Library services and indigenous peoples in Latin America: Reviewing concepts,gathering experiences

An introduction

In the north-east of Argentina there is a rough, wooded territory crossed by rivers and boas which has a name with a Quechua origin: Chaco (‘Land of hunting’). It was during my third stay there, in Chaco, more than two decades ago, that I met the man who kept several libraries in his head – a man from an indigenous people called Qom, or ‘Toba’, who every night relived a chapter of his people’s collective memory for anyone who wanted to hear it, which, generally, was just the wind and darkness.

During that period of my life, I met many other people who were worthy of admiration and the cause of amazement: the woman who defied life carrying a huge family on her back; the old woman who conversed with the spirits of the trees; the child who turned used trash bags into kites, and kites into birds. Human, daily wonders. But that particular man remained forever in my memory because he was the architect of what I have been ever since. It was in front of him that my career as a librarian began, without me even noticing it.

During my first two stays in Chaco, I did not have many opportunities to interact with the Qom people, the original inhabitants of that region. Life had brought me to that place for reasons that were eons away from any academic interest. Still, I knew they were there, in muddy slums on the outskirts of the cities, where they could be easily hidden and forgotten. The men worked as bricklayers, garbage men, gardeners and labourers; the women as cleaners. All of them begged, rummaged through trash and tried to survive on the edges of a society that was never going to open its doors for them.

I knew little about them. Unfortunately, I learned too much about the disgust that others felt towards them, about the misunderstanding, the contempt, the stereotypes, the hatred and the barriers. They were dirty, it was said; they smelled weird; they were gross; they had too many children who they ended up starving to death; they were drunk and vicious. There was an urban legend that turned them into bloodthirsty and vengeful murderers. And they were witches – a terrible crime in an area where imaginary witchcraft is more feared than a very real dengue epidemic.

The Qom, for their part, had hundreds of reasons to distrust daqshé, the ‘white people’. They did not spend a lot of time talking with them – I should say ‘us’. They did not speak about their lives; they did not give any sort of explanations. So, in order to learn something about the Qom, I was forced to collect the tales of outsiders, those who had been coming to the Qom original territory throughout time. There was the ‘collective taxi’ driver, for example, who told me, on one of those long journeys through the Chaco plains, that some ‘Tobas’ who he had taken to the town of Quitilipi had asked him to stop at the side of the road to collect stones from the rubble, something that is not seen very often in Chaco’s woody, muddy land, and that Qom people considered to have magical powers. Or there was the tale of a friend who was fond of hunting, and who invited me to my first and only armadillo stew in the middle of the forest, where he commented that the ‘Indians’ knew all about honey made by wild bees, a honey with a unique flavour.

Sentence after sentence, fragment after fragment, I was composing a mental image that had a bit of magical realism and a lot of that exotic aura which seems to be everywhere in Chaco. And, above all, despite my youth and my inexperience, I gradually became aware of the many open wounds (and those that were poorly healed), the daily aggressions, the official pressures, the oblivion and silence, the terrible discrimination, the cultural denial, the abuse and the mistreatment, and the many prejudices, stereotypes and preconceptions present in Argentinean society – including in my own head.

My third trip to Chaco was a ‘work journey’, although at that time I was just an amateur. I went there to collect oral tradition and to learn something about indigenous music. And this time, I did intend to speak with the Qom directly. Although it was difficult, I made it. I got the contact of a Qom elder living in the so-called ‘Toba neighbourhood’, which, at that time, was a favela-like place on the outskirts of the city of Presidencia Roque Sáenz Peña. He agreed to talk to me and share some of his people’s stories.

When I sat in front of that old man, it seemed to me that I was going to be able to learn little from a person who measured his words so much, and who was so slow in his pronunciation. Those were some of the preconceptions I carried with me without being aware of it: verbiage as a synonym of abundant information, of wisdom. The man began to speak in a Spanish tinged with old accents, with some very guttural consonants and some quite closed vowels. His first words – which I still remember verbatim today and have been repeating since then in practically all the lectures I have given on this topic – were: ‘At the beginning, there was no light, everything was dark’. It took me a while to realize that he was talking about the origin of the universe.

It was late evening when his story began, while we drank mate, the popular South American infusion. The sun had already risen when he told me about the Napalpí massacre, which happened in 1924. Over the course of his narrative, he had mentioned the origin of the world and of his people, the legends of many animals and plants, the complete cycle of tales of the rogue hero waxayaqa’lachigi (the fox), the arrival of the Spanish and the Argentinean soldiers, the wars with Paraguay, his own personal history and the one of the places where he had lived.

By the time he finished, mid-morning, after several rounds of bitter mate heated in a huge kettle over the embers of a weak fire, I had already abandoned the idea of trying to remember, much less record, that prodigious torrent of memory. When I left that little house with its wooden walls and tin roof, with my mouth still open in amazement and unable to believe that I had witnessed such a narrative demonstration, the forty-odd grandchildren of that man told me they were amazed at my patience when listening to the old storyteller – something that nobody wanted to do anymore, either in the community or within the family itself.

While walking home through the muddy streets of the ‘Toba neighbourhood’ under a persistent drizzle, my eyes reddened, a sad conviction stroke me: when that man died, not only would the collective and social memory of his people, of his culture, be lost, but also the story of a family, of individuals who perhaps passed through the world without leaving any more trace than that – a story or an anecdote that would name them. Actually, a giant library would disappear. I thought of my own personal story, made up of biographical anecdotes of Italian immigrants who I knew little about because I had never paid attention to the stories in which their adventures were told. And, already soaked under a dense Chaco rain, I understood that orality was a miracle that had to be protected.

Shortly after my meeting with that memorable Qom grandfather, I learned that he was gone forever and that, as I had feared during my walk home, he had taken his stories with him. Nobody remembered much of what he used to tell around the fire while he was drinking mate – not even me.

The power of a library

Orality is not an exclusively indigenous heritage: all human groups, no matter how ‘modern’ and urban they may be, maintain a certain amount of oral tradition. Through it, they rescue tiny fragments of faded events from the past and, by telling them, relive them for an instant. Oral tradition includes stories, songs, riddles, jokes, recipes, medicines, experiences and the many pieces of that infinite, wonderful and complex mosaic that is our memory, our identity and our diversity – a mosaic in whose recovery, conservation and dissemination libraries should play an essential role.

However, the role of libraries should not be limited to rescuing sounds like the ones my old friend from the ‘Toba neighbourhood’ used to pronounce. Libraries are very powerful institutions, and that was something I understood long before setting foot in the classrooms where I studied librarianship. I learnt it by living in societies with as many inequalities as that of Chaco. There I saw that libraries, well organized and with clear objectives, could become a support to which people in vulnerable situations could cling – and try to get out of the dark pit into which they had been thrown by fellow citizens with little conscience or no human values. Everyone knows that information is power, and libraries are its main managers: they can provide invaluable help by supporting education and training, collaborating with social processes or providing specific data to solve urgent problems, for example. They could even be the engine behind changes of attitudes and thoughts – or, going further, an instrument for social change.

Can libraries really become a tool for social change? They certainly can, and I would venture to say that they should, especially in certain contexts. There are a good number of experiences that demonstrate this point, and many of them have taken place in Latin America, that continent we call Abya Yala – experiences that have happened especially in places where racism, classism, xenophobia, gender violence, abuse, social and economic disadvantage, political manipulation, police excesses, oblivion, discrimination and cultural pressure have been, or still are, strong, as they were in Chaco, where I began my journey. And those experiences existed because there were librarians who glimpsed the important and sometimes determining role that libraries can play, especially public libraries, institutions that have the obligation to serve everyone without distinctions or barriers of any kind. Or at least that is what IFLA and UNESCO’s (1994) ‘Public library manifesto’ says.

Aware of the importance of libraries and the fundamental role that they can play, Latin American librarians have taken advantage of all the opportunities available to them – and of those they do not have as well – to create spaces with books, reading corners, places for songs and stories, cardboard-book collections or whatever it is that allows people to discover old and new knowledge, get hooked on information and actively use it to keep going, peek into the many doors that new knowledge opens and go through some of them. And they do so because they have discovered that every library can be a key to some locks and a tool for change.

What is more, libraries can promote certain types of change: in particular, those that citizenship most needs. Libraries also build themselves and, within an indigenous community, they can act as a ‘passive’ environment, where participants interact with generic knowledge, or as active agents, by identifying the most pressing problems and needs of the community, and providing appropriate, tailored services and, above all, relevant information – for example, on human and labour rights, pollution, peasant and worker struggles, or conservation and sustainability. The encounter between the community and knowledge might take place in the same way as in a ‘passive’ space, but an additional focus will have been put on a particular knowledge that, given the circumstances, is relevant and probably could not be obtained by patrons otherwise. And little else is needed for libraries to become spaces for critical thinking, debate, propositions and even militancy – and, above all, resistance.

In his latest book, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance, the British philosopher Howard Caygill recommends resistance as one of the few viable ways of living in the modern world. Individuals and groups who resist do so because they find themselves positioned in unfair or totally disadvantaged situations; after becoming aware of their state, they decide to rebel and disobey, but not necessarily in a violent way. Active resistance takes countless forms in the library arena. In Latin America, the examples are abundant: digital networks that share bibliographic resources obtained from locked databases; solidarity groups that collect and transfer books and magazines from libraries that do not need them to others that do; libraries that provide services in private homes, with the selfless help of their entire community; services that involve all the available cultural and social actors in a town; book rebinding and repair activities aimed at maintaining the good condition of library collections; the creation of ‘cardboard’ books to increase such collections; and fundraising through solidarity artistic shows, to name a few. So committed and purposeful are some of the supporters of those positions and practices that one can speak of activism, and even of true militancy.

In the case of libraries, and although this fact is seldom recognized, there is activism and militancy in favour of causes such as the dissemination of reading and writing skills, literacy (both traditional and informational), free access to information and knowledge, the abolition of censorship, leisure linked to one’s own and universal culture, the strengthening of identities through cultural recovery, the elimination of stereotypes and discrimination, and an et cetera too long and too rich to be summarized here.

Resistance, activism and militancy revolve around the idea of commitment – commitment as awareness of a specific situation (social, cultural, economic, political) and as a willingness to respect, defend and enforce values, ideas and beliefs such as peace, freedom and human rights. By committing to any of them, an individual or a group gets involved, in one way or another, in transforming reality. And they are overcoming indifference and individualism, and fighting for a more just society and fairer world. And with their will to change things and their continuous actions, alone or collectively, they are doing politics. Because everything mentioned above is nothing other than politics – people (librarians, readers, learners, teachers) pitching in, walking together, propping up futures and laying the foundation for the dreams of an entire society; people getting organized, taking care of each other, defending their rights; people participating, deliberating, deciding.

In short, libraries can be open and diverse spaces for debate and community-building, supporting development and local identity, and promoting critical thinking from a clear political perspective, encouraging communities to empower themselves, reinforcing the social fabric and generating sociocultural processes, participating in parallel processes, addressing their own problems, and finding their own solutions from a local and regional framework.

With many of these ideas in my backpack, and always inspired by my encounter with that old indigenous storyteller, the young librarian who I was once decided to develop the idea that had haunted his head since those first approaches to the Qom’s oral tradition: the development of library services for indigenous peoples and, specifically, for the Qom communities through which I had wandered for so long and learned to look and understand.

Library services and indigenous peoples

I had not yet received my Library and Information Science degree – I was a student looking for a topic for my thesis – when I had the idea of working on the design and development of library services to respond to the needs of patrons belonging to indigenous societies. And then I had a surprise (I actually had several, including that, after several years working with indigenous communities, some of my most resistant prejudices and stereotypes were still there, like Monterroso’s dinosaur). The academic literature available in Spanish on this topic was almost as limited as, unfortunately, it still is today (especially if we take into account the many years that have elapsed since Latin American librarians began to talk about the subject). This meant that if I was to work in that field, I was going to walk through a kind of terra incognita, poorly explored by other librarians.

Back then – and I am speaking of the late 1990s and early 2000s – the information was limited to sporadic publications by a handful of colleagues from Mexico, Peru, Chile and Brazil, based mainly on the results of their own work – publications that, for better or worse, continue to be mandatory references in this field. The concept of bibliotecas indígenas (‘indigenous libraries’), which was how we used to express the idea of ‘library services for indigenous peoples’, was quite unknown in the Spanish-speaking library world. And when it was raised, it seemed to be a quixotic Utopia; in fact, many of my university professors at that time were unashamedly surprised when they heard my proposal to work in this field, and kindly recommended other areas of study that were better paid or, at least, had a more promising future.

One of the earliest bibliographic reviews (if not the first) of the published literature on ‘indigenous libraries’ was carried out by the Mexican Rocío Graniel Parra in 1999. Graniel Parra had already been working with the idea for some years in Mexico and discovered that there were similar (small-scale, experimental) experiences in different corners of Latin America. The Argentinean Daniel Canosa carried out a bibliographic update of those experiences in 2005 when more of us were already working on the topic. At that time, there were other documents guiding our work. Among them were Actas del encuentro latinoamericano sobre la atención bibliotecaria en comunidades indígenas (edited by Graniel Parra herself in Mexico in 2001), Memoria del segundo congreso nacional de bibliotecas públicas de México (published by CONACULTA in 2002), Actas del segundo encuentro internacional sobre bibliotecas públicas (CONACULTA, 2003, which included a handful of texts on services to indigenous populations), and the proceedings of the IFLA Latin America and the Caribbean Section’s (2003) seminar ‘Acceso a los servicios bibliotecarios y de información en los pueblos indígenas de América Latina’, which is very similar to Graniel Parra’s 1999 text, with emphasis on the Peruvian sphere.

In addition to these proceedings and normative texts, articles were appearing (one by one) that addressed different aspects of the topic, sometimes in a rather specific way and without much continuity. The most prolific author initially was Graniel Parra herself. César Castro Aliaga and Mino Castro followed in Peru, working with societies such as the Asháninka people, together with Alfredo Mires and his emblematic Cajamarca Rural Libraries project (probably the oldest and most far-reaching on the entire continent), and the late Robert Gamboa with his work among the Mayans of the Yucatán in Mexico. In Brazil, José Bessa Freire and his research on the famous Magüta library of the Tikuna people stood out, among others; Fresia Catrilaf worked in Chile, in the Araucanía, with the Mapuche people; and in Bolivia there were good examples of libraries in the eastern lowlands, led by rural organizations. In Colombia, Ivonne Gómez Ruiz collected the experiences of the libraries in the Wayuu territory, while colleagues talked about the Guanacas library, and rumours spread about units opening their doors in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. In Argentina, I produced several texts on the topic while working in Chaco (Civallero 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2008a, 2008b).

One of the problems that became evident at that time was the poor systematization and limited dissemination of many library experiences (not only regarding services for indigenous peoples). About the vast majority, there was only one blog entry, a mention in one of the early social networks or, with luck, a conference paper or an article. Some were known thanks to word of mouth within the library community, and to learn about others it was necessary to travel to the places where they were located, since their creators had no intention of writing about them or simply would not have known how to do so.

In those texts that did circulate, several interesting ideas were outlined and presented. The more interesting were those linking libraries to intercultural bilingual education, as well as those about reading projects supporting the recovery and dissemination of endangered languages. Likewise, some authors explored different ways of getting books and other materials to rural or isolated indigenous communities: the bibliobus of the Chilean Araucanía, the boats of the Peruvian Amazon and the bongos of the Orinoco in Venezuela were remarkable examples.

Those of us who were lucky enough to be able to read in English were able to access the fantastic work on services for aboriginal and native populations carried out in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. There they worked with classification systems and subject headings that were respectful of the world views and values of the indigenous patrons, and in their own languages (for example, Maori), with codes of ethics for handling sensitive cultural materials, literacy programmes and oral history collections. Those pages were inspiring, despite the fact that they contained some highly debatable ideas, and the very concept of ‘library’ maintained a Eurocentric perspective that seemed to be intrinsic to it.

At the beginning of the millennium, I began to work on the development of a theoretical model of a library for indigenous peoples, as part of my undergraduate thesis in Library and Information Science at the National University of Córdoba in Argentina (Civallero 2004). I made the huge mistake of doing purely bibliographical/theoretical research, without stepping on the ground or listening to voices other than those in print, until the first draft of my thesis (a manuscript of more than 500 pages) was ready. Then, I went back to the ‘Toba neighbourhood’ in Sáenz Peña to announce (like a missionary bringing salvation to poor lost souls) that I was bringing them a library. In the personal bubble in which I lived, that announcement, I thought, could not be greeted other than with cheers and open arms. It was not. All I got for an answer was: ‘And why would we want a library?’ That sentence popped my bubble, gave me a terrible and much needed reality check, and put me in my place. It made me look in the mirror, where I could appreciate my huge arrogance, my lack of respect and a long list of other shortcomings. I clearly remember the moment when I threw my manuscript into the trash can, and how I swept away many of my shattered preconceptions. I also remember the moment when I approached the Qom community of Sáenz Peña again to ask what they needed, and how a library (or, at least, what I knew about libraries at the time) could serve them. It turned out that the community was suffering from a number of serious problems – especially the alarming loss of their native language and their orally transmitted knowledge – and my know-how could be useful to them.

I learned an unforgettable lesson, I had my humility cure and I carried in my backpack something that I tried never to leave behind: a grass-roots development perspective, getting the opinions, as well as the direct and active participation, of those involved in a project before undertaking it. Starting from there, I developed small sound libraries, made of cassettes on which I recorded oral tradition. Thus, I recovered one of my original intentions when visiting Chaco. The tapes were used at the local schools to support some of the first intercultural bilingual education programmes that operated in Argentina. From that initial experience, others emerged, including the creation of small school ‘books’ made by hand, the dissemination of biomedical information, the collection of family traditions, and the use of traditional games to recover and transmit knowledge (Civallero 2006a, 2006b, 2007d, 2007e, 2007f).

I found that libraries did have the ability to channel social change. Evidence of this possibility of change was that my work began to bother those who held power (or at least some power) in that corner of my country. The warnings immediately followed, from low-ranking politicians, some social actors and evangelist missionaries – all of them fearing that their status quo and advantageous social position would be undermined if the native communities acquired knowledge, tools to solve problems and instruments for change.

When I started a literacy workshop and, as practice material, used the temporary contracts of the Qom workers and the legal texts which demonstrated that those contracts were totally illegal, the glass overflowed. I received a visit from a hired thug, who pointed a gun at me and invited me to disappear if I did not want to end up in a ditch, with a bullet in the head – a threat that used to be carried out to the letter. It was then that I decided to abandon my fieldwork and look for other paths to walk and other spaces in which to fight. It seems unnecessary to point out that the work I was carrying out with the community was paralysed and ended up being erased from that place in the heart of the Argentinean Chaco. The ideas we raised there would take a few years to resurface.

This happened in the mid 2000s. By then, the Latin American bibliographic references on this type of library service had ‘multiplied’ (within the small scale the topic always maintained), but at the same time the projects that gave rise to articles, conference papers and blog posts seemed to atomize. There was much talk about ‘indigenous libraries’, but it seemed that very little was being done, everything was very small scale, and everything was for too short a time. Except for the Cajamarca Rural Libraries project, the rest of the projects that had served as a reference until then had disappeared or at least had lost all or a good part of their visibility. From many of them nothing was heard again, and only through personal contacts or direct visits was it possible to verify their disappearance – due to lack of funds, lack of interest, opposition or fatigue.

Since 2010, small-scale library experiences linked, in one way or another, to indigenous peoples have been happening throughout Latin America. Given that one of the clearest limits of library work is funding, such experiences often explore specific aspects over short periods of time. Even so, and despite the fact that the poor systematization and dissemination of experiences continues to be a constant, the scattered news of these ventures indicates that there is still interest in working on the issue, that utopian and quixotic topic.

This idea is, in fact, not new at all, much less quixotic, exotic or romantic (there is a lot to say about those labels and the reasons for their use in this case). It is a mere expression of the most basic librarian common sense. If libraries – especially public libraries or any of their variants – are aimed at satisfying the information needs of all their patrons, and if among those patrons there are people belonging to a particular social, ethnic or linguistic group (in this case, indigenous, whatever the disputed formulation or definition of that category may be), the resulting conclusion is a more than obvious syllogism: libraries must satisfy the information needs of those indigenous patrons. In order to do that, common sense dictates, such needs must be identified and studied (as with any other patron category), and libraries must find the most appropriate way to respond to them, taking into account the basic cultural traits of the final users, their social situation, their interests, their language and their history.

Unfortunately, nothing is as simple as it seems.

Eternal pending problems

Probably one of the main problems faced by any library service project aimed at satisfying the needs of an indigenous or ‘minority’ (or ‘minorized’) population is that libraries and all the concepts and techniques surrounding them are, for the most part, Eurocentric. And this fact is not always recognized, much less debated. Contemporary libraries are based on a model of European origin, one that always favoured the winner, the dominant narrative, the ‘strongest’ gender and the upper class, and that, in many cases, continues to do so. In addition, the library’s paradigm, by default, has its foundations in writing, a system that, in turn, has also historically favoured certain groups – those who had literary skills and spoke official languages.

Both writing and the more ‘traditional’ standard libraries organize knowledge hierarchically: some information, for different reasons and criteria, deserves to be preserved, while the rest is potentially disposable. In this way, a hegemonic voice and gaze are perpetuated (western, male, white, rich, ‘civilized’, written, in the official/dominant languages), and stratification within the production of knowledge is reinforced (academic or ‘famous/recognized’ authors above the rest). It is a system of legitimation of ‘official’, ‘correct’ knowledge and of exclusion, denial, silencing or invisibility of ‘the Others’.

Librarianship, as the discipline dealing with libraries, suffers from the same shortcomings, the same biases and the same gaps. It uses categories and methodologies that are designed to maintain and perpetuate a specific model, and it lacks many elements that may facilitate the inclusion of human sociocultural diversity, not to mention mechanisms of critical evaluation or ethical consideration. Those cultures, formats and codes that are not ‘dominant’ are usually treated as ‘special’; they are rarities and exceptions to the rule that deserve a separate analysis – an analysis that, generally, does not lead too far and is used to isolate, ignore and silence what is being analysed even more.

On the other hand, working with the concept ‘indigenous’ still represents a thorny issue. When in Latin America we speak of ‘indigenous’ (a label originally created outside the continent), we are usually referring – and perhaps we are not fully aware of it – to those peoples who have lived in Abya Yala from the beginning, before their territories were occupied and dominated by someone else. We are generally talking about the survivors of conquests and acts carried out by all kinds of imperial and colonial powers (and their heirs) at some point in the past, but especially during the last five centuries. And by doing this, we are defining entire human groups based on one or more genocides, and on a long history of aggression, pressure, denial and attacks. Perhaps it is not the most appropriate way to carry out such a definition (if there is a need to define, which is still under discussion).

Problems multiply because of the enormous number of preconceptions, prejudices and stereotypes, and the ignorance that exists regarding the culture, situation or needs of different indigenous societies, particularly in Latin America. Many projects working with native peoples focus on rescuing their traditional culture (which is sometimes seen as something exotic) and obviate their information needs. Those needs are vital for them to live in today’s globalized world, interacting with capitalist, consumerist and mostly urban societies, and for them to fight against the many pressures and conflicts to which they are subjected in an almost systematic way. Other projects place too much emphasis on ‘typical’ iconographies and architectures – that is, on the shape of the container – and are not bothered too much by the contents or by problems such as the remarkable dearth of editorial production in indigenous languages in many Latin American countries.

Cultural extractivism continues to be a constant, and represents a worrying issue. Many libraries have ‘used’ indigenous communities and given little or nothing in return. This erodes the trust and patience of the ‘observed’ ones, and closes many doors. Going one step further, it is necessary to rethink the very term ‘indigenous libraries’ in Latin America, a term that I myself have used profusely in my texts over the past decades. The expression maintains the ‘indigenous’ ones in the usual position of ‘the Other’ (special, different, isolated, somewhat exotic) and indicates that they need a library of their own. Reality, however, suggests that libraries – especially public ones – must serve everyone, both indigenous and non-indigenous, equally and integrally, without making distinctions, marking differences or adding unnecessary qualifications, and promoting interaction and recognition between different sectors and social groups. Personally, and following an international trend, I have opted to speak about ‘library services for indigenous communities’ – groups of patrons who, today, are quite heterogeneous but share a set of common features and basic problems that have been, and continue to be, constantly ignored and neglected.

On the other hand, it is urgent to discard and reject any approach that includes or perpetuates the false aura of uniqueness, romanticism, victimhood and exoticism with which the indigenous and ‘minority’ peoples of the world have been surrounded, an aura that has also maintained them in the position of ‘the Other’, observed with ethnographic curiosity at times, pitifully and mercifully at others, and almost always with rejection, as something alien, external and distant.

This list of contradictions and uncertainties regarding libraries and aboriginal groups is incomplete; in fact, it would be advisable to carry out research work that identifies them clearly and comprehensively. There are many drawbacks, many facets and edges, some very conflictive discussions and some paths full of thorns. Such difficulties can discourage one from tackling this topic. But they should not. There is much to discuss, to investigate, to collect and identify, to learn, to understand, to build and to deconstruct. There are many roads to be walked and many horizons to be reached. And it is essential to travel the former to get closer to the latter.

Some paths to the future

Twenty years after taking the first steps on the path that brought me here, I believe that the need to continue working with and discussing library services in areas with indigenous or ‘minority’ populations is just as pressing and just as important as it was two decades ago. And I also believe that it continues to be just as overlooked, forgotten or ignored.

Although in Latin America the social and political movements and processes of recent years have placed indigenous and ‘minority’ societies and their claims in the foreground, and new information technologies – especially social networks – have given relative visibility to their problems, things have not changed much: those human groups still do not have much of a presence in the political narrative, the media discourse, and the work of serious non-governmental and international organizations. Poverty, abandonment, oblivion, racism, exploitation, malnutrition, epidemics, violence and even murder continue to exist. Discrimination, denial, cultural, educational and religious pressure, the dispossession of land and resources, and the systematic violation of human and constitutional rights go on, seemingly unchallenged. The old problems are still alive, perhaps in new forms but with the same old contents.

Vast areas of work related to library services for indigenous peoples remain unaddressed; others have been addressed, but in a rather poor and superficial way. In fact, after three decades of several different projects and actions, a basic, solid and valid theoretical framework for these practices has not yet been defined from an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective, let alone a system of pertinent library and information science techniques and methods. There are many research topics that have not even been properly identified, much less addressed. There are many ideas that have been mixed up and, at times, confused. And work is still being carried out from a largely Eurocentric perspective (even from strictly indigenous organizations) without serious studies on the subject or measures being taken in this regard.

It is necessary to analyse, review and update the role that library and information science as a discipline and libraries as institutions can play in the documentation, maintenance and dissemination of indigenous and ‘minority’ languages, traditions (oral and written) and cultural expressions in Latin America. Likewise, it is necessary to address the problems that native and ‘minority’ peoples encounter when receiving library services tailored to their needs and realities, when accessing ‘external’ information, or when publishing and disseminating (without intermediaries) their own knowledge. And it must be done from a decolonizing perspective. Emphasis should be put on the development of tools, techniques, guides and strategies that allow any Latin American library to respond adequately to the needs of indigenous or ‘minority’ users, and to serve as a space for knowledge, encounter and dialogue for different cultures and identities.

On the other hand, as indicated above, it is necessary to define interdisciplinary and intercultural theoretical frameworks that combine librarianship, anthropology, linguistics, sociology and education, as well as indigenous cultural experiences and concepts, and that establish a wide range of categories and ideas to choose from when addressing any project related to library services for indigenous populations. It is urgent to design user studies and training programmes for library patrons that respond to the realities of indigenous peoples, and develop policies that, from a grass-roots development perspective, identify needs and allow the generation of responses to them.

It would be interesting to consider the possibility of creating platforms to collect the different experiences related to library services and aboriginal societies on the continent (I am, in fact, carrying out a project called ‘Casas de palabras’ related to this idea), on the one hand, to give visibility to many stories that, otherwise, usually go unnoticed (which, in practice, is equivalent to saying that they are invisible or non-existent) and, on the other, because it would allow feedback between projects, mutual learning, the detection of errors and problems, the identification of opportunities and pending issues, and the continuity of lines of research and action. And it is extremely important to remember that all these actions do not make sense if they are not carried out with an active, critical and supportive sociocultural commitment, putting first the social responsibility of libraries and their ability to support cultural and political processes at the local, regional and national levels.

My path took me to the ‘Old World’, to Spain. In addition to continuing to develop my ideas about the political and social role of libraries, in that country I spent years discovering local societies that, like the indigenous peoples of my native continent, have endured centuries of abuse, pressure and silence. It does not matter whether they are the old peasants of the high mountains of León and their descendants, who hardly speak llingua Ilionesa, or their neighbours from Galicia or Asturias, who have many cultural characteristics similar to those of the Quechua peoples of the Andes. There are oral repertoires that are being lost, languages in danger of disappearing and old storytellers who take entire libraries with them when they die.

I reviewed the stereotypes and preconceptions that still remained inside my head. And I kept learning from the old narrators and from those who keep other cultures alive despite everything. I kept being astonished at the richness of our cultural heritage as a species, and at our enormous capacity to neglect it, to ignore it and even to destroy it, or to rescue and protect it, when we finally understand its value, which sometimes happens too late.

I hope that it is not too late for the knowledge of our Abya Yala. I am confident that, in the coming years, we will witness the emergence of solid networks of oral archives, sound and mobile libraries, educational corners, popular and community library services, ‘houses of words’, and other physical and digital spaces for the recovery, organization and dissemination of traditional indigenous knowledge – knowledge like that of my old friend, the Qom storyteller from Sáenz Peña. We will see transcultural, open, public and inclusive spaces (and projects), free from prejudices or with them under control, that add and multiply efforts, and, at the same time, are critical and take advantage of the best of libraries, including their ability for social change and capacity for political transformation. They will be led and managed by indigenous societies and their professionals, who, after all, are the main protagonists of this story – or at least they should be.

Because if we do not make our own future, somebody else will make it for us.