Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Amautawasi Quechuan University author: Luis Macas Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization Edited by Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz
Sierra Club books San Francisco 2006
The state of Ecuador was formed about two hundred years ago without the participation of the indigenous people and they continue to be excluded today.

There have been two large marches that the Achuar have participated in to establish their rights without becoming incorporated into the non-indigenous culture. The first one occurred in 1990 and tens of thousands of people placidly traveled through the highways and city plazas with the support of the majority of the non-?i?or ?I?ndigenous people of Ecuador; they expressed that if the government did not give the indigenous people their demands, the indigenous people would prevent government offices in Ecuador from operating.? Too long of a sentence?. The Achuar, as well as the rest of the indigenous groups, now have the rights to operate as a “collective society” and not become integrated into the state of Ecuador in the national Ecuador constitution. This was very significant because it supported their ability to practice their idea of “complementary duality”. This belief includes the worldview that society isn’t composed of individuals. Instead, it is composed of communities that live in “reciprocity”.

In 1994, thousands of indigenous people marched to the capital of Ecuador, Quito, to demand that the government authorize the permit for a university to function with four separate centers instead of one large university in the city and ?with?gr? bilingual education; if these demands were not met the indigenous people claimed that they weren’t going to let the government work since the government wasn’t letting their university work. The government agreed to their demands but they had to modify their proposal for the university four times before Ecuador’s National Council of Universities approved it.