Communication From a Latin American Indigenous Perspective

Abstract

Indigenous peoples from Latin America understand and use communication from an Indigenous perspective. Communication is a key aspect of their ongoing struggles for self-determination and autonomy, and the ways they understand and use communication embodies ancestral knowledge as well as technological appropriations. Communication is the main vehicle for self-representation, which is materialized in various practices, media, and messages that circulate within communities, between villages, or toward the population of metropolitan society. Communication attests to the capacity of Indigenous peoples to produce new knowledge and different culturally grounded responses to diverse times and historic contradictions. Indigenous peoples throughout Latin America use communication to serve several purposes. It reproduces worldviews deeply rooted in identity, territoriality, languages, spirituality, autonomy, and sovereignty. It is also a mechanism for community (self) reflexivity. It is a political strategy. It is a basic right. And it is a set of practices and processes that give rise to specific media products. Hence, from these purposes it is possible to recognize five dimensions of communication from a Latin American Indigenous perspective: (a) communication as cosmogony, (b) communication for community self-reflexivity, (c) communication as a political strategy (d) communication as a right, and (e) communication as a medium. These dimensions exemplify the capacity of Indigenous peoples from Latin America to produce new knowledge embedded in ancestral knowledge and to fight for self-determination, autonomy, and cognitive justice via communication.