The Archive of the Group of Solidarity with the Indigenous Movement in Colombia

In 2019, the Luis Ángel Arango Library (hereinafter, BLAA) announced the reception of the documentary and photographic archive of Víctor Daniel Bonilla (Cali, 1933). This Colombian intellectual is known worldwide for the publication in 1968 of the book Servants of God and Masters of Indians. The State and the Capuchin Mission in Putumayo, in which he denounced the abuses of power by the missions of this religious order in southwestern Colombia. The book, based on rigorous historical and ethnographic research, opened a dialogue on the relationship between religious missions and the Catholic Church with indigenous peoples. Despite focusing exclusively on the Colombian case, Bonilla's book was quickly translated into several languages ​​and the author himself was invited to different American and European countries to present the findings of his research, since his approach allowed us to understand the historical experience of hundreds of indigenous peoples around the world.

The publication of Siervos brought Bonilla closer to the struggles of the indigenous movements in southwestern Colombia from the end of the 1960s until his retirement from public life less than five years ago. Bonilla's career is inseparable from the vicissitudes of the indigenous social movement, from its modern configuration to the present day, with indigenous representation in the National Constituent Assembly as a turning point. The archive that now rests in the BLAA, therefore, can only be partially understood as the accumulation of documents by one person. More accurately, it should be said that this collection acquires its true meaning in the general framework of the history of the indigenous movement in Colombia and its relations with non-indigenous people. The Bonilla archive can be called, more precisely, a specific collection of the solidarity archive, in reference to the network of those in solidarity and collaborators with the indigenous movement, a large and diverse group of non-indigenous people who have accompanied, supported and participated in its social and political demands.

The redefinition of the Bonilla archive as a solidarity archive allows us to raise three considerations that guide the approach of this proposal. On the one hand, it becomes clear that we are dealing with a documentary collection produced in the very activity of indigenous struggles, guided by the concerns and interests of a plural movement in tension both with itself and with the political conditions of the country. Unlike other archives of researchers kept by the BLAA (such as that of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gregorio Hernández de Alba or Brian Moser), the collection handed over by Bonilla was not made about indigenous peoples, but with indigenous peoples. The perspective of the solidarity and collaborators on their own role in the indigenous mobilization radically affects the generation of the documentation contained in the collection and, consequently, must also affect the ways of thinking about it and naming it. On the other hand, it is thus understood that this is not an archive about the past, but for the present and the future. The indigenous mobilization continues and, to that extent, this archive is vital for the contemporary formation and reflection of the leaders who have emerged after the new Constitution, faced in a new context with unprecedented problems, but whose interpretation is rooted in the historical experience of the indigenous question in Colombia and Latin America. Finally, as already hinted, the characterization of this archive as supportive implies its connection with personal and institutional collections dispersed throughout the country and which have also preserved the memory of the indigenous movement, so the BLAA archive must be considered as a node of a much more extensive network that needs to be tracked, mapped and analyzed.

Although the Luis Ángel Arango Library has already carried out an initial library and archival treatment of the collection delivered by Víctor Daniel Bonilla, its results merit a prompt, rapid and rigorous intervention to activate the intrinsic values ​​of the collection. This year, the BLAA made available to the general public an initial cataloging of the collection through the public consultation tools of its search engine. Under the MSS4235 symbol and the name “Archive on indigenous communities compiled by Víctor Daniel Bonilla” it is possible to find a classification list of 35 boxes of documentation with broad and general descriptors. This description, although essential, does not allow us to have an idea (not even an approximate one) of the nature of the sources found in the archive, which translates into a considerable obstacle to facilitate its consultation and to imagine possible and necessary public activations in the current context. The work proposal that

Movimiento indígena; historia de la antropología; Víctor Daniel Bonilla