Indigenous Political Organizations Research Articles

By What Jurisdiction? Law, Settler Colonialism, and the Geographical Assumptions of IR Theory

Abstract In this article, I consider critical writings on territory in International Relations, focusing on recent work on U.S. practices of extraterritorial jurisdiction. I suggest that, while such work has importantly traced the multiple ways in which U.S. authority often exceeds the supposed territorial boundaries of the United States, it has nonetheless failed to reckon with the contested and uneven nature of U.S. authority within such supposed boundaries. In particular, IR scholarship has failed to engage with the ways in which U.S. authority has been, and continued to be, contested by Indigenous people and nations. This failure is the product of an assumption that lies at the heart of the discipline—the assumption that Indigenous people are internal to colonizing or settler states. I suggest that the internalization of Indigenous people and Indigenous political organization that is at play in much IR scholarship is not simply a product of a generalized “state-centrism” or a product of histories of settler colonialism, writ large. Rather, at the heart of the territorial assignations and allotments of IR scholarship are assumptions about legal authority or jurisdiction—about who has jurisdiction to define and assign land, about who does not, and what law means at all. Critiquing these assumptions and their political implications, I show the importance of asking: “by what jurisdiction”? That is, what is the legal authority that we implicitly accept and assert when we designate territory in particular ways? The question insists that there are multiple laws (including multiple international laws) at play in global politics and opens up space for critical and postcolonial IR scholars to better take responsibility for their (often implicit) choices between multiple laws.

Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River: Kinship and History in the Western Amazon

Studies of contemporary Amazonian societies have always been in dialogue with the theoretical concerns of the anthropology of the day. Whether these themes are environmentally, philosophically, or politically founded (or, less often, economically founded), their sharpest focus is a single village. Rarely have anthropologists deliberately aimed to provide regional-level studies, incorporating people and societies that have related to each other, and continue to do so, over long periods of time. The connections across a region include marriage, friendship and ritual relations, and political alliances, as well as raiding, fighting, and enslavement. The success of this book is to have provided such a study in the Ecuadorean Amazon, for Pastaza Province, encompassing the Kichwa ethnolinguistic group of Sápara, Canelos Runa, Achuar, Napo Runa, Gaes, and Andoas peoples and, more recently, some Waorani kindreds.The main part addresses the kinship relations and the qualities of the memorized landscape of contemporary regional society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The six chapters cover various perspectives concerning how regional society is made and remembered. Indigenous concepts of kinship are key: the llacta (the residential cluster), the ayllu (the extended kin group covering different environments), and the runa (self-identified collectivity). Mary-Elizabeth Reeve builds on the proposal that kinship is practically based in the sense that living and working together forms closeness. To maintain long-distance ties between kin means visiting regularly, exchanging food and knowledge, and participating in festivals, all of which creates a “mutuality of being,” following Marshall Sahlins (p. 147). These relations are reinforced with more formal ones of ritual alliance and friendship, such as godparenthood, and more recently shared political ambitions across ethnic groupings. Movement and travel along rivers and forest paths through settlements and towns (called purina in Kichwa) are continuous elements of each chapter. These social relations are supported by regionally shared forms of healing by shamans and women's skills concerning the making of ceramic pots and the quality of their designs. The attachment to the landscape, and territory, is constituted by stories and myths, which circulate among kinsfolk on a regional level.While each chapter is clearly part of a whole, each could stand on its own in terms of topic and treatment. The writing mixes concise theoretical contextualization and regional comparison with vignettes, particular episodes that took place during the author's fieldwork experience. These vignettes effectively deepen the argument and provide a fine-grain word picture of individuals and their lives. This change of focus makes for compelling and attractive reading and will ensure that the book appeals to a variety of audiences. It also matches a core notion at work in this volume—namely, scale and the levels at which regional society works.Scale is essentially a spatial concept from geography and has been used by social theorists to refer to the way that actors assemble and organize sociopolitical relations across spaces. The analytical significance of scale is to provide flexibility in spatial and temporal terms for the configuration of these relations. Here, kinship is the most important of these scales as it enables Reeve to look at the micro level and scale out to the regional level. Also considered from this perspective in the concluding chapter are Indigenous political organizations in Ecuador and the ways in which their alliances have moved from the regional to the national level. Furthermore, what scale lends the argument in this book is temporal depth. Based on historical understanding of regional society over the last 400 years, Reeve knows that the reach and power of regional society is in flux. Today the dynamics of regional society have been curtailed by the border closure with Peru in the 1940s and incursions by non-Indigenous people, but in the past Amazonian Kichwa societies were larger and stronger, supported by ethnogenesis after colonial-era epidemics. Yet Reeve was only able to understand how this historical regional society was internally made by doing fieldwork in Pastaza and observing the way in which kinship connected people across the region. This fieldwork started in the early 1980s and has intermittently continued to the present day, providing a remarkable series of ethnographic insights that have been enriched by archival documentation (analysis of which Reeve has published elsewhere). This historically informed ethnography is a major achievement. It is hoped that the book will stimulate further such approaches in the future.

Charity for and by the Poor: Franciscan-Indigenous Confraternities in Mexico, 1527–1700

Particularly examining Indigenous confraternities sponsored by Franciscan friars in New Spain, this work makes the contention that Indigenous peoples eagerly supported the early proliferation and enduring persistence of religious sodalities because they provided valuable aid and services. The work highlights European scholarship on confraternities, mainly covering Hapsburg realms, that centers on what these institutions purported to do for communities. Laura Dierksmeier sees the alliances between Franciscan friars and Indigenous communities as built on mutual aid and support mediated through the institution of the confraternity. The work's emphasis on the appeal of confraternities' designed functionality provides a useful contribution. The author seeks to explain that Indigenous peoples found value in confraternities because of their capacity to offer assistance to fellow members and the larger community through mutual aid—specifically, burial services for confraternity members and the poor, charity, low-cost loans, hospital administration, and assistance to the incarcerated.The core of the book is divided into six thematically organized chapters that contextualize the evangelization projects in central New Spain from 1527 to 1700, the institution of the confraternity in Europe and in the Americas, the purpose of confraternities, how Nahuas adapted the institution culturally, confraternities' hospital and care functions, and finally their service to the “moral economy.” The book is richly illustrated with photographs of material culture, reproduced documents, and codex images. It also contains useful tabular data, which organize some of the evidence. The appendixes generously share information about specific parishes in central Mexico. The research examined financial and constitutional records discovered in archives in Europe, Mexico, and the United States.The work engages with and contributes to an emerging historiography on Nahua Christianity, building on the work of Louise Burkhart, Jonathan Truitt, and Mark Christensen for New Spain and the Nahuas and the work on Italian sodalities by Christopher Black. For New Spain, Dierksmeier's book, focusing closely on Nahuatl texts, complements the work of others who have elucidated how Nahuas and other Indigenous groups adapted Christianity to their own understanding of the divine. Importantly, Dierksmeier utilizes sources in both Spanish and Nahuatl, relying heavily on previous work of other philologists, particularly to see how Nahuas adopted the new religion on their own terms. Dierksmeier, following Burkhart, emphasizes that because “linguistic variations between languages made many abstract concepts difficult to translate,” Nahuatl functioned as a medium to convey the ideas of Christianity, not “as a replacement for Spanish” (p. 54). Supporting Christensen's arguments and focus on Nahua Christianity, Dierksmeier's work extends the conclusion that specific community-building and affirming aspects of Christianity drew Nahuas to the faith, but on their own terms and when they chose. The confraternity, therefore, represents another place where Nahuas found appeal in Christianity.The work is strongest when conveying the stated function of confraternities and communicating why Indigenous peoples used them, arguing that the benefits that confraternities made available to communities and their members were desirable and necessary. Confraternities provided more than just a means to build community. The book argues that had the institutions failed to provide something useful, Native peoples would have abandoned them. Yet, as Dierksmeier demonstrates, some Indigenous people joined more than one, despite the expense. The research also revealed that some became members when sick or as they approached death to take advantage of hospital care and burial services that membership provided, even though it cost more to join for those older or sicker than for people younger and healthier (p. 71). Confraternities thus provided useful services and a sense of identity and community belonging for Native peoples. Members paraded wearing regalia and symbolic cords to indicate their membership and status. Confraternities, although often organized by ethnicity, did not segregate based on status. Ultimately, communities gravitated toward these institutions because they served a need.The limitations of the book are few. It could have focused on the early formation of specific confraternities in Indigenous communities. As written, the work reads as a detailed survey of the topic rather than showcasing specific microhistories. The research may not have lent itself to such an approach. The argument, therefore, seems to rely heavily on what confraternities said they would do, the nature of membership, and the financial dealings within confraternities. The work also seems to discount Indigenous political organizations such as Native cabildos, which also provided space for Native leadership (p. 6). The book demonstrates effectively, however, that Native peoples quickly engaged with and continued to use confraternities into the eighteenth century.The book offers for both a general readership and a specialist audience a fine introduction to confraternities while at the same time engaging clearly and effectively with historiographical discussions and offering fresh insights. Furthermore, Dierksmeier conveys the strong analysis derived from a deep reading of European scholarship that enriches works done on confraternities as they developed in the Americas.

Reconciliation through renewable energy? A survey of Indigenous communities, involvement, and peoples in Canada

Reconciliation is about the genuine restructuring and transformation of the relationships between Indigenous and settler people. Although renewable energy has not been inherently positive for Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities in Canada have been participating in renewable energy production, which presents a potential pathway to reconciliation, climate change mitigation and a just energy transition. This study explores whether and to what extent community energy—defined by deep engagement in process, as well as local and collective benefits—relates to elements of participation associated with reconciliation, both conceptually and empirically. A conceptual framework based in community energy was developed to characterize and analyse 194 renewable energy projects associated with Indigenous communities. This framework considered ‘community’ as belonging to traditional land, places where Indigenous people live, and as local authority, such as the Indigenous political organization of a settlement or reserve. Projects were examined by legal form, project location, and control. The findings do not provide strong indications of reconciliation. We suggest that one pathway to reconciliation is equity ownership, which has risen over time, although most projects located on traditional territories and Indigenous communities generally have minority or no ownership. There were no projects associated with Métis communities, and only 6 associated with Inuit communities. Institutional change requires implementation of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) and extensive policy supports. Further research with and by Indigenous communities should examine how to support equity ownership by examining the findings of the 41 projects controlled by Indigenous communities and increased attention to Métis and Inuit communities.

Pueblos within Pueblos: Tlaxilacalli Communities in Acolhuacan, Mexico, ca. 1272–1692

Amid a self-similar stream of New Philology text presentations, additional perspectives on struggles initially following first contact, and book-length humanistic essays dealing with currently popular Western preoccupations and purporting, with limited success, to elucidate indigenous categories and cultures, Benjamin Johnson's analysis of the role of tlaxilacalli across four centuries in the eastern Basin of Mexico stands out as original, creative, and inviting of multidisciplinary engagement and collaboration. It serves as an exemplar of the productive use that can be made of certain aspects of the New Philology's output.The Acolhuacan region, heartland of the small precontact empire of modern-day Texcoco, the Aztec second city, offers unmatched density of documentation, as well as archaeological and ethnographic information, for approximately the last millennium. Johnson joins those who have succeeded in assimilating this complexity while identifying important underlying principles within it. The purpose of this attractively produced and heavily footnoted book is threefold. It posits an analytical equivalence between precontact and postcontact imperial structures to illustrate the role of tlaxilacalli in strengthening and vitiating the ruling processes of both regimes. It takes advantage of the detail in Texcocan documentation to tie individuals and households to known landscapes and local-level political processes. And it thereby highlights the role commoners played in the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of imperial structures.Johnson first must disambiguate the indigenous concept tlaxilacalli from the confused colonial semantic cloud of barrio, pueblo, altepemaitl, calpolli, altepetl, and so on—another revealing instance of the continued failure of the intrusive Spanish and their descendants to understand the cultures they confronted. Tlaxilacalli were face-to-face networks administered by commoners that incorporated compulsion and inequality while also offering security and community through rights and obligations involving landholding, kinship, and other affective attachments to specific landscapes. Tlaxilacalli offered submission to immature, developing imperial structures in exchange for a measure of autonomy, leading to policies of indirect rule on a microscale that made both precontact and postcontact imperial structures fractious and fragile.Chapter 1 posits a thirteenth-century origin of tlaxilacalli regimes in the northeastern Basin of Mexico, beginning their characterization by Johnson in terms of landholding, economic, and cultural forces within the larger context of precontact warring states. Chapter 2 studies precontact and first-contact imperial processes through the rapid rise of the Triple Alliance, facilitated by tlaxilacalli recruitment and support, and then the equally rapid redeployment of Texcocan tlaxilacalli in support of Hernando Cortés and invading indigenous groups to facilitate the entry of a new and, at the time, unknowable order. Cuauhtepoztlan, a tlaxilacalli within Tepetlaoztoc, comes under the microscope in the third chapter, in which Johnson, working from the outside in, applies a novel variety of techniques to describe this tlaxilacalli's hierarchical structures and processes, not only in terms of power but also in terms of attachment to community and landscape. The final three chapters further explore these themes across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when tlaxilacalli became the sole refuge for the great majority of commoners—and their means of projecting political power. As the former indigenous elite, never that closely integrated into tlaxilacalli, became detached from their economic support, tlaxilacalli adopted and used new Catholic cultural content to confect new idioms of attachment to landscape and community that also enhanced success in the variably corrupt colonial legal process.Johnson's work thus identifies a durable, adaptive, indigenous concept and its expression in a range of entities of central importance across four centuries. He handles the existing evidence well while also adducing extensive new evidence, implicitly inviting other disciplines to understand tlaxilacalli more thoroughly. Archaeologists may wish to study its applicability to their evidence before and after the twelfth century as well as inside and outside the Basin of Mexico. They may finally be drawn into renewed fieldwork in Tepetlaoztoc by devising methods to work around deep soil disturbance by modern agriculture. Ethnohistorians may take up the challenge of further characterizing the tlaxilacalli's internal economic, political, and affective processes, as well as its exact articulation within imperial regimes. Ethnographers may seek commonalities between what they see on the ground today and prior patterns persisting through many centuries. The latter two groups will advocate for greater understanding of kinship, compadrazgo, succession, inheritance, and landholding within tlaxilacalli.None of these comments are a criticism of this work but rather an assurance of its importance and centrality for future research in indigenous political organization and process across the contact boundary to today. While publications of minute textual examination continue to abound alongside wide-ranging studies of iconography, religion, gender, and other cultural content, this book is a beacon reminding researchers to understand and appreciate, through indigenous categories, the everyday realities, practicalities, choices, and struggles of the people who produced the works they study. The responsibility to understand this basic context remains key to optimizing future scholarly output and rendering it meaningful in worldwide comparative conversations.

Reconsidering 1969: TheWhite Paperand the Making of the Modern Indigenous Rights Movement

The White Paper of 1969, which proposed to eliminate the legislated difference between Indigenous peoples and other Canadians promised a dramatic break from the settler status quo but became, instead, synonymous with continued assimilatory policies, an out-of-touch federal government, and (somewhat ironically) a catalyst for the modern Indigenous rights movement. Indigenous criticism of the paper was swift, with several Indigenous political organizations producing policy papers decrying the White Paper and demanding its retraction. And discussions would not stop there. In the ensuing decades, scholars have taken up the policy as a turning point for Indigenous politics. This article questions what this White Paper dominance has done for our understandings of the modern Indigenous movement and suggests that the policy has been mobilized in ways that separate the movement into pre- and post-eras, effectively erasing, or at least minimizing, pre-1969 political work and overemphasizing provincial and national unity after 1969.

The social networks and structural variation of Mississippian sociopolitics in the southeastern United States

Network approaches in archaeology offer a promising avenue for facilitating bottom-up, comparative approaches to sociopolitical organization. While recent applications have focused primarily on migration and demographic trends, identity and identity politics, and the dynamics of geopolitical and regional interaction, little in the way of comparative sociopolitical organization has been attempted. In this study, I present an alternative approach to the use of sociotypological models across southern Appalachia. In particular, I demonstrate the value in employing network analyses as a mode of formally and quantitatively comparing the relational structures and organizations of sociopolitical landscapes; in this case, those traditionally characterized as constellations of chiefdoms. By approaching southern Appalachian histories through the relationships upon which social, political, and economic institutions were actually built, I move the study of southeastern political systems beyond the use of models that emphasize the behaviors of elites and the ruling class as inspired by the ethnographic and ethnohistoric records. To these ends, using a robust regional ceramic dataset, I compare network histories and political landscapes for the southern Appalachian region between ca. AD 800 and 1650. The results of these analyses contribute insights to the study of small-scale political organizations by demonstrating that (i) as chiefdoms developed, leaders drew on preexisting social and political conditions; (ii) while networks of chiefly interaction were defined by instability, wider networks of interaction were much more durable; and (iii) quantitative network analyses and qualitative ethnohistoric accounts can articulate with one another to shed light on indigenous political organization.

Arctic Indigenous Societal Security at COP21: The Divergence of Security Discourse and Instruments in Climate Negotiations

In UN climate change conferences, there exists a disconnect between the space for and use of Arctic cultural heritage as a catalyst for action and parallel international legal and financial support for climate adaptation and mitigation in the North. This article aims to unpack this divergence of creating a space for societal security discourse and producing tangible climate commitments to Arctic Indigenous peoples in UN climate negotiations. The article surveys and explores visual and textual narratives pertaining to Arctic heritage at COP21 focusing on regional Indigenous political organizations and representatives. It contends both that societal security is to maintain Arctic indigenous culture in its traditional state from changes in the climate and that societal security is to protect indigenous culture from harm or destruction while allowing it to live, change and develop in its own accord to assist with climate mitigation and adaptation actions. The article then turns to the resulting Paris Agreement and Paris Road Map to survey specific legal, financial, and policy support mechanisms for Arctic Indigenous peoples. The article argues that the space for and use of Arctic Indigenous societal security discourses at COP21 are uneven with the resulting global policy initiatives, and do not adequately support the security of current cultural practices and heritage in the Arctic.

Friendship Centres in Canada, 1959–1977

Friendship Centres in Canada, 1959–1977 Will Langford (bio) Friendship Centres were, and are, social service providers and social and cultural institutions directed toward Aboriginal peoples in Canadian cities and towns.1 They were the product of ameliorist Indigenous and non-Indigenous community social action and government intervention in response to the postwar migration of Aboriginal peoples to urban areas. Discussions of post–World War II Aboriginal activism have tended to foreground the emergence of Indigenous political organizations and the rise of red power militancy in the mid-1960s, resistance movements that were piqued in Canada in the early 1970s in response to the federal government’s proposal in 1969 to unilaterally abrogate treaty rights.2 Friendship Centres both related to and in some cases preceded these forms of activism and constituted an important aspect of postwar Indigenous organizing and mobilization. They were also, in many respects, analogous to the Indian Centers organized in the United States as early as the mid-1950s but especially from the 1970s.3 [End Page 1] Historians have begun to explore the connections of Friendship Centres to urban Aboriginal activism and to government policy in the 1950s and 1960s.4 In broadening the historical lens beyond individual centers and beyond the rhetorical confines of government policy, this political history essay puts in focus the experiences, possibilities, and contradictions of Friendship Centres in Canada between 1959 and 1977.5 It relies largely on the archival records of the Citizenship Branch, which collected center reports and materials and produced its own in the course of administering center grants. Combining empirical and textual analysis, this article examines the ideological and political bases of centers, contestation over their practices, the shifting character of public policy, and the often-implicit theme of friendship. The early history of Friendship Centres was marked by struggle over their control and, to an extent, over their practices and meaning. Informed by social scientific thinking and envisioned by government and community social service establishments as places of social assistance and cultural change, Friendship Centres were increasingly turned by Aboriginal activists into emergent places of Indigenous resistance and urban community. There were also important contradictions. On the one hand, Friendship Centres confounded social scientific expectation over the role of culture and the provision of social services. In the delivery of useful services and the elaboration of social and cultural activities, centers were generally supportive of broader claims to socioeconomic equality, cultural autonomy, and recognition of Aboriginal rights. Moreover, as I will suggest in closing, the affective bonds of friendship had the potential to generate solidarity-based ties among Aboriginal peoples and with non-Indigenous allies. On the other hand, the political meaning of Friendship Centres was indeterminate. Were centers status quo institutions that brushed over more fundamental questions about structural inequality? The relationship of Friendship Centre reformism relative to antiracist and anti-imperialist action remained uncertain and went largely uninterrogated. migration, integration, and the origins of friendship centres, 1958–1964 Aboriginal peoples moved to Canadian cities in increasing numbers in the decades following World War II. In the 1941 census, 4,469 “Indians,” or 3.6 percent of the total “Indian” population, were enumerated in urban areas. These counts rose to 11,015 and 6.7 percent in 1951; 28,382 and 12.9 percent in 1961; and, significantly, 90,705 and 30.7 percent in 1971.6 Evelyn Peters has demonstrated, though, that the total Aboriginal population in major Canadian cities remained quite low until the mid-1970s.7 A concurrent process of urbanization took place in the United States.8 Rising populations and chronic lack of economic prospects in rural areas prompted a growing, mobile group of young Aboriginal people to move to cities for employment and education and to escape reserves and residential schools. Indian Affairs placed some Aboriginal youth in urban secondary schools to continue their education or in sanatoriums to recover from tuberculosis. It also encouraged urbanization [End Page 2] through vocational training efforts and an Indian Placement and Relocation Program begun in 1957.9 Yet many more migrants moved of their own accord. Women outnumbered men, as cities offered an escape from the surveillance and assimilation policies of reserves...

Www.sicetno.org: A Database for the Study of Indigenous Political Culture and Ethnic Conflict in the Americas

SICETNO (System of Consultation of Political Organizations and Ethnic Conflicts in the Americas) is a digital platform that contains two databases: ORGINDAL (Indigenous Political Organizations in Latin America) and CETNA (Ethnic Conflicts and Nationalism in the Americas). It compiles and organises qualitative data for the study of democracy, nationalism, constitutional recognition and ethnic conflict in relation to indigenous political cultures in the Americas.

“Adaptive Resistance,” Conservation, and Development in the Brazilian Amazon: Contradictions of Political Organization and Empowerment in the Kaiabi Diaspora

Indigenous peoples have been active players in the process of securing land rights and conserving about 21 percent of the Brazilian Amazon. In this article, we examine advances and contradictions in the process of “adaptive resistance” by Amazonian indigenous peoples in terms of their seeking alliances and funding from outside allies, adapting institutions and social organization, and reconstructing self-representations for securing and managing their territories. Drawing from long-term research among the Kaiabi (Tupi-Guarani) indigenous people, we compare the process of formation of indigenous leaders and indigenous political organizations among three Kaiabi groups—Xingu, Teles Pires, and Rio dos Peixes—following the relocation of the majority of Kaiabi to Xingu Park starting in the 1960s. New models of leadership emerging from interaction with other indigenous groups—from the history of the creation of Xingu Park in Brazil and from access to resources brought by the alliance between indigenous peoples and environmentalism—were important factors enabling political empowerment among the displaced Xingu Kaiabi in contrast with the other two groups. We discuss contradictions of political empowerment and strengthening of indigenous organizations in the Amazon, which may also lead to trade-offs and to the risk of dependence on outside funds and agents. Multicultural organization and alliances provide important platforms to the adaptive resistance and empowerment of diverse Amazonian indigenous peoples.

Indigenous Political Organizations and the Nation-State: Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico

The growing visibility of indigenous political organizations and activism in Latin America has a variety of claims and methods to interrelate with the state and organized civil society. These claims are framed within the logic of development and state construction; thus, these political projects fueled by ethnic actors do not have a secessionist outlook. This article addresses the different types of ethnic conflict current in Latin America. It also discusses the practical experience of implementing rights of autonomy. By highlighting the frequent types of ethnic conflict and their prevalence, the author looks forward to proposing a comparative model to explain the different routes taken by the construction of an inclusive, plurinational state led by ethnic actors. The article derives its analysis from the data bank of indigenous organizations, ORGINDAL.

Oil frontiers and indigenous resistance in the Peruvian Amazon

The Peruvian Amazon is culturally and biologically one of the most diverse regions on Earth. Since the 1920s oil exploration and extraction in the region have threatened both biodiversity and indigenous peoples, particularly those living in voluntary isolation. We argue that the phenomenon of peak oil, combined with rising demand and consumption, is now pushing oil extraction into the most remote corners of the world. Modern patterns of production and consumption and high oil prices are forcing a new oil exploratory boom in the Peruvian Amazon. While conflicts spread on indigenous territories, new forms of resistance appear and indigenous political organizations are born and become more powerful. The impacts of oil exploration and exploitation and indigenous resistance throughout the oil history of the Peruvian Amazon are reviewed here, focusing on the Achuar people in Rio Corrientes. The driving forces, impacts, and responses to the current oil exploration boom are analyzed from an environmental justice perspective. We conclude that, in a context of peak oil and growing global demand for oil, such devastating effects for minor quantities of oil are likely to increase and impact other remote parts of the world.

Julgamento da Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol: todo dia era dia de índio

O julgamento da demarcação da Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol expôs o papel do STF como legislador positivo. O recém-publicado acórdão do STF sobre o caso agrega as chamadas salvaguardas institucionais formuladas nas 19 ressalvas à ação do poder executivo e aos direitos dos povos indígenas apresentadas em plenária. Algumas dessas ressalvas, verdadeiros enunciados normativos, ameaçam retroceder o reconhecimento de direitos de minorias étnicas no país, na contramão de compromissos internacionais de direitos humanos assumidos, especialmente quanto à interpretação do direito originário dos índios sobre suas terras tradicionais e quanto ao não reconhecimento da organização política indígena com o controle sobre suas terras.

Discourses, Power Negotiations and Indigenous Political Organization in Forest Partnerships: The Case of Selva de Matavén, Colombia

While much research on forest partnerships hitherto has been focused mainly on the drivers behind their formation, the kind of actors and deals involved, and the factors that promote or hinder their success, much less attention has been paid to the dynamic relationships and processes inherent in these partnerships. Based on the study of a partnership process in an indigenous reservation in Colombian Amazonia covering a variety of projects, this paper seeks to fill part of this lacuna by analyzing the partnership as a dynamic ‘discursive battlefield,’ in which objectives and actions are being constantly negotiated. Actors in the Matavén partnership strategically incorporate discursive elements in order to pursue their own interests while also endorsing those that ensure the continuation of collaboration. We conclude that discourses are embedded in partnership micro-politics. On the one hand, discursive shifts occur as a reflection of power balances at given moments. On the other hand, discourses constitute indispensable resources with the potential to both enhance individual actor’s negotiating power and to create opportunities for compromise. Within an ongoing discursive tension between ‘conservation’ and ‘indigenous autonomy,’ flexible notions such as ‘territorial ordering’ prove to be successful in allowing space for manoeuvre and granting conceptual coherence to shifts occurring ‘on the ground.’

Just like England: On the Liberal Institutions of the Circassians

With Pushkin's narrative poem Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), Circassians entered the Russian imperial imaginary as exemplary personifications of the savagery and freedom of the Caucasus as a whole (Layton 1994; 1997; Grant 2005; 2007). Accordingly, the Russian imagination of Circassian polity, now as egalitarian “free societies,” now as hierarchical aristocracies, now as “noble savages,” now as ignoble brutes, Muslim “fanatics,” or “Asiatic despots,” was a microcosm of the Russian colonial engagement with the Caucasus as a whole, often as not reflecting tensions in the self-perception of imperial autocracy and its elites more than indigenous political organization of Caucasian groups like Circassians in reality (Layton 1997; Jersild 2002; Grant 2005). Inasmuch as such imperial imaginings informed the fantasies of young men, causing them to enlist in search of the poetry of warfare, or informed fantasies of conquest among agents of the Russian state, these imaginings became real in their consequences for various Caucasian groups (Layton 1994; 1997). Nor was the exemplary alterity accorded Circassians limited to Russian audiences; it exerted a considerable fascination across Europe as well (King 2007: 241–45).

Fatal Errors: Ruth Landes and the Creation of the "Atomistic Ojibwa"

Abstract: This article examines several aspects of Ruth Landes' depiction of the Boundary Waters Ojibwa. Based on field work in the 1930s, the Ojibwa were characterized ahistorically by Landes as atomistic individuals living in small bands having no indigenous political organization, driven by need to disperse widely in a meagre country. Research into Landes' published and unpublished materials, in conjunction with ethnohistorical research and Elder testimony, reveal major problems with Landes' field work and her analysis of the Ojibwa. Although Landes' work represents many of the biases and preconceptions of colonial anthropology, regrettably, she compromised her ethnographic portrayal by fabrications, by serious errors of fact and omission and by questionable methodology. These weaknesses limit Landes' work as a reliable source on the Ojibwa.Ruth Landes' work on the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwa) has long been considered an example of classic ethnography. Her interpretations arose from field work among Rainy River Ojibwa on Manitou Rapids Reserve, near the town of Emo in northwestern Ontario. In several publications during the 1930s, the Ojibwa were characterized as atomistic individuals living in small, mutually hostile bands having no indigenous political organization, driven by need to disperse in a poor country. Landes further portrayed Ojibwa women as culturally dispossessed and underprivileged. Her ethnographies from Manitou Rapids became a focus of the theory of particularity or atomism among the Ojibwa in the early 1950s and 1960s. Landes' interpretations of extreme individualism also engaged ethnohistorians, who sought to determine the origin of such late features of Ojibwa culture, in order to reconcile them with historical evidence for earlier collective institutions.Historical research and Elder testimony from Rainy River First Nations(f.2) demonstrate how Landes compromised her interpretation by a number of fatal errors, including mistakes of fact, omissions and use of questionable ethnographic methods. These errors severely limit Landes' work as a reliable source on Ojibwa culture and society on Rainy River and in the Boundary Waters.Ruth Landes and the Origin of AtomismRuth Landes died in 1991. She was a student of Franz Boas, a contemporary of Margaret Mead and a student and friend to Ruth Benedict. Landes' ethnographies of Ojibwa materials have been praised for systematically studying the culture from a woman's point of view (Hallowell, 1938; Cole, 1995a, 1995b). Her Ojibwa work was a principal reason for Landes' success as an anthropologist; she ended her career as Professor Emerita at McMaster University. Although it has been suggested that the body of Landes' work has been ignored and marginalized (Cole, 1995b: 168, 177), there is little evidence that Landes' Ojibwa work was ignored.Landes studied under Boas at Columbia University at a time when his analysis had moved inward into the relationship between the individual psyche and culture. Landes' background included a master's degree in social work and a strong interest in psychology and Afro-American Jews. Boasian paradigm which examined the individual under the stress of culture (Boas, 1938: 269) was taken up by another of Landes' teachers, Ruth Benedict. Her focus on culture as stress, or entrapment, magnified psychological components by focussing on neuroses, psychoses and general abnormality. Abnormality among the Ojibwa proved an important component to Landes' development of atomism and her understanding of gender, particularly male roles (1938: 24).(f.3)The essentials of Landes' portrayal were published in 1937 as The Ojibwa of Canada (1966) in a comparative study edited by Margaret Mead, Cooperation and Competition among Primitive Peoples. Ojibwa Sociology was released in the same year, followed thereafter in 1938 by Ojibwa Woman (1971). Collateral articles were published in the journals Character and Personality (1937) and Abnormal and Social Psychology (1938). …

The Punjab Disturbances of 1907: the response of the British Government in India to Agrarian unrest

Two major factors determined the growth of Indian nationalism: developments within Indian society and indigenous political organizations and the British response to agitation and the demands of Indian politicians and interest groups. Current studies of Indian nationalism generally focus upon the former, while the relation of British rule to political development is either ignored or misunderstood. Frequently the British are portrayed as inept bureaucrats, or the government as a monolithic structure run on inflexible bureaucratic principles and bent upon a policy of repression. While the shoe often fits, this caricature ignores the basic fact that, despite mounting pressure from 1904 onwards, the British rulers managed to keep order and to choose their hour of departure. They were able to continue governing primarily because they were adroit in handling agitation, minimizing serious grievances, and retreating from policies or measures which threatened to inflame the subcontinent. Professor Anthony Low of the University of Sussex has shown graphically how the Government of India manipulated Gandhi's first and second civil disobedience campaigns to its own political advantage. This paper explores the background and the British response to an earlier but equally volatile situation, the 1907 rural disturbances in the Punjab.