Young People and Audiovisual Technologies in Rural Chiloé/Buta Wapi Chilwe: A Personal Path toward a Decolonizing Doing

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to present my experience attempting to practice some ideas of decolonial thinking within a doctoral research project. In 2010, I lived in a Williche Community in Chiloé/Buta Wapi Chilwe. As a retribution for the possibility of conducting my research there, I fulfilled several tasks defined by the Community’s Health Team. A project revolving around expressive creation with children and teenagers arose: The Weche Folil. After presenting some key features of my personal trajectory and those of the regional context in which Weche Folil is grounded; I propose to think of this project as a practice that points toward the subversion of ways of thinking, feeling and being which express the colonial dimension. I understand coloniality as a key dimension of our collective existence featured by inequality, arrogance, and pain. Love, time, dedication and caring are at the hearth of this decolonizing doing. Ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes are also part of it. This personal account may be of interest for researchers who are planning to work among indigenous peoples, especially in rural settings and in Chiloé.

A Gran Lonko used to say: For us, all life used to be the same. There wasn´t a tree or a fish that was worth more than others. We were all the same. Then, the Winka came and put a price on us, on all things. We took this as our belief and so now we sometimes put ourselves in rankings of value: This is worth more, this less, this is more important.

We are all equally important, from the tiniest microorganism to ourselves and all that exists.

Fidel Rain, Lonko Williche (Weche Folil 2014)

my translation

1. Introduction

The proposal I submitted together with filmmaker Cristobal García Toledo to the Telciu Summer Conference Organizing Committee included the screening of a film made by a group of young people in a rural community in Chiloé. This was a departure point for discussing our co-labor with them from the perspective of delinking from colonial thought and practice (Mignolo 2007). The committee answered to our application by proposing to place the presentation at the beginning of the Summer School that followed the conference. To me this was a good sign. Throughout the seven years I have been working with the Williche community of Koñimo-Lamekura in rural Chiloé, I learned to trust things that came out in a slightly different and more exciting way as originally intended.

As noticed by one of the conference organizers, our presentation helped to state that children have a place when imagining decolonial horizons and alternative futures. Indeed, it seems obvious that children play a significant role in the doing of decolonialization. The 2nd Edition of the Telciu Summer School included many activities addressing the local youth. However, as E. Menéndez reminds us, things that are obvious, things that are there so evidently that we look at them without seeing them, tend to remain unstudied. He states that precisely those things— “the obvious”—should guide our inquiries in the field of social anthropology (Menéndez 2012, p. 35).

In this essay, I propose to reflect on the intertwining of young people and decoloniality from within an experience of working with young people and audiovisual technologies in a rural Williche context. My argument is that in the early stages of the Weche Folil project, children were the main thinkers and doers of a collective experience that can be thought of in terms of a decolonizing doing. A doing that points toward the subversion of embedded ways of thinking, feeling and being that express and produce the colonial dimension, marking our collective existence with inequality, arrogance, and pain. Drawing from several thinkers who wrote on the topic since 1950s, such as F. Fanon (Fanon [1952] 2009), A. Memmi (Memmi [1957] 1991), G. Anzaldúa (1987) and L. T. Smith (1999), decolonizing doing is in my experience—as the work of these four and many other authors show—at the entanglement of being, feeling and thinking with others and with the whole of our bodies. It faces incompleteness, ambivalence, and contradictions that are particularly difficult to grasp with the established theoretical and methodological tool kit of the social sciences.

For the region where Weche Folil is grounded the revision of pertinent past and present work varies greatly depending on how many and which languages, times, geographies, and disciplines are privileged and on what aspects of the project are stressed. For this essay, it suffices to present succinctly two fields of interdisciplinary work related to the initiative. On the one hand, there is a complex body of research and practice on the use of audiovisual technologies in indigenous contexts. From the very beginning of anthropology as a discipline research was/is conducted through imperial eyes (Smith 1999, p. 42) as well as through imperial lenses. Studies at the intersection of audiovisual technologies, anthropology and colonialism/imperialism (see e.g., Colombres 1985) discuss how visual and audiovisual registers exoticize, distort and assault individual and collective dignity; simultaneously reinforcing the colonial situation and power imbalances. The analyses also suggest the possibility of using these technologies to promote resistance and self-determination.

A rapidly growing body of research and practice explore the possibilities of sharing, collaboration, empowerment and collective creation through/with audiovisual technologies in indigenous territories (Kohler 2004; Wilson and Stewart 2008; Smith 2012). Some authors propose “visual sovereignty” as an indigenous methodology pointing toward the decolonization of knowledge (Raheja 2007). Others, points to the “inutility” of words and (sociological) writing which can easily graft in the legitimation of power. This motivates a choice for reflecting on and portraying collective indignation through “creative montage” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012a, pp. 219–33).

Nowadays a category of audiovisual production named “indigenous video” is well established. It is a contested field. Many projects promoting the use of audiovisual technologies in indigenous territories” emerge out of cultural programming orchestrated by reformers working in state institutions during the late 1980s and 1990s” (Smith 2012, p. 330). The emergence of the Weche Folil initiative followed a different path paved with ideas of autonomy and self-determination. However, it is part—at the beginning indirectly and then formally—of a Community Health Project included in state programs that fostered neoliberal multiculturalism in Post-Dictatorial Chile. As in Bolivia and elsewhere this multiculturalism has been the “concealing mechanism par excellence for new forms of colonization” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012b, p. 99).

On the other hand, Weche Folil goes far beyond the use or sharing of audiovisual technologies. Indeed, it is not easy to situate it in a specific field. This project was the unintended and unplanned outcome of a methodological proposal placed at the margins of a doctoral research project and in the center of fieldwork as life experience. It grew out of being there with others in a specific context and is deeply signed by spontaneity and fluidity. It was/is made collectively in the doing. In this sense, it is related to P. Freire’s central notion of praxis as an acting in the world that is informed by thinking about the world and by reflecting on action and as action (Freire [1970] 2002). It is as well connected to S. Rivera Cusicanqui assessment that decolonization cannot be only a thought or a discourse, it needs to be practice (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012a).

Freire’s work has been enormously influential—as has the participatory action research program of (Fals Borda [1979] 1990)—for the other interdisciplinary field I want to mention, namely the field of methodological proposals attempting to avoid the perpetuation of patriarchy, racism and colonialism in the social sciences. It encompasses multiply proposals including participatory, collaborative, co-labored research as well as critical and indigenous methodologies (see Sandoval 2000; Denzin et al. 2008). As I will show in the next section, L. T. Smith’s proposal for decolonizing methodologies (Smith 1999) was central for the very possibility of practicing Weche Folil.

However, it is neither a research project nor a popular education initiative. It resists confinement and affiliation to one specific field or proposal. While it is in a sense close to the idea of co-labor as cooperation between academics and non-academics (Leyva et al. 2008), it is also related to M. de la Cadena understanding of co-laboring as different from collaborative research for not pointing to the use of academic expertise to help anybody figure out anything about himself, herself, or a group (Cadena 2015, p. 12). On the contrary, I was the one asking for help to figure out how conducting research for a doctoral project could be less disruptive for the people involved in this research and not be “absolute worthless” (Smith 1999, p. 3) to them.

Weche Folil can certainly be placed as one among many initiatives influenced by anti-colonial, anti-imperial struggles and thinking within and without the realm of the social sciences. The point I want to stress here is that this project is signed by the people who are part of it but transcends our individualities placing itself as an experience of collective creativity. In this sense, it is (unintentionally) consistent with the idea of creativity advanced by R. Gaztambide-Fernández when he states that the “attempt to rethink encounters with others in ways that rearrange the hierarchical symbolic orders that produce the very differences that make those encounters legible […] involves ‘creatively’ engaging with others in unexpected and perhaps even inopportune ways that might rearrange the symbolic content of human exchanges by mobilizing that which always exceeds the very terms of the encounter” (Gaztambide-Fernández 2012, p. 56).

In this essay, I draw on my personal experience as a way of making visible the complexities of colonialiality and its overcoming—or of the delinking from it, if preferred—in a regional context marked by the hegemony of neoliberal ideology, extractivism, and assaults on human dignity. I attempt to make the collective experience of Weche Folil available to an academic audience for consideration. This is a step I am beginning to take alongside to the efforts of some of the other participants—who are now young adults—to share our reflections on what we have been doing for the last seven years and how have we done it, so that our collective experience can relate to other (decolonial) healing processes (Simpson 2002; Mignolo and Vazquez 2013).

I begin by presenting those aspects of my trajectory that I consider relevant for Weche Folil’s rise and further trajectory. Then I situate this project in the sociopolitical context in which it is grounded. I recall the moment when the project began to be and offer a brief discussion of our collective experience. I propose to think about it in terms of decolonizing doing and intend to show some of the contradictions it faces. The style of story-telling I use from now on, intends to communicate our collective experience distorting it as less as possible in the translation to an academic text.

2. A Migrant from Latin America/Abya Yala Researching among Indigenous People in Abya Yala/Latin America

I migrated from Uruguay to Austria in April 2001, a couple of months before the peak of a great economic crisis that lasted for several years. I left my country and abandoned my studies (in Psychology) together with my partner who happened to have a European (Austrian) passport. We envisioned to get a well enough paid job to complete our studies and support our families back home. Indeed, I managed within slight over two years to learn German, establish a relatively good income and stable job and be admitted to study Social- and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. The experience of migrating without speaking the local language and working in whatever job I could get, was of great significance to me. This is the place from where I began to engage with Anthropology in a Central European University.

I also want to stress one of the social processes that caught my attention at that period along with racism, xenophobia and patriarchy as lasting features of Austrian society. I observed a widespread difficulty among people of dissimilar backgrounds—peasants, university staff, workers, students, politicians, artists, journalists—to grasp the global connections of poverty, wealth, migration, hunger, totalitarism, formal democracy, war and so on. People tended to think of their privileges as a matter of fact, disconnected to past or present inequalities and differentials of power. I came to think of this as “die Verwirrung” (the confusion) and continued to observe its various manifestations over the years, trying to understand the process.

As I advanced in my undergraduate studies, literature I read as a teenager interested in anticolonial struggles—from (Martí [1891] 2003) to (Fanon [1961] 1994)—acquired a more comprehensive and embodied meaning to me. Simultaneously, the writings of authors working around the concept of coloniality of power and knowledge (Castro-Gómez and Mendieta 1998; Lander and Castro-Gómez 2000; Moraña et al. 2008) showed a significant explanatory potential for today’s world(s). These—among other relevant theoretical lines—helped me to think of the process I mentioned before as part of the way the “colonial pattern of power” (Quijano 2001) works in everyday life. Thus, blurring very relevant conections, such as the interwining of racism and patriarchy with capitalism and science. The internalization of the colonial structure of knowledge make people feel superior or inferior to others regardless of the structural conditions that underline their status, privileges and disadvantages.

After graduation and while I was still living in Austria, I realized that only a (fully financed) doctoral research project would give me the opportunity of getting some significant long-term field experience in Latin America/Abya Yala. Therefore, I developed a research project that included fieldwork in a Mapuche territory in Chile.

As I said, I was aware of the link between imperialism, colonialism and research. The struggles of many in Abya Yala as well as the work of L. T. Smith and others (e.g., Smith 1999; Denzin et al. 2008) focuses precisely on the particularities of this entanglement in indigenous territories. In fact, she states that research “is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (Smith 1999, p. 1). Her argument for decolonizing methodologies includes the priorization of research that serve the interest of the researched, that is defined and controlled by them as well as the incorporation of “Non-Western” ways of thinking and doing in research programs. Quite to the opposite my doctoral project—because of its very conditions of becoming possible—was fully defined by myself and my interests, conceived in a very distant location and based on the “Western” way of researching I have been socialized in through formal education.

Dealing with this paradox was a challenge I faced in a two-folded way. On the one hand, the research design (topic, questions, aims, methodology, management of results) was discussed in depth with the community that acceded to be part of my project. On the other, I proposed an exchange: they would provide me with accommodation and food for about a year in which I would conduct my research and share its results. At that same time, I would assume tasks defined as worthy by the Community Health Team. The main feature of this method in my view was that the activities—and I was mainly thinking of a research project—were defined by the participants themselves so that the imposition of ideas, priorities, methods, ways of thinking and doing could be avoided.

3. The “Magical Island”

Chiloé/Buta Wapi Chilwe is an archipelago in the Southern Pacific Ocean formed by the Big Island of Chiloé and over forty smaller islands with a total land surface area of 9181 km and about 160,000 inhabitants. Today it is part of the Republic of Chile. Simultaneously, it is part of the Buta Willi Mapu—the Southern Mapuche Territory or Williche Territory—which forms part of the Wallmapu—the Mapuche Territory that extends over vast areas of today’s Chile and Argentina. The archipelago features environmental, sociocultural and historical particularities (Hidalgo et al. 2015). These particularities foster an image of a “magical island”, a pristine place full of enchantment. Although ecological depredation and very severe socioeconomic and ecological damage marks the present, this image still holds for touristic promotion and in the minds of many.

Chiloé is considered by historians to be a border territory, an area of privileged interethnic contact. Before the beginning of the Spanish Colonial Era in 1567, canoeist people from the South and agricultural groups from the continent inhabited mainly the coastal areas of the Inland Sea. It remained a border territory in the colonial period since the Spaniards could maintain the control over Chiloé, but not over the nearby continental Mapuche territory (Marimán 2006). Besides, colonization faced severe climatic and political difficulties because of the geographical insularity and isolation. This promoted the appropriation and utilization of indigenous technologies and knowledge by the colonizers (Urbina 1988).

Indigenous people suffered slavery, forced relocation and many abuses and discriminations. Especially in the areas of most difficult access some groups managed to maintain part of their “cultural control” over their ways of living throughout the colonial era. With the annexation to the Chilean Republic in 1826, they faced a renewed assault on their identity (Muñoz 2001). The Indian languages were prohibited, Indian territories confiscated by the State, medicine men and women persecuted. The construction of the Chilean Nation required that all people be the same and receive equal treatment by the State. However, the profound power imbalances derived from colonialism, neocolonialism and capitalism acted against this national and republican precept. This prevented the Chilean Nation to be one of equals. Even today discrimination, racism as well as power, gender and socioeconomic imbalances are part of everyday life in the country.

In recent times, the hegemony of neoliberalism—imposed by the military dictatorship (1973–1989) and strengthened in the Post-Dictatorial Period—had profound effects on the environmental, economic, and sociocultural levels. From the 1990s onward, a new discourse about diversity promoted the recognition of indigenous people as an especial kind of people who deserves preferential treatment. In 1993, a law was passed that came to be known as the “Indigenous Law”. Special programs in the areas of health and education were implemented following international guidelines. People in the Buta Wapi Chilwe sometimes speak of “real communities”—the ones that exist before the Indigenous Law was passed—and “the new communities” that, aiming to be recognized by the State, were created after the Indigenous Law was signed.

The consequences of state multiculturalism are complex and multiple (see Boccara and Bolados 2010). For many it is a new form of domination and control. In this sense, Chile’s case is considered to be one of the contexts where the repressive dimension of neoliberal multiculturalism becomes more explicit (Kaltmeier et al. 2012). As I am writing these lines, my mailbox keeps receiving communications of Universities, Human Rights Organizations, Professional and Students Associations, expressing concern and disagreement with what is been identified as a new wave of criminalization and state represion against the Mapuche People in Chile and Argentina. The hunger strike of four Mapuche prisoners is serving as one of the catalyzers of this new wave of public concern about the relationship between indigenous peoples and States.

This is the context from where I am writing. More importantly, it is the context where the Weche Folil project is grounded. For this essay, it suffices to say that multiculturalism as a state strategy has encouraged divisions and weakened solidarities among people sharing the same territory and used to resist and create alternatives together. At the same time, a sense of belonging to a collectivity, that for centuries opposed different kinds of injustice, arose among people who previously did not feel part of it. That is the case of many of the families that founded the Williche Community of Koñimo-Lamekura in 1997. The Weche Folil experience is rooted in this community and specifically in its Community Health Project.

4. Unexpected Outcomes and the Beginning of an Enduring Project

For the past ten years the Williche Community of Koñimo-Lamekura conducts a Community Health Project funded by a Special Health and Indigenous People Program of the Ministry of Health. Fifteen people, mostly women, composed the Community Health Team. My research agreement with them included the fulfillment of tasks assigned to me by them. After several meetings, where I told extensively my life story and answered questions, a schedule was established for the tasks I should fulfill.

I was open for any task or activity but I must admit that I was mainly expecting to do some sort of research. Although I was indeed asked to support a community research initiative, the main interest of the Health Team was another one: I should work with the teenagers, especially with those still living in the community. Since the Rural School of Koñimo only provides eight years of formal education, most young people leave their homes at age 13–14 to attend secondary school in urban areas. They usually come back at weekends. In these opportunities—I was told— “they just meet to drink alcohol”. The memory of discrimination and humiliation in their encounters with urban life is still vivid among the elders and even the youngest members of the Health Team. They believe that humiliation and a feeling of inferiority in the encounter with the city mark the life of rural, indigenous people. Lack of activities for the youth in the community exacerbates the situation. Many teenagers and young adults are sad, lacking enthusiasm and the will to participate in the communal activities.

I followed this collective analysis carefully trying to figure out what exactly was I being asked to do. After discussing the issue extensively, we came up with the following agreement: I would do the same I had been doing with the Health Team, that is introduce myself and my will to work with teenagers. From then on, it would be up to them to decide if they wanted to and what they wanted to do. To avoid the imposition of ideas, priorities, ways of thinking, and doing, the teenagers would define their degree of participation. Members of the Health Team would disseminate this proposal among the youth inviting them to meet me at the Ruka (Community House) on a Saturday morning.

At first, I was more scared than excited about this idea and doubted that anyone would come to that meeting. At that point, I had been living in Koñimo for about one and half months and did not have much contact with teenagers. I had noticed a passive use/consume of technology, especially television in the community in general. At that time, in 2010, neither smartphones nor computers where common, particularly not among children. Internet was mostly unavailable. However, teens and children watched TV and some used the computer of the Radio Station to play videogames.

Television and mass media are important actors in the production and maintenance of the colonial structure of knowledge (Lander and Castro-Gómez 2000). They play a major role for example in the dissemination of a very partial, simplified and distorted image of what is called “the Mapuche Conflict” (see Cayuqueo 2013). Out of these reflections I began to consider sharing my research devices—computer, film camera, photo camera and audio recorder—with the teens. Partly because it seemed to me that it was the only thing I had, that may catch their attention. Simultaneously, because I began to elaborate an idea: If people relate creatively to these technologies, if we learn to tell our own stories through them, we would develop a more differentiated approach to the stories told by others. Thus, a better-informed use of new technologies would be promoted.

Although I did not have any specific training in visual arts and not even in visual anthropology, I began to feel confident about the possibility of engaging creatively with audiovisual technologies together with others. Trusting that my lifelong passion for storytelling and poetry would be of some help, I decided to bring all my research devices with me to the Saturday meeting and present the general idea to the participants.

Four boys and four girls aged 11 to 14 showed up in that opportunity. I presented my idea as one possibility and insisted on building an open space for doing things together that ought to be defined collectively. They liked the idea and they liked me. I liked them. We decided to meet again the following weekend.

5. “Aunty, Come Here, We Made a Movie!”

From that first meeting onwards, we continued to meet every weekend and almost every free school day. Sometimes for four hours but mostly from ten in the morning to around four in the afternoon. The number of participants increased to about 12. The relative equivalence between number of girls and boys continued and has been a constant through the years. We had to open a second space for younger people (seven to 11 years old approximately) because some of them communicated to members of the Health Team their wish to have a similar space as the teenagers.

Our activities revolved around expressing ourselves through diverse methods and strategies, many of which arose spontaneously. At first for many of the participants it was not easy to look at me or at others into the eyes and say anything. Partly for this reason, expressing ourselves became our main challenge. Chatting, drawing, storytelling, poetry, photography, collecting trash, walking through the forest, visiting the shore, listening to music, playing, building sculptures with our bodies, with matches, wood sticks, stones or wool, interviewing and making fire; virtually everything became a creative experience worth of sharing.

At the beginning, I had a hard time preparing myself for the “workshops”. I used to be anxious about the activities of the day which were mostly not planned at all. For a while I used to ask everyone I met about group dynamics and games and then tried to figure out if it could be adapted to our way which ought to be collaborative instead of competitive. Fortunately, I learned soon to let it go and trust our collective creative capacity.

From today’s perspective, I would say that the first and central step was getting to know, trust, and relate to each other in a more horizontal, respectful, and caring way regardless of gender, age, ethnicity or socioeconomic status. We talked extensively about personal interests, life experiences, opinions, and wishes. We also discussed which ways of talking, looking, touching, and being with each other we wanted or did not wanted in that collective space that we called “workshops”.

The cameras began to get shared not only during the workshops, but also on weekdays for personal or small group projects—as reporting on a dead Dolphin found on the shore or taking pictures of a little sister, the elders, and the animals in a household. These self-determined exercises together with stories we wrote or thought of as well as things we listened to, learnt about or experienced during the week were shared with the whole group at the weekend meeting. They served as a departure point or inspiration for conversations, a story or a collective enterprise. We began to project a photography exhibit for the end of the year, based on themes the teenagers wanted to show or share with the Community—such as the trash in the shore and in the paths or the death trees.

Some of the teenagers proposed to give the group/space a name. We consulted with older people who are trying to recover the Williche language. According to them, Weche Folil means Young Roots. We also designed a logo consisting on an image that resembles simultaneously a tree and a hand with the Williche seven-pointed star at each end of its branches/fingers, and the Spanish words for “to create” and “to express” written on the bottom right side.

Another important step was our “special workshops”. Photographers, storytellers, and filmmakers came from the city to work with us helping to expand our creative possibilities and our horizons. After consultation with the group, I contacted the artists and invited them. The Health Team provided travel expenses, food and accommodation. In this way we had a special workshop on stenopeic and digital photography, another one on storytelling and also a film workshop.

The film workshop was a milestone for the future of the group. It lasted for seven days in which a fiction short film was written, produced, shot, and edited. A couple of days after the filmmaker who worked with us left the community, I was rushing from one interview to another and passed some two hundred meters away from the house where one of the boys lived. He saw me from the distance and shouted: “Aunty, come here, we made a movie!” I replied that I knew we did, since I was also there and that I really had to keep going. He insisted: “No, no, another. We made another movie, you have to see it!”

The movie entitled “The eternal fall” consisted of three shots of a bike going down a hill; it was shot with a cellphone by a group of three boys and edited by one of them who had a computer at home.

6. Love and Time for Decolonizing Doing

At the end of that year I left Koñimo. My fieldwork there came to an end. The exhibit of Weche Folil’s work on 18 December 2010 was supposed to be our last activity. By then, many of the hurdles we faced—the difficulty of talking loud enough to be heard and to hear quite enough to listen, for instance—seemed to have been left behind. Other hurdles—for example, the tendency of some members of the Health Team to relate to younger people and especially to girls in an authoritative, vertical way—also seemed to have declined. This can be thought of as a sign of colonial wounds that began to heal, understanding colonial wounds as “all the wounds infringed by patriarchy and racism, in all walks of life”, as Mignolo states in an interview (Gaztambide-Fernández 2014, p. 206).

That year we met one last time to say goodbye. I hoped that the young people would continue with the collective artistic enterprise without me. After all, almost everything we did was mostly “their” collective creation. I thought my main contribution might have been to act as a catalyst or enabler, to interpret wishes, feelings and timings and mediate between them, as analyses e.g., in the field of Community Health Care suggest for similar experiences (see e.g., Granda 2004). Later I realized that this kind of thought expressed as much my wishes as my own colonial wounds. On the one hand, to think about subjectivities as less important than others for intersubjective creativity is tricky, and can be easily interpreted as intrinsically related to the coloniality of power. On the other hand, the coloniality of knowledge underlies the very attempt to explain my own engagement in this collectively produced experience in terms of established models and scientific analyses. Fortunately, the boys and girls did also reflect on our experience and the roles and places of each one of us for and in that farewell meeting. One of them told me: “Thank you for dedicating so much time to us and giving us so much love. This way we learned a lot and we grew together”. I replied: “Thank you for dedicating so much time and love to me”. We all ended up thanking each other for the time and love we shared.

In this way I learned, that time, love, dedication, and caring are key dimensions for the possibility of a decolonizing doing. I use this term here to refer to a process that points toward the subversion of those profound ways of thinking, feeling, and being that express and produce a dimension of our collective existence featured by inequality, arrogance and pain. This dimension may be called the colonial dimension for it is based on the hierarchical classification of people.

In the case of Weche Folil, one of the ways of being, feeling and thinking that expressed the colonial dimension was/is the vertical and authoritarian way of relating to younger people, especially girls, which dominates family, institutional, and social relations in Chilean society. Another expression of that dimension was/is a feeling of inferiority and an impossibility to speak loud, to express yourself proudly, to talk with your will, as the Williche leader Fidel Rain states in one of the films of Weche Folil (2014). I think the Weche Folil experience produced—especially in that first year—some new ways of being together that question and transform this and other expressions of the colonial dimension. However, decolonizing doing is an incomplete process, full of uncertainty, contradictions, and ambivalence.

The project Weche Folil did continue but not in the form I envisioned. In 2011, I came back to the Buta Wapi Chilwe to complete my doctoral fieldwork. A member of the Health Team called me and asked me if I would do something with the youth again. We filmed our third short-film with the support of a filmmaker and a scriptwriter. In 2012, I moved to Santiago, where I still live. The workshops and meetings continued over all these years.

In this new period too often the activities were planned, proposed, or organized by some of the Health Team members or by myself. I began to be put on and to assume a different role in the group, so did the young people. In some opportunities, the very ways of being with each other that we already took for granted, at least in the intimacy of our activities, were directly challenged. For example, in 2014 we were invited to screen one of our movies in a distant community and to spend a weekend there. This was for several reasons a very significant invitation. One of the Health Team members organized the trip’s logistic. He also invited a person from another community to travel with us. In the journey these two men assumed a vertical leadership attitude that was opposed to the way of being and doing together we fostered. An anecdote shows the kind of challenge that this posed, and how this difficulty got solved.

After a meal, this guest told the boys should come with him and the girls should do the dishes because this is “women’s job”. I was as surprised as were our hosts, a couple that seemed uncomfortable by a guest spelling out how thing ought to be done at their place. The boys and girls looked at each other without a word and, after a short while, the boys stood up and went. No one expressed dissenting. This was somehow surprising since we had extensively discussed the issue of housekeeping and we had established long ago our own ways of doing, that admitted no gender division for this sort of labor. Discussing the situation later, we concluded that we all “obeyed” in the first place because we wanted to prevent the person who has organized the travel for us—and had invited this man—to feel bad. However, and without planning it, there was an act of dissention. After the next meal, the boys rushed to stand up, collected the dished, washed them, and cleaned the kitchen before anyone said anything. Back in the community, we reflected on this situation and the attitude of those two men. We decided to talk to the Health Team member, express our gratefulness to him for making the travel possible and remind him, that the vertical and patriarchal way was opposed to the ways we were building as core of Weche Folil’s philosophy. He agreed and expressed renewed support in this endeavor. We had had similar talks with him before, and it was not the last one.

The precariousness of decolonizing doing, and its paradoxes are also visible in two changes introduced by the new status of the Weche Folil project. Especially since it became formally part of the local Health Project. I was asked to follow bureaucratic procedures, such as keeping track of the attendance. More importantly, activities must be planned and implemented on a yearly basis. Money spent on those activities, including paying the people who support us, and myself, needs to be budgeted. I did not realize the full implications of these developments at one glance. For example, we used to (involuntarily) forget listing attendees because we could not even think of a list in our collective creative space. Although I did write accurate reports, the list-issue caused some frictions at the time of sending the Health Team Report to the Ministry of Health twice a year. The solution for this problem was that a member of the community team is now responsible for this list and complete it after the activities, which is in many senses a tricky solution. It places this action outside our realm of responsibility, constructing an illusion of a place untouched by unpleasant bureaucracy.

The money issue caused even more frictions, especially within the community. While money facilitates that people from far away come to work with us, and that economic constrains does not prevent me from traveling to the Weche Folil activities; in one way or another it strengthens the idea that money is all that counts and restrict our doing. For example, since the Health Team became responsible for spending a pre-established amount of money within a pre-established period on activities with the youth, the possibility of self-determining the times and moments for doing and for not doing are severely restricted. Sometimes I had feel that some participants did not really want to be in these activities, that to some people all that counts is delivering the bills and a correct report to external actors and sometimes I feel I should stop being part of the program.

The point is that for these and other reasons I tend to think of that first year—as we were meeting regularly, spending plenty of time, and sharing plenty of love which each other without anybody asking for lists or thinking about expenditures—as the actual transformative experience of decolonizing doing. My path to practicing decolonialization supports Rivera Cusicanqui’s observation that “women’s practices as producers, merchants, weavers, ritualists, and creators of languages and symbols capable of seducing the ‘other’ and establishing pacts of reciprocity and coexistence among different groups” (Rivera Cusicanqui 2012b, p. 107).

On 30 September 2017, the Weche Folil is going to register a Healing-Plants Reckoning and Gathering Workshop. It will be the first time I will not be present in a “big” audiovisual endeavor. I have been helping to coordinate some details and following weekend we will edit the film together. The way this activity has been organized and the conversations I had with some of the participants of Weche Folil in the past months have been touching. I am thinking now of the effects of long-term commitment. I am still uncertain of its results: Did my lasting presence rather promote or inhibit the kind of collective healing I wished to support? That is a healing process toward self-determination. Most likely, both.