Redacting Colonial Legacies of the Rubber Genocide
A collective pedagogical exercise that uses archival and testimonial texts, redaction, annotation, and reflection to re-story extractive histories through unforgetting. Rather than seeking historical closure or redemption, the activity invites participants to remain with difficult histories collectively and reflect on how colonial forms of forgetting continue shaping relations between people, Territory, responsibility, and extractive realities in the present.
Tools
In Loreto, Peru, the rubber boom is often remembered as a period of economic prosperity and urban modernization. Yet the violence that sustained this wealth — Indigenous forced labor, genocide, and territorial dispossession — frequently remains absent from dominant public memory. This is not an accident or the result of how time passes… This happens by design.
In many extractive territories, colonial violence survives through different kinds of violence, from the obvious material destruction of lives to “subtle” forms of active forgetting, carried out through the silencing, romanticizing, or distancing of histories of extractive dispossession and harm. This activity responds to that forgetting by unforgetting (Shotwell, 2016), a practice that refuses erasure and redemption of colonial histories.
By engaging archival and testimonial texts through redaction, annotation, and reflection, Redacting Colonial Legacies of the Rubber Genocide invites participants to enter into relation with the unforgetting of the history of the rubber genocide. The pedagogical intention is not to fill historical gaps or inform people of the violent events to make them “aware.” The activity re-stories through unforgetting as a way to situate the from of the participants (where, in relation to this particular history of the Territory, are they coming from) and pushes them to inhabit unresolved histories (which often implicate us) rather than seeking for “solutions” or asking for “forgiveness” for what settler ancestors did.
Redacting Colonial Legacies of the Rubber Genocide is a practice that pushes us to sit with the discomfort of acknowledging how this history implicates us as individuals, and as a collective living in Iquitos, a city shaped by extractive relations. This process is a small step to understand unforgetting as a practice of accountability — one that opens different possibilities for relating to Indigenous peoples and Territory in the present and future.
For our session, we gathered a selection of historical and testimonial texts related to the rubber boom from multiple sources. These included excerpts from The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement (1997), a diary documenting Casement’s — a British consul in Brazil — investigation of rubber extraction; The Blue Book (2011), the official Putumayo report compiled by Roger Casement based on testimonies collected in Iquitos and the Putumayo in 1910 detailing the abuses of the rubber economy; as well as testimonies of descendants of caucheros documented by Jean Patrick Razon in 1978 (Chirif, 2014), alongside a fragment from The Legend of Rubber by Carlos G. Amézaga.
In this activity, each participant is invited to enter different texts and re-story their relation to that particular memory of the Territory. The interventions are meant to be relational experiments that foreground a continued practice of learning not about, but from and with the histories of place, and the positions we relationally occupy.