When one arrives at a new place, the first thing to do is rebuild their territory and take ownership of the new one. If there are no territorial appropriation exercises in the new space it is impossible to have life in that place. That is built, but you have to know how to do it.
For him, the steps come before the physical and economic appropriation because one has to survive. Thus, for example, it is the people who came to the city and stuck to the traffic light, who lives 5 blocks from the traffic light that gives them life and begins to look for the little school for the child, the church to go to on Saturdays. He begins to rebuild that space of life and he has to feel it as his own because if it is not so he will not be able to rebuild his.
In nomadic peoples, like some indigenous people in Colombia or the Sahrawis in the desert, territorial appropriation is itinerant like them. You have to look for the spaces that you make your own. One type of what we call territoriality is spirituality.
“Those places of spirituality here are Rockley Park and another shared spiritual space that is on the Potomac River up on K Street, I have several spaces that are mine. I don’t have the title to the property, but they are mine.”
Listening is the best school in life.
To live, you don’t just need territory but a life plan. Small or large, that is the horizon and the path. Concepts are sometimes born from ancestry that comes from behind or from ahead, because in indigenous cultures the past and the future speak in the present. The past listens to the future and vice versa.
But sometimes things do not come from ancestral concepts, but from their wisdom. When the 1991 Constitution was approved in Colombia, all State entities were obliged to make their development plans. Jairo, who later had to make his plan in exile, went to Cauca to talk to the indigenous communities about how to make those plans. One day he was in a meeting with the Nasa:
“Hey, translate development project for me.” So for ‘project’ we know what the word is, but the word development did not exist, it does not exist in any indigenous language. Therefore, if the word does not exist, the idea is not in reality, and a development plan cannot be made in an indigenous territory.
Then they asked the elders: How am I going to live beautiful tomorrow? nasa wët f’nzi, it is said in Nasa.
So when one arrives in a territory like this, with thousands of problems, it is time to locate each person within the framework of their territoriality. A life plan is to harmoniously organize a space for spiritual, physical, environmental, social life and everything that you want to put there, in order to do so, is supported by pillars or something that supports that territory. That is, pillars and harmony are needed.
By asking the elders, the development plan found its word between the past and the future. He then had to translate it into Spanish. For indigenous peoples there are no development plans, only life plans.
Now we have another word of ours, to which we can add another one, learning from the black communities, a plan for “the tasty life”.