Indigenous mobilizations against the State for their autonomy and self-determination has become a marker of 21st century Latin American history. The challenge posed by indigenous people to internal colonialism (i.e. coloniality of power embedded in nation-state building after decolonization) threatens the ideas of nationhood, peoplehood, and citizenship the state has used since independence. It is completely re-writing the Latin American nationalist project.
From this resistance is where a new form of politics is forming, what is being called ‘Spirit Politics.’ Indigenous communities, in their reflection of the past and fight for autonomy, revalidated the old organizations and functions of their political sphere. In all these cases the shamans role in politics is stressed along with their relation to politics and culture—giving birth to the terms ‘Spirit Politics.’ New indigenous leaders mix foreign with familiar, the present with the past, in the production of hybrid and groundbreaking works that are then claimed to be authentically ‘native.’ Through appropriating the instructions of dominant society, indigenous associations are inscribing their struggles within a global context—they produce their own knowledge and try to recover control over their natural and cultural resources.
The hybridity of thought that indigenous communities are bringing into the mainstream, along with their perception of the world, is opening incredible doors for development of political and social thought. For example, the redefinition of Mapuche land as territory is made as much in political terms as in sociocultural terms. In political terms because they claim autonomy on their land and try to reorganize space according to their own social principles of organization. In sociocultural terms because the conceptualization of mapu, or territory, Mapuche people have goes far beyond the mere management of political differences. The territory is made out of several different spaces and places which are divided both horizontally and vertically. Mapuche conceptualization of the environment it entirely connected to the political project of reterritorialization. That is why the participation of Manchi (shaman)is so overwhelming in the movement. Manchi are not only playing a role as emblems of the Mapuche struggle for recognition of their cultural and political rights, they are also playing an internal sociopolitical role insofar as they are the ones who are believed to know which spaces are to be respected.
Spirit politics is articulating politics through the eyes of the indigenous and giving their political agents agency. Its not about left and right wings, but rather incorporating their political and belief systems into the mainstream in order to make their rights understood as legitimate.