Amazonia Beyond Borders: Indigenous Land Protection for an Indigenous Group in Voluntary Isolation

Abstract

This article looks at the land protection efforts by the Manxineru, whose lands are affected by numerous actors: state agencies, enterprises and transnational mega-extraction projects. We draw especially from the experiences, activities, and articulation of the Manxineru in protection of the land for the Yine Hosha Hajene (Mascho-Piro), their kin living in voluntary isolation, who circulate more in the Manxineru’s demarcated territory in the Brazilian-Peruvian border area. The article presents Manxineru’s key land protection practices that have been strengthening the social networks of different actors as a go-between with other Indigenous group and authorities of the dominant society, as well as managing better their own forest resource use, gathering economies, and hunting practices for healthy relations of human-environment assemblage. Indigenous knowledge and perspectives for the protection of ancestral land, beyond the borders of the state-set Indigenous reserves and protected areas, have become crucial in creating new governance models. By these methods, the Manxineru have managed to cope with differing economic interests and values in living that oppose and ignore their human-environment relationality and interactions. Yet, as we will point out, the mosaic of different Indigenous areas and conservation still need the implementation of state protective activities by a variety of governmental actors.