Wayuu Peoples’ Struggles for Self-determination in the Guajira Peninsula

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKER: Emil' Keme, 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 (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. His most recent book is Le Maya Q’atzij/Our Maya Word. Poetics of Resistance in Guatemala (2021).

This event is co-sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.

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If you have any questions, please conatct Dylan Nelson at dylannelson@g.harvard.edu