Collaborative Conservation and Contexts of Resistance: New (and Enduring) Strategies for Survival

Abstract

Proponents of schemes to incorporate indigenous individuals and ideas into mainstream natural resource management point out that participation allows Native voices to be heard, giving previously excluded citizens seats at environmental decisionmaking tables while simultaneously supporting effective programming and indigenous rights.1 These claims have validity. While initiatives have varied in both their durability and their ability to respectfully integrate diverse perspectives, Native North Americans have found ways to productively present their communities’ critical concerns in new and important arenas and, through their recent collaborative undertakings, have become accepted as valid environmental actors—an achievement environmental justice scholar Laura Pulido refers to as “ecological legitimacy.”2 Yet, critics argue, partaking in mainstream processes leads to empowerment not on autonomous indigenous terms, but only within an asymmetrical (post)colonial system.† Even as indigenous contributions are encouraged, usually sincerely, the politically dominant settler society continues to set operating discourses, patterns of information transmission, and rules for producing relevant knowledge. As anthropologist Paul Nadasdy suggests in his critique of land claims and co-management in northern Canada, “to be ‘empowered,’ local people must first agree to the rules of the game, rules that they had no role in creating and that constrain what