Alt can’t solve material decolonization – doesn’t prevent uranium mining, or unethical policy makers.

The use of indigeneity as a common signifier has fostered mobilisation across different ethnic groups. This process has been aided by NGOs and técnicos (technical experts) that accompanied the Eighth and Ninth Marches. NGO representatives facilitated meetings, provided training, funded activities and constructed written announcements and texts. These mediatory actors therefore helped to re-articulate the grievances of the marchers under the banner of indigenous rights. This could be seen in the writing of open letters to the government during both the Eighth and Ninth Marches, made possible through the aid of technical experts from one of the principle legal organisations defending indigenous rights in Bolivia CEJIS (Centro de Estudios Jurídicos e Investigación Social; Centre of Legal Studies and Social Investigation). Therefore, in order to ‘speak’ and be heard, the indigenous peoples have to undergo a process of representation through the language of legal rights. They therefore remain ‘subaltern’ because their attempts at self-representation fall outside the ‘the lines laid down by the official institutional structures of representation’ (Spivak 1996: 306). Thus, Glenn (2011) contends that the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is ironic since it seeks the recognition of alternative epistemologies through civic institutions that have homogenising and universalising tendencies. However, as Fabricant notes in her work with the Landless Peasants Movement in Bolivia, movements ‘take NGO ideas and meld them with their own creative strategies to come up with solutions that will work for their communities’ (2012: 120). Moreover, Gustafson (2009b) offers a balanced interpretation of the ways that NGOs offer a language and model for politicising alternative worldviews. The indigenous movement consciously reifies certain strategic essentialisms whilst at other times actively resisting them. Indeed, indigenous knowledges do not exist outside of other knowledge forms (Walsh 2002). As Walsh argues ‘[t]he efficacy of the movement in fact derives from its ability to construct and use the correspondences among various contemporary knowledge positions […] in order to exercise political tactics and strategies’ (2002: 71). A politics of refusal is unlikely to advance indigenous demands. As such, Hale suggests an analytical framework based on the Gramscian notion of articulation to ask: will the subjugated knowledge and practices be articulated within the dominant, and neutralised? Or will they occupy the space opened from above while resisting its built in logic, connect with others, toward ‘transformative’ cultural-political alternatives that still cannot be fully imagined? (2002: 499). Indeed, there is the danger that identifying under a single indigenous label risks losing the complexities and processes that permeate the heterogeneous inter-ethnic collectivity of the lowland indigenous movement. This acts to disembody the identity claims from some of the more radical tangents of the movement. Mexican anthropologist Miguel Alberto Bartolomé argues that indigenous autonomy should contemplate ‘new modes of [interethnic, inter-cultural] social articulation that are more egalitarian than existing [ones]’ and that a multi-ethnic state ‘should explore all possible paths in the search for novel forms of conviviality between culturally distinct groups’ (2005: 146 cited in Gustafson 2009a: 998). Escobar similarly calls for a decolonisation that ‘can be started in earnest from a deessentialized perspective’ (2008: 305). Indeed, the movement seeks the recognition of plurality without the homogenisation of indigenous cultures or ideologies or the ranking of difference that necessarily works to subordinate some cultures and let others dominate. This project of emancipatory societal transformation is an on-going challenge for the lowland indigenous movement.