Indians win back sacred art.

San Francisco 

"The spirits of our ancestors were lonely, and they called to us," is how Pio Cruz, an Amyra Indian from Bolivia, explained his community's search for their sacred ceremonial weavings. Cruz and his fellow villagers from the little town of Coroma, nestled high in the Bolivian Andes, accomplished a rare feat in November. After four years of struggle, they managed to recover the sacred art they had lost to the North American art market.

At the outset, the task seemed hopeless. How could all impoverished village of 6,000 inhabitants--most of whom do not speak Spanish, never mind English--hope to force wealthy art collectors and dealers in the United States to hand over goods for which they had paid high prices? The Coromans managed to catalyze a network of lawyers, anthropologists, Native American activists, U.S. Customs officials, and the Bolivian government, to pressure the dealers and collectors into returning the weavings.

"It was an amazing case," says Michael Ratner, a lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights who helped the Coromans get the weavings back. "I really have to hand it to them. That they were able to do this makes you believe that there really is another dimension, a spirit world." Indeed, the Coromans themselves say that their achievement was due to the intervention of the ancestral spirits who reside in the weavings--and from the help they got from Native spirits in North America.

High in the Andean mountains of Bolivia, expert Amyra weavers once produced woven garments with vibrant colors and the texture of silk for the Inca nobles. The Incas are long gone but, remarkably, some of the weavings in use at that time remain. These ancient garments are worshipped in many parts of the Andes; they are not only consulted as oracles and venerated as encoding the history of the people, but are believed to contain the souls of the ancestors. Carefully preserved in bundles called q'epis, the weavings survived the Spanish conquest and the brutal anti-Indian policies of many Bolivian governments.

In no village in the Andes are the textiles more ancient, more beautiful, or more valued than in Coroma, Bolivia. Since before Columbus landed in the Americas, the people of Coroma have hidden away their sacred weavings, bringing them out only on November 1, the Day of the Dead, when the garments are ritually displayed in an all-day celebration of the connection between the world of the living and the universe of the deceased. Unfortunately for the Coromans, the unsurpassed quality and antiquity of their weavings make them highly valuable on international markets--a fact that did not escape dealers in South American art and antiquities.

According to Cristina Bubba, a social scientist who has lived and worked in Coroma for more than ten years, some of these dealers took advantage of the November I celebration to photograph the best weavings. Then they took the photographs to Bolivian intermediaries, instructing them to obtain the garments. Over the course of five or six years, at least 200 of the finest and most precious weavings left Coroma for the United States, to make their way onto the walls of collectors wealthy enough to pay tens of thousands of dollars for each one. Several of the Bolivian intermediaries have since been convicted of theft and imprisoned, along with some of the Coromans who were entrusted with the weavings' care.

Under the 1983 Cultural Property Implementation Act, the United States Information Agency has the power to declare that articles from a particular country or culture cannot be legally imported into the United States. This ban has to be requested by the country of origin before it can take effect (a stipulation added after intense lobbying by art dealers).

Currently there is a five-year ban on the importation of Coroma textiles, which have been recognized as being owned communally by the Indians and of "important historic, religious, and social significance in their daily lives," according to the USIA.

But the ban was not yet in effect when many of the Coroma weavings left Bolivia, so the Coroma Indians negotiated a settlement to get back some, but not all, of their weavings.

High-society collectors were jolted into handing over a small number of the weavings when they realized they might have to endure vociferous public protests on the part of Native American activists. San Francisco art dealer Steven Berger was persuaded to turn over forty-three weavings after Customs raided his home and warehouse.

"I hope this shows Native people that they can win," says Susan Lobo, a cultural anthropologist who played a key role in the fight. "And I hope it sends a message to collectors that it is wrong to buy items of veneration, especially those in use by living cultures."

Meanwhile, in Coroma, "the people are very happy," says Bubba. "This thing in Coroma is the start of something new; it is going to open a new road."