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This event will be hybrid. To register for the virtual session, click here.
Speaker: Emil' Keme (K’iche’ Maya Nation) is 2022-2023 Fellow at The Harvard Radcliffe Institute, member of the Community of Maya Studies, and Professor of English and Indigenous Studies at Emory University
How do Indigenous peoples whose homelands have been demarcated by settler colonial borders assert their autonomy or sovereignty? In this presentation, I address the answer to this question by discussing the Indigenous Wayuu experience in the Woumain or the Guajira peninsula in today’s Venezuela and Colombia. The Wayuu, who have been referred to by some scholars as the people of the desert, have claimed that they were never conquered by European powers. Rather, their main problems began once the Venezuelan and Colombian governments “officialized” their respective settler colonial borders on their ancestral lands in the early 1800s, splitting many related Wayuu communities into different colonial regions, and thus beginning new cycles of resistance and Wayuu struggles for self-determination.
Emil' Keme's most recent book is Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word. Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala (2021).
Presented in collaboration with Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University