Nahua Patterns of Colonization in Maya Towns of Guatemala, 1524 to 1582: The Indigenous Records

This article seeks to further contribute to our understanding of the outcomes of earlier Nahua-Spanish alliances after Guatemala was pacified. The richly documented struggles of the Maya-Pok'omam communities around Lake Amatitlan in Guatemala between 1524 and 1580 reveal - in microcosm - the larger processes some of them stretching back into the pre-contact period that Mesoamerican scholars call ‘conquest-after-conquest.’ As this essay highlights, fifteen years after the initial phase of the Spanish conquest of Guatemala had ended, Nahua conquistadors from Central Mexico initiated their own colonization of Maya-Pok'omam towns, mobilizing both Nahua and Kaqchikel migrant groups to settle there. Within these Maya towns, the Nahua conquistadors impinged upon Maya economic assets, sharing them with their Dominican allies while maintaining political and social control over their local Maya subjects. Nahua economic and political encroachment of Maya assets finally brought about distinct and recognizable currents of Maya dissent against their foreign overlords, in parallel to the revival of local historical legacies of self-rule.     

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.     

Actor-Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political Ecology

Abstract:  Recent critiques of environmental justice research emphasize its disengagement from theory and its political focus on liberal conceptions of distributional and procedural justice. Marxian urban political ecology has been proposed as an approach that can both contextualize environmental inequalities more productively and provide a basis for a more radical politics of environmental justice. Although this work takes its primary inspiration from historical materialism, it also adapts key concepts from actor-network theory (ANT)—in particular, the agency of nonhumans—while dismissing the rest of ANT as insufficiently critical and explanatory. This paper argues that ANT—specifically, the version articulated by Bruno Latour—provides a basis for an alternative critical approach to environmental justice research and politics. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of ANT and Marxism, I contend that ANT gives us a distinctive conception of the  social  and opens up new questions about the production and justification of environmental inequalities.     

Monitoring to Learn,Learning to Monitor: A Critical Analysis of Opportunities for Indigenous Community‐Based Monitoring of Environmental Change in Australian Rangelands

Indigenous community‐based monitoring has been a central feature in many international attempts to improve monitoring of and local adaptation to environmental change. Despite offering much promise, Indigenous community‐based monitoring has been underutilised in natural resource management in Australia, particularly within the remote, semi‐arid rangelands. This paper discusses contextual social and environmental factors that may help to explain this apparent deficiency, before critically analysing key stakeholder perceptions of the roles for, and challenges of monitoring in the Alinytjara Wilur ara Natural Resources Management region in the north‐west of South Australia. The analysis guides a discussion of responses to better integrate monitoring in general, and Indigenous community‐based monitoring in particular, into regional environmental management approaches. We argue that community‐based monitoring offers a range of benefits, including: better coordination between stakeholders; a heightened ability to detect and respond to climatic trends and impacts; the effective utilisation of Indigenous knowledge; employment opportunities for managing and monitoring natural resources; and improved learning and understanding of rangeland socio‐ecological systems. Identified opportunities for spatial and temporal community monitoring designed for the Alinytjara Wilur ara region could be of value to other remote rangeland and Indigenous institutions charged with the difficult task of monitoring, learning from, and responding to environmental change.     

Pre-colonial Ethnic Wars and the Colonization of Northern Tanzania from 1800 to 1950 CE: The Case of Chagga of Kilimanjaro

In the late 19th century, the various chiefdoms of the Chagga people of Mount Kilimanjaro, in north-eastern Tanzania, engaged in continuous warfare among themselves. While the Mangi (chiefs) sought to expand their areas of domination and strengthen their chiefdoms with the wealth acquired through warfare, they also provided an opening for foreigners to become involved in these local conflicts. This paper examines the role and impacts of the Chagga wars in the German colonization of Chagga land. In the initial stages of the colonization process, the Germans could not know where to start or who to partner with in order to facilitate this process in Kilimanjaro. With the entire Chagga community at war, one chiefdom against another, and the axis of power moving from chiefdom to chiefdom, it was not very easy for colonialists to determine which one was dominant. Although Rindi, the Mangi of Moshi, convinced the Europeans that he was the most powerful chief in Kilimanjaro, the ceaseless wars made the Germans aware that there were other more active and even stronger chiefdoms than Moshi. For the Germans to get into Kilimanjaro, and secure a future for themselves there, the solution was to wage war against the Chagga. Hence they engaged in war with the Kibosho Chiefdom which, under Mangi Sina, was by then the most powerful and prosperous chiefdom. Although Karl Peters had signed a treaty with Mangi Rindi of Moshi in 1885, the country was brought under complete colonial rule by Germans in the early 1890s, after subduing the long-running local wars in the area. This paper draws on the author’s research into oral history in Chagga land, and his archaeological survey of the area, to explore the unintended consequences of involving Europeans in the Chagga chiefdom’s local wars.