Indigenous Populations

Summary

This essay seeks to locate the Indigenous people in relation to Christianity and to situate the Christian approaches to Indigenous peoples and their ancestral spiritualities. The analysis is based on their reality and the long historical burden that weighs on their bodies and that to a certain extent was and still is sustained by some theological underpinnings of Christianity. We will also locate the processes through which Christianity sought to recognise its path and insertion among ancestral peoples, often described as inculturation. In some contexts, it aimed towards the emergence of a church with an Indigenous face and the articulation of Indian/Indigenous Christian theology.

However, it should be noted that, in current times and contexts, rather than proposing inculturation, the challenge is to recognise people with all their realities and expressions, not only cultural but also religious, taking account of the processes that they interweave from their spiritualities in the care and defence of the land and territory. For Christians, this means regarding Indigenous people not only as targets for evangelisation, but as worthy fellow citizens who carry the ancestral memory of their knowledge, wisdoms and spiritualities. Then it becomes possible to carry out interreligious and intercultural dialogues and to promote decolonising processes.

Approach to Indigenous Populations

Latin America and the Caribbean is a context that includes a plurality of different worlds. The categorisation of ‘Indigenous’ territories or populations is very limited, since the plurality of experiences and ways in which they are organised make their societies flexible to change, as evidenced by more than 500 years of resistance and creative re-existence. Thus, it will be significant to recognise the extensive inhabited territoriality, such as Abya Yala, the name given by the Kuna people of Panama and Colombia as a symbol of identity and respect for the roots of ancestral people, evoking such meanings as Mature Land, Living Land and Flourishing Land.

Regarding the towns and the population itself, an exact number or a fixed location cannot be determined, because of the lack of precise information due to the various modes of territorial redistribution, organisation and allocation. According to the World Bank, with all the political biases of its multicultural discourse, 13 Caribbean countries did not consider ‘ethnic’ variables in their statistics.