Governing Indigenous Territories: Enacting Sovereignty in the Ecuadorian Amazon by Juliet S. Erazo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Governing Indigenous Territories: Enacting Sovereignty in the Ecuadorian Amazon by Juliet S. Erazo Karl Offen Governing Indigenous Territories: Enacting Sovereignty in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Juliet S. Erazo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. xxvi and 237 pp., maps, photos, notes, appendices, and index. $23.95 paper (ISBN 0-8223-5454-3) What happens to indigenous peoples after they receive title to their ancestral lands? This question has rarely been asked, let alone answered, despite the plethora of studies documenting the indigenous struggle to obtain official titles. Addressing this question is what makes Juliet S. Erazo’s Governing Indigenous Territories such a compelling read. The book combines a detailed ethnography and ethnohistory with a number of geographic methods—air photo interpretation, map analysis, indigenous conceptions and uses of space—to significantly advance our understanding of how indigenous peoples with a collective land title in hand interact with one another, Catholic missionaries, the state, the market, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the rapidly shifting discursive terrain that has swung from ‘economic development’ to ‘biodiversity conservation’ in a single generation. The Ecuadorian case study is set among the Kichwa community of Rukullakta in the Upper Napo River valley. Although Rukullakta’s [End Page 243] experience might appear singular, Erazo engages the many externally imposed and internally negotiated social and environmental themes and contradictions that occupy the lives of all indigenous and forest-dwelling peoples in Latin America, and especially those in the biodiverse Neotropics. The book contains ten useful and well-drawn maps, five thematic and chronological chapters, and is bookended by a comprehensive introduction and a short concluding chapter. Simply put, Erazo was not able to conclude a story that remains ongoing. One can imagine the author debating with herself if she should do more fieldwork or simply wrap the book up. She opted for the latter, noting that “Documenting history as it is occurring (and from thousands of miles away) can be confusing and difficult” (p. 198). We can empathize with the understatement and, in the end, having to cut the narrative off at a random point in time does not detract from an invaluable fifty-year snapshot of Kichwa political life. Indeed, one of the things that makes this study especially useful is its access to community archives: thousands of pages of hand-written minutes of community meetings dating back to the community’s formation as a cattle ranching cooperative in the 1970s. Access to the Actas de la Cooperativa Agropecuaria San Pedro de Rucu-Llacta, Ltda. is a dream for any scholar, and provided much of the basis for Erazo’s ethnohistory, a benchmark for socio-spatial change, and ready-made fodder for follow-up interviews with former leaders. The Actas also helped Erazo appreciate and convey the poignant struggles, changing priorities, leadership strategies, membership responses, and the internal debates governing bodies contended with on a continual basis. In 1977, 207 Kichwa families received collective title to 42,000 hectares of traditional lands in the Upper Napo watershed—more land than they asked for and the largest indigenous land title in the country. This successful struggle was supported by the 1964 agrarian reform, a movement to colonize the Oriente region of Amazonian Ecuador, and a state-funded turn toward the creation of cooperatives. Co-ops received wide support and radically changed indigenous lives by forcing a re-conceptualization of what ‘personhood’ meant (p. 49). Cooperative work arrangements, shared social space, and communal cattle pastures created with easy credit helped indigenous leaders in Rukullakta embrace a modernist vision of economic develop. But unlike citizens of a municipality, coop members were supposed to provide volunteer labor. Many resisted this and criticized their new autonomy as “pura minga” (p. 67). Things changed when cattle loans came due and the state “funding magic” disappeared (p. 72). The 1980s were marked by an important challenge to the early modernist vision, as a political and territorial re-ordering into sub-centers (now called communities) took place, devolving power to smaller socio-spatial units. In a strong chapter three called “The Property Debate,” Erazo shows how three socio-territorial visions vied with one another to shape Rukullakta’s land governance and landscape ideals: collectivists who...