Amazonian Indigenous Tradition in Conflict with the Oil Economy

Preface and Acknowledgments 1: Introduction: Indigenous Peoples and Culture Scale Culture Scale, Culture Process, and Indigenous Peoples Large-Scale versus Small-Scale Society and Culture The Problem of Global-Scale Society and Culture Social Scale and Social Power Negative Development: The Global Pattern Policy Implications 2: Progress and Indigenous Peoples Progress: The Commercial Explosion The Culture of Consumption Resource Appropriation and Acculturation The Role of Ethnocentrism Civilization's Unwilling Conscripts Cultural Pride versus Progress The Principle of Stabilization 3: The Uncontrolled Frontier The Frontier Process Demographic Impact of the Frontier 4: We Fought with Spears The Punitive Raid Wars of Extermination 5: The Extension of Government Control Aims and Philosophy of Administration Tribal Peoples and National Unity The Transfer of Sovereignty Treaty Making Bringing Government to the Tribes The Political Integration Process Anthropology and Native Administration 6: Land Policies The People-Land Relationship Land Policy Variables 7: Cultural Modification Policies These Are the Things That Obstruct Progress Social Engineering: How to Do It 8: Economic Globalization Forced Labor: Harnessing the Heathens Learning the Dignity of Labor: Taxes and Discipline Creating Progressive Consumers Promoting Technological Change Tourism and Indigenous Peoples 9: The Price of Progress Progress and the Quality of Life Diseases of Development Ecocide Deprivation and Discrimination 10: The Political Struggle for Indigenous Self-Determination Who Are Indigenous Peoples? The Initial Political Movements Creating Nunavut Guna Self-Determination: The Comarca Gunayala The Political Struggle The Shuar Solution CONAIE: Uprising Politics Reshaping Ecuador's Political Landscape The Dene Nation: Land, Not Money Land Rights and the Outstation Movement in Australia Philippine Tribals: No More Retreat Indigenous Peoples and the Arctic Council The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Tebtebba: An Indigenous Partnership on Climate Change and Forests 11: Petroleum, the Commercial World, and Indigenous Peoples Petroleum: The Unsustainable Foundation of the Commercial World The Gwich'in and Oil Development in the Sacred Place Where Life Begins Petroleum Development and Indigenous Rights in Ecuador First Nations Opposition to Canadian Tar Sand Development Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) vs. Shell Oil Assigning Responsibility for Tar Sand Development 12: Global Warming and Indigenous Peoples The Indigenous Response to Global Warming Indigenous Peoples as Climate Change Refugees Arctic Warming and Alaska Natives Global Warming Perpetuators and Beneficiaries Assessing the Global Costs of Climate Change & the Carbon Economy 13: Human Rights and the Politics of Ethnocide The Realists: Humanitarian Imperialists and Scientists The World Bank: Operational Manual 2005 and False Assurances The Idealist Preservationists You Can't Leave Them Alone: The Realists Prevail Indigenous Peoples' Rights Advocates Voluntary Isolation in the Twenty-First Century Indigenous Peoples as Small Nations Conclusion Appendixes Bibliography Index About the Author

Amazonian ecological and cultural landscapes have been cause for debate between environmental and development agencies that have attempted to re-configure them into conservation regions and frontier areas for agricultural expansion. However, it has also been the diverse Amazonian peoples, through their socio-political dynamics, rights struggles, and reactions to state control of space and resources, that have re-defined their identities and landscapes. This article examines the political struggle for the revitalization of indigenous ethnic identities and the recognition of territorial rights of the Indigenous Council of the Lower Tapajos-Arapiuns (CITA) in the state of Para, Brazil. CITA's claims became visible in 1998 within disputes between globalizing development and conservation strategies that questioned the legitimacy of indigenous land rights claims and identity. Findings indicate that essentialized notions of indigenous peoples and the Amazonian landscape have been appropriated by non-indigenous a...

Abstract This paper discusses the impact of local and national policies in the Philippines on the participation of indigenous peoples in relation to fisheries management. Specifically, this research focuses on the Tagbanua, an indigenous group in Coron Island, Palawan, on the western side of the Philippines. The struggle of the Tagbanua in reclaiming their ancestral title to the land and sea reflects broader moves toward self-determination, which is critical not only to their ancestral lands and waters, but also to their survival. Indigenous rights are essential in addressing social justice and in giving a greater voice that encourages indigenous peoples towards self-governing institutions and common management of resources. Significantly, the fundamental development of indigenous peoples lies in the recognition of their rights in their ancestral domain and the preservation of their culture, tradition, system, practices and their natural resources. This paper examines the Tagbanua experience, through a critical exploration of institutions and property rights, with attention to corresponding effects in reducing conflict with other stakeholders in the area, and in affecting the sustainability of fishery resources.

Abstract The Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (1997) offers indigenous peoples in the Philippines the opportunity to obtain title to an ‘ancestral domain’. This article discusses how leaders of the Bakun Indigenous Tribes Organization (BITO) in the Cordillera Highlands strategically used the state-sponsored indigenous-peoples discourse and political-administrative structure to acquire land rights for the inhabitants of the municipality of Bakun. Though the inhabitants did not necessarily identify themselves as indigenous, they welcomed land rights as a protection against unwelcome incursions by mining companies and other extractive projects. However, the discourse of indigenous peoples’ rights tends to essentialise the difference between indigenous and non-indigenous populations. Being indigenous has become a politicised identity whose bearers are expected to prefer the ‘traditional’ over the ‘modern’, the ‘collective’ over the ‘individual’. In Bakun, moreover, the discourse of indigenous peoples’ rights eventually became an arena in which a power struggle was played out between BITO and the municipal council, both belonging to the indigenous community.

The Levantamiento Indigena of 1990 was a defining moment in the advancement of indigenous politics in Ecuador. Following the uprising of 1990, scholars have paid close attention to the politics of identity and indigenous representation in Ecuador with the main focus being placed on the highland and Amazonian regions of the country. Based on fieldwork conducted in Ecuador's Manabi province, this article provides preliminary insight into the growth of an indigenous discourse on the Ecuadorian coast. I focus on the process of re-indigenisation in the coastal community of Macaboa. This research is significant because while a great deal of scholarly attention has been paid to indigenous movements in Ecuador's highland and Amazonian regions, indigenous politics on the coast have gone largely unnoticed. The case outlined in this article is emblematic of the shifting nature of identity and the way in which ethnic discourses are increasingly being adopted by marginalised groups in their attempts to negotiate with the state.

In June of 2009, indigenous protest over the Peruvian government’s natural resource policies erupted, tragically, in a violent confrontation where 33 Peruvians lost their lives. Conflicts over natural resources are bound to increase, especially in developing countries, as governments development ambitions collide with indigenous peoples’ territorial claims. This article, within the context of Peru’s natural resource development agenda, examines the government’s hydrocarbon development policies against indigenous resistance and protest. Turning to an alternative theoretical framework, modernity/coloniality, I argue that the government’s development logic misrepresents indigenous perspectives on development, undermines indigenous territorial rights, and suppresses indigenous participation in Peru’s natural resource agenda. A more complex reading of indigenous perspectives reveals a more sustainable approach to development, one that does not reject modern development, but does challenge the Eurocentric predilections of development.

Lands inhabited by indigenous peoples often have low population density but abundant natural resources. For those reasons, many actors have historically attempted to occupy those lands or use the resources in them. Increasing pressures over lands occupied by indigenous peoples have resulted in the awakening of indigenous peoples over their rights to land and resources generating many debates over indigenous peoples' rights to land and self-governance. In this article, we provide a historical and geographical overview of territorial and governance issues among the Tsimane', an indigenous group native to the Bolivian Amazon. We examine how the Bolivian state economic policies implemented during the 20th century affected the Tsimane' ancestral lands, and how – over the late-20th century – the Bolivian state accommodated Tsimane' claims to lands in between multiple interests. We show how national policies led to the reconfiguration of Tsimane' territoriality and to a fragmented institutional representation. Current indigenous territories and indigenous political representation are an expression of conflictive policies that have involved multiple actors and their specific interests on indigenous lands and its resources.

Indigenous peoples have resisted the colonization of their territory and their souls for hundreds of years. The contemporary experience is of transnational corporations operating in their territory, competing for the precious natural resources they have traditionally preserved. The paper starts by discussing how theory can contribute to self-determination and emancipation of indigenous people by celebrating their resistance as one of their survival mechanisms in opposition to other approaches that focus on the assimilation and oppression of indigenous groups. The central argument is that the development of the oil industry in the Amazon basin has been and still is one of the vectors of ethnocide of indigenous peoples and is at the same time triggering short and long-term resistance as a response to the 'oil conflict' and 'corporate globalization', their ultimate goal being their self-determination and survival as peoples. I conclude by stating that indigenous life projects and alternative understandings of development can shape the way towards a 'post-neoliberal civilization' based on diversity and egalitarianism versus cultural homogenization and unfair distribution of resources.

When written, these words were intended to apply, not to the seminomadic, forest tribal peoples of the Amazon basin, but to those indians of Central America whose societies and cultures have long since been riven and shaped by the violent forces of market competition and international commodity price fluctuations. Reproducing the experience of the continent as a whole, it is their very integration into the world economy, rather than their marginalisation, which explains the increasingly intolerable conditions of life they are forced to endure. What marginalisation they continue to share ith their Amazonian counterparts, it would seem, is of a cultural, social and political nature.KeywordsIndigenous PeopleIndigenous CommunityTribal CommunityTraditional LandTribal PeopleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This chapter discusses the governing of oil extraction in Ecuador, the formation of oil enclaves, and indigenous responses to the establishment and operation of oil fields. It focuses on a specific case; the exploration and exploitation of oil by the Consortium Arco Oriente, later AGIP, in Oil field 10 in Pastaza province, part of Ecuadorian Amazonia. Oil exploration and production in this part of Ecuadorian Amazonia have prompted different types of indigenous responses; organized indigenous resistance on the one hand, and a parallel cooperation between certain communities, newly established indigenous organizations, and the oil company on the other.

This article examines the makings of post-traditional environments through processes of urban ethnogenesis among the Ese Eja, an indigenous Amazonian group living in the border areas of Peru and Bolivia. We argue that the use of tradition as social currency by the environmental service sector, particularly by a thriving international ecotourism industry, has exacerbated processes of urbanization, dislocation, and social and ecological alienation of indigenous peoples. We examine how far an Ese Eja past is selectively reinvented through discourse and appropriated by participatory projects and development. This unearthing and reburial of history is then used to authenticate the present and its environmental agenda in a postglobal world of environmental moral righteousness.

Set against the background of struggles for territory, livelihood, and dignified existence in Latin America’s neoliberal conjuncture, this paper examines contemporary Andean Indigenous claims for water access and control rights based on historical arguments. In the case of the Acequia Tabacundo irrigation system in the north-Ecuadorian Highlands, the rights claims deployed in peasant-Indigenous struggles are cultural and social hybrids. They are rooted in Indigenous history, but also spawned by centuries of interaction with and defense against colonial and post-colonial frames imposed by the Spanish Empire, modern Ecuadorian State structures and influences of transnational capital. Through these conflicts over Indigenous water rights, authority, and identity, this article illustrates and examines the role of Indigenous accounts of their water histories, striving to reclaim, and govern their water territories in times of booming export-flower water extraction.

Most scholars characterise Peru as a country with weak indigenous movements, whose demands would have no influence in regional and national policies, even though its socio‐economic structures are similar to those of Bolivia and Ecuador, where indigenous movements are stronger. Based on fieldwork in the northern Peruvian Amazon and Lima between 2012–2013 and 2016–2018, this article argues that pro‐indigenous legislation enacted as a response to strong indigenous mobilisation as well as the creation of indigenous autonomous governments in the Amazon express an unnoticed struggle for indigenous self‐determination. These social phenomena also raise questions about the common assessment of the strength or weakness of indigenous movements.

Abundant land and strong property rights are conventionally viewed as key factors underpinning U.S. economic development success. This view relies on the “Pristine Myth” of an empty undeveloped land, but the abundant land of North America was already made productive and was the recognized territory of sovereign Indigenous Nations. We demonstrate that the development of strong property rights for European/American settlers was mirrored by the attenuation and increasing disregard of Indigenous property rights. We argue that the dearth of discussion of the dispossession of Indigenous nations results in a misunderstanding of some of the core themes of U.S. economic history.

Historically, merchants, traders, and governments have colonized and homogenized Indigenous peoples in order to weaken or eradicate their traditions, customs, and identities. Colonialism deprived Indigenous peoples of access to and collective control of their original lands' natural resources while also undermining their distinctive cultures, languages, and religions. Post-colonial governments exacerbated these consequences by promoting and supporting non-Indigenous interests above those of their indigenous peoples. Exclusion from all economic activity, in particular, has made surviving in a globalizing world hard for such aboriginal groups. Even the most remote and isolated Indigenous communities are endangered by the enormous rise in global demand and competition for oil, gas, minerals, forests, water, and arable lands as globalization's reach are enhanced by new and developing technology.