This research undertakes the critical systematization of the territorial recovery
process that the Pijao people of the San Antonio de Calarma Reservation (Tolima,
Colombia) has carried out since the mid-1970s. This process has been called “the
recovery of Ima” (Mother Earth in Pijao), and is structured by two dimensions of the
indigenous territorial struggle in the municipality of San Antonio de Calarma: recovering
“ownership” of territories considered “ancestral” –both by institutional means and by de
facto territorial occupation–, and the healing or restoration of balance in the "dry world"
(Ima, the territory) in order to "return to the origin."
Through militant research—situated in the methodological field of collaborative
ethnographies and drawing from the epistemological principles of participatory action
research—the recovery of Ima was determined to be not only a process of territorial
defense, but also an exploration of the Pijao's own way of being, thinking and feeling the
territory, an onto-epistemic process that has led to the recovery of Pijao wisdom called
"Life-Conceptions", a complex relational system of territorial knowledge that proposes
alternatives to the multiple crises imposed by capitalism.
At the same time, the process of recovering Ima has contributed to the re-existence
of the Pijao people in Southwest Tolima, by questioning the "de-Indianization" strategies
that, since the mid-19th century, landowners and agro-industrial entrepreneurs used to
"peasantize" the indigenous workforce and integrate the region into the circuits of coffee
production which sustained the Colombian economy in the 20th century. In this sense,
the recovery of Ima is an expression of the re-Indianization-re-ethnicization experienced
by Tolima’s Pijao people, who have found in their territorial struggle a path to uncover
their own wisdom and their own ways of organizing and mobilizing, with the ultimate
goal of "recovering the balance of the dry world and returning to the origin."
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