Paez (people)
The Paez are an indigenous people living in southern Colombia .
Dates and backgrounds
You refer to yourself as Nasa . Their language is called Paez , which they call Nasa Yuwe themselves. They live in Cauca , a department of Colombia and there in 21 Indian reservations on a total of 2,764 km² in the inaccessible Andean region of Tierradentro . Their number was about 138,000 people in 2011. This makes them one of the largest indigenous peoples in South America. About 65% of them are of Christian religion.
Like all Andean peoples, the Paez have been heavily influenced by Spanish culture since the Conquista . Coca cultivation and the resulting drug crime has been a recurring problem for the ethnic group since the 20th century and until today . The Nasa indigenous people in the north of the Cauca have been fighting for resistance since colonial times. Nasa fight for autonomy, their traditional territories, culture, language, customs, knowledge and for the realization of their worldview, which is based on harmony between all living beings. You are in the midst of the armed conflict between politics, the military, paramilitary and guerrillas.
This negative development has been countered by a re-indigenization movement since 1971 , which, in addition to fighting for land rights, has tried intensively to strengthen ethnic awareness. The movement is based on an intellectual elite whose aim is to banish foreign cultural elements and to revive the pre-Columbian heritage as much as possible. This applies both to the ritual revitalization of ethnic religion and shamanism (and thus comes close to a crisis cult ), as well as to many other cultural elements. In 1994 there was a devastating earthquake in the southern tribal area, which clearly solidified and accelerated the process. The shamans interpreted this as a warning shot from Mother Earth and other numinous spirit powers, because the Indians followed the commercial western lifestyle, which had already caused great damage to the life-saving environment.
literature
- Nina Richter: Highlands Colombia: Paez- Shamanism , 2001, e-book ISBN 978-3-640-01925-0
- Josef Drexler: Eco-cosmology - the polyphonic contradiction of Indian America: Resource crisis management using the example of NASA (Paez) from Tierradentro, Colombia , LIT publishing house; February 5, 2009, ISBN 3825819264
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Drexler 2009, pp. 144–145.
- ↑ Nonviolent Resistance by NASA Summereder, Magdalena (2012) Nonviolent Resistance by NASA. Diploma thesis, University of Vienna. Faculty of Social Sciences