Remote spatial analysis lacking ethnographic grounding mischaracterizes sustainability of Indigenous burning regime

Scientific research that purports to evaluate Indigenous fire regimes in the absence of ethnographically contextualized ecological data runs the risk of exacerbating the fire blame game and providing evidence to support distorted narratives advanced by anti-Indigenous advocates. Spatial analysis of fire scars in Indigenous territories can be an effective tool for characterizing cultural fire regimes in terms of distribution and frequency, especially when qualified by linkages to different local ecosystems. A recently published article drew on fire scar mapping from satellite imagery to assess anthropogenic fire distribution and frequency in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, Central Brazil. The authors use their findings to characterize A'uwẽ (Xavante) use of fire as unmanaged and a model of unsustainable use of cerrado resources. In this article, we discuss Aguiar & Martins's recent paper in light of our long-term research on A'uwẽ hunting with fire in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, arguing that A'uwẽ hunters do burn according to established cultural protocols, manage their use of fire for conservationist purposes, and do not cause environmental degradation by burning.

Indigenous people’s self-determination in the context of COVID-19 in northern Mexico

This article presents various transformations registered in the political sphere and community participation due to the COVID-19 pandemic on Indigenous territories in northern Mexico. It explores the challenges of the Rarámuri and Ódami Indigenous people’s experience in guaranteeing their political rights and self-determination in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically when organising festivities and ceremonies that were unable to celebrate to comply with official health care guidelines. The article gives firsthand accounts of the political relations between Indigenous groups’ community responses and the Mexican government’s actions to mitigate the effects of the new coronavirus. The article draws on the argument that the current health emergency context is inserted into a complex network of pre-existing and structured power relations that largely define the scope of the actions taken because of the pandemic. Critically, the community responses emanating from Indigenous groups show crucial cultural differences in ways to deal with the disease.

Sensory access at sxxnitk: Blockages, fluidities and futures

In the summer of 2020, tensions rose at sxxnitk, an ancestral fishing village site, for the Syilx Okanagan Peoples due to a landowner seeking to exclude access to a portion of qawsitk (Okanagan) river. Access to sxxnitk is integral for Syilx Nation building and realizing embodied relationships with the Salmon peoples, which have been hindered by a multiplicity of factors that almost removed salmon completely from the Territory. Sensory access throughout the village site is not only important to rebuild relations with the salmon, but also those with the place itself. sxxnitk remains a portal of relationality with waterscapes from the high mountains into the Pacific Ocean. Waterscapes connect peoples, polities and humans/more-than-humans throughout their spaces of motion. In an era of altered river pathways, intensified relationships grounded in particular waterscapes can help to build relations beyond the structural blockages that fragment the flow of the river and its ecologies. These relationships are important for collaborative healing throughout the watershed. Renewing relations with ecologies of flow and motion bring to question the fragmented jurisdictions that seek to carve up Indigenous territories.

Indigenous Influence and Engagement in Mining Permitting in British Columbia, Canada: Lessons for Sweden and Norway?

Mine developments in Indigenous territories risk disrupting Indigenous cultures and their economies, including spiraling already high levels of conflict. This is the situation in Canada, Sweden, and Norway, as elsewhere, and is fostered by current state legal framework that reflect historical trajectories, although circumstances are gradually changing. Promising institutional changes have taken place in British Columbia (BC), Canada, with respect to new legislative reforms. Notably, new legislation from 2019 intends to implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in the province, by promoting consent-based and collaborative decision-making mechanisms. New environmental assessment legislation is another example; this legislation includes early engagement, collaborative decision-making, and Indigenous-led assessments. The article’s aim is, first, to analyze how Indigenous communities can influence and engage in the mining permitting system of BC, and, secondly, to highlight the positive features of the BC system using a comparative lens to identify opportunities for Sweden and Norway regarding mining permitting and Indigenous rights. Applying a legal-scientific and comparative analysis, the article analyzes traditional legal sources. The article concludes that the strong points that the BC regime could offer the two Nordic countries are: the concept of reconciliation, incorporation of UNDRIP, the spectrum of consultation and engagement approaches, and the structure of environmental assessments. All three jurisdictions, however, struggle with balancing mine developments and securing Indigenous authority and influence over land uses in their traditional territories.

Examining the Subjugation of Indigenous Women through Community Partnerships with Extractive Industries

Integration into the capitalist market creates an opportunity for Indigenous communities to relinquish interdependent relationships with the Canadian state by commodifying natural resources to subsidize funding. Corporate partnerships offer Indigenous communities an opportunity for economic development to help alleviate conditions of poverty; however, the potential benefits are not reaching all members of the communities equally. Rather, extractive developments on Indigenous territories are creating new and complex challenges for Indigenous women. This paper examines the current and historical legacies of colonization within Canada that have excluded and oppressed Indigenous women, and have made Indigenous communities dependent on colonial processes to improve socioeconomic disparities. The legacies of colonization, the patriarchal foundations of capitalism, and the transient nature of extractive developments disproportionately harm Indigenous women, making corporate partnerships an unsustainable option to maintain Indigenous independence from the Canadian State.

Indigenous Social Movements and Institutional Reform: Mechanisms of Interest Representation in Three Colombian Municipalities

In the 1990s, Colombia passed but unevenly enforced multicultural reforms to address indigenous rights. Parallel to this, decentralization laws delegated key aspects of interest intermediation to local governments. These reforms changed the political opportunity structure that framed the relationship between indigenous people and the state. Indigenous activists engaged nonindigenous authorities and institutions at the local level in contentious, cooperative, or competitive strategies of interest intermediation to redistribute assets, claim indigenous rights, and create coalitions committed to ethnic governance. These strategies involved various mechanisms including framing indigenous claims, mobilizing communities, and repurposing or revising existing institutions to help keep indigenous territories and communities together. The reforms opened new opportunities, and activists responded by sustaining contentious strategies of interest intermediation such as social protests and testing cooperative and competitive mechanisms to coordinate different jurisdictions, participate in local elections, build up broader constituencies, and increase coalitions to support indigenous rights. En la década de 1990, Colombia aprobó reformas multiculturales para abordar los derechos indígenas, pero procedió a ejercerlas de manera desigual. Paralelamente, las leyes de descentralización delegaron aspectos clave de la intermediación de intereses a los gobiernos locales. Estas reformas cambiaron la estructura de oportunidades políticas que enmarcaba la relación entre los pueblos indígenas y el Estado. Los activistas indígenas involucraron a autoridades e instituciones locales no indígenas en estrategias de intermediación de intereses contenciosas, cooperativas o competitivas para redistribuir activos, reclamar derechos indígenas y crear coaliciones comprometidas con la gobernanza étnica. Estas estrategias implicaron diversos mecanismos, entre ellos la formulación de reclamos indígenas, la movilización de las comunidades y la reutilización o revisión de las instituciones existentes para ayudar a mantener unidos los territorios y las comunidades indígenas. Las reformas dieron lugar a nuevas oportunidades, y los activistas respondieron sustentando estrategias contestatarias de intermediación de intereses, como protestas sociales, y probando mecanismos cooperativos y competitivos para coordinar distintas jurisdicciones, participar en elecciones locales, construir grupos más amplios y aumentar las coaliciones en apoyo a los derechos indígenas.

Pandemic State Failure, Hydrocarbon Control, and Indigenous Territorial Counteraction in the Peruvian Amazon

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Peruvian government failed to protect its sparsely populated Amazon region. While infections were still rising, resource extraction was quickly approved to continue operations as a declared essential service that permitted an influx of workers into vulnerable indigenous territories despite weak or almost absent local healthcare. This article analyzes territorial counteraction as an indigenous response to pandemic national state failure, highlighted in a case of particularly conflictive stakes of resource control: Peru’s largest liquid natural gas extraction site Camisea in the Upper Amazon, home to several indigenous groups in the Lower Urubamba who engaged in collective action to create their own district. Frustration with the state’s handling of the crisis prompted indigenous counteraction to take COVID-19 measures and territorial control into their own hands. By blocking boat traffic on their main river, they effectively cut off their remote and roadless Amazon district off from the outside world. Local indigenous control had already been on the rise after the region had successfully fought for its own formal subnational administrative jurisdiction in 2016, named Megantoni district. The pandemic then created a moment of full indigenous territorial control that openly declared itself as a response and replacement of a failed national state. Drawing on political ecology, we analyze this as an interesting catalyst moment that elevated long-standing critiques of inequalities, and state neglect into new negotiations of territory and power between the state and indigenous self-determination, with potentially far-reaching implications on state-indigenous power dynamics and territorial control, beyond the pandemic.

Ethnography of economic globalization in Mapuche and forest territory of South-Central Chile

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose an ethnographic discussion surrounding the sociocultural dimensions of the contemporary economy, using the dynamics of monoculture expansion into the indigenous territories of South-Central Chile as an empirical reference. Design/methodology/approach From an ethnographic approach, the paper systematizes some ideas about the difference and inequality that have redrafted the current relationships between forestry companies and Mapuche communities within the context of international certification of forestry management. Findings Findings indicate that difference and inequality, are today managed from global economic rationality and their control impacts directly on quotidian life of diverse and unequal territories. Considering this, this paper gets to conclude that these conditions, while never ceasing to deepen their expression, have been recrafted from the new references of the global economy. Research limitations/implications For the critical ethnographic approach to be applied, it is necessary to design and implement wide access, which means this type of study usually has limitations when not being able to get to every scale of economic development. For this reason, it is important to keep the methodological discussion, about the ethnography of the economy. Originality/value The study puts in perspective intercultural relations and the inequality of territories in the framework of the global economy. Illustrates how the managing of the international market of wood and pulp design and insides in local quotidian life systems.

Are indigenous territories effective natural climate solutions? A neotropical analysis using matching methods and geographic discontinuity designs

Indigenous Territories (ITs) with less centralized forest governance than Protected Areas (PAs) may represent cost-effective natural climate solutions to meet the Paris agreement. However, the literature has been limited to examining the effect of ITs on deforestation, despite the influence of anthropogenic degradation. Thus, little is known about the temporal and spatial effect of allocating ITs on carbon stocks dynamics that account for losses from deforestation and degradation. Using Amazon Basin countries and Panama, this study aims to estimate the temporal and spatial effects of ITs and PAs on carbon stocks. To estimate the temporal effects, we use annual carbon density maps, matching analysis, and linear mixed models. Furthermore, we explore the spatial heterogeneity of these estimates through geographic discontinuity designs, allowing us to assess the spatial effect of ITs and PAs boundaries on carbon stocks. The temporal effects highlight that allocating ITs preserves carbon stocks and buffer losses as well as allocating PAs in Panama and Amazon Basin countries. The geographic discontinuity designs reveal that ITs’ boundaries secure more extensive carbon stocks than their surroundings, and this difference tends to increase towards the least accessible areas, suggesting that indigenous land use in neotropical forests may have a temporarily and spatially stable impact on carbon stocks. Our findings imply that ITs in neotropical forests support Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement. Thus, Indigenous peoples must become recipients of countries’ results-based payments.