Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
saddened by the death of Jnupi—a Direquednejnaigose man who was my
first adopted father—she ridiculed my weakness and stupidity at length.
“He was bad. It is good that he died,” she said, unsmiling, in her high
rasping voice. “I hope that all of us old people will die soon so that all
those bad old things will die too and be forgotten forever.”
While historians offered linear accounts of cause and effect, for el-
ders like Codé the past was something to transcend. It was emphatically
nonlinear and rotational, something that made unpredictable demands
on the present. I soon discovered that Echoi, in particular, was defined
by such profound tensions.
5
Elders across Ayoreoland, from the Dire-
quednejnaigosode and Jnupedogosode in Bolivia to the Guidaigosode
and Totobiegosode in Paraguay, concurred that Echoi was formerly
known as
Erami Gatocoro
, the center of the world. Many said they had
once considered it “the trunk of humanity” (
Ayoreode-ero
), a place where
a permanent truce was in effect. Yet, in the same breath, these elders as-
sured me that Echoi has since become irrevocably lost. Returning, they
agreed, was now impossible.
It seemed that every attempt I made to approach Echoi was blocked.
I began to envision Echoi as a mocking and uncanny place whose power
was indistinguishable from three convergent strands: contested Ayoreo
senses of the past, systematic efforts to exterminate Ayoreo, and my own
thwarted desires for a site of redemption from the stark inequities that
were so profoundly apparent in the Chaco. Echoi was uncanny to the
same degree that the subject position of the Indian was always partial and
violently interrupted. The negativity of Echoi as a space exceeded each of
the contradictory limits set around viable Native life. For outsiders who
located viable Native life in continuity with the past time of tradition, it
was a landscape of loss that prefigured the present as an epoch of crisis
requiring intervention. For Ayoreo-speaking people, it was both a site of
nostalgic fantasy and immorality that must be transcended. It opposi-
tionally framed modernity as a space only inhabitable for radically trans-
formed humans. This complex terrain was also the severely attenuated
zone of Ayoreo political agency, defined by local assertions of autonomy
predicated on the value of negation, rupture, and transgression. Yet this
negativity also posed a critique of the politics of indigeneity. Such emerg-
ing spatial ontologies refused the reduction of human life to the segre-
gated and limited set of practices that counted as authentic Native culture
in a neoliberal Latin America, and unsettled the contradictory notions of
humanity organized around any coherent narrative of an “Indigenous”
or cultural past. Ayoreo-speaking people did not piece together history
from the remainders of their lives. Rather, they made the remainders of
