KemeE Abiayala 2018

For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die: Toward a Transhemispheric Indigeneity
Author(s): Emil Keme and Adam Coon

Source: Native American and Indigenous Studies , Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 42-68
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/natiindistudj.5.1.0042
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EMIL KEME
For Abiayala to Live, the Americas

Must Die: Toward a Transhemispheric
Indigeneity
Translated by Adam Coon
We don’t need permission to be free.

—ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION
FOR THE READER not yet familiar with the category of Abiayala,1 it comes from
the cosmogony of the Guna population, an Indigenous nation in the region
of Guna Yala (or the land of the Guna), formally known as San Blas in pres-
ent-day Panama.2 Abiayala in the Guna language means “land in full matu-
rity” or “saved territory” (Aiban Wagua, 342). According to Guna cosmogony,
up to the present, four historical stages have occurred in the evolution and
formation of Mother Earth. Each stage is designated by a different name. The
first is Gwalagunyala. At this stage, after being created, the earth was conse-
quently hit by cyclones. The second, Dagargunyala, is characterized by being
a stage of chaos, disease, and fear that culminates in darkness. In the third,
Dinguayala, Mother Earth is tormented by fire. Today we live in the fourth
stage: Abiayala, that of the “territory saved, preferred, and loved by Baba
and Nana” (Aiban Wagua, 342). Abiayala is also the name that the Guna use
to refer to what for others is the American continent as a whole. The con-
cept came to have continental repercussions after the Aymara leader Takir
Mamani, one of the founders of the Tupaj Katari Indigenous rights move-
ment in Bolivia, arrived in Panama. He heard about the conflict between
Guna authorities and the American investor Thomas M. Moody, who in 1977
had “bought” the island of Pidertupi in the Guna Yala territory and who since
then has begun to exploit tourism in the region. Moody consequently prohib-
ited the Guna from fishing around the island, which created a deep tension
between the Indigenous people and the American. The Guna then “requested
the intervention of the president of the republic [Omar T orrijos Herrera]
to eliminate Moody’s tourist enterprise and also requested his support to
establish tourist hotels operated by the Guna themselves” (Pereiro et al., 82).
When the Indigenous demands were ignored, young Guna attacked Moody
42 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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and his wife, burned their hotel and their yacht, and killed two policemen.
Moody subsequently took refuge in the U.S. embassy and accused the Guna of
being “communists” who sought to take over the country and do away with
the “Yankees.” The news was widely disseminated by newspapers and tele-
vision news programs in Panama. But in the end, the Guna were victorious in
winning a legal claim against Moody for the defense of their territories and
autonomy, which forced Moody to leave Guna Yala. The island of Pidertupi
consequently passed into the hands of the General Guna Congress (CGK).3
After hearing about these conflicts and the struggles for their territorial
autonomy in the Guna Yala territory, Mamani met with the saylas or Guna
authorities on the island of Ustupu. There they told him: “Everyone uses the
name of America for our continent, but we hold the true name Abya Yala” (in
Quillaguamán Sánchez, 3). Given his ability to travel to international forums,
the saylas then entrusted Mamani to disseminate this message to leaders
and representatives of other Indigenous nations with the goal of using the
“real name” of the continent. Mamani followed the saylas’ advice and spread
the message in various gatherings and international forums, asking Indige-
nous representatives and organizations that instead of using the names of
“America” or “Latin America” they use Abiayala to refer to the continent in
their official declarations. Mamani argues that “placing foreign names on
our villages, our cities, and our continents is equivalent to subjecting our
identities to the will of our invaders and their heirs” (in Quillaguamán Sán-
chez, 3, my translation). Therefore, renaming the continent would be the
first step toward epistemic decolonization and the establishment of Indig-
enous peoples’ autonomy and self-determination.4 Since the 1980s, many
Indigenous activists, writers, and organizations have embraced the Guna
people’s and Mamani’s suggestion, and Abiayala has become a way to refer
not only to the continent but also to a differentiated Indigenous locus of
cultural and political enunciation (Muyolema, 329).5
In this essay, I would also like to embrace the Guna people’s and M
amani’s
petition with the objective of proposing Abiayala as a transhemispheric
Indigenous bridge. By invoking this category, I propose to develop a dialogue
that could potentially lead us to develop political alliances in the forma-
tion of a new Indigenous and non-Indigenous historical bloc that opposes
ideas and civilizational Eurocentric projects like “Latin (America),” “Lati-
nity,” or “Americas,” as well as extractivist economies based on capitalism
and socialism at national, continental, and intercontinental levels.6 I believe
that the moment is appropriate given the permanent threats to our cul-
tures, languages, territories, and identities we face in every country in and
out of the hemisphere, against nation-states that characterize themselves
by recycling colonialist logics that continue disfavoring us. Like the struggle
N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 43

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of the Guna people against Moody and their epistemological articulation of
the category of Abiayala, we need to develop collective Indigenous strate-
gies and knowledges in the restitution and dignification of Indigenous life
and our sovereignties.
Transhemispheric Indigeneity
Before proceeding, I must offer some clarification. First, I evoke “Indige-
nous peoples” as a category that takes into account the contradictions this
entails. As is well known, when Christopher Columbus invaded our territo-
ries, he called the “New World” the “West Indies” and imposed on us the cat-
egory “Indian,” which imprisoned us epistemologically, erasing our “density”
or our deep complexities as Indigenous societies (Andersen). Since 1492 in
Abiayala, the category Indian “applied indiscriminately to the entire aborig-
inal population, without taking into account any of the profound differ-
ences that separated distinct peoples and without making concessions for
preexisting identities” (Bonfil Batalla, 111). Not only that, “Indian” has been
used to control and subjugate our identities in order to weaken our right to
use ethnic affiliations that mark our differences as nations, that is, as Nava-
jos, Cherokees, Aymaras, Mohawk, Mapuches, Maya K’iche’, and so on. We
should take into account, for example, that the first peoples of this conti-
nent “were by modern estimates divided into at least two thousand cultures
and more societies, practiced a multiplicity of customs and lifestyles, held
an enormous variety of values and beliefs, spoke numerous languages mutu-
ally unintelligible to the many speakers, and did not conceive of themselves
as a single people—if they knew about each other at all” (Berkhofer, 3).7 It
is important to recognize that definitions of Indigenous identity have colo-
nial origins and that instead of constituting unified, fixed, and unchangeable
constructions, these are characterized by being hybrid, restructured, and
renegotiated constantly and historically at the local, national, and global
levels.8
Hence we must also recognize that we are colonized subjects, operat-
ing within the spaces and institutional structures established by Spanish,
French, Dutch, Portuguese, and British colonialisms and the consequent
internal/settler colonialisms established by the descendants of the first
invaders. These experiences have obviously generated complicated rela-
tionships between Indigenous nations, our territories, the nation-state,
and modernity that are characterized by what Osage Nation anthropologist
Jean Dennison has called “colonial entanglements.” That is, our struggles
for self-determination depend on continual negotiations, as well as on the
development and construction of criticisms that decentralize and dismantle

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dominant Latin American narratives based on our sacrifices and the appro-
priation of our knowledges. We must recognize that the processes of con-
quest have not been finished or abandoned. Rather, the “logic of elimina-
tion of the native”—to evoke the work of Patrick Wolfe—continues to be the
organizing principle of modern nation-states and their hegemonic institu-
tions. These use various tactics to access Indigenous territories, often with
the complicity or strategies of co-optation of Indigenous sectors that have
allowed the nation-state to achieve its political and economic objectives. It
is, then, a question of counteracting these logics by questioning the forces
that shape, restrict, or create opportunities for the transformation and con-
sequent articulation of a project that vindicates us individually and collec-
tively. Decolonization should not be a metaphor (Tuck and Yung) given that
today—as in the past—from south to north, from east to west, we continue
fighting to defend our territories and to regain our sovereignties. We have
every right to restore and dignify our lives as Indigenous peoples given that
we have been here for thousands of years.
I must reiterate that in saying this I do not think only of our epistemo-
logical and political challenges to the West and its colonial legacies. Several
Indigenous women and men have also internalized and recycled the values
bequeathed by the invaders and their descendants. We must not ignore
those criticisms that point to how the internalization of European values
among black and Indigenous classes granted some authority have led them
to oppress their own sisters and brothers, at times in even more cruel and
ferocious fashion. A confrontation with the hegemonic system must begin
with an assessment and confrontation with ourselves. We must recog-
nize that at many historical moments we have been active participants in
the affirmation of Western values, which include, among other things, the
assertion of a heteropatriarchal and heterosexual system that excludes
Indigenous women or attitudes that disrespect the rights of those with dif-
ferent sexual orientations.
In sum, while we recognize the limits of the category “Indian” or “Indig-
enous,” the homogenization of our experiences has articulated principles
that united us. As Craig Womack underscores, though Indigenous Nations
“have different languages, different ceremonies, different religions, dif-
ferent economies, different histories, different forms of government, they
all share a legacy of stolen land, decimated populations, and engineered
cultural theft” (237). In this sense, despite the colonial and entangled ori-
gins, the concepts of “Indigenous” and “Indigeneity” continue to be useful
tools for political persuasion: they are contingent historically and situa-
tionally and maintain legal validity when we deal with hegemonic institu-
tions, depending on the historical context and situation. I invoke the idea of

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transhemispheric or global Indigeneity not with the intention of articulat-
ing essentialism or a generalization of our densities, but rather as a collec-
tive Indigenous proposal that originates from those experiences that unite
us. My objective is to interpellate a collectivity of Indigenous nations, as well
as non-Indigenous allies that struggle to transcend the conditions of inter-
nal/external colonialisms and their logics of elimination.
In proposing Abiayala as our locus of Indigenous transhemispheric enun-
ciation, I am fully aware of the ideological and political complications that
this also entails. Some critics will surely draw attention to linguistic barriers
and to the present contradictions in speaking of processes of decoloniza-
tion or self-determination in hegemonic languages. One of the ironies, for
example, is that the dialogue and exchange between Takir Mamani and the
Guna saylas about the Abiayala project likely happened in Spanish. Despite
taking into account the incredible weight of colonization in the hegemonic
languages, these have also facilitated dialogues and exchanges among us.
Nevertheless, while it is understandable to consider these languages and
their potential to create Indigenous bridges, we must also be aware of the
dangers in overvaluing them.
As a way of example, we can underscore certain contradictions and
limitations with regard to proposals about global Indigeneity from the
perspective of dominant languages. In his book Trans-Indigenous (2012),
Chadwick Allen reminds us several times of his interest to expand “the
archive and [explore] new methodologies for a global Indigenous literary
studies in English” (xxxii). Throughout his study, Allen constantly repeats
that his proposal is based on texts written and produced by writers “pri-
marily in English” (xi, xii–xv, xviii, xxxii, 135, etc.). Despite his valuable
contribution, Allen’s proposal, in his call for a “global Indigeneity,” obliter-
ates the contributions of activists and intellectuals from other parts of the
“globe” (particularly the south of Abiayala), even when such contributions
have been translated to English. This position becomes more evident in
his article “Decolonizing Comparison,” which complements his book. Allen
calls attention to “an impressive list of Indigenous activist-intellectuals
from around the globe” (emphasis added, 378) who have effectively artic-
ulated responses and strategies to promote the causes of Indigenous free-
dom “within, through, or beyond the ever-evolving contexts of colonialism
and imperialism” (378). In his list, he includes Taiaiake Alfred from Canada,
“Linda Tuhiwai Smith in Aotearoa New Zealand; Aileen Morton Robinson
in Australia; Noenoe Silva in Hawai’i; and Simon Ortiz, Jack Forbes, Gerald
Vizenor, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, Jace Weaver, Jolene Rickard, and
Lisa Brooks in the United States among others” (378). I do not doubt the
valuable contributions of the activists/academics mentioned by Allen, but

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rather his geopolitical privilege of articulating a “global Indigeneity” from
just the geographical contexts demarcated by an Anglophone colonial-
linguistic genealogy.9 Such a proposal justifies the complaints expressed by
Victoria Bomberry with regard to the development of Indigenous studies
in what is today the United States and Canada: “It seems that the devel-
opment of the field of Native American studies has suffered from a myopic
focus within U.S. national borders that denies current realities and rep-
licates colonial constructs, including the othering of Indigenous peoples
from south of the U.S.-Mexico border” (213).
Here it is important to underscore that such attitudes are not character-
istic of the Indigenous north of Abiayala. A similar “myopic focus” of Allen’s
characterizes many Indigenous positions in the south and the insistence
that Abiayala is a project that only corresponds to the geopolitical con-
text of what is today “Latin America.” Contrary to existing proposals about
global Indigeneity, which privilege exchanges primarily in English, Spanish,
French, or Portuguese, my proposal intends to operate through an epistemic
disobedience (Mignolo) that transcends the linguistic and geopolitical bor-
ders and generates alliances that lead us to constitute and materialize—like
the Zapatista slogan—a world where many worlds can fit.
Abiayala: Our Locus of Political Enunciation

This in turn leads me to ask: What does it mean to think about the world
from the plurality of our Indigenous experiences? To think from the over
one thousand Indigenous languages still spoken in our hemisphere? As
Linda Tuhiwai Smith indicates, in the twenty-first century “a new agenda
for indigenous activity [extends] . . . beyond the decolonization aspirations
of a particular indigenous community [and moves] . . . towards the devel-
opment of global ‘indigenous strategic alliances’” (108). Indeed, we are at a
moment when we need to learn from each other as Indigenous peoples and
share our stories and experiences among ourselves and with others in order
to disclose our similarities and differences in terms of languages, cultures,
ideologies, politics . . . We are at a moment where many of our histories and
struggles are becoming more and more visible, affording us opportunities
to develop new and fresh alliances and exchanges where we can develop
agendas against economic, political, and cultural oppressions that have kept
us in conditions of subalternity.
Some will say that an obvious problem is the lack of multilingual episte-
mological exchanges. Very few works of Indigenous intellectuals and activ-
ists from northern Abia Yala have been translated into Spanish and Portu-
guese.10 Although still limited, a better job has been done translating and

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publishing texts from southern Abia Yala into English.11 In spite of these lim-
itations, important conversations have been generated about global Indi-
geneity with academic publications such as Indigenous Experience Today
(edited by Orin Starn and Marisol de la Cadena, 2009), Indigenous Peoples
and Autonomy (edited by Mario Blaser and others), Decolonizing Native His-
tories (edited by Florencia Mallon, 2012), Comparative Indigeneities of the
Americas (edited by Bianet Castellanos and Lourdes Gutierrez), Indigeneity
(edited by Guillermo Delgado and John Brown, 2012), The World of Indige-
nous North America (edited by Robert Warrior, 2014), The Oxford Handbook
of Indigenous American Literature (edited by Daniel Heath Justice and James
Cox, 2014), The Five Cardinal Points in Contemporary Indigenous Literature
(edited by Gloria Chacon et al., 2015). Ironically, perhaps, it has been social
networks such as Facebook that have also enabled a valuable exchange of
dialogues and knowledges through the constant dissemination of articles
and books in PDF, facilitating access to many Indigenous works and in some
cases eliminating the high cost to obtain them in print.
Nevertheless, while it is important to celebrate these steps toward the
creation of transhemispheric Indigenous bridges, we must not forget the
fact that more than a thousand Indigenous languages survive in our hemi-
sphere and that it is essential to generate support for the survival and revi-
talization of these languages. This must be one of our priorities.
This brings me to the project of Abiayala. A lot of you may be wonder-
ing: Why this particular category and not another one, like Turtle Island,
Anahuac, Tawantinsuyu, or Pindorama?12 As far as I know, while these cat-
egories evoke narratives of the creation of humanity and the world similar
to that of Abiayala, their uses in contemporary Indigenous societies have
been associated in relation to certain Indigenous geopolitical territories and
peoples, much of the time following and legitimizing the divisions that we
have inherited from Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch colo-
nialisms. That is, Turtle Island usually refers to Indigenous peoples and
territories in the “North,” particularly those where the British marked and
divided Indigenous territories and where English has become the adopted
language of many Native Americans. Similarly, Tawantinsuyu refers mostly
to the Andean region, particularly the territories and peoples associated
with the Inca and Aymara Empires, which were later colonized by the Span-
ish. Abiayala, contrary to these assumptions, has been consciously and
politically articulated as a broader geopolitical locus of enunciation with
clear transnational claims. Its epistemological articulation emerges against
ideas of (Latin) America in order to counteract their colonial legacies and
recover the hemisphere for Indigenous peoples. Abiayala offers us the pos-
sibility to articulate a collective locus of enunciation that goes beyond the

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borders imposed on us by Europeans and their descendants, the possibility
to rethink and recover the world from our own epistemological millenar-
ian legacies. Do we need to underscore how we as Indigenous peoples have
lived in the hemisphere way before settlers and their descendants forged
the ideas of “(Latin) America,” “Hispanic America,” “Iberian America,” “West
Indies”? Our necessity to rethink our hemisphere from Abiayala is urgent.
As far as I know, there is no other Indigenous nation that identifies and
imagines a name for our hemisphere as an Indigenous collective project.
To be clear, when I speak of Abiayala, I am not proposing the cancella-
tion or omission of categories like Turtle Island, Tawantinsuyu, Anahuac,
Pindorama, or any other used and recognized by an Indigenous nation in
the continent. Instead, I am proposing to reconfigure the map of our hemi-
sphere according to the names and parameters employed by our ancestors
and descendants. Abiayala could be the Indigenous name of our hemisphere,
and then we should activate other Indigenous categories within Abiayala.
Besides continuing to affirm the categories of Turtle Island, Mayab’, Pin-
dorama, Anahuac, and Tawantinsuyu, we should recover and affirm many
other ones, such as Wallmapu the name that the Mapuche Nation uses to
refer to the Araucanía Region in what is today Chile and Argentina, or Gua-
jira, the category that the Wayuu Nation employs to refer to the coastal
regions of what is today Colombia and Venezuela. We could restitute the
Indigenous name Guanahani to rename San Salvador in the Bahamas, and in
that way we can reactivate the memory of the Lucaya Indians in the Carib-
bean. As we know, that memory was trampled by Christopher Columbus
during the so-called discovery of the New World.13
Now these struggles to revive and recover the ancestral names of our
territories are nothing new. They have even culminated in successful cam-
paigns to assert our historical memory. Since 1975 the Koyukon people,
members of the Athabasca Nation in what is now Alaska, United States,
petitioned the U.S. federal government to change the name of the highest
mountain in northern Abiayala. The federal government in 1917 had offi-
cially named the mountain McKinley to honor American president William
McKinley (1897–1901). The Indigenous settlers, however, long before 1917,
recognized the mountain as Denali or Deenaalee (“the highest” in the Koyu-
kon language). On his visit to Alaska in September 2015, President Barack
Obama finally acknowledged the demands of the Koyukon nation and the
state of Alaska to reclaim and rename the mountain as Denali.
Efforts to recover the Indigenous names of our territories also charac-
terize the valuable work of cartographer Aaron Carapella, who for more
than fifteen years has worked to reconfigure the map of our hemisphere
with thousands of Indigenous names. His map, Tribal Nations of the Western

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Hemisphere, is an essential contribution to rethinking our continent from
our ancestors’ memory (Figure 1). According to Carapella, the map contains
the names of approximately three thousand Indigenous nations throughout
our hemisphere’s geography and is to date the most complete map of names
originating in our territories before and after the arrival of Europeans.
Carapella indicates that the map is a “visual reminder of who called this land
home for tens of thousands of years before any European set foot, creating
a sense of pride for modern-day Native Americans as well as educating the
non-Native public. To Native Americans, this land will always be our ances-
tral homeland.”
Although Abiayala and other Indigenous names within our continent
are not yet well-known concepts among people in faraway communities,
it is a question of working so that the wings of these projects gradually
reach a multiplicity of spaces in order to stimulate and dignify our ances-
tral memory. Let this be the first step in the creation of a global Indigenous
and non-Indigenous movement against predatory neoliberalism. Let these,
among others, be the plural principles that guide our paths toward our col-
lective strengthening.
I also understand that some readers will think that in proposing Abiayala
as our locus of enunciation I am proposing a civilizing project that brings
the danger of recycling a “reverse racism,” or the same colonial logics that
the European invaders and their descendants have bequeathed to us. First,
the development and assertion of a collective cultural and political Indige-
nous consciousness is not the same as racism. As I mentioned earlier, we are
colonized subjects, and every day both the nation-state and its hegemonic
institutions exhort and teach us to hate ourselves, to internalize ideas of
white and criollo-mestizo supremacy regarding ideas of beauty, religion, his-
tory, and so on. Hence the urgent need to dignify our cultures through our
own civilizing project that emanates from our over-one-thousand-year-old
histories and our ancestral values.
In second place, when I say this, I don’t pretend to obscure the complex
hegemonic narratives nor our human experiences. I am fully conscious
about how alliances to certain Indigenous sectors and not others may gen-
erate profound tensions. This is exemplified by the Evo Morales government
in Bolivia, which in 2011 approved the construction of a highway that would
run through the Parque Nacional y Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional
Isiboro Sécure, or Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory
(TIPNIS). This territory, which encompasses 1.2 million hectares of land, is
inhabited by Amazonian Indigenous nations like the Mojeños-Trinitarios,
Chimanes, and Yuracarés in the North and by Quechua and Aymaras in the
South. The latter are called colonizadores (colonizers), since they migrated

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to and established themselves in the region in the 1970s. Besides, these
Indigenous sectors in the south of the TIPNIS represent Morales’s constit-
uency and supported the construction of the highway, given that it would
facilitate transporting their merchandise. The approval of this “modern”
project generated the resistance of the Amazonian populations in the north
who argued that the highway would bring serious ecological consequences
to the region, including the displacement of various populations from their
ancestral lands. Morales’s decision to build the highway led to a sixty-five-
day march in August 2011 by Amazonian Indigenous nations to La Paz to pro-
test the project. Initially, the marches were denounced by the government
as an “imperialist conspiracy” and were violently repressed in September
2011 (Webber). Morales insisted that “the road was needed to bring eco-
nomic development to poor [Amazonian] indigenous communities” (Frantz).
However, as the protests grew to the point of acquiring national and inter-
national attention, Morales gave in to the demands and in December of the
same year signed the untouchable law (ley intangible), which states that
the national park cannot be exploited by commercial enterprises. The deci-
sion, however, led to new protests by Indigenous sectors that had supported
Morales’s initial decision and represented his constituency, like the Consejo
Indígena del Sur (Indigenous Council of the South [CONISUR]), residents of
Cochabamba and San Ignacio de Moxos, and Cocaleros (Frantz). The con-
flict showed the tensions between the various Indigenous peoples and, at
the same time, some of the contradictions of Morales’s socialist and sover-
eign agenda. The debate continues today as to whether or not moderniza-
tion projects based on extractivism are the most adequate to respond to the
necessities of Indigenous peoples.
Contradictions and tensions between Indigenous sectors such as those
that have occurred in Bolivia characterize many of our experiences at the
communal, national, and transnational levels. These contradictions and
tensions are also not at all new and certainly precede the European inva-
sions of our territories; they are a part of our complex human experience,
which, as I have suggested above, has on many occasions been obliterated
by both the hegemonic discourses elaborated by the European invaders and
their descendants, as well as by our allies and even by ourselves.
By calling attention to these complexities, my purpose is to make them
visible. It is a matter of showing that carrying out the Abiayala project brings
with it many challenges within and outside the academic field. Is it impossi-
ble to transcend them? I do not think so. Rather, we must deepen the exist-
ing dialogues and exchanges inside and outside institutional spaces. Inter-
national meetings such as those sponsored by the United Nations General
Assembly, which in 2014 held the World Conference on Indigenous Peoples,

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have been important. At the organizational level, we can also mention the
work of the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC) and the World Council
of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP). Academic conferences include the Interna-
tional Congress: Indigenous Peoples of Latin America (CIPIAL); the Native
American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), which has approved
the creation of the Abiayala Working Group; and the Latin American Studies
Association (LASA) and its Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Peoples (ERIP)
and Otros Saberes / Other Knowledges sections; among several others.14
These spaces have been important for exchanges of ideas and knowledge,
which in some cases have permitted us to transcend linguistic barriers in
the formulation of policies that allow us to imagine the potential of a trans
hemispheric Abiayala project.
Along with these exchanges, it is also necessary to champion perma-
nent criticism of all those positions that threaten our efforts to recover and
defend our ancestral territories and to dignify and restore our Indigenous
life. I believe that we must develop categories of analysis that do not lose
sight of the materiality of our experiences in economics, society, culture,
linguistics, gender, and so on. Similarly, we must continue to revitalize the
emancipatory principles of our peoples, that is, to start from our own cos-
mogonies and those forms of social cohesion that have been the cornerstone
of our survival. In these steps we must follow and discuss the proposals of
Indigenous women and men who today, as in the past, are guiding the paths
of our emancipation. Suffice it to mention here Zapatismo in what is now
Chiapas, Mexico, the Water Protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota, and
Idle No More in what is now Canada. May these movements, and those Indig-
enous and non-Indigenous women and men who struggle to defend Mother
Earth, be our point of departure in our efforts to restore our memory and
our organic relationship with our territories. It is therefore a matter of con-
tinuing to generate collective consensus that shows our historical opposi-
tion to the deplorable mercantilist and ethnocentric economic principles
that have kept us in conditions of subalternity.
Here I should also underscore that by proposing Abiayala as our locus of
political enunciation I am not suggesting a civilizational project that is exclu-
sive to Indigenous peoples. In our movement toward emancipation, there
have been many non-Indigenous sisters and brothers who have walked with
us and at times have even sacrificed much more than we have. As Leanne
Simpson states, “Every hard-fought victory has been a direct result of the
alliances and relationships of solidarity we have forged, maintained, and
nurtured with supporting Indigenous nations, environmental networks,
and social justice organizations” like church groups and human rights activ-
ists who “have stood alongside us as allies and as friends, often juggling a

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variety of roles and responsibilities, always under very challenging circum-
stances” (xiii).
We cannot overlook the force, resonance, and potential that the project
of Abiayala has among Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists and aca-
demics. This allows us to take advantage of an important opportunity in the
articulation of a civilizational Indigenous politics urgently needed in a new
epoch of challenges for Indigenous nations in our hemisphere and in other
parts of the planet.
The Americas Must Die

When I propose an epistemological and geopolitical resignification of our
hemisphere from the perspective of Abiayala, I should also clarify that I am
not proposing a cancellation of the ideas of “America” and “Latin America.”
Instead, I am proposing the end of our affective and political affiliation to
these categories as Indigenous peoples. Given that we have a very strong
cultural capital, it is our duty to unearth and affirm our own points of mil-
lenarian references in order to recognize ourselves in our own hemisphere.
Besides, ideas like “(Latin) America” for us represent Eurocentric projects
that consciously or unconsciously justify our exclusion and colonization.
From such exclusions, marginalization, and colonization emanates Abiayala
as our own cultural and civilizational project.
Indeed, following Kichwa scholar Armando Muyolema’s theorization of
the concept, Abiayala is a term that challenges the idea of Latin America, or
the “Americas,” because these projects continue to be constitutive of eth-
nocentric and colonialist logics. They endorse and affirm the aspirations
and geopolitical projects of the white and criollo-mestizo populations. While
many “modern” nation-states have “officialized” Indigenous languages,
such languages and cultures have not acquired national status; that is, they
are not part of educational curricula accessible to all peoples within “mod-
ern” nation-states. On the other hand, the idea of citizenship endorsed by
the state through narratives of mestizaje or “blood quantum” only aims to
erase our millenarian origins.
For example, recognizing the oppressive dimension of these hegemonic
narratives has led many Indigenous activists and intellectuals to deny
them. In her study Hawaiian Blood (2008), J. Kêhaulani Kauanui develops
a rigorous critique of blood quantum policies in Hawai’i. Such policies have
historically served those in power to develop strategies to undermine not
only Kanaka Maoli identity but also fuel their land dispossession. This pol-
icy, which was introduced in the island in 1920, has culturally and politi-
cally operated through a reductive logic, destabilizing notions of Indigenous

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identity based on genealogy. According to Kauanui, the policy of classifi-
cation based on “blood quantum is a colonial project in the service of land
alienation and dispossession. Blood quantum classification does not allow
for the building of Kanaka Maoli political power because it is ultimately
about exclusion, while it also reduces Hawaiians to a racial minority rather
than an indigenous people with national sovereignty claims” (10). Similar to
the blood quantum policies, mestizaje has been employed to justify projects
of deindianization and territorial dispossession. Mestizaje is the category
that many people use in Latin America to deny their Indigeneity and affirm
a criollo-mestizo racial/ethnic and economic status. Because of this, many
Indigenous activists and scholars reject mestizaje. In his Revolución india,
Aymara intellectual Fausto Reinaga states: “I am not a mestizo writer or
man of letters. I am an Indian. An Indian who thinks, who develops ideas,
who creates ideas. My ambition is to forge an Indian ideology, an ideology
of my people” (60, my translation). Similarly, Kaqchikel Maya writer Luis
de Lión states: “I cannot participate in the so-called mestizaje because His-
panism is precisely the negation of my language, of my culture” (cited in
Montenegro, 8, my translation). More recently, members of the Nican Tlaca
(“we the people here” in Nahuatl) movement in California have developed
a campaign to reject categories like “Hispanic,” “Latina/o,” and “American”
and to recover their Indigenous heritage. They have developed posters and
several videos on YouTube to justify their claim to Indigeneity (Figure 2).15
They state: “We must reconstruct our Anahuac nation in order to be liber-
ated from the European occupation under which we are enslaved. We must
declare ourselves as the Nican Tlaca race, using Mexica civilization, and the
Anahuac nation as points of unity and points of liberation.”
Ideas like “America” and “Latin America,” for example, were conceived as
projects that sharply excluded us from their civilizational and political ide-
als. As is known, the name of “America” began to acquire hegemonic promi-
nence in what is today the United States toward the end of the seventeenth
century. The British used to refer to the “Indians” and settlers as “Ameri-
cans” in a pejorative manner. From here, settlers who sought independence
from the British began to embrace and adopt the concept in a positive way
to counteract British citizenship. In his farewell address in 1797, George
Washington publicly claimed that “The name of AMERICAN, which belongs
to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patri-
otism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations.” John
Adams continued with similar affirmations to those of Washington in March
of the following year in his inaugural discourse as U.S. president. Interpel-
lating the “American People,” he exhorted settlers to adopt and embrace the
term positively.

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With the adoption of the politics of “manifest destiny” by the United
States at the beginning of the nineteenth century, particularly with the Mexi-
can-American War (1845–48), the idea of “Americanism” and the concept of
“America” entered in a deep tension. According to Arturo Ardao (1981), the
idea of Latin America emerges as a direct response to the growing imperial-
ist aspirations of the “Anglo-Saxon America” or the United States in “Span-
ish America” and the Caribbean. The name was first proposed by Colombian
intellectual José María Caicedo in his poem “Las dos Américas” (The two
Americas), published in 1856. Caicedo states in one of the verses: “La raza
de la América latina al frente tiene la raza sajona” (The Latin American race
has in front of him the Anglo-Saxon race). Caicedo was obviously responding
to the Mexican-American War, during which Mexico lost half of its territory
to the United States. This defeat obviously developed a lot of anxieties—and
rightly so!—among criollo-mestizo intellectuals regarding U.S. imperialist
expansion in the region.16 Caicedo would later obtain a post as ambassador
of Spanish American affairs in Paris. From there, he would write various
articles in which he sought to establish a conciliatory discourse that implic-
itly addressed European colonialisms in various parts of the hemisphere. In
one of his articles, he once again evoked the idea of “Latin America”:
Since 1851 we have started to give Spanish America the denomination of Lat-
in; and this innocent move has brought the anathema of various newspapers
in Puerto Rico and Madrid. It has been said of us: “Because you hate Spain you
unchristen America.” “No,” we responded. “I have never hated a single people,
nor am I one of those that curses Spain in Spanish.” There is an Anglo-Saxon,
Danish, Dutch America, etc.; there is also a Spanish, French, and Portuguese
America; and for this latter group, shouldn’t the scientific denomination be
Latin? Of course, we Spanish Americans are Latin not because of our Indian
heritage but rather because of our Spanish one. (Ardao, 74, emphasis added)
As we can see, the cultural and civilizational project imagined by Caicedo

sharply excludes the “Indians.” The adjective “Latin” is directly associated
with Europe and not Indigenous peoples.
In this sense, “Latin America,” “America,” and the “Americas” are not
just the names of specific territories imagined by settlers. These concepts
also embody the enduring historical and cultural regimes of colonialisms
throughout the hemisphere. Such categories have historically denied us the
right to name our own lands and our own experiences and have entailed—in
the name of white-criollo-mestizo projects—the suppression and margin-
alization of Indigenous languages and ways of thinking and being on the
assumption that Indigenous lives and cultures are “savage,” “barbarous,”
“backward,” or “uncivilized.” We as Indigenous peoples can only be a part
of Latin America or America if we give up our lands, languages, and cultural

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and religious specificities. Contrary to this civilizational project, which
maintains us as slaves in our own lands, Abiayala represents our own polit-
ical project and locus of enunciation.
Indeed, it is important to underscore here that these claims about the
marginalization of Indigenous Nations are not “things from the past” or
things that have been “resolved” by (Latin) American nation-states through
the adoption of “multicultural” or “intercultural” agendas. On the con-
trary, racism, xenophobia, heteronormative politics, and class oppressions
maintain their force and continue to define our experiences globally. It is
enough to just look at our contemporary experiences in order to confirm my
assumptions with regard to our tense relationships with “modern” nation-
states and their hegemonic institutions. For them, those of us who resist
extractivist economic policies continue to be viewed as a “problem” or a
threat to their status quo.
In what is today Chile, the presidents Michelle Bachelet and Sebastina
Piñera have used the antiterrorist law established by General Augusto
Pinochet in 1984 to justify the incarceration and assassination of Mapuche
activists in the southern region of the Araucanía.17 In Totonicapan, Guate-
mala, in early 2012 the Guatemalan army repressed a peaceful protest led
by K’iche’ Maya peoples who demanded that the government not increase
the cost of electricity, not privatize education, and not give more constitu-
tional power to the Guatemalan army. The military response included the
brutal assassination of eight people and the wounding of thirty-five oth-
ers.18 In December of the same year, Saskatchewan, Canada, witnessed the
emergence of the Idle No More movement, which challenged the laws of the
Canadian nation-state to approve the extraction of resources in the territo-
ries of the First Nations. The approval of these laws was made without con-
sulting Indigenous leaders, which was interpreted as an effort of the Cana-
dian government to reduce the rights to sovereignty of the First Nations.19
In Peru in 2009 President Alan García, with the desire to implement neolib-
eral extractivist policies in the Amazonian region, sent the National Guard
to invade Indigenous territories. The Amazonian resistance, similar to the
K’iche’ protest, was met with gunshots from the Peruvian army. García jus-
tified his actions in the following way: “These people don’t have crowns.
They aren’t first-class citizens. What can 400,000 natives tell 28 million
Peruvians? You [the government] don’t have the right to be here? No way!
That is a big mistake, and whoever thinks this way is leading us to irratio-
nality and to a backward primitivism” (in Bebbington, 288, my translation).
Around the corner from Peru, in the southern Amazonian region of what is
today Ecuador, the Shuar peoples in the Condor mountain ranges defend
their territories and resources against the invasion of the Chinese mining

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company Explorcobres S.A., which aims to exploit the tin underneath the
Shuar’s lands. The Ecuadorian government, which approved the operations
of this mining company, has declared a “state of exception” in the region,
restricting not only the rights of Indigenous communities but also the
demobilization of Acción Ecológica, or Ecological Action, an organization
that has been denouncing attacks against the Shuar population.20 On Sep-
tember 26, 2014, forty-three male Indigenous students from the teachers’
college of Ayotzinapa headed to Guerrero, Mexico, to protest Mayor José
Luis Abarca’s approval and signing of a law to raise the price of tuition for
higher education in the state. On the way to their destination, the students
were intercepted by the local police and handed over to a group of s icarios,
or “hitmen,” who kidnapped them. Their parents are still looking for them
with the hope that they are alive. In March 2016 the Lenca leaders Berta
Caceres and Nelson García, members of the Civic Council of Popular and
Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), were assassinated in
what is today Honduras for their efforts to defend their territories against
the hydroelectric company Desarrollos Energéticos (DESA). This company
had obtained the approval and support of the Honduran government to
exploit the water in Lenca territories. They have also claimed that key
documents that denounced the assassination of Caceres and García have
been displaced.21 Since the first of April 2016 the Sioux Nation in North
Dakota, along other Indigenous nations in Turtle Island, have protested and
resisted the construction of an oil pipeline that would cross the Missouri
river—sacred Indigenous territory—and that would cause immeasurable
ecological damage. This resistance, until now, has resulted in attacks and
imprisonment of various “water protectors” and non-Indigenous leaders
fighting for their rights to the sovereignty of the Indigenous nations in
what is today the United States . . .
I can keep giving examples—all day!—showing the constant tensions
and confrontations we continue to have with “modern” nation-states.
These struggles, which did not start recently but rather in October 1492,22
signal that our liberation entails not just dismantling today’s mercantilist
system, which is based on predatory extractivism, but also the destruction
of all those systems that prevent us from expressing ourselves in our Indig-
enous languages and impede the rights of Indigenous women or Indigenous
gays or transsexuals. It entails establishing an Abiayala that recognizes,
accepts, and respects our differences and at the same time asserts a project
of shared Indigenous demands. We would do well to begin by reviving for
our times the proposal of the Cuban writer José Martí, that the history of
Abiayala—of the Incas, Mayas, Nahuas, Navajo, Cherokee, Inuit—up to the
present should be learned inside out, even if we do not learn the history of

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the archons of Greece. Our Greeces are much more preferable to Greeces
that are not ours. We need them most. Let the world be grafted onto our
Indigenous nations, but let the trunk be that of our over-one-thousand-
year-old nations. And let the defeated pedant be silent, for there is no place
where we can feel more pride than in our oppressed Indigenous republics
of Abiayala.23
It is, then, a question of opening the cage in which the invaders placed us
and of listening to the plurality of histories that characterize our peoples,
to break all those exploitative chains that colonialism has imposed on us.
Let us develop processes of relearning to revive our memories and nourish
ourselves with old and current knowledges; let us learn non-Indigenous his-
tories and knowledges as long as these are dissident tools that guide us in
producing categories that help us bring our emancipatory goals to f ruition.
Therefore, for us to recognize and endorse categories like America or Latin
America would contribute to affirming a colonialist logic that overlooks our
needs as Indigenous nations. In particular, our continued efforts to recover
and defend our territories and restitute our linguistic, cultural, and religious
specificities, efforts that Latinamericanism and Americanism in general, in
all of its forms, have failed to deeply address and understand. For these rea-
sons, I would venture to say that the efforts of subaltern-popular Indige-
nous rights movements should be invested in first d eveloping—through the
idea and civilizational project of Abiayala—an Indigenous and even global
historical bloc that, while it addresses internal and external oppressions,
also manages to bring us together as diverse Indigenous nations struggling
to overcome external and internal/settler colonialisms and their logics of
elimination. By positioning ourselves as Indigenous subjects, we can not
only enable the hegemonic articulation of our demands but also negotiate
with non-Indigenous others to secure the constitution of multicultural or
intercultural national and international models based on our own Indige-
nous needs and perspectives.
To conclude, like the Guna Nation and Takir Mamani, I encourage you
to consider and adopt the idea and civilizational project of Abiayala as a
transhemispheric Indigenous category that challenges the Eurocentrism of
(Latin) America, to inscribe it in your official declarations, political mani-
festos, scholarly articles, books, films, and so on. In this way, Abiayala can
become our category, our own locus of political enunciation that can lead
us to restitute our Indigenous life and that of our Mother Earth. At the
same time, it is about not just the vindication of our ancestral categories
and the names of our territories but also our efforts to recover them and
defend them. Indeed, the struggle of Abiayala is a struggle for our territo-
ries, for the richness of our lands, for our rights to our ways of life. These

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are economic, political, and geocultural struggles that we fight collectively.
Let’s take Abiayala as a point of departure to think of better modes of inter/
multicultural sociability that consequently lead us to materialize, like the
Zapatista slogan, a world where many worlds can fit.
EMIL KEME (aka Emilio del Valle Escalante) is a K’iche’ Maya activist/scholar
from Iximulew (Guatemala). He is an associate professor of Spanish at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Notes
Readers familiar with the work of Russell Means (Oglala Lakota) will notice
that the inspiration for the title of my work comes from his essay “For America
to Live, Europe Must Die.” Means’s essay in Spanish can be accessed with the
following link: http://lakotaes.skyrock.com/1931687975-Discurso-de-Rusell
-Means.html.
1. Some academics and activists also use Abya Yala and Abia Yala. In this
work I use spelling used and suggested by the Dule (Guna) historian Aiban
Wagua in his book Así lo vi y así me lo contaron (Thus I saw it and thus they
told me).
2. The Guna are one of eight officially recognized Indigenous nations in
Panama. The other seven are Ngäbe, Bugle, Teribe/Naso, Bokota, Embera, Wou-
naan, and Bri Bri. The Guna Yala Shire (also Kuna and Kuna Yala) was created in
September 1938 and comprises an insular area composed of about forty islands
and twelve villages. According to the 2010 population census of the Republic
of Panama, the Indigenous population of the region of Guna Yala represents
33,109 people. According to the same document, in 2010, approximately
30,000 people in other parts of Panama were identified as Gunas (Pereiro et
al., 16). The name of the region officially changed from Kuna to Guna in Octo-
ber 2011, when the Panamanian government acknowledged the petition of the
saylas, or Indigenous authorities, that their mother tongue does not use a pho-
neme for the letter K. Hence, the official name should be Guna and Guna Yala or
Gunayala.
3. The General Guna Congress (CGK) was formed and institutionalized in
1945. It is the highest political-administrative body of this Indigenous nation
and is made up of representatives from forty-nine communities in the Guna

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Yala Territory. For more information, visit its website: http://www.gunayala.
org.pa/index.htm.
4. I include both terms, “sovereignty” and “autonomy,” taking into
account that they have been used by several Indigenous nations in Abiayala.
Maya Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, for example, speak of “autonomous com-
munities.” Given the history of treaties that recognize their traditional territo-
ries with hegemonic rule, Indigenous nations in what is now the United States
and Canada emphasize their status as “sovereign” nations. These discussions
are complex, and in this article I do not have time to go into greater depth. It is
important to recognize the valuable work of Glen Coulthard on First Nations in
Canada and their struggles for sovereignty. According to Coulthard, we should
not confuse the struggles for our self-determination with policies of recog-
nition. Our work involves invalidating the legitimacy of the modern/colonial
nation-state and its policies of Indigenous “recognition” in order to material-
ize our sovereignties.
5. As far as I am aware, the Quito Declaration of 1990 is the first official
Indigenous document that uses the term Abiayala politically and collectively.
As is known, the meeting “500 Years of Indian Resistance” took place in Q uito,
Ecuador, between July 17 and 21, 1990. It was attended by representatives of
120 Indigenous nations of the hemisphere, international organizations, and
non-Indigenous organizations that support Indigenous rights. The meeting
sought “to establish once and for all areas of work and coordination that will
definitively allow us to advance in our demands for justice, respect, and free-
dom” (89). The declaration, among other things, speaks of “the defense and
conservation of nature, Pachamama (Mother Earth), of Abya-Yala (the Amer-
ican Continent), of the equilibrium of the ecosystem and the conservation of
life” (100).
6. From now on, I will use (Latin) America to refer to this geopolitical
context.
7. Of the thousands of languages mentioned by Berkhofer, today over a
thousand Indigenous languages survive. This speaks of our complex diversity
and differences as Indigenous nations (K’iche’ Maya, Aymara, Quechua, Navajo,
Osage, etc.). See Ethnologue: Languages of the World in order to access the
information about Indigenous languages: https://www.ethnologue.com/region
/Americas.
8. It is also necessary here to take into account the complexity of Indig-
enous notions when considering Indigenous/Afro-descendant populations
that use the notion of Indigeneity in the defense of their cultures. Such is the
case of the Garífuna population in what is now Central America and those who
assert their Indigeneity based on the biological/cultural mixture between Afro-
descendants and Carib-Arawak peoples. Similar experiences emerge in what
is now Surinam and the Guyanas with the Kali’ña, Lokono, and Akawaio pop-
ulations and the Wayuu populations in Guajira in what is today Colombia and
Venezuela.
9. In the same article and in his 2014 NAISA presidential address, Allen has
tried to conciliate his position by recognizing the work that Native American

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writers like Allison Hedge Coke have done in translating and publishing Indige-
nous writers from the south of Abiayala to English or international gatherings
that have led to the formation of important international organizations like
the World Council of Indigenous Peoples.
10. I must confess I was overjoyed to find some Indigenous works in select
Iximulew bookstores, such as House Made of Dawn (La casa hecha de alba) by
N. Scott Momaday and Custer Died for Your Sins (El general Custer murió por
vuestros pecados) by Vine Deloria Jr. The effort of publishers such as Abya Yala
in Ecuador and LOM in Chile is also laudable. They have translated seminal
works into Spanish, such as Disciplining the Savages (Disciplinar a los salvajes)
by Martin Nakata and Decolonizing Methodologies (Descolonizar las metod-
ologías) by Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
11. Works of various time periods such as the Popol Wuj, Annals of the
Kaqchikeles, El Huarochirí, Time Commences in Xibalbá by Luis de Lión, among
many others are available to us in English when it comes to thinking about cur-
ricular strategies or transhemispheric exchanges.
12. The category of Turtle Island has been used to delineate Indigenous ter-
ritories in what is now “North America” (Mexico, the United States, and Can-
ada). Similarly, Tawantinsuyu corresponds to what is now the Andean region
(Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia), Anahuac has been used to refer to what is now Meso-
america (present-day Mexico and Central America), and Pindorma is the cate-
gory which the Tupi-Guarani used before the arrival of the Portuguese in what
is now Brazil. For more detailed discussions regarding these categories, see the
studies of Hewitt; Reynaga; Sevcenko; and Moonen.
13. Let us remember Columbus’s epistemic violence when he sought to erase
the Indigenous memory of Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean: “To the first
island I discovered I gave the name of San Salvador in commemoration of His
Divine Majesty, who has wonderfully granted all this. The Indians call it Gua-
naham. The second I named the Island of Santa María de Concepción; the third,
Fernandina; the fourth, Isabella; the fifth, Juana; and thus to each one I gave a
new name.” Note how the Genoese admiral categorically sets aside the Indige-
nous names of the islands in order to impose Spanish ones.
14. These sections within NAISA and LASA have worked to support the pres-
ence and debates of Indigenous (and Afro-descendant in the case of ERIP and
Otros Saberes) scholars/activists from the south of Abiayala, which has been
significant in creating productive dialogues and exchanges.
15. For more information on the Nican Tlaca Mexica movement, see http://
www.mexica-movement.org/. In addition to posters, they have also created
videos published on social media like YouTube, Facebook, and so on. See, for
example, the video Latinos/Hispanics Have Native American Ancestry, https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHwlgi6zu9E.
16. Indeed, filibusterer William Walker invaded Nicaragua and declared
himself president in 1856.
17. See Calfunao; Linconao.
18. See Hernández.
19. See Idle No More.

128.83.214.19 on Tue, 19 Jan 2021 06:57:10 UTC
20. See Aguilar.
21. On July 7, 2016, Cáseres’s fellow team member Lesbia Yaneth Urquía was
also killed because of her struggle against multinational companies. See “Ase-
sinan a Lesbia Yaneth.”
22. For Indigenous struggles in Abiayala solely in 2012, see Schertow.
23. See Martí, 34.

128.83.214.19 on Tue, 19 Jan 2021 06:57:10 UTC
128.83.214.19 on Tue, 19 Jan 2021 06:57:10 UTC
FIGURE 1. Aaron Carapella, Tribal Nations of the Western Hemisphere. Le wachib’al usipanik le Aaron
Carapella.
IMAGEN 1. Aaron Carapella, Tribal Nations of the Western Hemisphere. Cortesía de Aaron Carapella.
FIGURE 1. Aaron Carapella, Tribal Nations of the Western Hemisphere. Courtesy of Aaron Carapella.

128.83.214.19 on Tue, 19 Jan 2021 06:57:10 UTC
FIGURE 2. “Nican Tlaca,” Mexica Movement. Le wachib’al usipanik le Mexica
Movement.
IMAGEN 2. “Nican Tlaca,” Mexica Movement. Cortesía de Mexica Movement.
FIGURE 2. Nican Tlaca Mexica movement. Courtesy of Mexica movement.

128.83.214.19 on Tue, 19 Jan 2021 06:57:10 UTC

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For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die: Toward a Transhemispheric Indigeneity

Author(s): Emil Keme and Adam Coon

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For Abiayala to Live, the Americas

Translated by Adam Coon

We don’t need permission to be free.

42 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 43

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44 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 45

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46 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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Abiayala: Our Locus of Political Enunciation

N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 47

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48 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 49

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50 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 51

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52 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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The Americas Must Die

N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 53

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54 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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As we can see, the cultural and civilizational project imagined by Caicedo

N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 55

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56 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 57

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58 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 59

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 61

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 63

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64 Emil Keme NA IS 5:1 2 0 18

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N A I S 5: 1 2 0 18 For Abiayala to Live, the Americas Must Die 65

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IMAGEN 2. “Nican Tlaca,” Mexica Movement. Cortesía de Mexica Movement.

FIGURE 2. Nican Tlaca Mexica movement. Courtesy of Mexica movement.

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