Indigenous peoples,local communities,and Payments for Ecosystem Services

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs are reshaping the governance of ecosystems and natural resources around the world. These programs often occur in spaces that are unceded, contested, or otherwise not legally recognized as Indigenous homelands, customary areas, and territories. Building on the discourses of Indigenous self‐determination, nationhood, and cultural responsibilities, this paper examines how PES programs produce unique outcomes for Indigenous peoples as ecosystem services providers. Our findings demonstrate and substantiate three themes that impact Indigenous ecosystem services providers uniquely: (1) the internationally recognized right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent for Indigenous peoples; (2) the reinforcement of settler colonial jurisdiction; and (3) mismatches between Indigenous knowledges and PES‐type approaches. The ways that PES programs run the risk of reifying and reducing Indigenous knowledges have not yet been adequately considered within current PES approaches. Our findings enable a conceptualization of PES as a new conservation tool within ongoing histories of land management and dispossession by settler colonial governments. We assess the strengths and challenges of PES programs as a departure from previous conservation modalities.     

The Idea of Indigenous Knowledge

The idea of ‘indigenous knowledge’ is a relatively recent phenomenon that, amongst other things, constitutes part of a challenge to ‘western’ thinking and conceptualization. Advocates of indigenous knowledge maintain that its study has profound educational and ethical relevance and also emphasise its significance in antiracist, antisexist and postcolonialist discourse, in general, and in terms of the ‘African Renaissance’, in particular. This paper argues the following: (1) ‘indigenous knowledge’ involves at best an incomplete, partial or, at worst, a questionable understanding or conception of knowledge; (2) as a tool in anti-discrimination and anti-repression discourse, ‘indigenous knowledge’ is largely inappropriate. I show, further, that in the development of ‘knowledge’, following some necessary conceptual readjustments in our understanding of this term, there is considerably greater common ground than admitted by theorists. It is this acknowledgement, not adherence to a popular concept of debatable plausibility that has profound educational, ethical and political consequences.     

The natural hazard sector's engagement with Indigenous peoples: a critical review of CANZUS countries

Natural hazard management agencies across the settler countries Canada, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the United States (or CANZUS countries) are presently involved in an increasing range of collaborative and consultative engagements with Indigenous peoples. However, perhaps because these engagements are diverse and relatively recent, little has been written about how they emerged and, from these agencies' perspectives, little is known about how these engagements find their motivation within government natural hazard management frameworks. In this article, we review existing academic and grey literature to categorise the origins of recent and present engagements and then identify and elaborate on the key rationales informing natural hazard management agencies' interactions with Indigenous peoples. We argue both that the broad principles of sustainability and inclusion have transformed these interactions and that developmentalist approaches and an overemphasis on Indigenous peoples' traditional knowledge can sometimes undermine this work. Incorporating critiques of settler colonialism relevant to the CANZUS context, this review aims to support established, emerging, and future collaborative engagements by investigating and analysing the literature to date.     

Negotiating Indigeneity: Culture,Identity, and Politics

Krause, Richard A. The Clay Sleeps: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Three African Potters. University: University of Alabama Press, 1985. xii + 203 pp. including bibliography and index. $17.50 cloth.

Arnold, Dean E. Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. xi + 268 pp. including photographs, maps, bibliography, and index. $37.50 cloth.     

Dismantling the Divide Between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge

In the past few years scholarly discussions have characterized indigenous knowledge as a significant resource for development. This article interrogates the concept of indigenous knowledge and the strategies its advocates present to promote development. The article suggests that both the concept of indigenous knowledge, and its role in development, are problematic issues as currently conceptualized. To productively engage indigenous knowledge in development, we must go beyond the dichotomy of indigenous vs. scientific, and work towards greater autonomy for ‘indigenous’ peoples.     

Ethnodevelopment: Social Movements, Creating Experts and Professionalising Indigenous Knowledge in Ecuador

Indigenous social movements have become important development actors in recent years. As the targets of "socially inclusive" neoliberal policies and protagonists in global anti‐capitalist movements, the position of these social movements in mainstream development is often ambivalent. This ambivalence reflects contradictions between economic neoliberalism and goals of social development as well as different understandings and practices in development‐with‐identity. We explore the relationship between the institutionalisation of ethnodevelopment and the creation of indigenous experts through indigenous social movements' engagement in popular training that emphasises indigenous knowledge. Drawing on Michael Watt's notion of governable spaces of indigeneity, we examine how institutionalisation is occurring in a range of ways that establish new alliances and cut across scales. Analysing the politics occurring at the development policy interface, we focus on the processes of representation, negotiation and embodiment involved in indigenous professionalisation, as activism shapes "scaled up" policy making.     

Settlers unsettled: using field schools and digital stories to transform geographies of ignorance about Indigenous peoples in Canada

Geography is a product of colonial processes, and in Canada, the exclusion from educational curricula of Indigenous worldviews and their lived realities has produced “geographies of ignorance”. Transformative learning is an approach geographers can use to initiate changes in non-Indigenous student attitudes about Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. This study explores non-Indigenous student perspectives concerning a field school and digital storytelling as transformative experiences within the context of an “Indigenous Perspectives on Environmental Management” course; they were asked to reflect on their course experience. Findings indicate that students found both to be effective and important steps in the transformation of their own worldviews.     

Postcolonial Conservation and Kiekie Harvests at Morere New Zealand – Abstracting Indigenous Knowledge from Indigenous Polities

Conservation authorities and local Maori are engaged in a collaborative science project within the Morere Scenic Reserve (east coast of the North Island in New Zealand). Although the project was restricted initially to the integration of knowledge to support sustainable harvests of kiekie (Freycinetia baueriana), the illegitimacy of state agencies to manage competing Maori demands for that species led inadvertently to the devolution of harvest administration to a local tribe. The success of the Morere experiment is evident in widespread support for a subsequent decision to fallow the kiekie resource, suggesting that further experiments to activate Indigenous polities within conservation management are warranted. Nonetheless, ambivalence towards Maori development needs circumscribes the potential of devolved management and collaborative science.     

Anthropology,Self-determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God

Over the past forty years the Aboriginal people of Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island) in north-east Arnhem Land have successfully incorporated Christianity into their world view. However, a Uniting Church report characterises members of this same Yolngu (Aboriginal) community as being overwhelmed with feelings of inferiority and powerlessness and unable to function within structures established by Balanda (non-Aborigines). This paper contrasts the ways in which Christianity has helped break down the separation between cultural groups with its function as a structure for explicit discourse on Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations and inequality. While some Elcho Islanders see anthropologists as people who listen in order to work for Aborigines, Aboriginal Christians see them and other ‘scientists’ as attempting to undermine Aboriginal belief in the Christian God. They are seen as degrading a spiritual movement which has its foundation in the Dreaming and as posing a potential threat to the momentum of Aboriginal directed change in the community.     

Living a Long Way from Home: Communicating Land-related Knowledge in Dispersed Indigenous Communities,an Alternative Approach

Many indigenous communities are at a crossroads as regards lived experience of traditional livelihoods and members with intimate knowledge of their traditional landscapes. Using case studies from two indigenous communities, this article explores the application of both GIS tools and other geographic multimedia in community-based research projects that document landscape-related knowledge. The study involves a First Nation community in British Columbia, Canada and a Sámi community in Finnmark County, Norway. We discuss how land-use traditions and related knowledge constitute a peoples' identity and explore digital means of transferring this knowledge to support the ongoing transfer of indigenous knowledge between geographically dispersed community members, as well as future generations.     

Revealing circumstances of epidemiologic transition among Indigenous peoples: The case of the Keg River (Alberta) Métis

Rates of type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders are elevated among Indigenous peoples; however, no research has examined the origins of these diseases among the Métis. This case study documents a transition in lifestyle and health that affected the Keg River Métis of northern Alberta during the middle decades of the 20^th century. This community began to experience previously absent diseases, including obesity, heart disease, gestational and type 2 diabetes, and preeclampsia. This shift in disease burden appears tied to rapid socio‐cultural and economic change driven by a decline of traditional economic activities, access to government transfer payments and wage labour, an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, and a growing availability of non‐traditional foods. This study points to earlier emergence of diabetes among Canadian Indigenous populations than commonly credited and presents the case for a rapidly evolving epidemic tied to environmental and cultural change. Underlying this were structural changes that emerged out of colonization.     

Indigeneity,Race, and the Media from the Perspective of the 2019 Political Crisis In Bolivia

This article analyses the disputes over images related to indigeneity and plurinationalism in the post-electoral crisis in Bolivia, focusing mainly on the realm of social media. It pays particular attention to how images such as memes, photographs, and videos produced and circulated by the movement for “democracy” opposed to Evo Morales and by sectors of the Right, project ideals of national unity based on racialised imaginaries that tend to obliterate references to plurinationalism. I also analyse the dichotomous ways in which multitudes and episodes of violence were represented by the two main sides in the conflict, such as the references to “mobs” and “hordes” versus “civic movements” and “resistance” respectively. I conclude by considering examples of promotional materials that the current interim government of President Jeanine Añez has developed since its inauguration, in order to reflect on the ways in which these display certain images of the “permitted Indian” for the national project that the social sector represented by her government is beginning to outline.