The text explores the ways in wich the indigenous people used the law during the laststage of the colonial era, it means, since the Bourbon reforms to the independence.The first part of the text is the result of an historiographical review, that shows theway in which the original ideal of the colonial regime of conserving the indigenouslegal systems was transformed into the creation of a distinctive legal system thatpretended to separate the “republic of indians” from the “republic of spaniards”. Theseparation was not effective in order to preserve the pre hispanic legal traditions,but it allowed the different ways in which the law was used as a mecanism for adaptionand resistance. The second part of the article describes those uses of law, withsome legal actions by the indigeous people in the end of the xviii century and thebeggining of the xix in the New Kingdom of Granada.