Why Colombia?

Inspired by the success of our prior projects in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, we sought a location and partnership where we can best make a meaningful impact. The reality for indigenous cultures in Colombia is notably different than in other Latin American countries.

Within Colombia there are:
+1.9 million indigenous people (4.4% of population)
115 separate indigenous cultures exist (the government recognizes 87)
64 spoken languages of 13 linguistic families, many are endangered

Little is widely known about these incredible cultures.

For centuries they were racialized, dispossessed, eradicated, and pushed to the limits of their territories. It wasn’t until the rewriting of Colombia’s new constitution in 1991 that indigenous peoples got recognition as part of the nation.* This structural disenfranchisement of 499 years created an abysmal trench for their integration into the social, political, and economic fabric of the nation.

Their resilience is incredible.

Despite all odds, many of these communities are emerging from the long shadow of history. They are ready to engage, participate, and share their strategies of survival, their stories of resistance, and forms of organization in order to re-exist today, among us, and for the future to come. 

• The 1.9 million Colombian indigenous people collectively represent only 4.4% of the population, with no single culture more than a fraction of a percent.  The indigenous are therefore treated as a ‘statistical outlier’ which is either ignored or suppressed by Colombian society as a whole or most branches of government that are more concerned with post-conflict issues and overall economic development. 
• 79% of the indigenous population live in rural areas, the majority of whom live on ancestral territory in indigenous resguardos.
• Despite the Colombian constitutional support for indigenous rights and the recent laws, the Ministry of Education has made no accommodation for indigenous language and culture into the tightly controlled curriculum.  ONIC has taken the Ministry of Education to court and won judgments, but the Ministry of Education has failed to comply. 
• Colombia has not signed the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education (ratified in 1960, 103 countries have signed). In 2007, Colombia was only one of 11 countries to abstain in voting on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). 
• Decades of war & drug trafficking has inflected death and dislocation from ancestral lands.  Mining, deforestation, and megaprojects have had an enormous impact on people + planet.
• Statistics demonstrate the results of this imbalance.  Indigenous fare significantly lower than the rest of Colombian society on every measurement of development, health and education.  

Despite these injustices, many vibrant communities maintain their culture, language, sense of community, connection to nature, and spirituality which is not present in occidental society. 

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Information from Colombia national census (2018), the first comprehensive survey of demographics for these cultures:

* In 1991 Colombian government adopted Convention 169 of IOL (International Labor Organization) concerning Indigenous Peoples, which became Law 21 of 1991. Today, this law is the broadest one to guarantee the rights of indigenous peoples in the Americas. This principle is at the center of article 7 of the Colombian Constitution, a charter on the Ethnic and Cultural Diversity of contemporary Colombia.