This article was printed in Native Peoples magazine, Winter 1994 issue

BY JOHN ANNER

Aymara
With help from Indian people in the US, Aymara Indians from Bolivia Recover their Sacred Weavings

It was a long way from Coroma, a tiny Aymara village perched high on the Bolivina altiplano, to San Francisco, California, but greater still is the chasm that separates traditional Aymara Indian culture from the high-powered world of international art dealers. Despite the formidable obstacles of language, culture and distance, however, Aymara Indians from Coroma have succeeded in recovering dozens of sacred ancient textiles illicitly removed from Coroma to be sold on the U.S. art market.

The textiles are communal property in Coroma and other Andean villages because of the important role they play in the culture. As anthropologist John Murra detailed in his famous study of the Inca empire (of which Coroma was a part), “No political, military, or social or religious event was complete without textiles being offered or granted—burned, sacrificed or exchanged.” Stored in sacred bundles called q’epis, the weavings are guarded andn revered. Llamas are sacrificed to them, they are consulted as oracles, and they confer authority and power on their guardians. Among the detrimental effects following the loss of the weavings (detailed in a 1990 article by Cristina Bubba Zamora in the Bolivian journal Unitas) is "the loss of the supernatural and religious power that the q'epis give to the Jilaqatas." A Jilaqata is a religious leader; the position rotates each year, with the new delegates chosen through consultation with the q'epis. "In our sacred weavings are expressions of our philosophy, and the basis for our social organization," explained Coroma village leader Pio Cruz. "It is through the sacred weavings that our community authorities are chosen, and through them that we maintain our links to our ancestors, the founding Grandmothers and Grandfathers." According to Bolivian social scientist Cristina Bubba Zamora, Coroman religious leaders consulted the q'epis to find out what to do when it was discovered that the weavings were gone; the oracles advised a journey to the United States.

On a chilly morning in 1988, four Aymara Indians approached the U.S. Customs vault in downtown San Francisco. Inside, shelved in the midst of other confiscated art and cultural artifacts of all kinds, were dozens of carefully wrapped textiles: sacred ceremonial items made from the wool of llamas and vicunas, clothing that had been stored and protected for centuries in little villages in the Andes. Worth as much as ten thousand dollars each to wealthy art collectors, these garments are believed by the Aymara to contain the souls of their ancestors.

The Coroma villagers had come to San Francisco to take their weavings home again. According to the Coromans, hundreds of their textiles had been removed from their village during the 1970s and 1980s, illegally sold to art dealers. "The spirits of our ancestors were lonely, and they called to us," said Pio Cruz. "Without them, bad luck has fallen on our village and the crops are dying."

Eventually, after much legal and bureaucratic wrangling, the Coromans were able to retrieve forty-eight of their textiles. The story of how the weavings were lost and retrieved reveals fundamental contradictions between the way the Native peoples and Western institutions and individuals view culture, religion, and art; contradictions that historically have been resolved in favor of the West.

Native Americans and others who support Native American rights have, however, increasingly fought against the trade in sacred items and against the notion that the destruction of Native religion and culture is inevitable. In the United States, years of persistence paid off with the passage of the 1990 federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAG-PRA). The House Interior Committee, in its report on investigations to support NAGPRA, noted that "the practice of some ceremonies has been interrupted because of...the loss of certain objects" and that giving the objects back might allow the descendants to reclaim their religious practices and heritage. NAGPRA specifically recognizes the importance of sacred objects and items of cultural patrimony to Native communities and religions and establishes procedures for the repatriation of contested objects. The passage of the legislation—and the example of institutions such as the National Museum of the American Indian, which has vowed not to display sacred items—has allowed more equitable relationships to be negotiated between tribes and museums, federal agencies and even private art collectors. "This is a very comprehensive legislation," says Native attorney Walter Echo-Hawk. "It gives tribes a strong mechanism for getting back both remains and important items."

Although experts point out that there are a large number of legal and procedural requirements that must be met before items can be turned over, it does seem that there is at least a legal consensus—and a developing moral one—that it is not right to traffic in the sacred art and material of traditional societies.

This new legal recognition of the complex and fluid mechanisms of cultural patterns in Native America and the role played by sacred and ceremonial objects, however, has yet to be applied to the international art market. The case of the Coroma textiles is the very first time that sacred or ceremonial items were returned from the United States to a living culture from which they were taken.

Steven Berger, an art dealer from San Francisco, was thinking about All Souls Day as he hiked along the dirt road to Coroma in late October 1985. He was there to observe the ceremony and to photograph participants wearing sacred garments. According to documents later submitted by the Bolivian government to the United States asking for a ban on the import of the weavings, Berger used these photographs to identify the pieces he wanted. He then provided photographs to intermediaries, instructing them to find the guardians of the weavings and arrange for their purchase.

After obtaining several hundred of the weavings, Berger imported the textiles into the U.S. Some he sold to collectors, while others were provided to a traveling exhibition of Aymara weavings. Most he kept stored in his house or in a rented storage space.

It was from Berger's two storage places (along with an exhibition facility in San Francisco) that the weavings were confiscated in 1988 by U.S. Customs. According to Customs Special Agent Jamie Trantor, the case was relatively straightforward: "The Bolivians came to us claiming to be the rightful owners of the material." Once it was shown that the weavings were communally owned by the village of Coroma, she said, and that the village had not permitted their sale, Customs was required by law to confiscate them. "We have specific laws that prohibit interstate transit of stolen property."

Berger denied knowing that he obtained the weavings illegally. "I would never knowingly traffic in stolen property," he said in an interview. While admitting that there are many communally-owned textiles in Coroma, he argues that there were also many in the same style that are individually owned—by individuals who want to sell the material. "The Indians have something of value, while their per capita income has to be less than $500 a year and I'm paying between $5,000 and $7,000 for textiles. Wouldn't you sell?"

Cristina Bubba Zamora acknowledges that in a context of grinding poverty, high inflation (10,000 percent annually), and severe drought, it is not surprising that some Coromans were willing to part with their textiels in exchange for large amounts of cash. Bubba, who has worked in Coroma since the mid-1990s, notes, "There are six thousand people living in Coroma. If you can convince ten out of six thousand to sell, well, this is not very hard, but it is a small percentage of the total." Bubba says that, contrary to Berger's claims, many of the weavings he bought were community property stolen by Coromans who had been convinced to sell them.

Depicting Coroman religious and cultural tradition as violated drives Berger crazy. Sitting on the edge of the living room couch in his modest San Francisco home, he flips through a book of color photographs. "This is absolutely a broken down tradition," he says, pointing to a Coroman dressed in a ceremonial poncho with what looks like a red plastic fireman's hat jammed on his head. "This guy is wearing a fireman's outfit!" Berger argues that he is not to blame for the Coroma weavings coming on the market; he just took advantage of the disintegration of a traditional culture that no longer meets the needs of its adherents.

Advocates for repatriation of indigenous sacred and ceremonial items call these kinds of arguments racist and self-serving. Museum curator Nancy Kelker says, "There is this lingering concept among collectors and museum curators that these Third World people are inferior somehow. We might like their art," she continues facetiously, "but because we are civilized and cultured we have more of a right to do it than they do."

Faced with the possibility of a long and expensive court case, Berger eventually relinquished forty-four of the weavings in his possession, but he was anything but happy about it. "You can't stop progress," he argues; "there is no going back [to traditional cultural and religious practices]." In some ways, he is right. Indian cultures continue to be pulled in many directions, and one of the results even within relatively isolated and remote societies is a breakdown in unity of purpose and identity.

In Coroma, a battle is being fought between people who believe in and practice a syncretic religion that combines Christianity with ancient indigenous rituals centered around the textiles, and recent converts to Protestant sects. While the Catholic church in Bolivia has reached an uneasy acceptance of hybrid religious practices, evangelical Protestants believe worshiping textiles to be heresy. Converts to these denominations would just as soon see the weavings burned—or sold for as much money as possible.