indigenous

It was past midnight and a gentle rain pattered against the roof of the shaman’s house, where we sat conducting a whispered interview on a pile of blankets by the fireside. The red record button of my handheld recorder blinked in the darkness. I strained my ears to catch what Taita Antonio, a shaman, ex-political leader, and land defender of the Kamëntsá people of southwest Colombia, said next: “Our fight is for life and for water.

On January 17th, the ASUO meeting for NASU’s budget was packed to the gills. The tension was palpable; more and more people squeezed in and the ASUO committee members sat aligned at their table and firmly asked no one in the room to stand behind them, even as space dwindled. As the meeting convened, the NASU members sat across from the ASUO budget leadership. The ASUO Chair outlined that the meeting was closed to public comment and any filming.

Content Warning: Colonialism, Racism

The Kamëntsá are an Indigenous community of southwest Colombia whose ancestral homeland is the Sibundoy Valley, a mountain basin straddling the Andean highlands to the west and overlooking the vast Amazonian lowlands to the east. It is fitting that such a unique geographical position, situated between two vastly different ecological and cultural worlds, should be home to a people as unique as the Kamëntsá, who fuse Andean and Amazonian cultural elements, speak a language unrelated to any other, and whose forms of artistic and philosophical expression are singular in the world.

Marta Lu Clifford is an enrolled member and tribal elder of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. In addition, Clifford is a highly respected tribal elder within the Kalapuya and UO Indigenous communities. Over the past couple of years, Marta has joined together with Lane Community College Longhouse Director Lori Tapenhanso of Navajo Nation and UO Department of Theatre Arts Professor Theresa May to establish the Illioo Native theater group. The Illioo Native theater group tells traditional Indigenous stories through the art of theater.

Hey, you! You realize you’re on stolen land, right? Who am I kidding, of course you do. But, how do you feel about that? Seriously! How does it feel to live on stolen land? Are you uncomfortable? I encourage you to think about these questions and keep thinking about them until you die. If you’ve spent much time around the University of Oregon, you’ve certainly heard that it’s “located on Kalapuya Ilihi, the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people,” who were dispossessed of this land in the 1850s, forcibly removed to the coast, and whose descendants “continue to make important contributions in their communities, at UO, across the land we now refer to as Oregon, and around the world.