Indigenous Land Research Articles

Indigenous lands and conservation units slow down non-GHG climate change in the Cerrado-Amazon ecotone

Preserving tropical forests by avoiding deforestation and forest degradation is essential for maintaining ecosystem services. Brazilian Conservation Units (CUs) and Indigenous Lands (ILs) have effectively prevented deforestation and supported climate regulation. However, these protected areas face increasing threats from forest fires and droughts across the Amazon and Cerrado biomes. This study assesses how disturbances affect climate regulating factors (surface temperature (LST), evapotranspiration (ET), and albedo) in Mato Grosso state, among different land uses (CUs, ILs, and multiple-use areas - MUs). To do so, we analyzed satellite data collected between 2001 and 2020. Results showed that MUs (outside protected areas) had lower ET (∼10%), higher daytime LST (∼1.5 °C), and higher albedo (∼10%) than CUs and ILs in both biomes in 2001. Over the study period, MUs experienced a greater increase in LST (Amazon: ∼1.4 °C; Cerrado: ∼1.1 °C) and albedo (Amazon: ∼6%; Cerrado: ∼3%) compared to protected areas, regardless of the biome. In contrast, ILs and CUs showed smaller mean changes in LST (∼0.2 °C), ET (∼1.3%), and albedo (∼1.3%). These changes were associated with native vegetation loss, forest fires, and water stress. Our results highlight the important role of protected areas in maintaining climate stability, with higher ET, lower LST, and lower albedo than other land uses. However, the long-term preservation of these services within protected areas depends on interventions in surrounding regions, particularly in the Amazon. Protecting and restoring these natural ecosystems is key for safeguarding ecosystem services and climate regulation in tropical regions.

Territorial Conflicts and Soybeans: Kanhgág Politics and Their Struggle for Land Rights in Southern Brazil

Today, Kanhgág people live mainly in small Terras Indígenas (Indigenous Lands) in southern Brazil. Those lands are the outcome of a history of equivocal alliances and conflicts between indigenous peoples and European colonisers. Presenting aspects of these relations in both historical and contemporary settings, this article traces continuities and transformations in indigenous politics and cosmology, focusing on the struggles over territory and resources now playing out around soy cultivation. Avoiding simplistic presentations of colonial impositions, it draws on kanhgág people's dualist cosmology, factional sociality and the fecundity of alterity to consider those territorial struggles within indigenous autonomy and alliances.

"Odd but recognizable": Indigenous Epistemologies and Indo-Creole Belonging in Cyril Dabydeen's Dark Swirl

Abstract: Recent scholarship across postcolonial, settler colonial, and critical Indigenous studies has interrogated the ascription of a settler identity to racialized communities whose own presence on Indigenous land may have been the result of the violent processes of colonialism. Simultaneously, this body of work has attended to how even these communities can replicate settler modes of belonging that marginalize Indigenous Peoples. In the postcolonial Caribbean, a discourse of labor and land ownership arguably consolidated Indo- and Afro-Creole belonging in such a way. This article examines literary fiction's role in imagining other ways of belonging for East Indians in Guyana. It illuminates how Cyril Dabydeen's Dark Swirl (1988) circumvents the framework of labor, land ownership, and enclosure to articulate a mode of belonging that unfolds by engaging with Indigenous histories and epistemologies. The resultant rearrangement of the East Indian characters' understanding of the land they inhabit is key to the novel's articulation of creole belonging. Dark Swirl thus intervenes in scholarship on creolization in the Caribbean that has often either ignored East Indians or reproduced the discourse of Indigenous disappearance.

“A Rape of the Earth”

Abstract This article is a Sámi feminist analysis of large-scale resource extraction in Sábme, the transnational Sámi territory spanning northern Fenno-Scandinavia and the Murmansk peninsula. Specifically, it centers on the mining of Indigenous land within the borders of the Swedish nation-state to explore the knowledge evolving from Sámi feminists engaged in the anti-mining struggle. Here, I argue that Indigenous epistemes—that is, the foregrounding of relationality and interdependency between land, humans, nonhuman beings, and the natural environment—are foundational to the research participants’ struggles against mining in Sábme. From within a Sámi knowledge system, mining entails fracturing the relational web of connection. Consequently, mining represents a multigenerational threat against the survival of Sámi body lands and lifeworlds.

Denaturalizing Dispossession in the Political Ecology of the American West: Reassessing the History of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and Its Implications for Indigenous Land and Water Rights

Indigenous dispossession has been left out or relegated to the historical background of much of the political ecology of the American West, naturalized as a precursor to natural resource policy rather than as a direct and ongoing consequence of it. This article offers a framework for denaturalizing dispossession, drawing on Indigenous and settler colonial studies to examine the specific legal, political, and territorial processes by which dispossession is produced and contested over time. This framework is used to examine the long-overlooked history of Indigenous dispossession wrought by the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the early twentieth century. In-depth archival, legal, and ethnographic research reveals how, in the 1930s, this history became obscured by naturalizing discourses that continue to be invoked in disputes over tribal land and water rights today. The study underscores the complex intersections of law, history, and justice in struggles over dispossession and highlights the need for more engagement on these issues from political ecologists of the American West.

Indigenizing Blankness in the Works of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gerald Vizenor, and Jordan Abel

ABSTRACT The article examines the strategic use of blankness in the literary works of Indigenous authors Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Nation Anishinaabe) and Jordan Abel (Nisga’a). The study begins by tracing the broader tradition of blank books, blank works of art, and blank pages in English language literature, discussing the techniques that have evolved to make blankness speak. We then trace the potential implications of blanks in work specifically by Indigenous artists, where it can be made to speak as a commentary on erasure, genocide and epistemicide. However, in our readings of all three writers, we discover that each uses strategies of blanking to take the audience through such a trauma-centered reading, but also to go beyond it. By emphasizing the creative renewal that blankness embodies, each author uses it as a (literal) space of healing and imagination. This space is then linked via various narrative associations, most importantly by invoking the ancient art of petroglyphs, to Indigenous land sovereignty and survivance.

Wages for Earthwork

This essay proposes a novel paradigm for a political theory of climate justice: wages for earthwork. Indigenous peoples have disproportionately contributed to the sustainable stewardship of the natural world through ecological systems of governance, which I theorize as “earthwork.” Proponents of climate reparations have focused on reparations for unequal climate damages from emissions. By contrast, I propose “wages” or reparations to Indigenous peoples for debt owed to them for their devalued climate work. This framework makes use of an analogy to the 1970s feminist wages for housework movement, which sought to reveal the exploited and yet indispensable character of systematically devalued work rendered natural and invisible. I contend that (re)valuing earthwork must also be central to projects aimed at decolonizing climate justice, that is, anticolonial climate justice. More than monetary transfers alone, wages for earthwork prioritize the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and land and wider structural transformation of colonial capitalism.

The conflict between Rights of Nature and mining in Ecuador: Implications of the Los Cedros Cloud Forest case for biodiversity conservation

Abstract Global emergence of Rights of Nature (RoN) has gained momentum since Ecuador became the first country to constitutionally recognize it in 2008. The shift from perceiving nature as an object, to granting it legal subjecthood, can revolutionize protection of ecological systems. In 2021, Ecuador's Constitutional Court issued a landmark ruling, halting mining in the Los Cedros Protected Forest. Three pillars form the basis for legal protection of Los Cedros: (i) the right to timely, Free Prior Informed Environmental Consultation, (ii) application of the Precautionary Principle in risk to RoN, and (iii) the Right to Water. We analyse the Court ruling to identify legal frameworks applied then map and rank mining risk to other protected forests, Indigenous territories, unprotected native ecosystems, biodiversity and areas of water resource conflict to determine potential scale of conflict between mining and RoN. 7813 mining concessions of 22,812km2 overlay 9.2% of Ecuadorian mainland, 2323 concessions (29.7%) overlap 16,081km2 of protected forest (4781 km2, 20%), Indigenous territory (6473 km2, 8%) and native vegetation outside protected areas and Indigenous territories (13,390 km2, 9%). With 80% of their protected forests at risk from large‐scale mining, the most impacted Indigenous communities are the Shuar. Synthesis and applications: The Los Cedros legal case in Ecuador sets a precedent for using RoN to challenge mining in 4781 km2 of similar Protected Forest, with potential to protect an additional 16,081 km2 of Indigenous lands and biologically important ecosystems. However, lack of biological data for these areas will necessitate extensive data collection, possibly through community‐empowering citizen science. Our study emphasizes the urgent need to integrate indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge (ITEK), law and ecology. We propose a new transdisciplinary field of ‘ecological forensics’ to support nature protection within the RoN framework. Our research also identifies areas where RoN could effectively protect nature and that are likely to be of high investment risk for the mining industry. The final recommendation is to reconsider mining concessions in Ecuador, especially in ecologically sensitive areas, Indigenous territories, high biodiversity areas, and regions with water resource conflicts, to maintain ecological integrity and social harmony. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Patterns of Indigenous Land Tenure and Utilization: Comparison of Customary Law in Balinese and Acehnese People

Aim: This study examines and analyzes changes in patterns of tenure and utilization of customary land in line with changes and developments in society in the era of globalization and tourism industry both in Bali and in Aceh. There were lands that were originally customary lands. Customary. Some have changed their function while others are still functioning as customary lands. The purpose of this study is to analyze the causes of changes in patterns of tenure and utilization of customary lands in the Indigenous Peoples of Bali and Aceh. Before the change in orientation related to the use of customary land which still adheres to the communal and religious functions of customary land, but along with economic development and in the era of globalization, the tenure and utilization of customary land has undergone changes that lead to economic orientation. A controversial issue in land is the concept of economic function and social function of land which is the basis for excessive land use. One of the sources of the problem is the construction of tourism facilities, resulting in the economic value of the land being so high. Methods: This study uses mixed methods as legal research, namely between normative and empirical legal research by using field data and secondary data. Results: Found that in anticipating changes in the pattern of tenure and utilization of customary lands in the indigenous peoples of Bali and Aceh, the government and stakeholders need to design and implement various policy models that can maintain the sustainability of culture, environment, and the interests of the indigenous peoples of Bali and Aceh. A policy model that favors indigenous peoples in providing protection for customary lands in Bali and in Aceh. Community involvement and facilitating institutional development within indigenous peoples in decision-making in the ownership and use of customary land. Conclusion: Indigenous Peoples in the era of globalization have an important role in anticipating changes in the pattern of tenure and utilization of customary land in order to maintain cultural values, identity, and community welfare. For this reason, steps need to be taken, including strengthening indigenous peoples through education and self-awareness, strengthening identity and culture, active involvement of indigenous peoples in decision making and the establishment of customary institutions in representing indigenous peoples related to their interests.

Scrutinising commodity hype in imaginaries of the Swedish green steel transition

The technological push for hydrogen-based steel production has become a flagship project of the Swedish state for advancing its global environmental leadership and becoming the world's first fossil free welfare state. The new production process has the potential to drastically cut emissions in a heavy polluting industry. The plans also entail a drastic upscale in steel production, energy and iron ore consumption and risk increasing existing pressures on Indigenous Sami land, local communities, and biodiversity. This article sets out to investigate the frontier-making function of green steel imaginaries to contribute to debates on sacrificed spaces of extraction for green commodity demand. The article speaks to a call for a critical turn in sustainability transitions literature by introducing the concept of hype to scrutinise the material consequences of growth-based green transition imaginaries. This article builds on a narrative analysis of government, industry, and company actors’ visions of a green steel future. The analysis illustrates how sociotechnical imaginaries are constructed to enable particular industrial futures over other green transition pathways. We show that the sociotechnical imaginary of green steel, fuelled through hype, serves to advance the new commodity and growth of the industry while effectively cancelling out democratic nuance and non-extractive alternatives. The findings illustrate the importance of pluralising green imaginaries to ensure inclusive transition pathways and to nuance and discursively dismantle the hype of green transitions that fail to break with the growth paradigm.

A Western Cape Food Tour: Examining Indigenous Foods in Eateries Through the Lived Experience Model

Drawing attention to indigenous foods is economically advantageous for local communities growing plants to sell to the food industry, to promote food tourism and establishing alternative food systems characterised by lower costs, lessened environmental impact, and local availability. There is evidence that indigenous land stewardship could reinforce indigenous food sovereignty by recovering indigenous foods that could disappear. Although South African cuisine is not globally recognised as an ethnic cuisine, interest in it is growing, as its recent 52nd ranking (out of 100) on the TasteAtlas.com global cuisine rankings for 2023/2024 shows. Increasing understanding, availability, and celebration of indigenous foods in commercial eateries is therefore critical, along with an understanding of their sociocultural contextuality. Lived experience was the predominant guiding methodological model for this research. The researchers used qualitative phenomenological reporting to present their first-hand lived experiences, along with knowledge gained through meaning making of indigenous and heritage foods. Although this model has been criticised for methodology slurring, attention to academic rigour (in line with Husserl and Heidegger’s applied philosophical viewpoints) ensured that the knowledge gained was grounded in the researchers’ own experiences. The researchers report key insights and meaning making from their eating experiences and indigenous foods found during a food tour from 17 to 22 September 2023, along a predetermined road route within the Western Cape province of South Africa. This research contributes to the unique application of lived experience within the hospitality and tourism environments, and particularly the application of IPA (Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis) to assess participants’ ways of making meaning of indigenous food offerings found in eateries in detail.

An Interview with Cheryl Bryce: Decolonizing Place for Indigenous Food and Land Sovereignty

On February 4th, 2023, Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel spoke with Cheryl Bryce, Songhees Nation member and knowledge-keeper who focuses on land and Indigenous food sovereignty. She founded and continues to lead the lək̓ʷəŋən Community Tool Shed, an initiative that brings people together to decolonize the land and reinstate indigenous food systems. The following conversation covers kwetlal (camas) food systems, traditional land management, and sharing knowledge.

Galadzi (Bear)

The spirit of the ancestors are depicted in the painting of the bear, the great bear, and the salmon that returns to the river Gwani (Nimpkish River). This serigraph is reproduced for the Special Issue: Honoring Indigenous Land and Water Defenders (featured on cover). Copyright © Francis Dick 2003

An Interview with Loreisa Lepine: čisélqən tθə sx̌ənəšəns ə tθə iləkʷsiləŋ ɫtə (Following the Footprints of Our Ancestors)

On November 6th, 2023, Hannah Gentes spoke with čésəlit̓əšən (Loreisa Lepine). Loreisa is the first officially recognized and “ongoing” Indigenous Land Steward at the University of Victoria. Loreisa’s work involves the creation and prioritization of reconnection to land for Indigenous students in their homelands (lək̓ʷəŋən territory). Loreisa leads the A Place of Medicine restoration project in the courtyard of the David Turpin building at UVic. Their conversation covered being in relationship to the land, navigating colonial education spaces, and plant revitalization.

Clinical, Laboratory and Neurodevelopmental Findings in Children from the Yanomami-Ninam Population Chronically Exposed to Methylmercury.

Despite legal safeguards, the Yanomami community faces challenges such as unauthorized incursions by gold miners, resulting in environmental degradation, particularly from mercury. This jeopardizes the health and food security of indigenous individuals, especially due to the consumption of contaminated fish. Ethnic and racial disparities persist in indigenous healthcare, marked by troubling health indicators such as malnutrition, anemia, and infectious diseases. This cross-sectional study, conducted in October 2022 in the Yanomami Indigenous Territory in the Amazon Forest, Brazil, presented clinical, laboratory, and neurodevelopmental findings in Yanomami children chronically exposed to methylmercury. The results revealed that Yanomami children exhibited weights and heights below expectations (median Z-scores of -1.855 for weight for age and -2.7 for height for age), a high prevalence of anemia (25%), low vaccination coverage (15%), and low IQ (average 68.6). The Total Hair Mercury (Total Hg) levels ranged from 0.16 µg/g to 10.20 µg/g (mean: 3.30 µg/g; median: 3.70 µg/g). Of 117 children tested, 93 children (79.4%) had levels ≥ 2.0 µg/g (had no significant difference between sex). Among the 58 children for whom it was possible to estimate the Total Intelligence Quotient (TIQ), the average value was 68.6, ranging from 42 to 92 points (median: 69.5; standard deviation: 10.5). Additionally, the lowest score on the IQ test was associated with 5 times the risk of having high levels of mercury in their hair, 2,5 fold the risk of having an older age, and almost 8 times the risk of consuming fish, adjusting for nut consumption. Notwithstanding the study's limitations, results suggest that mercury contamination from illegal mining activities on indigenous lands may negatively impact neurodevelopment in older indigenous children, particularly those fish consumers, despite the inherent benefits of fish consumption. Addressing other socio-environmental concerns is crucial for enhancing the overall health of the population.

Pathways of financial capital in the Brazilian agrarian space: elements for the debate on water conflicts in Mato Grosso, Brazil

Based on the reading of Moore (2015) and the concepts of neo-extractivism and land grabbing, this paper characterizes an emblematic form of the realization of capitalism in Latin America, particularly in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso. As concrete expressions of land grabbing, the recently established Investment Funds in Agroindustrial Productive Chains (Fiagro) are discussed, and companies listed on the stock exchange directly linked to land speculation and/or monoculture are also presented. The geolocation is also revealed of the farms managed by Fiagro and their proximity to water conflicts in the state of Mato Grosso, together with a map presenting the geoenvironmental compartments of Mato Grosso and the indigenous lands. The objective is to discover clues on how – in response to the general movement of circulation and appreciation of capital on a global scale – the construction and operationalization of these renewed financial instruments may have a concrete impact on the existence of territories of peoples and communities that insist on operating with another logic.

Agents of the Settler State: Incarcerated Filipino Workers, Conjugal Migration, and Indigenous Dispossession at the Iwahig Penal Colony

Abstract: This essay examines a conjugal migration program at the Iwahig Penal Colony in the early twentieth-century Philippines that was designed by American colonial administrators and built by incarcerated Filipino men. The penal colony was part of a settler colonial project that was pushing to transform Indigenous spaces into terrains primed for the influx of land-seeking migrants from Hispanicized islands. Before the prison was opened, Indigenous Tagbanua lived at the site, which had never been governed by Euro-American colonizers. US officials cast Tagbanua families as impediments to development. The penal colony's incarcerated men were from lowland areas that had come under colonial rule for centuries. Colonial administrators saw their labor, conversely, as the linchpin that would turn the land, and eventually the entire island, into a terrain for commercial agriculture. Bureaucrats worked to transport women to Iwahig who had been in romantic relationships with prisoners before their arrests in order to support this project. Even though only 10 percent of incarcerated men were ever joined by their female partners, state agents cynically characterized the nuclear families formed through conjugal migration as institutions that sat at the foundation of the penal colony's settler colonial goals. Ultimately, American colonizers used these logics to confiscate Indigenous land that they identified as "underutilized," and integrate it into the colonial political economy.

Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege ed. by Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien (review)

Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege ed. by Daniel Heath Justice and Jean M. O’Brien (review)

Soil, Seeds, and Roses: Plantation Afterlives in an Argentine Soybean Frontier

In the Argentine Chaco — a world hotspot of agribusiness-driven deforestation — descendants of European settlers ( gringos) who built manual cotton plantations on Indigenous land and labor in the twentieth century, have since been displaced from farming by the “soy boom.” Nevertheless, plantation legacies persist in the racialized plant-relations of these actors today, and in their conflicted — and often acquiescent — attitudes to agribusiness. Drawing on emergent theories of the “Plantationocene,” this essay examines how three settler interlocutors grieve the loss of plant-worlds that soy agribusiness has displaced, with a focus on living soil, cotton seeds, and potted roses. I show that these multispecies attachments perform a double role: while they sensitize these actors to the ecological fallouts of the soy boom, they also reinforce settler colonial plantation logics of racialized progress that ultimately feed their acquiescence to that agribusiness model.

Conservation gaps and priorities of range-restricted birds in the Northern Andes.

The ongoing destruction of habitats in the tropics accelerates the current rate of species extinction. Range-restricted species are exceptionally vulnerable, yet we have insufficient knowledge about their protection. Species' current distributions, range sizes, and protection gaps are crucial to determining conservation priorities. Here, we identified priority range-restricted bird species and their conservation hotspots in the Northern Andes. We employed maps of the Area of Habitat (AOH), that better reflect their current distributions than existing maps. AOH provides unprecedented resolution and maps a species in the detail essential for practical conservation actions. We estimated protection within each species' AOH and for the cumulative distribution of all 335 forest-dependent range-restricted birds across the Northern Andes. For the latter, we also calculated protection across the elevational gradient. We estimated how much additional protection community lands (Indigenous and Afro-Latin American lands) would contribute if they were conservation-focused. AOHs ranged from 8 to 141,000 km2. We identified four conservation priorities based on cumulative species richness: the number of AOHs stacked per unit area. These priorities are high-resolution mapped representations of Endemic Bird Areas for the Tropical Andes that we consider critically important. Protected areas cover only 31% of the cumulative AOH, but community lands could add 19% more protection. Sixty-two per cent of the 335 species have ranges smaller than their published estimates, yet IUCN designates only 23% of these as Threatened. We identified 50 species as top conservation priorities. Most of these concentrate in areas of low protection near community lands and at middle elevations where, on average, only 34% of the land is protected. We highlight the importance of collaborative efforts among stakeholders: governments should support private and community-based conservation practices to protect the region with the most range-restricted birds worldwide.