Commentary: “An Indian Among Los Indigenas”

By Chava Possum

Ursula Pike’s debut An Indian Among Los Indigenas fell into my lap serendipitously when Ursula reached out to the local organization that houses my Decolonize This Book Club about a possible author visit, since the themes of her memoir so clearly parallel the topics our club cares about. Though she grew up in California and later Portland, Ursula has a special connection to Central Oregon. Her mother used to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the Warm Springs reservation, which is perhaps 45 minutes from my house.

Her memoir follows 25-year-old Ursula during her two year stay in Bolivia as a volunteer with the Peace Corps. An enrolled member of the Karuk tribe of California, Ursula began her service feeling that she was different from the white volunteers and missionaries who travel to countries like Bolivia to tell the Bolivians what they need. She writes,

“… part of my struggle was knowing I followed in the footsteps of Western colonizers and missionaries who had also claimed they were there to help.”

But, as we know from North American history, particularly the history of Residential Schools run by white Christians to forcefully assimilate Native children to dominant culture, stripping them of their families, languages, religion, medicine, and ways of being, white “help” is often violence in disguise. It’s fair for anyone to question Western organizations like the Peace Corps and Ursula questions it from day one and throughout her trip to Bolivia.

“In college, I heard Noam Chomsky refer to the Peace Corps as the peaceful wing of the State Department. To me, that meant it was more about making the US look good overseas than about bringing real development.”

But joining the Peace Corps offered Ursula everything she wanted and needed: a way to travel while getting paid, a paycheck to help cover the costs of graduate school, and an opportunity to connect with other Indigenous people. So, keeping her suspicion in mind, Ursula leaps at the chance to follow this dream, hoping her Indigenous identity will help her connect with the locals and avoid carrying on a legacy of colonization with her to Bolivia.

Following her assignment to Kantuta— a village in Central Bolivia re-named for anonymity— Ursula’s post brought her to a children’s center funded and run by German evangelicals. (Red flag!) But at the center, Ursula meets a few Bolivian women who largely worked in the kitchens and, in them, discovers true friends who help her navigate a two-year stay in Bolivia. But now, the work begins. Panicked at the idea of having to prove her worthiness for this position, Ursula struggles at first to find ways to be useful.

“The combination of White Man’s Burden and Native Women’s Self-Doubt made it difficult to get much done.”

She constantly walks a tight rope between being “proactive” like her supervisors want and overstepping by assuming she knows better than the Bolivians themselves. But, as time passes, Ursula forms friendships with villagers, with the Bolivian staff at the center, and with a few fellow volunteers. Through those relationships, she begins to spot opportunities to contribute: starting up a bakery for young girls at the center to learn to make bread and sell it, a similar popsicle business, and teaching the children English. As her Peace Corps supervisor, Carmen, tells her,

“Anything you can do to help [the children] understand that they have options in life will be worthwhile.”

But seeing the massive infrastructure and agricultural projects her fellow volunteers are doing makes Ursula feel that she is not enough, especially in light of how much the Bolivians are doing to host her: teaching her the languages and cultures, showing her how to catch a ride to another city or town, how to cook their foods, and even some of the more menial tasks, like laundry, that are difficult to do in a totally new environment. How much could she be helping when she needs so much help herself?

Separate from family and friends, Ursula battles loneliness and depression during her term of service. Yet, at the same time, she falls in love, gets heartbroken, forms loving friendships, and explores beyond her comfort zone. It’s a journey full of love, lust, panic, despair, thrill, joy, grief, isolation, and growth.

Ultimately, the book poses the question: What does it mean to have experienced the effects of colonialism firsthand, and yet to risk becoming a colonizing force in turn?

And the answer?… Perhaps not as clear as you’re hoping.

At no point does Ursula (nor any of the other characters) come right out and definitively say, “If you do things this way, then you’re not contributing to a legacy of colonization.” That’s, I’m sure, what many of us readers were hoping to see, but ultimately with dismantling any oppressive system, there is no one answer— no singular solution or quick fix. How could one person possibly fix a problem 500 years in the making?

So… what do we do?

It reminds me of a line from a book I recently read called The Bad Muslim Discount, when the narrator explains how his mother handles grief and pain. He tells us that she welcomes the bad as if a guest in her home, knowing it will one day end, even if it’s a long time away. He is in awe of her ability to sit with discomfort, to exist with it, to give it room, without seeking immediate relief or solutions— a talent the book claims Westerners don’t really have. We want instant gratification, we want clarity in all things, and there’s little tolerance for discomfort. But, truthfully, that discomfort is what we’re faced with in this question. What do we do? We welcome that discomfort as if an old friend, patient in the face of not knowing.

The book posits that if you’re American or from a Western nation— no matter your race, gender, creed, etc.— you will travel carrying a legacy of colonization with you. It’s inevitable because it’s bigger than any one of us alone, so big we all carry part of it on our shoulders— some more than others. However, there are ways to travel (especially in service work) that take that legacy into account and reduce harm. If, as the memoir argues, we need cross-cultural solidarity to pursue justice and liberation, then we Westerners must decolonize our selves. A life-long process of learning and unlearning. Colonization actively finds ways to separate us from one another— to dehumanize, divide, and build resentment so that mass movements struggle to take off and sustain momentum. So it’s up to each of us.

What does that look like?

I reflect back nearly 10 years to when I myself was a white missionary in Bolivia.

When I was about 14 or 15 years old, I went on a mission trip to Bolivia with my youth group. Before I converted to Judaism, I was a Christian— Episcopalian to be specific. Though not an especially evangelical denomination, we still have a long history as a force of colonization in America. At my church, Episcopalians leaned heavily toward white and rich. My family was an odd exception to the rich part. Episcopalians have a deep bench in Appalachia, where descendants of Scotch-Irish colonizers sent to Turtle Island to steal land and resources from sovereign Indigenous nations still live. And if many of those descendants are now wealthy, where do you suppose that all came from? Not only the Indigenous peoples of North America, but of South America too.

This is the historical and political context of my trip to Bolivia in 2008/2009, a context I was completely unaware of as a brainwashed white kid. But I’m sure this context did not escape the notice of the Bolivians we interacted with.

We were sent to Bolivia primarily because one of our priests was married to a Bolivian. (Episcopalian priests are allowed to marry.) It was easier to travel there, given her intimate knowledge and connections. And I was really excited to go. I’d never flown in a plane before and I was getting to spend a week with my friends. Though I wasn’t particularly religious, the trip wasn’t (ostensibly) about evangelizing. But I believe our presence did ultimately evangelize by the nature of the project we did: renovating an old church in town.

Truth be told, I had a great time. I enjoyed the rare break from my professional dance career and I got to go on an international trip with a crush! What teenager wouldn’t be excited? And over the years since the trip, I looked back on it fondly. It felt formative, life-changing, and like we helped people. But once I started learning about colonization, my fondness has hardened into shame and anger.

Learning about the true roles missionaries played and continue to play in genocides against Indigenous peoples in North and South America, Black Africans, and Asian peoples across Siberia, the Middle East, India, and across ocean waters to the Philippines and Hawaii, I saw my real place in that history. just another colonizer out doing “the Lord’s work.”

I mean, wouldn’t it have been a lot easier and better for the Bolivians who hosted us to hire local painters and construction crews to renovate the church? How was a group of 14 year olds more experienced in those tasks than adults who live down the road? Was it worth it? I don’t think so anymore.

I’d like to claim that the transition of mindsets was swift and resolute, but it wasn’t. We all validate and justify our actions and choices. My validations were that I hadn’t caused anyone direct harm, meaning me, Chava Possum, individually din’t force anyone to convert, to give me all their resources, or to do things they didn’t want to do. But such validations were born from my perspective and are most likely false. There’s no way to know whether my presence hurt anyone. And besides, such validations ignore just how much America (and by extension Americans) extract from Latin American countries like Bolivia. Ursula writes,

“I attended student-organized meetings where stories of massacres and revolutions happening in real time in Central America were translated in front of me from Spanish-to-English. The speakers were often Indigenous women imploring us to get the US government out of their country, to explain that millions of our tax dollars were being spent to keep dictators in power.”

In training, Ursula watched a 1969 film called Blood of the Condor about “Quechua villagers in Bolivia and an agency called the Progress Corps,” spoken entirely in Quechua. The film alludes to forced sterilizations on Indigenous women and was so potently received by the public in Bolivia that the Bolivian government asked the Peace Corps (who had not participated in forced sterilizations) to leave in 1970. Though the film was fictional, it addressed a very real genocidal tactic that the US and other Western nations have used and continue to use in colonization efforts. Ursula writes,

“In North America, one in four native women were forcibly sterilized. Full-blooded women were targeted first.”

Twenty years later, the Peace Corps was allowed to return to Bolivia, when a US-friendly government was elected. (I wonder how that happened…)

Even when Americans aren’t committing this level of abuse individually, we still bring whiteness with us, like a virus. Whiteness demands assimilation. Though you (the reader) may not go up to people and say, “Assimilate,” it’s implied in nearly everything we say and do, consciously and unconsciously. Ursula writes at length about how Indigenous Bolivian cultures (there are many) are witnessing a wave of assimilation to the whiter mainstream. Why? Because assimilation can help you get a job that pays better, get an education, support your family, and survive. Ursula writes,

“Bolivians told me all the time that they were proud of their Incan ancestors… Yet they knew what many people, especially the wealthier, whiter population of Bolivia, thought about Los Indios. Few wanted to be seen as Indian.”

I carried my whiteness with me to Bolivia. And, like Ursula, I ask, “Was I a part of assimilation?” Whereas Ursula asks this question of a specific family, my question extends to a larger collective— anonymous, multi-cultural, and covering hundreds of years. Unlike Ursula, I did not stay with a family in Bolivia, so I wonder what effect my presence had on no one in particular, but everyone. And I’ve ultimately landed at an uncomfortable answer: My presence was most likely more harmful than positive. Ursula’s memoir repeatedly circles the idea of balancing the harm and the benefits that volunteers from the Peace Corps can bring. The arithmetic of how many benefits one needs to provide to cancel out the harmful effects of colonization is constant and unsatisfying because how does one measure goodness? How does one measure violence? Barometers for such intangible things are inevitably subjective and limited. So, though I can’t exactly measure out my impact, I believe the scales lean on the side of harmful over positive.

And yet I still keep a scrapbook of my trip to Bolivia. It sits in my office closet, with the rest of the memorabilia I keep like old letters from friends and family and pictures. I made the scrapbook soon after returning home from Bolivia, hoping to capture as much of that experience as possible before, as so aptly put in the book, everyone and everything becomes a ghost to me. It reminds me of Ursula’s point in the Afterword. She quotes Teju Cole’s essay “The White Savior Industrial Complex”,

“The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It’s about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

Wealth can be used for good, if one ignores how that wealth was generated in the first place. Americans’ relative wealth and privilege compared to Bolivians comes from stealing resources. US imperialism in Latin America lives a policy of extraction: extract important resources out of third and fourth world countries (like gold, tin, rubber, mahogany, cocaine, and lithium in Bolivia’s case) for Americans to use however they see fit.

My question then is: How is a 1-2 week mission trip going to rectify exploitation that’s been happening for decades now?

But the scrapbook remains in my possession. It’s been with me over 10 years now, but as I flip through the pages, I find that, despite my best attempts, it’s all too blurry to remember. All I remember are the times I spent with my friends. The rest was backdrop. My mission trip to Bolivia was not about justice, just like Teju Cole explains; it was about validating my privilege and having an emotional experience that helped me grow. So I keep the scrapbook not out of sentimentality anymore, but as a reminder about who I really am: still a colonizer.

Ursula’s memoir read incredibly easily; you’re gripped to the page because the stories offer what most of us love: funny friends, drama, and vulnerable truths. Though I don’t tend to like memoirs, this was special. If you’re like me and are not into memoirs, still give this one a chance. And if you’re planning to travel as a volunteer or a missionary, make sure this book is in your carry-on luggage. Talk with your fellow volunteers and missionaries about colonization. Develop strategies and guidelines for decolonization that you can all hold each other accountable to. Learn about the history of the country, particularly its relationship with the US. And, above all, listen to the people of that place.