Sioux Valley Dakota Nation exchanges knowledge with committee for Colombian massacre victims
Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, originally hails from Colombia and now at UBC-GRSJ documented this journey.
The driving force of the project was finding the balance between culture, families and the scientific process of identifying those placed in unmarked graves, she said.
“I called it the forensics of care … Scientists think that you don’t need the spiritual, nor the caring, nor the emotional and relational component,” Riaño-Alcalá said.
“On the contrary, if you are going to do science, particularly in this context of violence, systemic violence, colonial and racist violence, you do need to bring all of them into dialogue, otherwise you are not doing good science.”
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(Pic) University of British Columbia professor Pilar Riaño-Alcalá shows Sioux Valley Dakota Nation elder Lorraine Pompana a tapestry documenting the work of the Commitee for the Rights of the Victims of Bojayá. (Chelsea Kemp/CBC) Indigenous and Black communities in Colombia do not have the same level of self-government and autonomy as some First Nation communities in Canada, Riaño-Alcalá said, which impacts the exhumation of graves.
These experiences of violence are shared universally across many Indigenous communities around the world, Riaño-Alcalá said, but the pain of these losses is unique to each community.
“It’s finding connection through pain, but through ceremony too,” she said. “It’s not the same experience, but there is something that connects us.”
Building a relationship with Sioux Valley is meaningful because both groups are using community, ancestral knowledge and science to guide their searches, she said.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/sioux-valley-colombia-unmarked-graves-1.6865022#:~:text=A%20southwestern%20Manitoba%20First%20Nation,former%20residential%20school’s%20unmarked%20graves.
