Awajun women can make poignant political speeches too

I was recently very much impressed by the video and story posted on this Latin-American English language blog, El Oso, which in turn, related the efforts of Peruvian journalist Jacqueline Fowks to document the fight of the Peruvian Awajun indians, in the conflict of the Bagua region.

Despite being problems located far away from my surroundings, there were some points so poignantly familiar.

• The arrogance of monolingual journalists towards native speakers of other languages that, being bilingual, try to speak in the other person's language
• The astonishing familiar speech of that Awajun woman... It's so basque, in a sense, being full of direct Spanish loans... It is as if a language with no connection with Spanish, when touched by its influence, should develop some traces. This might sound like a stupid claim, but really, one feels similar about my own language, as spoken by old people, for instance.

The shocking part in the video is from second 21 to 1.25.

Particularly, without doubting of the transcription (here: 'en') that Fowks got from an Awajun speaker, Fermin Tiwi; I would say that the woman, before mentioning the helicoptero, says something about cinco-metros and diez-metros, that is, plain Spanish for 5 & 10 meters. There's no mention of that in the transcript. It sounds familiar to me because it's also typical of some Basque dialectal forms to directly mix spanish numerals in some measurement contexts, for instance dates and time. So, I guess that the woman says something about the range of their spears, no more than 5 or 10 meters, or perhaps she refers to the short range from where soldiers shot at the indians... I don't know.

I was also interested in the subtitling of the video, that was finally achieved thanks to that journalist's effort. Captioning transcripts, subtitling; i think they are good ways to get multilingual understanding: hearing people's own speech has a value in itself, very much clear in the case of this Awajun woman, but it's good to understand the discourse. You see the first video, and you may feel the woman's gone crazy because of her tragedy... but you read the subtitles and you realize that she has a poignant political discourse, no bullshit at all.

El Oso also mentions that some of the documentation relating to the Bagua conflict opposing indians and the government (+ all those explotation companies) has surfaced in the website Wikileaks. Great. In that sense, I think that Wikileaks should take a more open view towards captioning and subtitling. Some months ago they released a shocking video document they named Collateral Murder, the video had burnt english captions; and they also released transcriptions in other languages, but none of them was in a temporal format, that is, SRT or SUB or some format that ties text to video-time, so each caption appears at the desired moment. I wrote to Wikileaks, asking for SRT files and volunteering for a Basque version, but this was the disappointing reply that I got.

We looked into this. srt is not yet reliable enough, but we will release the raw final cut project soon

One day, they'll learn, I guess.

Finally, I've written about this Awajun women also in Basque. I thought there would be some reaction, but, nope. In the Basque Country, there's great interest in Latin-American affairs, I would say. But it's always because of us understanding Spanish. In progressive circles, apparently pro-indigenous discourses like those of Evo Morales in Bolivia or Rafael Correa in Ecuador are greeted and hailed, but I am always left in doubt: I suspect it's just the same criollo attitude of always, a colonialised state of mind, which cannot think of any cultural, social or political role for speakers of indigenous languages.