Experiences Of Indigenous Peoples Research Articles

Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples

Review: Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples By Mark Dowie Reviewed by David Jenkins Roundhouse Institute for Field Studies, USA Dowie, Mark. Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict Between Global Conservation and Native Peoples. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009. 341pp. ISBN 9780262012614. US$27.95, hardcover. Alkaline paper. Conservation Refugees is a careful and nuanced look at the relationships between transnational conservation efforts and native peoples—relationships that are anything but careful and nuanced. With a wealth of empirical detail, Dowie demonstrates how conservation of the natural world has often resulted in the displacement and impoverishment of local peoples. In many such instances, the removal of native peoples in order to maintain biodiversity has had the unintended consequence of degrading conserved lands. Dowie emphasizes three central problems in the relationship between transnational conservation and local peoples. The first is that the natural world is in part a product of the social world. Transnational conservation organizations—Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, for example—have been slow to understand this fact. Contemporary ecosystems are deeply entwined with human activities, and simply removing humans from “nature” ignores the various ways humans are integral to the functioning of many ecosystems. The second, related problem is that Big Conservation tends to elevate values of biological diversity above values associated with local self-determination. Rights of indigenous peoples become subsumed by presumably transcendent values of ecosystem preservation. Because habitat preservation is perceived as the greater good, removal of local peoples from their homelands becomes a lamentable necessity, but a necessity nonetheless. Such removal tends to be not of a few thousand, or even a few tens of thousands of people, but of several million. The destruction of a 15,000 year old Forest Pygmy culture and displacement of thousands of Pygmy families, as the outcome of the creation of a mountain gorilla preserve, is a typical example. Dowie draws his examples from the experience of indigenous peoples in Africa, India, Thailand, Brazil, and Western North America. These peoples include, among others, the Miwok, Maasai, Pygmies, Karen, Adivasi, Basarwa, Ogiek, Kayapo, Basarwa, Ogiek, Mursi, and Akoa—names of cultural groups that are undoubtedly less familiar to westerners than the environments these people inhabit. This points to an unfortunate western bias: while the more than 100,000 protected areas on the planet are seen as a triumph of conservation efforts, the cultural loss of people displaced from these selfsame areas is barely noted. The third problem Dowie addresses is economic. Big Conservation, he argues, has become increasingly tied to a market mentality, in which economic relations may come to trump both environmental coherence and social and cultural stability of indigenous peoples. In the process, many environmental groups act as pious smokescreens for extractive industries, throwing up an atmosphere of doing good for the planet all the while it is business as usual. For example, in the state of Karnatka, India, the Adivasi were displaced from ancestral lands—ecologically sensitive areas—with the aim of preserving wildlife. These lands, however, were then used as industrial plantations for teak and eucalyptus trees. Big Conservation’s ties to the market take many forms. The example I found particularly jarring was of Conservation International’s 2002 fund-raising trip to Milne Bay along the southeast coast of Papua New Guinea. CI leased a $25,000/day luxury yacht to provide a close-up look at coral reefs for potential funders such as H. Fisk Johnson, CEO of S.C. Johnson Company, who is one of the richest people in the U.S., and Stone Gossard, guitarist for Pearl Jam, whose apparent interest in CI was to explore ways to mitigate the 5,700 ton carbon footprint of a world tour. CI’s CEO Peter Seligmann was host and pitchman.

Stepping onto the Yakama Reservation: Land and Water Rights in Raymond Carver’s “Sixty Acres”

Raymond Carver grew up in Yakima, Washington, yet his work is rarely interpreted as an engagement with the social, ecological, and economic histories of the Pacific Northwest. In an attempt to reconnect Carver’s work to place, this essay looks at “Sixty Acres,” an early and nearly forgotten story set on the Yakama Indian Reservation at mid-twentieth century. While reading the story alongside histories of federal land and water policies in the Columbia River Basin, the essay traces how the Yakama War, the inequitable irrigation of the Yakima Valley, and the construction of The Dalles Dam and inundation of Celilo Falls have marginalized the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation. However, the essay also considers how Carver—like many white writers from the Pacific Northwest during the 1960s—was attempting to identify with Native Americans by creating an image of a Columbia River Indian that corresponds more with his own feelings of social and economic marginalization, than the actual experiences of indigenous peoples.

“Why do we have to do all this Indigenous stuff?”: Addressing Racism in Teacher Education

This article examines teacher education?s role in preparing teachers in Australia and New Zealand to take account of multiple and diverse cultural, social and historical experiences of the children they teach. It draws on a study of early career teachers, which explored their experiences and reflections in negotiating policy and practice discourses infused with an equity agenda. In particular, the discussion here focuses on responses to policies, social/cultural history and professional practice, and what needs to happen in teacher education, if we are to address significant discrepancies between the educational experience and achievement of indigenous and non-indigenous people.

From First Nations to Self-Government

The indigenous movement in the United States moves from aboriginal autonomy to quasi-conquest and domination, internal colonies, and tribal reservations and back to limited self-government and claims to sovereignty. This article traces the roots and efforts of the U.S. indigenous movement to maintain political autonomy, land, and cultural autonomy within the legal, political, and cultural institutions of the United States. The American Indian experience is quite different from the experiences of most indigenous peoples, but the U.S. indigenous movement illustrates some fundamental points of the indigenous perspective and provides a model for defining indigenous relations with nation-states.

New World, First Nations: Native Peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes under Colonial Rule

Derived from a conference held at the University of New South Wales in October 2002, New World, First Nations is an anthology that examines the complex experience of indigenous peoples under Spanish colonial rule. Besides a short introductory essay by David Cahill and Blanca Tovías, the book contains ten articles that reassess in a variety of ways the social and ethnic changes that occurred in the Andes and Mesoamerica with the Spanish Conquest, the imposition of the colonial order, and the coming of independence.The anthology’s first section examines the modification and survival of indigenous social and cultural practices during the conquest. Susan Schroeder considers the ways that despite the Aztecs’ defeat, Nahua record keeping was perpetuated by colonial amoxoaque (keepers of the book) such as Chimalpahin and Tezozomoc. By preserving and adding to the chronicle of their altepetl (ethnic state), they sought to preserve its memory and status. Susan E. Ramírez adds to her important works on the curacas (Andean ethnic lords) in the early colonial period. She shows that whereas curacas had traditionally had filled both material and spiritual roles, the demographic collapse caused by European diseases, plus Spanish economic demands and religious proscriptions made it difficult for the chiefs to fulfill their legitimating religious functions. Kerstin Nowack offers fresh insights into the neo-Inca state of Vilcabamba, established by Manco Inca following his failed siege of Cuzco in the mid-1530s. She argues that rulers such as Manco Inca and Tupac Amaru could not accept attractive offers of peace from the viceregal government because the Spaniards failed to provide satisfactory rewards to the powerful Incan nobles who effectively controlled Vilcabamba. Elsa Malvido examines how, in New Spain and especially the Mayan Yucatán, Spanish clergy used the tremendous mortality resulting from epidemics to teach Catholic concepts of Good Death and Bad Death. (Her claim that the plague carried off 90 percent of the European population is suspect, although it underscores why Spaniards would be obsessed with death.)The middle section of the anthology, which deals with colonial social and economic change, is the least focused part of the anthology. Historical anthropologist Janine Gasco confirms the complexity of ethnic identity for colonial Chiapas and notes there is little difference in surviving material remains between rural households from pre-Columbian to modern times regardless of ethnic identity. Kevin Gosner challenges Jeremy Baskes and Arij Ouweneel’s view of an uncoercive repartimiento de mercancías. Based on his research in Chiapas, Gosner contends that the repartimiento varied regionally and changed over time, and that, given the paucity of indigenous documents related to the repartimiento, it is very difficult to prove its voluntary nature. In a perceptive historiographical essay on Andean gender relations, Nancy E. van Deusen traces the shifting paradigms of gender studies, emphasizing their growing complexity. She calls for more studies about the sixteenth century, when the crucial collision between cultures and ethnicities established the foundation on which colonial gender relations were built.The final section turns to independence, with articles by David Cahill, Luis Miguel Glave, and Eric Van Young. Cahill focuses on the late colonial Inca nobility of Cuzco and its relationship with the city’s creole elite. He shows why the Great Andean Rebellion and the independence period are unintelligible without an understanding of the kinship links and other ties between the two groups. A chief exemplar of those ties was Mateo García Pumacahua, the indigenous military leader who helped royalist forces put down the Tupac Amaru Rebellion and who became president of the Cuzco audiencia (royal high court) yet supported the nationalist rebellion of 1814. Pumacahua was a chief actor in the 1814 Cuzco rebellion, which Glave discusses. He explains why that promising nationalist movement failed and is mistakenly considered by most Peruvian historians as only a precursor to independence. Like Glave for Peru, Van Young finds Mexican independence a far more complicated and contradictory process than portrayed in traditional historiography. He rejects Benedict Anderson’s assertion in Imagined Communities that Mexico had developed a full-fledged nationalism, finding instead that nationalism barely touched the rural masses and others who made up the vast majority of the population.Thus, the unifying message of these essays is the need for flexibility in considering the historical complexities of indigenous peoples under Spanish colonialism and the dangers of overgeneralization. Most of the articles are filled with qualifiers, referring vaguely to “many” people, asserting that something “may” have been the case. Several articles are so dense that a nonspecialist in the subfield will find them difficult going. That is true, I suspect, of Glave’s article, yet as an Andeanist, I found it provocative and insightful (it would benefit, however, from a less literal translation). Selective reading will reward most Andeanists and Mexicanists.

Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity Victoria Wyatt Jennifer Kramer . Switchbacks: Art, Ownership, and Nuxalk National Identity, University of British Columbia Press. xiv, 152. $29.95 Between June 1995 and November 2001, Dr Kramer conducted sixteen months of fieldwork among the Nuxalk in Bella Coola, British Columbia. She explored the complicated facets of contemporary construction of identity among the Nuxalk, focusing on the roles that contemporary artworks – visual arts, songs, and dances – play in affirming identity. Today, in many disciplines, authors urge us to embrace a view of the world that acknowledges interconnections and complexities. (An outspoken advocate for a new way of thinking is David Weinberger in Everything Is Miscellaneous.) Embracing complexities and relationships – an ecosystems perspective – seems especially important as we face interconnected global challenges. Strong writing will contribute to this goal by advancing awareness of four overlapping concepts: diversity, complexity, relationships, and process. Kramer implicitly emphasizes the importance of these concepts. She points out that we should view artworks as processes rather than as static objects. Artworks assume layers of meaning over time, based on their relationships with the people – Native and non-Native – who have seen and used them. Kramer persuasively reminds us that cultures undergo processes. Essentialist concepts of culture do not reflect the reality of human experiences. Other writers have made the same point equally forcefully, and Kramer may somewhat overstate the extent to which the essentialist perspective remains a problem in contemporary literature. Nevertheless, the point about cultural change is extremely important, and eloquent demonstrations such as Kramer's deserve much credit. Kramer acknowledges diversity among the Nuxalk, noting that there are many different opinions in the community and even sometimes in individuals. She notes that contemporary politics make it important for bands to establish an image of nationhood in non-Native contexts such as land settlement, self-government, and repatriation. She points out that artworks, as representations of culture, contribute to the image of nationhood, even though there may be different attitudes towards ownership of artwork within the village. [End Page 168] Kramer provides a vivid discussion of some complexities involved in attempts to engage young people in cultural expression. Her experiences with these programs while volunteering at a school give insight into issues widely faced by peoples who have experienced extreme cultural oppression. Kramer interprets her observations among the Nuxalk through the lens of anthropological theory. She quotes generously from a wide range of academic writers studying societies in many parts of the world, giving readers an important bibliography. Implicitly she suggests relationships between experiences of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world. Some readers may find the balance in the text weighted too much towards general theory, at the expense of culturally specific information and interpretations. As a historian, I would have preferred more synthesis of specific cultural/historical circumstances with the general theory. We have different disciplinary perspectives, and I would be wrong to steer readers away because of my preferences. Kramer implicitly invites readers to form their own opinions about the appropriate balance between theory and specificity. For this reason and several others, Switchbacks will interest a wide range of readers, serving as an excellent textbook for upper-level and graduate anthropological courses. One of the values of the text is Kramer's reflections about her role as an outsider doing fieldwork. Students embarking on fieldwork would benefit from reading her ideas. At times her interpretations cannot be persuasively supported by the short quotes provided, but this limitation is endemic to fieldwork: it is difficult, in a short text, to document all the experiences and conversations that lead one to form a conclusion. Kramer does need more specificity and documentation when making statements about other writers' intentions; for instance, readers familiar with The Legacy, by Peter Macnair, Alan Hoover, and Kevin Neary may rightly feel puzzled by her remarks. In a relatively short text, Kramer accomplishes much of value. She demonstrates the importance of acknowledging complexities and process when examining human situations. Students and practitioners of anthropology can gain much by reading her text. Victoria Wyatt Department of History in Art, University of Victoria Copyright © 2008 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’

Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal, Some Are More Equal than ‘Others’

Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a Nahua Vision of the Conquest of GuatemalaBajo el signo de la compulsión: El trabajo forzoso indígena en el sistema colonial yucateco, 1540 – 1730

Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a Nahua Vision of the Conquest of GuatemalaBajo el signo de la compulsión: El trabajo forzoso indígena en el sistema colonial yucateco, 1540 – 1730

Environmental and health benefits of hunting lifestyles and diets for the Innu of Labrador

The Innu of northern Labrador, Canada have undergone profound transitions in recent decades with important implications for conservation, food and health policy. The change from permanent nomadic hunting, gathering and trapping in ‘the country’ ( nutshimit) to sedentary village life (known as ‘sedentarisation’) has been associated with a marked decline in physical and mental health. The overarching response of the national government has been to emphasize village-based and institutional solutions. We show that changing the balance back to country-based activities would address both the primary causes of the crisis and improve the health and well-being of the Innu. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with Innu older people ( Tshenut), empirical data on nutrition and activity, and comparative data from the experiences of other indigenous peoples, we identify pertinent biological and environmental transitions of significance to the current plight of the Innu. We show that nutrition and physical activity transitions have had major negative impacts on individual and community health. However, hunting and its associated social and cultural forms is still a viable option as part of a mixed livelihood and economy in the environmentally significant boreal forests and tundra of northern Labrador. Cultural continuity through Innu hunting activities is a means to decelerate, and possibly reverse, their decline. We suggest four new policy areas to help restore country-based activities: (i) a food policy for country food; (ii) an outpost programme; (iii) ecotourism; and (iv) an amended school calendar. Finally, we indicate the implications of our analysis for people in other countries.

Retelling the History: The Indigenous Palestinian Bedouin in Israel

As Linda Smith notes in the Foreword, it has been the common experience of indigenous peoples to have their histories erased and retold by the conquering colonial powers, and it is all too common for indigenous people to be powerless and passive participants in this process. In this paper it is my intention to retell the history of my own people, the Palestinian Bedouin living in what is now southern Israel, from an indigenous perspective. It is also my intention to explore the ways in which the telling of history is not only a matter of the past, but is critical to determining current and future political and social policy. As such, the retelling of indigenous histories—and the introduction of indigenous histories into mainstream discourse—is as much about our futures as it is about our past. Furthermore, it is an act of resistance against the colonisers’ hegemony over the telling of history and against the violence that their hegemony has both dictated and hidden from view: Under colonialism indigenous peoples have struggled against a Western view of history and yet been complicit with the view. We have often allowed our ‘histories’ to be told and have then become outsiders as we heard them being retold … Maps of the world reinforced our place on the periphery of the world, although we were still considered part of the Empire. This included having to learn new names for our lands. Other symbols of our loyalty, such as the flag, were also an integral part of the imperial curriculum. Our orientation to the world was already being redefined as we were being excluded systematically from the writing of the history of our own lands. (Smith, 1999, p. 33)

Reconsidering Incorporation : Uneven Histories of Capitalist Expansion and Encroachment, Native America

In “Reconsidering Incorporation: Uneven Histories of Capitalist Expansion and Encroachment, Native America,” Caleb M. Bush critically examines theories of capitalist expansion, and argues that processes of incorporation into global capitalism are ongoing and partial, rather than past and complete. Bush emphasizes the role of local agency in shaping incorporation. In applying the concept of incorporation to the experience of indigenous peoples of North America, he contends that the exploitation of indigenous lands and resources needs to be considered in world-historic terms, not as an instance of internal colonialism.

The Tyranny of localism: Indigenous participation in community-based environmental management

This paper examines the claim that community-based environmental management is fairer and more democratic than so-called ‘top-down’ approaches. The paper examines the experience of Australian indigenous peoples with a national, community-based environmental management programme. The analysis of the programme reveals systemic marginalization of indigenous peoples. The paper suggests that ‘bottom-up’ governance serves to magnify the importance of local material and symbolic contests in which indigenous groups are engaged. Community-based environmental management can fail precisely because of what many of its advocates take to be its more democratic quality: its localism.

Being healed by an indigenous traditional healer: sacred healing stories of Native Americans. Part II

Abstract Culture determines how one views illness and thus, their choice of healing to seek treatment for disease processes. Traditional indigenous healing is an ancient holistic approach used today by some Native Americans to resolve health care problems. This article presents four stories of three indigenous people who sought traditional healing for imbalance and disease. The accounts were derived from a qualitative phenomenological study, The lived experience of indigenous people healed by indigenous traditional healers . The healing stories provide examples of contemporary specific healing rituals used during indigenous healing encounters. Healing methods described include the Sun Dance, Yuwipi, Ojibwe Healing Ceremony, Shaking Tent and Shaker Healing Ritual. The stories reveal that old knowledge is still paramount in a contemporary society. The accounts point to the necessity for health care professionals and nurses to understand and encourage Native people to incorporate indigenous healing practices into their lives for attainment of the highest level of well-being, which includes potential for decreasing health disparities in this population.

Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler‐Colonial State Formation

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the use of the concept of cultural genocide to understand one particular episode in Australian legal, political and social history, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, mostly during the 20th century. After outlining the approach of Australian courts to the idea of cultural genocide, the paper examines the construction of the UN Genocide Convention, particularly the clause concerning the forcible removal of children, which illustrates the underlying instability of the boundary between a cultural and a physical understanding of genocide. It then explores how this instability was manifested in the development of early 20th century Australian legislation concerning the ‘protection’ of Aborigines, indicating the underlying racially‐oriented coerciveness of conceptions of Aboriginal ‘welfare’, and concludes by reflecting on the wide range of ways in which the concept of genocide can and should be used, especially in capturing the experience of Indigenous peoples under settler‐colonialism.

Overview of the Social Transition in the North project 1995- 1998

Objective. This paper describes the overall aims and design of the Social Transitions in the North study. The objective of the STN study was to assess how epidemiological, demographic and domestic changes have affected Northern communities.Study Design. Sixteen communities in the Russian Far East and Alaska were compared. Survey data were collected in three phases with a response rate of 70%.Methods. The experiences of indigenous peoples with demographic, epidemiological and domestic changes were measured using forced-choice questionnaires, focus groups, oral histories, protocol interviews, interviews with institutional informants, genealogies and analysis of secondary data.Results. The principal researchers died during a boating accident before the analysis phase. Alaska researchers were asked to review the data for utility.Conclusions. The STN data was developed using rigorous cross-cultural research team. It was be used by social science researchers and others to better understand the impact of rapid changes in the Arctic.

Living and writing indigenous spiritual resistance

For Indigenous peoples working inside institutions it is important to work in ways that support decolonizing the mind and spirit. It is important to find ways of creating, interrogating, validating, and disseminating knowledges. Telling stories is a practice in Indigenous cultures which has sustained communities and which validates the experiences of Indigenous peoples and epistemologies. This paper explores the importance of inclusion of Indigenous knowledges in academic settings through three stories about: (1) academic insistence that knowledge is outside the self, (2) backlash to Indigenous practices in academe, and (3) intergenerational impacts of experiences of suppression in education. The stories help us critique theoretical conceptions of what constitutes ‘valid’ knowledge and understand struggles for survival and resistance to domination in educational institutions. The paper explores responses to dominant societies' suppression of Indigenous knowledges in academic settings and broader society through acts of resistance, storytelling, living spiritual resistance, writing as survival strategies, and resistance within education. This paper explores ways that Indigenous knowledges are honored, affirmed, and shared.

The Legal Revolution in Town Politics: Oaxaca and Yucatán, 1812-1825

delictuosa de unos indios, 1813,” Archivo General del Estado de Yucatan, Merida (hereafter cited as AGEY), Colonial, Varios, vol. 1, exp. 17. Wherever possible, I have modernized the names of the towns I refer to. If there was any doubt about the identification of a town, however, I left its name as written in the documents. There were some towns that I have not been able to correlate with modern towns, either because their names have changed or because they no longer exist. A further note on terminology: I have chosen to use the word

TRANSFORMING CULTURAL VILLAGES IN THE SPATIAL DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES OF SOUTH AFRICA

ABSTRACT Cultural villages in South Africa are predominantly owned and controlled by whites. Transformation in cultural village tourism is essential to the government's agenda of empowerment through tourism. Comparison with the international experience of indigenous people with tourism, points to historically and politically determined factors that have shaped ownership and benefit flows from cultural villages. Literature on indigenous tourism further highlights trends in support for empowerment through tourism, and related debates. In South Africa, the use of tourism as a tool for empowerment has been taken forward predominantly within SDIs and through the SDI process, and has started to affect cultural villages in these areas. Current local strategies and projects can both learn from and contribute to international debates around tourism and empowerment.

Cultural Trauma and Recovery

This article examines an essential psychological function of culture and the consequences of its traumatic disruption from the perspective of terror management theory. The experience of indigenous peoples in their contact with Europeans and the social, psychological, and behavioral consequences of that traumatic contact constitute the focus of this examination. Culture, it is suggested, serves as a psychological defense cooperatively constructed to manage the terror inherent in human existence and allow anxiety-prone human organisms to act adaptively. Implications for mental health professionals working with culturally diverse populations and with people seeking to recover, clarify, and affirm their cultural foundations are considered.

Unresolved grief and the removal of indigenous Australian children

This paper considers the usefulness of theory and practice in mainstream psychology in relation to the experiences of Indigenous people directly affected by the practice of child removal. It consists of an interview in which one of the authors, Joyleen Koolmatrie, an Indigenous psychologist, reflects on her work with Indigenous people affected by the removal, including a description of her workshops, which have been conducted throughout Australia, and a reflection by the authors on the approaches to the management of unresolved grief contained in the clinical literature. Key points arising in the paper concern the necessity for psychological theories of grief and grieving to open out to include consideration of sociopolitical and inter-group aspects of loss, and the significance of the identity of the mental health professional who seeks to work with Indigenous people affected by the removal. It is considered preferable that such professionals should themselves be Indigenous since this minimises the risk of re-enactment of the initial trauma and structured oppression within the therapeutic setting.