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Abstract

This thesis examines how the “peacemaker myth”, which claims that Mennonite settlers brought spiritual and material prosperity to Indigenous communities, remains a form of settler-colonial denial in Paraguay today. While Mennonite settlers continue to claim that they peacefully coexist with Enlhet and Enxet peoples, their actions result in displacement, subjugation, and environmental destruction. Mennonites left Canada in the 1920s to resist forced assimilation, yet began imposing their own cultural and religious values upon Indigenous communities in Paraguay as soon as they arrived. The hypocrisy of the Mennonites who left Canada, preserving their autonomy while using their powers to deny the same to Indigenous peoples in Paraguay, is an exercise in settler-colonial impunity: importing lessons of domination learned in one settler setting into another subsequent settler setting. Highlighting Indigenous protests, this thesis argues that such resistance dismantles the peacemaker myth by revealing the ongoing effects of Mennonite-led environmental destruction, economic dependency, and cultural erasure in Paraguay. By situating Mennonite expansion within the broader discursive framework of the Doctrine of Discovery (see Miller 2019), I trace a pattern of Mennonite “moves to innocence” (Mawhinney 1998) that shapes Indigenous-settler relations in Latin America to this day.