. He also created more economic sovereignty in the country by having a stronger share of the state involved in natural resource extraction and state-led businesses. So he moved forward with a lot of these progressive socialist policies over a number of years and as a part of this was also an element of the political uses of history. So this is something that I explored in my research. So right here is a picture of one of the inaugurations of Emo Morales in 2015 that I attended. This is at Tewanaku, an ancient Indigenous ruins of a city, of a pre-Incan city in the Andes, right near Lake Titicaca. And these are some people here that are part of the celebration. You can see the ruins there, the stone. And next to that is a portrait of Tupacatari, the 18th century rebel leader. And his face is created out of potatoes, corn, and carrots. And it's supposed to represent the different products that were grown in this part of the highlands of Bolivia. And so this is just to symbolize that Emo Morales as a socialist, leftist, Indigenous president also used some of these elements of history and these symbols of rebellion to justify his own presidency and build up his own legitimacy as a political leader. So you see these kinds of references to the past, and it helped bolster his government through many years. So I traced the roots of the government's uses of history in this form as well as movement's history in the following ways. So the first example that I look at, that I wanted to talk about today is the Qataristas. The Qataristas were a group of Indigenous intellectuals and leaders that organized in the 1960s and 70s in Bolivia, and they were the ones who put up the statue of Tupacatari. Next to Tupacatari, this was put up in 1969, is the Bolivian flag, and next to that is the Bifala, which is a multi-colored checkered flag that represents the many Indigenous societies in Bolivia. There's about 43 different Indigenous languages and nations in Bolivia. And so what the Qataristas did during the 1960s and 70s, this is the first case study that I look at in terms of how Indigenous movements have used history for their own ends, was they said that, you know, we need to rescue Tupacatari's history, we need to rescue the history of other Indigenous leaders and put them at the center of the political map of our nation. They used it as a way to explore the place of Indigenous people in Bolivia to say, we aren't going to be erased, our histories aren't going to be erased, and we need to promote these Indigenous histories of rebellion to say, we aren't victims, we aren't just victims of dispossession and colonization, we're also survivors and heroes of this work, we're protagonists of our own history, and they started promoting Tupacatari's image and the history of Qatari and other Indigenous rebels like Bartolina Sisa, his wife, and they even, they put up posters around the country, and in 1973 they launched a manifesto of Tiwanaku, which talked about centering these Indigenous histories of resistance in their own political lineage and building political parties as a part of that. Some of the people who founded some political parties that ended up paving the way toward the election of Evo Morales in decades later were these folks. So, Genaro Flores is in the center here. He was a major union leader. Next to him is Constantino Lima and Luciano Tapia. These were people who were a part of this Qatari's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, and you can see here some of the symbolism which is really important to these movements. So, you see the Uefbala, the multi-colored rainbow, checkered rainbow flag representing the many Indigenous nations of Bolivia. Up in the upper left corner is a portrait of Tupac Qatari, and behind them is also another portrait of Tupac Qatari with Illimani, the biggest mountain in Bolivia, and the Andes behind him. And then on the table in front of them are some other symbols which are really important to these movements. One is the symbol of authority in the Andes, a kind of, what I want to say, like a staff of authority that a leader would have. And in front of them are also green leaves which are coca leaves. So, coca leaves in Bolivia have been used for tens of thousands of years by Indigenous societies. People chew it, drink it in tea. It helps alleviate altitude sickness. It helps give people stamina when they're working in the mines. It's also a symbol of indigeneity for Indigenous communities. And so, people will chew it at union meetings and meetings. It's also a key ingredient in cocaine, which is why it's been the focus of a lot of U.S.-led eradication efforts. But it's also been a symbol of anti-imperialism because a lot of communities see the U.S. presence in the country in the war on drugs as not so much an effort to eradicate coca leaves as much as an excuse for a military presence in the country and to push against the radical leftist unions that are a part of the coca movement. So, these are some of the symbols that recur throughout a lot of the movement's meetings. So, this group was really important in the 1960s and 70s. Renato Flores ended up founding a Kepesino union in the late 1970s in the middle of a dictatorship that was suppressing Indigenous rights, trying to erase Indigenous identity, and trying to push these radical groups to the sidelines, understandably, as a dictatorship. But he created, Renato Flores created the Cessute Sebei. It's an organization that's a Kepesino union in Bolivia that was independent of the state, independent of the dictatorship, a dissident organization that was also trying to rescue pre-conquest forms of agricultural organization. They talked about how they can recreate rural organizing to focus on reciprocity and mutual aid and collaboration and cooperatively working the land. These were things that pushed against more modernizing, large-scale agriculture that the government was pushing at the time. So, they were also trying to rescue and strengthen a lot of these forms of rural organizing and agricultural development. And they also had really strong militancy. So, here's a picture of a Cessute Sebei march, the organization that Renato Flores started in the late 70s, and they're marching down from El Alto down into La Paz. And you can see in the distance, it's kind of faded, but La Paz is based in a valley, and out in the distance are the mountains, and you can see the Wefala flags here. And this is an important picture historically because it's one of the Cessute Sebei's first marches, but it's also important because geographically, it gives you an idea of how people laid siege to the city, because the city is down in the valley, and if these organizations blocked all of the roads to the capital of the country, it forces all the politicians to pay attention to whatever it is you're demanding. So, people would do this regularly and continue to do it today because the main airport is in El Alto, and you can block the airport coming into the city. You can block major transport, tourism, trucks coming in from Peru and Argentina. A lot of them come down this road. So, this is a really important thing to keep in mind in terms of the geographical space being central to the organizing and the use of blockades to pressure contemporary governments, but also reenact Katari's 18th century siege of the city, which is something that was on a lot of people's minds during this period when they were fighting against the dictatorship, and the Setsu Sebei had a big role in toppling that dictatorship, leading to a return to democracy in Bolivia in 1983, which also coincides with, during this time, the foundation of the Bartolina Cisa Federation. So, this is a picture of a leader of the indigenous, the women's indigenous union called the Bartolina Cisa Federation. So, that organization was taking its name directly from the name of the wife of Tupac Katari, another indigenous rebel who coordinated the army, the indigenous army's rebellion against, against La Paz. So, the Bartolina Cisa organization was created roughly around the same time as the Setsu Sebei, as a women's arm of this movement, and they carried the same banner of Tupac Katari, Bartolina Cisa, promoting these histories of indigenous resistance, using the same language, using the same tactics of Tupac Katari, in some cases they were using the same exact types of blockades, in some cases they were names of different names that referred to mobile blockage, which could involve taking logs and rocks and moving them quickly from highway to highway, depending on where the armed forces were arriving, and then other ones that were particularly focused on strangling the city of La Paz in this militant direct action. And so, around the same time, this is really a heart of my research, this is the oral history section of it, which I found really fascinating. During this same time, an organization called the Andean Oral History Workshop, the TOA, for its acronyms in Spanish, was founded. And this is a picture of the oral history workshop in La Paz, interviewing an elder who was a casique apoderado, who was a, who was someone who was a leader of his community, leader of his community in the early part of the 20th century, and he's sharing his stories of rebellion, how he pressured the government, how he represented his organizations in court. And so what the TOA did, the Andean Oral History Workshop did in the early 1980s, they were founded in 1983, was that they did the kind of reflected a lot of this militant organizing that was happening in the streets, and they reflected that in the university through oral history gathering, gathering oral histories to say, okay, the Setsuit Sebe, Bartolina Cisa, the Cataristas, these organizations are working for change and supporting indigeneity in the streets. We're going to reflect that with our own historical research, centering oral history at the center of our work. So they, they looked to the libraries, they looked to the archives, they looked to their professors, and they found a void when it came to indigenous history of Bolivia. They found an absence of silence in erasure of this history. And they said, we can, we may not have documentary evidence of all of our history, but there has been history that has been passed down orally through generations. And this is how a lot of the collective memory was sustained over many, many centuries and decades to say, we're going to pass our oral history from generation to generation, from the elders to the younger, younger people. And the TOA put this at the center of their work, working collectively, collaboratively to create what they called a common pot, which was basically like a potluck, where you're, where you're putting everything together or a big pot of soup, you put, everybody's bringing something and putting in, putting something into the soup to create it. And they would do that with archival research, collecting interviews to basically reinvigorate this historical consciousness, putting his oral history at the center of people's awareness of indigenous history in the country. And this is a picture of, of that happening. So the Indian oral history workshop gathered all of these work, or gather all of these oral histories and produced a number of pamphlets over the years. This one is called mujer en resistencia comunaria, a pamphlet that is about women and communal resistance. So they were gathering a lot of interviews and putting them into cheap pamphlets that were produced in Spanish and Imara, the main indigenous language they were working in, and spread this out to the countryside, to the rural communities that they were interviewing. So they weren't, they were trying to really invert the classic tradition of research, which is more extractive, where foreign, foreign or, or city-based intellectuals and researchers would go into rural indigenous communities, extract a lot of information, do a bunch of interviews and never return, and also have none of the subjects of the research inform the focus of the research and the ultimate results of the research. But the Indian oral history workshop was really about inverting that to say, we want the subjects of our research to direct the entire research project from the theory to the production of everything. And so they, a big part of that was, was including the people who were they interviewed in the production of these pamphlets, and then returning this material to the countryside, to rural organizations, to small towns, and so there was a reciprocal nature, which is at the heart of a lot of their work as well. So some of the most profound work that the Indian oral history workshop did over the years was their work on the Casiques de Polarados, a network of indigenous leaders in the early 20th century who worked to defend indigenous communities' rights against incursions by the Hacienda and, and government to dispossess indigenous lands. And the Casiques de Polarados are in this photo here, one of the only photos of many of the Casiques de Polarados, all together in one place. This is a photo from 1925. And in the center of this photo, I'm going to show another one in the next slide, is a photo of Santos Marca Tula. His last name was Tula, T-U-L-A. And he was one of the most profound, most influential indigenous leaders among the Casiques de Polarados, and he ended up at the center of a lot of the toa's research because what they found was that this was a man who had led a lot of rebellions, led a lot of advocacy work in the courts, in the government, but there was virtually no mention of him in any history books, in any archives, in any newspapers. He was virtually unknown. He had been erased from the country's history. And so the Andean Oral History Workshop said we need to recover this. We need to put this back on the political map of the country. And so they went out and interviewed by the time they started working, Santos Marca Tula was dead. But a lot of his colleagues and a lot of the people who worked with him in this picture were still alive. And so they went out and collected oral histories about Tula's struggle, about his organizing work, and published a really influential pamphlet about this right here. So this is a depiction of Santos Marca Tula. And this small pamphlet, it's about maybe 50 pages long. This was spread throughout the countryside, throughout the country, in the lowlands, in the highlands, to indigenous communities. And it helped contribute to this indigenous movement that was galvanized in the early 1980s and onward with the Sesu Tzebe, the Carthadistas, these other organizations. They used these pamphlets for organizing to say, you know, this is our history that's been silenced. This is why we are the heirs of these histories of rebellion. And this helped contribute to that. The other thing that the Indian Oral History Workshop did was they didn't just publish pamphlets, they also turned their work into radio novellas, like radio soap operas, basically, which were a way to popularize these stories. This is a picture of some of the TOA members recording in 1991, some of their other radio novellas that were based on oral history. So they did this because radio was really popular in the 80s and 90s. And it reached a wide amount of rural communities. And they would perform these histories of Santos Marca Tula, Tupacatari, other indigenous rebels, to make it more accessible and popularize these histories in Aymara, in Quechua, in Spanish, so that people could understand it. And afterwards, people would call up to the studio and say, oh, I just was listening to your radio show about Santos Marca Tula. I actually knew him. I'd like to talk with you. So it ended up creating this collective research process where people who were listening to the shows would call up and increase the knowledge and increase the awareness and the research that the organization was doing. So one of the great things that I really liked the most about this research was interviewing people who were involved with these struggles. I've done research in Bolivia almost every year for the last 20 years. And I got to interview a lot of the protagonists in these different movements. And one of my favorite stories was when I actually got to meet Santos Marca Tula's son. So that's the Casique Polarado who died in the 40s. But one day in the Toa offices in La Paz, it was a really rainy day. And I was sitting there interviewing some of the Toa members about their work with oral history. I was basically doing an oral history of the oral history workshop. And they were really friendly, really welcoming to me throughout these years of research. I really enjoyed working with them. And one day I said, they said, well, you want to know more about Santos Marca Tula, you should talk with his son. And I was really surprised and stunned because I didn't know that any of Tula's immediate kids were still alive. I had no idea. And they said, well, if you'd like to interview him, he lives in Al Alto. We can take a bus up there. It took us like five hours to get to this person's house. Maybe not five hours, maybe more like three hours. Took a long time. A lot of different taxi rides and bus rides. It was pouring rain. We ended up getting to this small house in this working class, Imara City of Al Alto. And in a small room outside of his family's main house, this man, Gregorio Barco Gorachi, Tula's son, was resting. And when I interviewed him, he was about 96 years old. He was almost entirely blind. He only spoke Imara, the indigenous language of Imara. He didn't speak any Spanish. So I worked with him through a translator who came with me from the TOA offices to talk with him. And I was surprised to meet him. And he was surprised that I was there to do research on his dad. He didn't know that anybody from a foreign university, coming from so far away, as he explained to me, cared about Santos Marcatula, knew about his father. And when I got there, he was a little sleepy. But then he started to get really animated when he started to recall his memories about his father. And it was really moving. Even though I don't speak Imara, I speak Spanish, the translator from the TOA, who was translating to me, was making sense of what Gregorio Barco Gorachi was saying. But I could even tell from how he was holding himself and the emotion in his voice that he was getting, becoming really excited about talking about his father and talking about Tula. And he told me some stories that really helped complement a lot of the more official stories that I'd heard about Tula. For example, he said that while his father walked around the country and traveled around the country from court to court and public office to public office representing his community, he was constantly persecuted by the police and the military. And he said there were certain cases when the military and the police would try to hurt him or even kill him. And certain types of like miraculous things would happen. He said that they tried to drown his father and a big wind would come up and move a bunch of waves and push people around so that the police who were trying to drown him couldn't drown him. And they said they tried to burn him once and he wouldn't burn. So there are all these kind of like superhuman characteristics that his father had. He also said that Tula had the ability to talk with plants and talk with animals. And this speaks to some of the more mythical and some kind of super, what do I want to say, the role of myth and spirituality in these histories which is often totally dismissed in the historical record. So this is why oral history is so important is because people like Gregorio Barco Goraci couldn't talk with me about or talk with anyone about these extraordinary things happening that have meaning within the community that have political purpose that have truth to them. And so it was really exciting to talk with him. He said that his father could always talk, like I said, talk with lizards, talk with dogs, talk with and this helped him on all of his journeys. So these were things that really made an impression on me and it related to the importance, like I said, of myth and memory in this political consciousness. And then when we left his house, the rain had stopped raining and I was walking out with some of his relatives and a young man had joined us. And then we were walking like blocks and blocks away and suddenly this dog came out of nowhere looking like it wanted to attack us. And Goraci's, I think it was his grandson, talked to the dog and was able to call him down. He said, yeah, this is the thing that we have this ability to talk with animals. So this is just like what my, I think it was his uncle, what my uncle was talking about. So that was like a really nice anecdote that said, well, maybe there is something going on here. So that was a really great experience. And I was really privileged and honored to be able to talk with with a lot of the people who were participants in these struggles and particularly Tula's son. So besides the, besides the work that I did on TOA, the Endi Neural History Workshop, I also looked at a lot of different cases of how these histories were being recovered. And one of the ways was through the, the strengthening of the IU, which is a rural organizing system of governance that has been that has existed in the Andes for thousands and thousands of years. And this is a picture that represents that where mother Imara mothers are gathering in a meeting in 1985. They're sharing coca leaves. They're sharing some lunch. And so as a part of the IU, which these, these women are a part of, the IU, as I mentioned, is an organization that, that predates the Incas that predates the Spanish conquest. And it's a form of organizing in the rural parts of the highlands and the Andes that is about communal work. That's about sharing responsibilities. That's about rotating leadership so that one person is in the control of the community the entire time, but it's rotating over time. It's about coming to decisions collectively through consensus and also sharing a lot of the labor for an IU, which is often a network of different villages and families spanning across geographical spaces. So it's, they often will be kind of like what they've been called archipelagos that are in the highlands where some members of the IU will raise llamas in the lower, the lower mountains where people will raise potatoes. And then in the lowlands and the more tropical areas where people will grow other fruits and vegetables in the warmer climates. And they'll all work together to produce these crops, share them, bring them to market to sustain themselves. And this kind of collaboration has persisted even in the face of state repression and the expansion of the Acienda and other institutions, including the Spanish conquest, which tried to completely eliminate the IU's entirely because they totally resisted the conquest, Christianity, and the forced labor in all the horrors of colonialism, but that somehow over, not somehow, but through many different ways the IU survived and it persisted and it still persists into today. So one of the things that they did, this is a photo of the foundation of Konamak, a national network of IU's, which was formed in 1997. So these IU's got together in the 90s various IU's across Bolivia and they worked with the Andean Oral History Workshop to form a national network to say we don't want to be erased, we don't want to be sidelined, we want to become stronger through this national network, we want to reinvigorate our own histories, reinvigorate our own traditions and use oral history to do that. So they worked with the Toa to go around to the elders in their towns and in their communities to rescue some of these traditions of rotational leadership, collaborative work across different geographical spaces, the different governing techniques of these organizations in the IU, and they worked with the Toa to do archival research to find old land titles, to dig up, for example, proof that their ancestors had been forced to go to the mines in Potosi, in the silver mines in Potosi, Bolivia to mine by the Spanish. The Spanish had forced them to go into a servitude which was called Mita and after this servitude was completed, they were given titles to the land that had already been theirs but it was proof that their land was theirs and so the Toa helped this organization do research to find these old land titles that in some cases dated back to the 16th century to prove that their indigenous territory was theirs and that they had the right and legitimacy to control their IU and their territory. So this was another way that these histories, that these grassroots historical research methods were passed on through generations in the 70s, 80s, and 90s and with the foundation of the Konamak in 1997. So throughout all of these different ways of maintaining history, using these different methodologies, collecting oral histories, it leads us to this point in early 2000 when all these movements burst onto the stage in Bolivia and this is the photo I showed earlier of the conflict around the gas war and so it brings us back to that point where during this time there was a lot of momentum to kick out the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, huge corporations like Bechtel, agents of corporate globalization to say we don't want this kind of capitalism, we don't want this kind of capitalist corporate model in our country, we want to have more economic sovereignty, we want to put indigeneity at the center of our politics and so on. And so all these different ways of using oral history, of creating these different models for governance in the countryside, they fed into these movements in their early 2000s leading to, as I mentioned, the election of Ivo Morales. So this is a period that's full of a lot of tumultuous movements but Ivo Morales was elected in 2005, he was in charge of the country until he was deposed in a coup in 2019 which I'll get to in a second but I just wanted to wrap up the points on oral history in the following way. So when I went there to do some research in 2019 I continued with a lot of these questions of how is oral history being used today, how is this research being conducted and I ended up meeting up with an organization with a nation called the Caracota Indigenous Nation, Tata Samuel Flores is the leader here and he's holding their, his ancestors, 16th century titles to their land. And so this was just a couple of a few years ago, by the way they look like they're really mad at me or really serious but they're actually really nice guys. They were like posing for this official press conference and but they're they're actually really friendly but they're you know they're on a serious mission. So what they were doing here in this meeting was showing me their 16th century land titles just like the IU's had been doing, just like Santos Marcatula had been doing, they've been using the same type of historical research to say we are the owners of our land, this is our indigenous territory, our ancestors went to the Mita, they went to the mines and here are the here is the proof, the colonial proof of our of our right to this land. So this movement, this group was going to La Paz to petition the government to say to fight against the dispossession of their land from private interests to say we have a right to this land and so this really struck me because it shows that these indigenous communities are still using some of the same research techniques, some of the same oral history and archival research for their movements. And so what happened over the last, so Eva Morales, Eva Morales again was deposed in a coup in 2019 and this is a protest in 2020 against the coup government that took power and demanding elections. So just to, so in 2019 Eva Morales ran for election again. He was a, this was a controversial move because he in 2015 ran for, wanted to run for president in 2015 and asked the country through a national referendum and said should I, can I have the right to run again as president and in this referendum everyone said no you can't we don't want you to run again. And he instead, you know he instead ignored the results of this referendum and went to the Supreme Court and had the court say that it was his human right to run again for president. So very controversial among people who didn't support Eva Morales after all those years in power. And in spite of all that he ended up running again in 2019. People, some of his critics said we don't want you to run again. We had a referendum. We don't, we want somebody else in power. He ran anyway at the same time. He was still quite popular among his base of supporters because of all these policies that it empowered indigenous people that had lifted up impoverished sectors of the country and had had all these, all these progressive policies and land reform, changing the constitution, nationalizing gas reserves, etc. The country had really benefited from this. The middle class was growing. The GDP was growing. A lot of good things were happening for, for working families. And he was really popular at the same time. There are a lot of people who didn't think he should run again. And in 2019, basically a coup was organized after the elections had taken place that showed that he had won. And the election and, and a coup took place in November 2019 that ousted him from office and led to a lot of bloodshed and pushed toward a coup government led by Janine Agnes, who ended up leading a massacre of a number of different communities, indigenous communities who were protesting against her government. And during the same period, she was in office from 2019 throughout 2020. She kept on delaying new elections. And during this time, this is when COVID hit. So a lot of rural communities and urban communities, a lot of people are suffering, right? Understandably. And there's a lot of discontent. There was a lot of anger toward the government. And what the indigenous communities did was that they again relied on some of these same protest tactics. And they laid siege to La Paz again, referring to Tupac Katari, organized national road blockade campaigns, using a lot of these same tactics that have been passed down through oral history, collective memory, to say, this is how we, this is how we're going to work for change against this dictatorship, this coup government. And because of these protests, this is a picture of some of these protests a couple, a few years ago, they ended up pushing back against the coup government. And because of these protests, elections happened again, elections happened. And the movement toward socialism, the Moss political party, was elected again to run the country. So Luis Artase, a member of Able Morales' political party, won elections in 2020. Able Morales came back from exile. And it was all thanks to the indigenous movements of the country that pushed forward, defending democracy, pushing against the dictatorship. And throughout a lot of these uprisings that I've visited the country various times throughout this time, oral history, this rebel memory, these types of historical strategies for indigenous resistance were still at the center of a lot of these struggles for democracy and indigenous rights. So I'll end the talk there and lead to, we can go into any questions that folks have. Thanks so much for listening to me today. And I look forward to the conversation. How about now? Let's chipper. So who's in power now? Yeah, great question. So Luis Artase is still the president now. So he was elected in 2020. And he's the president, he's the, he's part of the Moss party that's, that's Able Morales came out of. So he's still on the left, a socialist coming from the same traditions. He was the economics minister under Able Morales for many years. And he was really successful leading the country out of poverty, partly because of the commodity boom, which happened in the late 2000s into the early like 2013. So they really benefited from that. So that's one of the reasons why he was elected because people liked that period of time. And he has decided that he will be running again for office in the election in 2025. So they're going to have an election again in 2025. But Able Morales has also decided he wants to run again in 2025. So the two of them have been at odds recently and they haven't been able to seem to come together at all. And so it may be possible that they might be, it's possible that they will be running on different, in different political parties against each other in the initial primaries, which would divide the left and benefit the right. So that's kind of where things are at. In spite of, you know, the end of the coup government, the return of the Moss and power, Able and Luis Artase haven't, in the leadership, they haven't been able to, to get together. Morales is out of the country now, isn't that correct? He was out of the country in exile in Mexico and Argentina, but he's back in Bolivia now. He did return. Yep. Sure. We have a question from Zoom. Hi. So is there a history of respect for members of the community who remember? History of respect for members of the community. How you learn? Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Definitely. Yeah, there was, there's been kind of a revalorization. I'm thinking of the word in Spanish, revalorización. But it's basically, I think the Toa really helped, helped make that happen. So there is definitely reverence that people who maintain these histories have. A lot of the, a lot of the historians, the Imara historians who I spoke with, they're esteemed members of the community are history professors in La Paz and other parts of the country. And, and I think that the, the different organizations that I talked about, the Cataristas, the César Cebe, the Toa, it's really thanks to these organizations that made historical consciousness and maintaining these histories so important and helping people to realize the importance of this. And so definitely people are revered and have been supported and listened to and they've published a number of books. And so thanks to the Toa and people like Hinata Flores and people like Silvia Rivera, founder of the Toa, is putting, putting a lot of this back at the center of politics. And I think that one of the, one of the representations of this, the, the proof that it's so popular is the way that the government has used some of these histories and their own official branding and speeches and they put two pocket, they named their, their planes after Tupac Catari, they named the satellite after Tupac Catari. It's obviously working for like the political purposes of building a narrative around why they, you know, why they were the legitimate heirs of these struggles. So it definitely has a lot of political capital. Reminded as you talk intermittently, it dots into my head about our own USA history of treatment of indigenous peoples. And so anyway, in a, if, in some kind of a, maybe a fantasy that given all this background of, of, of violation of rights, land rights, human rights, et cetera, travesties abound and these tenacious efforts on the part of these people to, to endure and to be heard and to prevail. If there was a fantasy somehow that they wouldn't somehow emerge, let's just say in the next 20 years, as, as singly, you know, able to realize what they want, what would happen, would they be compensated or would they, would they have rights that they don't have now and especially election rights or a right to cast a vote in elections rather? And, or would it be recognition of land rights like our, our indigenous people here want recognition of treaties that were violated and that anyway, so what, what, what more concretely would they, would they realize if this fantasy came? Great. Well, thank you. An excellent question. Yeah. And so it's an area that I don't have as much knowledge in, ironically enough, like I focused more on Latin America than the U.S., but I've learned a lot from scholars like Nick Estes who wrote a book called Our History is the Future, which touches on a lot of these same topics, which is the uses of history in indigenous movements in the U.S. And I think that, that to answer your question about the future, what we could expect, I think that some of the examples of, of, like pre, not prefigured politics, but like the, the example of Standing Rock in North Dakota where indigenous movements organized to reject an oil pipeline through their territory. That is something that comes to mind as an example of a similar type of indigenous resistance to reject the state sanctioned corporate looting of indigenous land, poisoning of the land through the water. And I think that there are a number of indigenous rebellions that have taken place that are similar to what's been happening in Bolivia across North America in Canada and the U.S. that are really pointing a way forward to not just justice and, and our so-called reconciliation regarding the genocidal past of U.S. and Canada, but also moving forward in the case of like taking land back and saying that it's not just about political rhetoric, but we want actual material progress and we want political power. And I think that one of the ways that a lot of indigenous politics have been centered on the world stage recently, not just recently, but over the past decades, is an example and a vision for an alternative to the environmental destruction which is at the heart of climate change. So from Canada to the U.S. to across the Amazon and Bolivia, it's indigenous communities who are often on the front lines of defending the Amazon, defending rivers, defending the countryside against mining, gas, logging, cattle ranching, et cetera. So I think that in terms of a global indigenous politics as an alternative to the climate disasters we're seeing, that's where I see like some of the more, the more collective political vision for the future that is really being talked about and embraced and put forward as a real alternative to business as usual. Do we have any other questions? What foreign countries were getting the cheap gas and how was it being transported out of this landlocked country? Thank you, great question. Yeah, so Bolivia is a landlocked country. They're also are rich in a lot of mineral resources. So they've been in World War II, it was a source of a lot of tin. It's also been a source of a lot of copper before the Spanish exploited all of it. There was silver in a lot of the mines there. So it has a long history of foreign looting of their natural wealth, right? It's one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere. So people are familiar with that. And so with the gas war in 2003 that you're mentioning, the plan was for U.S. companies, specific LNG from California to come in through a Chilean port, and take Bolivia's gas and bring it to the port in Chile to bring it to the U.S., so over land. So that was another thing that Bolivians were really upset about. They were saying not only is a U.S., like a gringo company coming to our nation to exploit our wealth once again, but then the Chileans are going to benefit from it too because they're going to process this and benefit from this industry. And they stole Bolivia's only access to the sea in the late, in the 19th century. So Bolivians still want access to the sea for a number of reasons. And this kind of brought all of those grievances together. So people were upset against the Chileans, the U.S. and the Bolivian government, the right wing Bolivian government who was supporting it at this time. So there were plenty of reasons to be upset with it, which is one of the reasons why it brought so many people together to reject it. Anyone else? I believe you said there are 65% of the population who are indigenous. What are the other 35? So roughly 62% of the population self-identifies as indigenous based on the census. And the other, it's a mixture. It would be people who identify more as like a mestizo or people of European descent. So a variety, but the biggest thing that stands out is that 65% of the people self-identify as indigenous, which is one of the biggest proportions of that in Latin America. Anyone else? No? Thank you so much, Ben Dongle.