SESSION 2 | 3 OCTOBER 2022 | INDIGENOUS SELF-DETERMINATION
PRESENTATIONS
Session Abstract:
Increasingly, conservation efforts call for “integrating” Indigenous knowledges with Western scientific systems. Shifts in governance and management to meaningfully incorporate multiple knowledge systems have the potential to support improved environmental, social, and political outcomes including Indigenous self-determination. However, efforts to “integrate” traditional or Indigenous knowledges into Western scientific systems risk reifying colonial legacies and perpetuating inequities through continued extractive practices, sociopolitical hierarchies, and marginalization of vulnerable communities. Barriers to meaningful recognition and incorporation of multiple knowledges into conservation initiatives include a reliance on false dichotomies separating Western science from Indigenous and traditional knowledge, and assumptions of empirical superiority of the positivist practices of western scientific research over Indigenous knowledge systems. These also serve as power-laden barriers to communities’ efforts to actualize self-determination in resource governance. With an example from a case study of salmon management within Clayoquot Sound and the efforts of five Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations to pursue self-determination in resource management, this presentation will discuss how pluralisms (rather than dichotomies) of knowledge, institutions, and community serve to support localized actions towards salmon conservation, restoration, and fishery management. In this case, typical Westernized approaches to knowledge “integration” encounter multiple issues, while knowledge pluralisms are better realized through institutional frameworks under indigenous leadership featuring governance guided by relational principles and supported through strategic institutional, research, and community partnerships subverting the power of the state. This work is conducted in the traditional territory of Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations, with the guidance, collaboration, and permission of Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations and Ha’oom Fisheries Society.
Session Abstract:
Despite growing recognition for a rights-based approach in forest governance, Indigenous people around the world continue to grapple with many challenges in retrieval of their customary resource rights. The passing of the Forest Rights Act in 2006 in India was meant to resolve historical injustices by recognising Indigenous people’s rights, but limited acknowledgement of rights themselves, abysmal implementation by state agents, and entrenched power asymmetries continue to stifle social justice for India’s Indigenous communities. With this background, I explore whether and how Western scholarly argument in favour of a more decentralized forest governance, with state and non-state actors located at multiple levels of the jurisdictional scale, could be applied in a Global South context. I draw empirical material from the study of Van Rajis, a small forest-dwelling tribal group living in the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India. To find, I triangulate multiple methods with a qualitative approach. I argue that these cross-scale actors have different interests, and powers, and this might variously allow or stifle Indigenous people’s resource rights. I discuss how power flows both ways, but asymmetrically. While varied goals and vested interests at all levels of governance greatly hinder Indigenous entitlements, continuing efforts by local-level pressure groups and the community’s internalisation of their ethnic social identity to retrieve customary resource rights create countervailing power to state subjectification. The study build on prior and current research and ongoing debates on natural resource governance from political ecology, environmental politics, and social justice perspectives.
Session Abstract:
Ulu Indigenous Peoples of the Baram River watershed in Malaysian Sarawak began a movement to create the Baram Peace Park within their territories. Movement members envisioned the Peace Park as a new forest territory within their ancestral lands that would allow them to reduce large-scale logging of the forests and strengthen their control of the area. In 2020 the Sarawak government and the International Tropical Timber Association announced their plans to create a new legal entity, the Upper Baram Forest Area, with the same boundaries as the proposed Peace Park.
Building on a decades-long solidarity with Baram environmental justice movements as activists and researchers from the USA, this paper uses our experience with the Baram Peace Project to explore the potential of decolonizing transnational environmental justice struggles. Based on our work with the Baram movements for indigenous control and environmental well-being, we analyze the ways that transnational solidarity activism and research can move beyond typical Western ideas of consent and participation and into more emancipatory roles of allyship. We describe the formation of an Indigenous movement across the upper Baram that advocated for the Peace Park and our position within it, our experimentation with a series of ecological and cultural community-led research initiatives across the region to support Indigenous claims to the land, and the way that these efforts of advocacy and research unfolded alongside the state and intergovernmental organizations efforts to define and control the Baram in their own vision.
Session Abstract:
The conflict that perpetues between the Chilean State and the Mapuche indigenous people is a symptom of a crisis in the policies developed in relation to Indigenous people. This crisis is largely due to a lack of an adequate theoretical framework to address the conflict. Indeed, the State has concentrated on an economic reading of the conflict by relying on redistribution mechanisms, without realizing that social conflicts can also be understood from an experience of grievance that seeks reducing moral inequality. In this sense, our hypothesis is that the demand of the Mapuche for the recognition of the cultural value of its identity is embedded with its natural context and ecosystems. This claim is grounded in the fact Mapuche culture finds its symbolic efficacy in an environment that requires protection to ensure the reproduction of this society as well as its collective and individual identity. However, a review of the legal system shows that this symbolic value of the environment for the indigenous people is not adequately understood by land planning tools, which explains to a large extent why conflicts arise from the unsustainable and non planned use and exploitation of natural resources. Our objectives are: Diagnose the forms of moral suffering and diminishment of autonomy that indigenous people can experiment with the State negation of their identity embedded in a natural surrounding, through an ethnographic and decolonial historical approach, which allows giving a relevant symbolic dimension to the surrounding nature that is fundamental for the reproduction of the social identity and self determination of the Mapuche people.