Beyond Pluralism and Media Rights: Indigenous Communication for a Decolonizing Transformation of Latin America and Abya Yala
by Kathryn Lehman
In resisting genocidal projects of modernity since the Conquest and their most recent phase, neoliberalism, indigenous peoples have provided leadership in maintaining pluralist societies and protecting the rights of all living beings. This role is little known even to many on the left because of the history of the nation-state and current communications and research practices. Drawing on community-based autonomous alternatives to neoliberalism, indigenous media contribute to twenty-first-century Latin American participatory democracy and plurinational socialism by defending communication as a basic human right. They evoke a long history of place-based narratives whose values are encoded in language, and their epistemologies are strengthened by transnational indigenous communication networks and practices. Moving beyond pluralism and media rights, indigenous communication transforms media practices in order to decolonize relations among humans, other living beings, and the environment that sustains life.
