Indigenous Land Titling Research Articles

Indigenous collective land titling and the creation of leftovers: Insights from Paraguay and Cambodia

AbstractCollective land titling often drags on for decades, while private land concessions and holdings do not face the same problem, creating ‘leftovers’ of land available for Indigenous peoples to attempt to collectively title. In two ethnographic case studies in Cambodia and Paraguay, we analyse community‐based Indigenous land titling by focusing on the on‐the‐ground dynamics of property relations, Indigenous livelihood shifts and ecological change. In both countries, large agricultural players implemented a staggering change in local landscapes through deforestation, configuring new realities that in turn feed into local environments and titling processes. Adapting their livelihoods to living in the leftovers, in Cambodia, the Indigenous Bunong shifted from rice to rubber as they navigated the slow titling process. In Paraguay, some Indigenous Guarani shifted from corn to cattle by renting out their collectively titled land. The case studies show that the liberal titling approach to secure Indigenous lands overestimates the ability of title to remove land from capitalist logics such as the push to rent or sell, while some spaces of autonomy are opened. We critique the liberal approaches to formalising title, where Indigenous struggles for their ways of life are funnelled into fighting for collective property.

Property rights and violence in indigenous land in Brazil

In Brazil establishing secure rights to indigenous land is a prerogative of the President and is the main tool for conducting indigenous policy. It is also highly controversial with intense debate as to the extent of land which should be considered indigenous and the extent of rights that should be protected. Despite strong constitutional rights, indigenous territories have been regularly encroached by an expanding economy. It is thus not clear that this policy instrument can effectively protect indigenous rights and avoid the depredation and devastation of their land and communities. I analyze data on all indigenous lands in Brazil to measure the impact of property rights on violence. To deal with the reverse causality from violence to property rights as well as omitted variables, I exploit an indigenous land titling program from 1996 to 2005 that selected for territories that were most prone to violence. Using as counterfactual a matched sample of territories that did not receive this treatment, I provide causal evidence that stronger property right to indigenous land can reduce violence.

Trends in Aboriginal water ownership in New South Wales, Australia: The continuities between colonial and neoliberal forms of dispossession

There is significant interest in global trends in Indigenous land titling but relatively less attention given to Indigenous water tenure despite significant reform of water governance regimes in many regions of the world. This paper considers the intertwined and complex history of Aboriginal land and water tenure in the Australian State of New South Wales, within the Murray-Darling Basin. Its temporal scope encompasses the initial dispossession effected by colonization and settler water development; the re-appropriation of land and water under social justice restoration schemes from the 1970s; and the past decade in which the small water holdings in the possession of some Aboriginal organizations have significantly diminished. The paper shows that proprietary rights to land and water acquired through the colonial period strongly conditioned rights of access to water during subsequent eras, particularly when Australian governments separated land and water titles and capped water use to create the world’s biggest water market. Using empirical water entitlement data, we profile the composition, spatial distribution and value of Aboriginal water holdings in the NSW portion of the Murray-Darling Basin. We show that while Aboriginal people in this area constitute nearly 10 % of the total population, their organizations hold only 0.2 % of the available surface water. We identify changes in Aboriginal water holdings between 2009 and 2018 that are indicative of a new wave of dispossession. Almost one fifth of Aboriginal water holdings by volume were lost over 2009−18 (at least 17.2 % in standardized terms). We discuss the factors that render Aboriginal water-holders vulnerable to the loss of valuable water rights and those factors that constrain the ability of all Aboriginal people to fully enjoy the benefits of water access, including water market participation. Additionally, we identify critical omissions in Australian water rights reform and offer recommendations for redress that are of wider international relevance.

Traditional Laws Meet Emerging Biotechnologies: The Impact of Genetic Genealogy on Indigenous Land Title in Australia

The increasing popularity and availability of genetic testing has the potential to play into debates surrounding forms of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land ownership known as “native title.” This paper draws on research with applied anthropologists working in native title, and a review of descriptions of native title holders in existing determinations, to address three key questions: Are native title holders and claimants interested in using genetic genealogy for claiming native title or resolving membership disputes? If so, can this biotechnology offer them the kind of information they seek? And finally, does the legal framework allow or support its use for these purposes? Our findings highlight the importance of disseminating current information about genetic genealogy among Indigenous Australians and having frank conversations about the opportunities and limits of genetic technologies in this context.

Rethinking territory and property in indigenous land claims

The recent proliferation of indigenous land titling processes has generated debate around the possibilities and limits of indigenous engagements with modern forms of cartography, territory and property. This paper makes a novel contribution to these discussions by highlighting the contradictory effects of territory and property in indigenous land claims processes. My analysis departs from a consideration of multicultural cartographies of territorially-bounded indigeneity and their awkward articulation with the racial regimes of ownership (Bhandar, 2018) that undergird settler and postcolonial property systems. The paper then examines how this tension has played out in the mapping and titling of Native Community Lands in South-eastern Bolivia. I trace how the discursive and cartographic representation of Native Community Lands as bounded, contiguous spaces of indigeneity has been undermined by the socio-spatial effects of propertisation, which has reinscribed colonial hierarchies of race and property, leaving indigenous villages isolated within discontinuous fragments of marginal land. The paper concludes by examining how the tensions between territory and property continue to haunt indigenous resource politics in the Bolivian Chaco two decades after the creation of Native Community Lands.

Ambivalent cartographies: Exploring the legacies of indigenous land titling through participatory mapping

This paper reflects on the possibilities and limits of participatory mapping as a tool for interrogating the power–knowledge inequalities that structure indigenous peoples’ engagements with postcolonial state cartography and bureaucracy. I describe mapping activities conducted in a remote Guaraní community in the Bolivian Chaco as part of a research project exploring the dynamics and legacies of Native Community Lands, a national indigenous land titling programme. While these exercises were designed to explore the disjunctures between state and indigenous knowledges of territory, they generated unexpected power dynamics that led me to reflect more deeply on the power of maps, the pitfalls of ‘countermapping’ as an activist practice and my own imbrication in a bureaucratic field of power. The paper concludes that participatory mapping can be a fruitful if ambivalent method for studying state bureaucracy, which demonstrates the value of examining the legal-cartographic knowledges of the state ‘from the margins’ – including from the perspective of the people and places they claim to represent.

Reconciling the North: Transit Pipelines and the Pursuit of Self-Sufficient Self-Government in the Yukon

The research investigates how the responsibilities of Self-Governing Yukon First Nations (SGYFNs) regarding Settlement Land under the Umbrella Final Agreement, 1993, can be used to advance pipeline projects on Indigenous land title. In doing so, it challenges the contemporary notion of the Westphalian state system that has come to define the modern nation-state entity. Accordingly, the investigation employs contemporary border theory to examine how the responsibilities and obligations of SGYFNs, the Government of Yukon, and the Government of Canada can solve Aboriginal boundary issues to develop a sustainable Arctic economy in the 21st century, which is on the verge of unprecedented opportunity. As such, it takes transnational pipeline projects in developing countries as the basis of a trans-territorial model within the Canadian context, before concluding that it is equitable, lawful, and fair to provide incentives to reluctant Yukon First Nations to consent to pipeline development projects on Settlement Land.

Separating Sisters From Brothers: Ethnic Relations and Identity Politics in the Context of Indigenous Land Titling in Indonesia

Environmental and social transformations in Jambi province, Indonesia, are inextricably interlinked. Large-scale agro-industrial development and nature conservation policies equally alienate local communities from their agricultural lands and turn land into a scarce resource. Consequently, access to agricultural land becomes increasingly contested, not only between communities and state institutions or companies but also among communities themselves. To secure or restore local ‘indigenous’ land rights against land grabbing and green grabbing by states and companies, indigenous land titling has become a powerful tool all over the world. Ongoing activities of indigenous land titling in Indonesia have been largely perceived as an act of justice by indigenous and land rights activists and affected communities. Yet, a challenging step towards titling is the identification of who is and who is not ‘indigenous’. This highly political process creates ethnicity-based identities tied to rights and possibilities around land as a contested resource. Based on a case study of a national park in central Jambi, this paper shows that what is perceived as an act of justice against the state can also produce injustice among local communities by heavily impacting and transforming local social structures and relations.

Ch’ixi landscapes: Indigeneity and capitalism in the Bolivian Chaco

Contemporary debates around the ontological turn have pitted efforts to take indigenous ontologies seriously against demands to make visible the forms of dispossession and environmental suffering that characterize the (post)colonial and capitalist present. Meanwhile, a growing array of governmental projects seeks to identify and protect indigenous ontologies in the face of capitalist development processes, including through forms of collective tenure. How can we make sense of such initiatives, and what kind of territories do they encounter and produce? This paper engages this question ethnographically through an examination of everyday life in a legally recognized Native Community Land in the Bolivian Chaco. Drawing on Bolivian Aymara scholar Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s notion of ch’ixi, I argue that indigenous territories are neither ontologically separate from, nor entirely subsumed by, capitalist development processes. Rather, they are subject to multiple land values, ontologies, and investments. A contested indigenous land titling process, capitalist labor relations, hydrocarbon compensation money, and efforts to maintain relations with spirit beings are all interwoven in the fabric of Guaraní everyday life. Such ch’ixi landscapes emerge at the confluence of capitalist efforts at rendering territories investable, governmental efforts at managing dispossession, and Guaraní efforts to maintain life and exercise territorial sovereignty amidst contradictory processes of (post)colonial governmentality.

Ideas cambiantes sobre territorio, recursos y redes políticas en la Amazonía indígena: un estudio de caso sobre Perú

The titling of territory was the principal objective of the Peruvian Amazon’s indigenous political movement over the past four decades. Despite more than eighty communities in the Ucayali region still without legal title, the regional indigenous movement increasingly focuses on strengthening governance over already titled territory. We explore a growing emphasis on forestry production in the discourse of indigenous rights in Ucayali. Networks of indigenous leaders have produced environmental discourses to forge new relationships between their communities and Ucayali’s extractive economy. Our analysis of eighty interviews and testimonies of indigenous leaders and community members demonstrates the value of exploring resource management in titled territories to inform current agendas for untitled communities. Natural resource extraction from the forests and waterways of indigenous communities creates much of the conflict over indigenous land titling.

A tale of two villages: An investigation of conservation-driven land tenure reform in a Cambodian Protection Forest

In this paper, we present an analysis of the change in household land use following a conservation-driven process of indigenous land titling reform in a Cambodian protected area. In each of the two study villages, we investigated how household land use had changed and the extent of compliance with both legal boundaries of titled areas and community regulations created to govern land use within these areas. A comparison of current household land holdings in each village with those at the start of the tenure reform process indicated a significant increase in household land holdings. Changing land use practices were also revealed, as households shift away from traditional subsistence based land use towards more commercialised agriculture. Household compliance was observed to be strongly correlated with total land holdings and participation in the tenure reform process, with compliance levels significantly higher in the village that had experienced lower levels of external land grabbing and immigration. Similarly, understanding and perceptions of the tenure reform process was found to differ dramatically between the two study villages. The importance of supporting local resource management institutions created through tenure reform, particularly in the face of strong external drivers of change, and of engaging with immigrant households are highlighted as key to the continuing effectiveness of participatory land use planning approaches.

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

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...

Indigenous land claims in Europe: The European Court of Human Rights and the decolonization of property

This study examines the potential impact of recent developments in international human rights law relating to indigenous land claims on the protection of property under the European Convention on Human Rights. In a departure from colonial law the authors show how the doctrine of ancestral indigenous land title has recently been incorporated into international human rights law. This development, however, has yet to occur within the regime of the European Convention. The authors argue that the new decolonized approach to property can and should be adopted by the European Court of Human Rights in its interpretation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 of the European Convention.Keywords: Indigenous Peoples, European Court of Human Rights, Land Rights, Property, Legal Pluralism, Ancestral Land Title, International Human Rights Law, Protocol No. 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights.Citation: Arctic Review on Law and Politics, vol. 4, 2/2013 pp. 156–180. ISSN 1891-6252

The ethno-environmental fix and its limits: Indigenous land titling and the production of not-quite-neoliberal natures in Bolivia

During the 1980s and 1990s, an era of neoliberal reform, global development institutions like the World Bank began promoting and financing the collective titling of indigenous territories. Extending and linking existing discussions of neoliberal multiculturalism and neoliberal natures, this paper interrogates indigenous land rights as a type of “ethno-environmental fix”, designed to synergise protection of vulnerable populations and highly-valued natures from the destructive effects of markets, in an era of multiple countermovements. Using the example of the titling of TCOs (Original Communal Lands) in Bolivia, the paper explores how governmental aspirations for indigenous territories unravelled in practice, producing hybrid, double-edged and “not-quite-neoliberal” spaces – spaces which have, paradoxically, emerged as key sites for the construction of more radical indigenous projects.

:Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska

In Canada, New Zealand, the United States, and even Australia, recent decades have witnessed a fragile but positive trend toward reparative justice for indigenous peoples. Strong moral and practical cases can be made for such reparations, but it tends to be the legal case that produces results. Entire archives of evidence have been roused out and a whole new field has opened up for historians. But there are problems; when high-paid, high-powered lawyers work with low-paid, job-hungry historians on reparative justice cases, the legal approach often wins out. Comparative and transnational histories offer a way out of this trap. They are connected to no particular case, no particular group of clients, and can apply the valuable new data produced by “reparative history” to wider issues. Stuart Banner's new book is a welcome case in point. The book ranges impressively across nine complex histories of nineteenth-century land alienation, from the American colonies of California, the Pacific Northwest, Hawai'i, and Alaska to the British colonies and protectorates of Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, Fiji, and Tonga. Banner shows that the relevant colonial regimes had three options when deciding on how colonial law would interpret indigenous land rights. They could deny that indigenous peoples had any ownership rights at all, the doctrine of terra nullius; they could accept that indigenes owned all land until alienated by sale or cession; or they could take a middle course and recognize indigenous ownership only of land “actually used,” with “waste” land falling to the state. Under the second and third options, where indigenous land title was recognized, colonial regimes tried to detribalize or individualize it.

Small Nations of the Russian North and their Rights as Indigenous Peoples

Claims by the ‘Small Nations’ of northern Russia for recognition by the Russian state of some form of indigenous rights to lands they have traditionally used and occupied to derive their livelihood – an issue that has long been dormant – may be emerging as a public issue in the Russian Federation. This would coincide with similar actions initiated by aboriginal groups in other Arctic jurisdictions, such as in Alaska, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, and Greenland, and by the Sami of Norway, Sweden and Finland. This paper outlines how a control-consociationalism typology can be utilized to analyze how the Russian Federation and a number of regional administrations have responded to such historic claims by these indigenous minorities. Under a control situation, the cultural identity of a minority is almost exclusively determined by the laws, regulations and administrative procedures of the state. Under a consociationalism model, there would be a continuing dialogue between a state and a minority within an administrative framework that the minority has had a significant role in developing. Such a typology can be used to trace more than four centuries of administrative control by the Russian state and also to examine how existing institutions deal with these indigenous northern minorities. Recent documentation by the government of the Russian Federation indicates that most authorities see collective minority rights as a component of human rights and furthermore that these northern Small Nations constitute an indigenous minority. However, the concept of indigenous land title is likely to be a divisive one among politicians and administrators; many will oppose it or maintain that it is not really necessary. Many indigenous rights activists, on the other hand, see it as a fundamental issue – even one of moral justice – that must be ultimately addressed by the state.

Aboriginal self-determination and indigenous land title in post- Mabo Australia

In June 1992, the Australian High Court handed down its judgement in the landmark case of Mabo v Queensland No. 2). Much to the consternation of powerful mining capital, pastoral and state government interests, the majority of the Justices overturned legal precedent and declared that under certain circumstances common law indigenous title to land had survived European conquest. This determination was enthusiastically received by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia on the grounds that it paved the way for a renewed phase of indigenous empowerment and self-determination. The paper places the Mabo judgement in context and, three years on, discusses the question of whether the earlier euphoria was justified.