The Colombian documentary film Nabusímake centres on the history of the place of the same name, and in 37 minutes develops a method of historical research drawing from Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources of knowledge.
With excellent digital cinematography, the sources come from oral and written testimonies of community members, the mamos [the spiritual guardians of the communities], the press and pre-existent film sources. The documentary was produced collectively by Zhigoneshi Colectivo de Comunicaciones, with funding from the Colombian Ministerio de Cultura, in the context of the 2010 bicentenary of independence commemorations.5 Zhigoneshi comprises members from all four Indigenous communities who live in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and who have strong historical connections: the Wiwa, Arhuaco, Kogui and Kankuamo. The collective has made a number of films, with members of the group specialising in different facets of the production process – sound, lighting, camera – but the member who has the most consolidated work to date is Amado Villafaña, the director of Nabusímake. In piecing an alternative version of Nabusímake’s past together, the video poetically entwines the history of the occupation of the Arhuaco sacred site with the audiovisual and political history of Colombia.
The Capuchin Mission school, el Orfelinato las Tres Avemarías, ultimately approved in 1916 by state authorities and established the following year in Nabusímake (or San Sebastián de Rábago, the missionaries’ name for the settlement), like many other colonialist schooling projects, sought to assimilate Indigenous peoples into the fabric of the (mestizo) nation state. Religious authorities had been in the region since the mid 18th century but it was not until the early 20th century that tensions between the colonos [settlers], misioneros [missionaries] and Arhuacos seemed to intensify and worsen (Muñoz, 2017). As the film makes clear, in 1916, a delegation of Arhuaco leaders travelled to Bogotá to petition President José Vicente Concha (1914–
18) for the establishment of a school in the area devoted to the teaching of mathematics and Spanish, subjects seen as necessary and beneficial to the community’s development priorities, particularly in the context of disputed
5 A truncated version of Nabusímake can be viewed online here: http://uno.memoriasdelalibertad.
org/#videos (accessed 4 March 2019). The other films produced as part of this ‘Memorias de la libertad’ bicentenario programme are: Jiisa weçe: raíz del conocimiento (Cineminga, 2010) and Mi finK (Grupo Fundación Villa Rica and Soporte Klan, 2010).
and exploitative commercial trade relations in the area (p. 391). However, the state had previously authorised the founding of a mission school in San Sebastián de Rábago in 1914, and upon the request of the Arhuaco leaders in 1916 masked their true intentions in acquiescing to the delegation’s demands. Thus, from 1917 the Capuchin mission instructed young men and women from the Arhuaco community in the region in leaving behind their language, clothes and other social and cultural customs termed salvaje [savage].
Including the chewing of áyu or coca leaf, all were deemed incompatible with the Colombian project of nationhood. The Orphanage, contrary to its name, actively orphaned children by attempting to strip them of Arhuaco culture.
Though Arhuaco records – oral and written6 – document and remember this period with ‘emociones cruzadas de malestar y admiración’ [mixed feelings of unease and admiration] (Mora, 2009, p. 34), this indoctrination continued until 1982, when the Consejo Indígena Arhuaco organised and finally managed to expel the Capuchins from the site, culminating in the rebirth of the place as Nabusímake the following year.
From the outset, Nabusímake establishes its relationship to historical reconstruction. A short fragment of black and white church bells ushers in the director, Amado Villafaña, who in Arhuaco language addresses the camera directly, and who is shot from a low angle against the backdrop of a limpid blue sky, in a ‘rotundo gesto de anfitrión’ [emphatic gesture as host] (Mora, 2015, p. 90). He states: ‘Aquí estamos en Nabusímake. Aquí nos dejaron desde el principio de la creación. Ahora hemos venido a recoger información sobre los padres capuchinos’ [Here we are in Nabusímake. This is where they left us since the beginning of time. We have come to collect information about the Capuchin priests]. A series of versatile transitions between archival footage of a religious procession in 1962, and the colour rendition of this same celebration from 2008, cements this fluid relationship between the past and the present. In this way, the film initiates a journey accompanying the director and his children, Gunzareymun and Ángel, as they collate the history of Nabusímake from the arrival of the Capuchin missionaries to the ultimate ousting of the church authorities in 1982. In acknowledging the enmeshed histories of Arhuaco organisation and forced conversion through an exploration of embodied and recorded memories of the mission, the documentary powerfully illustrates the negotiated status of the archive in reconstructing memory for the community.
The establishment of the mission would coincide roughly with the first attempts of Colombian entrepreneurs to create a national cinema. However, it is worth noting that early filmic records concerning the territory’s Afrodescendant and Indigenous communities from the late 1920s and early 1930s were designed to appeal commercially and were made by
filmmaker-6 One of the key sources employed in the film and in work on Arhuaco activism more generally is the testimony written by the Arhuaco, Vicencio Torres Márquez, Los indígenas arhuacos y la
‘vida de la civilización’.
explorers (Mateus Mora, 2013, pp. 60–4). Later, the mission would collaborate in producing its own – exuberantly racist – feature film, El valle de los arhuacos (Vidal Antonio Rozo, 1964), which Angélica Mateus Mora (2013, p. 71) has dubbed a form of ‘cine de evangelización’ [evangelising cinema]. El valle de los arhuacos, which is also cited in Nabusímake, foregrounds racialised depictions of the Arhuaco as dirty, corrupt, drunk, murderous, superstitious and ultimately, as destined to ‘desaparecer como indio’ [disappear as Indians] (ibid., p. 84). Nabusímake revisits this production as an intertext in a compelling scene following the visit of the director and his children to Bogotá to view the film where it is housed in the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico archive. There, the camera witnesses the confused reaction of the receptionist who receives Amado Villafaña, the crew and Ángel and Gunzareymun, as they explain their interest in viewing the film. Once inside, Nabusímake stages a lesson in how to interpret El valle critically, through the deconstruction that Amado Villafaña offers of the filmic representation of the Arhuacos. With the silhouette of the Villafaña family and Amado’s tutosoma hat in the foreground, and the screened film in the background, the dissonance between the family’s viewing practices in the present and the projected narrative could not be made more clear.
When Ángel asks after the screening if things were really like that back then, Amado proclaims that everything they saw was a complete lie. Thus, the right to decipher and interpret otherwise these racist archives is pitted as an overtly political and pedagogical act. This reviewing of racist archives might even be termed a kind of audiovisual repatriation. In Dobbin’s (2013, p. 129) terms, this gesture is not so much a repatriation of concrete material items to source communities ‘but rather [of] elements of history, memory, and identity that are associated with the images’.
The archives that underpin the documentary are housed in different kinds of repositories – some personal, some state, some communitarian and some in the vibrant voice of testimony – with differentiated possibilities for access and interpretation. Early on in the documentary, as Amado Villafaña and his children look out over the settlement of Nabusímake with a photograph of Villafaña’s father in hand,7 the director tells Gunzareymun and Ángel about a collection of photographs which he came across when speaking with Manuel Chaparro, a former cabildo [traditional authority] of the Arhuaco community.
These photographs, though this is not made explicit in the film, were taken by a Swedish ethnographer, Gustav Bolinder, during two separate trips he made to the area in 1914–15 and 1920–1 (Mora, 2015; Muñoz, 2017). As Catalina Muñoz (2017, p. 377) carefully documents, these photographs do not have widespread circulation in the community today, though enlargements of four of them were selected for display outside the community meeting house. The others remain in the private collection of Manuel Chaparro.
7 The director’s father, Juan Bautista Villafaña, was the designated interpreter among the Arhuaco delegation that petitioned the president for a school in 1916.
The director connects the cruel mistreatment community members associate with the mission with the photos he saw, swiftly corroborated in the film by the testimony of Damiana Crespo, a former student at the school, who speaks of the most common abuses witnessed during her time as a pupil. Ángel then asks his sister: ‘Después de ver las fotos, ¿cómo sería esa época? Imaginemos….’ [After seeing the photos, what do you think it was like back then? Let’s imagine…].
Cross-cutting between shots of Ángel’s face and a restaging of the grievances suffered under Capuchin rule – animating the aforementioned photographic collection – this sequence dramatises the children’s imagination in sepia tones.
Several of the photos are re-enacted in sequence, combining different episodes of Arhuaco subjugation under the missionary authorities spatio-temporally.
The re-enactment is employed as a way to represent the violence of the mission from an Arhuaco perspective based on accounts of the time and the oral and archival sources available, but it also performs a mediating role between the different generations involved in the making of the video.8 Each photograph, belonging to a wider collection of images with text in the case of Bolinder’s work, or set to motion in their re-activation in Nabusímake, draws attention to how photographic imagery, when removed from the containing discourse of the archive of collection, can afford new interpretations which can be made to cast new narratives. Moreover, the ‘Indigenous repurposing’ of such images often serves to rebuild community and family filiations (Hearne, 2006, p.
308). In this example, the photograph of the children’s paternal grandfather presents a springboard to reconsider the role of photography in documenting the family’s and – by extension – the community’s past.
The specific photo the director recalls from the Bolinder collection – one of a girl tied to a pole, which is staged in the dramatised sepia scene in the film – is in fact from the collection of photographs published following the 1914–15 expedition (Muñoz, 2017, p. 389). These images appear to pre-date the foundation of the mission school in Nabusímake; according to Bolinder’s own captions included in the publication, the grievances documented are attributable to the Arhuaco community (Bolinder, 1915, cited in Muñoz, 2017). In fact, Bolinder’s first trip to the area appears to have been precisely on the heels of the Vanishing Indian. According to Muñoz (2017, p. 385),
In his early pictures, Bolinder construed the Arhuaco as an isolated, authentic and uncontaminated indigenous group. Local archival sources show that, at the time of Bolinder’s expedition, the Arhuaco engaged in different forms of interaction with their non-indigenous neighbours including trade, labour relations and land transactions. Bolinder carefully silenced this part of Arhuaco life in order to show his audience an autochthonous and exotic indigenous community, on the margins of capitalism.
8 See Córdova (2014) for another approach to re-enactment in recent Latin American Indigenous film.
Figures 4.2 and 4.3. Bolinder photo and re-enactment in Nabusímake (2010). Courtesy of Pablo Mora, Amado Villafaña and Zhigoneshi Colectivo de Comunicaciones.
This description corresponds wholesale with the salvage ethnography tradition, in vogue at the time. In their remediation, however, the photographs – the originals are intercalated with the dramatisation – are afforded a new role that interrupts the original purpose of the photographs with a politicised Arhuaco interpretation. The recasting of the Bolinder image as an authentication of the Capuchin order’s cruelty demonstrates the ways in which the Arhuaco protagonists and filmmakers reassert control over the telling of ethnographic fictions. In the temporal and spatial splicing of Capuchin violence, Nabusímake offers an Arhuaco version of the past and simultaneously lays out a path to historical consciousness as the documentary represents a learning journey for the director’s children.
Of course, for many the revisiting of moments of catechism, forced conversion, stolen children and punished tongues remains too painful. While some people may have affective ties to archival images – not least the director and his children – others may prefer to avoid rehearsing the abuses of the past. As Pablo Mora (2009, p. 34), the executive producer of several films made by the Zhigoneshi Collective and close collaborator of Amado Villafaña’s in particular, writes as a preamble to a sample of the Bolinder photographs published in the community magazine:
¿Qué sentido tiene hoy, veintisiete años después de que la misión capuchina saliera de la región, reintroducir el espectáculo de viejos abusos?
No sobra describir con palabras escuetas que se trata de una jovencita amarrada, un grupo de niños en formación disciplinar, un mamo al que le están cortando el pelo y otro amarrado por la espalda, conducido por un mestizo sonriente. La contemplación de estas imágenes dolorosas nos hiere y no es suficiente decir que eran otras épocas –a casi cien años de distancia– y otras costumbres educativas hoy en desuso, como esta de evangelización compulsiva.
[What use is it today, 27 years after the Capuchin mission has left the area, to reintroduce the spectacle of past abuses? Is it not enough to describe with a few well-chosen words that they show a girl tied to a post, a group of children organised in military file, an Arhuaco elder whose hair is being cut, and another elder with his hands tied behind his back, all orchestrated by a smiling mestizo. The contemplation of these painful images hurts us and it is not enough to say that those were other times – almost 100 years ago – and that other educational customs were used, which are no longer used today, such as forced catechism.]
As Mora’s discussion intimates here, the community was split over whether to dramatise these photographs at the time and would eventually use actors in the assemblage of staged photographs (Mora, 2015, p. 89). In the end, and despite the tensions this re-enactment caused, the sequence was filmed and included in the final documentary. This use of the Bolinder photographs in Nabusímake might therefore be seen to chime with Hulleah J. Tsinhanjinnie’s (2003, p. 41) concept of photographic sovereignty:
It was a beautiful day when … I first encountered photographic sovereignty … when I decided that I would take responsibility to reinterpret images of Native peoples. My mind was ready, primed with stories of resistance and resilience, stories of survival. My views of these images are Aboriginally based … not a scientific godly order but philosophically Native.
The animation of ethnographic stasis in the film is crucial to understanding how the archive encloses the potential for the future, serving a politicised historical memory, activated through aberrant fictions of the photographs. In other words, ‘As much as and more than a thing of the past […], the archive should call into question the coming of the future’ (Derrida and Prenowitz, 1995, p. 26).