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Decode and conquer5/18/2023 ![]() ![]() The reason is, the Inca were more of a political entity than an ethnicity, Marcone Flores says. These are a watered-down version.” Who Were the Inca?ĭisregarding the heritage of modern Andean people doesn’t mean that the descendants living in old Inca capitals, like Cusco or Cuenca, today are Inca themselves, though. “In this narrative of Peruvian nation, the original people become a brutish race as result of centuries of dominance by Spaniards, epidemics coca leaf use,” he continues.Īnd while things are improving to some degree, many Peruvians still say, “These are not the same people. “We study and care for the Incas, but we made invisible the local native populations from this official history,” he says. They view what happened in the Spanish invasion as a sort of “reboot,” even though the Europeans incorporated many elements of the Inca Empire into their own governance of the area. He says that this identity sometimes results in feeling pride for the Inca, while discriminating against modern Quechua-speakers. “So, we claim to be heirs of the Inca Empire, the rightful guardians of this amazing civilization.” “The way that we Peruvians built a white criollo nation in a mostly indigenous-populated country, was to imagine ourselves neither European or Indigenous,” Marcone Flores says. ![]() ![]() And they simultaneously disregarded the ongoing issues that the legacy of colonialism to the Inca’s descendants caused. In Peru and Bolivia, this meant many people who were mostly European-descended became proud of the achievements of the Inca. Politicians and institutions sometimes used the glories of the past empires of the Inca, Aztec or Maya to form a new brand of nationalism after countries won their independence from Spain. This includes after the 16th century conquest of the Inca and notwithstanding the suppressed 18th century Túpac Amaru II rebellion. The division between European-descended people and Indigenous Americans has become a little more complex in some countries than it was in the initial years. “There’s an expression ‘Inca yes, Indians no,’” Giancarlo Marcone Flores, an anthropologist at the University of Engineering and Technology in Peru, tells Discover Magazine. Part of the colonial invasion of the Americas led to decoupling the achievements of classic-era Maya, Aztec or Inca with modern Indigenous people that directly descended from them. But do the Inca still exist today? The question isn’t as simple as it sounds, and it depends on how you define the Inca. ![]()
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