The passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 focused attention on the ways in which Indigenous peoples are adapting to the pressures of globalization and development. This volume extends the discussion by presenting case studies from around the world that explore how Indigenous peoples are engaging with and challenging globalization and Western views of autonomy. Taken together, these insightful studies reveal that concepts such as globalization and autonomy neither encapsulate nor explain Indigenous peoples' experiences.
Indigenous Struggles for Autonomy: The Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua offers a broad and comprehensive analysis of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast and the process of autonomy that was initiated in 1987 as part of a wider conflict resolution process during the years of the Sandinista revolution and has continued through to the present day. Over its 30 year period of development, the autonomy process on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast can be seen as a crucible for the autonomous struggles of minority peoples throughout the Latin American continent. Autonomy on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast remains highly contested, being simultaneously characterized by progress, setbacks, and violent confrontation within a number of fields and involving a multiplicity of local, national, and global actors. This experience offers critical lessons for efforts around the world that seek to resolve long-established and deep-seated ethnic conflict by attempting to reconcile the need for development, usually fostered by national governments through neo-extractivist policies, with the protection of minority rights advocated by marginalized minorities living within nation states and, increasingly, by intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations and the Organization of American States. This book presents analyses that reveal the broad implications for the struggle for autonomy on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, conducted by scholars with expertise in an array of disciplines including sociology, globalization theory, anthropology, history, socio-linguistics, cultural and postcolonial studies, gender studies, and political science.
Jharkhand, the land of forest, named by the people of the neighboring plains, had been a safe haven of the indigenous peoples until the sixteenth century when the process of central state formation began to grow out of the nontribal matrix in the region. The states that emerged then fell under the direct influence and control of the great empires of successive periods that encroached upon the resources and lives of the indigenous peoples. They disrupted their egalitarian social system and their culture based upon a symbiotic relationship with their environment, forcing the indigenous people to retreat to even more inhospitable regions to rebuild their social structure. However, they were never able to fully escape the ever-increasing boundaries of the state, which eventually stripped the Jharkhand of its resources and left its people peasants. The modern Jharkhand movement, a continuation of the peoples' resistance to the encroaching state, has been widely covered in the media and academic circles. Various analytical reports, academic interpretations and political explanations, often holding contradictory views, have been published over a period exceeding the last five decades. The production of such a huge corpus of literature shows the strength of the movement, and the immense significance of the issues. Containing contributions by leading social scientists and activists, this volume furthers the discourse on the relationship between mainstream nationalism and the indigenous identity often termed ethnicity, as it relates to the nation state. In doing so, it helps civil society understand the relevance of autonomy and identity of the indigenous peoples of the country as a whole. Thebasic line of inquiry concerns the issues (dispossession from life supporting resources of land, forest, water and identity), the main cause (internal colonialism) and the remedy (provision of autonomy).
Contains 13 essays which discuss the experiences of indigenous peoples in their quest for municipal and regional indigenous autonomy. Includes discussion of the ILO Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, 1989 (No. 169).
The 1980s and ‘90s saw Latin American governments recognizing the property rights of Indigenous and Afro-descendent communities as part of a broader territorial policy shift. But the resulting reforms were not applied consistently, more often extending neoliberal governance than recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights. In Negotiating Autonomy, Kelly Bauer explores the inconsistencies by which the Chilean government transfers land in response to Mapuche territorial demands. Interviews with community and government leaders, statistical analysis of an original dataset of Mapuche mobilization and land transfers, and analysis of policy documents reveals that many assumptions about post-dictatorship Chilean politics as technocratic and depoliticized do not apply to indigenous policy. Rather, state officials often work to preserve the hegemony of political and economic elites in the region, effectively protecting existing market interests over efforts to extend the neoliberal project to the governance of Mapuche territorial demands. In addition to complicating understandings of Chilean governance, these hidden patterns of policy implementation reveal the numerous ways these governance strategies threaten the recognition of Indigenous rights and create limited space for communities to negotiate autonomy.
The Canadian North is witness to some of the most innovative efforts by Aboriginal peoples to reshape their relations with "mainstream" political and economic structures. Northern Quebec and Labrador are particularly dynamic examples of these efforts, composed of First Nations territories that until the 1970s had never been subject to treaty but are subject to escalating industrial demands for natural resources. The essays in this volume illuminate key conditions for autonomy and development: the definition and redefinition of national territories as cultural orders clash and mix; control of resource bases upon which northern economies depend; and renewal and reworking of cultural identity.
Over the past two decades, Zapatista indigenous community members have asserted their autonomy and self-determination by using everyday practices as part of their struggle for lekil kuxlejal, a dignified collective life connected to a specific territory. This in-depth ethnography summarizes Mariana Mora’s more than ten years of extended research and solidarity work in Chiapas, with Tseltal and Tojolabal community members helping to design and evaluate her fieldwork. The result of that collaboration—a work of activist anthropology—reveals how Zapatista kuxlejal (or life) politics unsettle key racialized effects of the Mexican neoliberal state. Through detailed narratives, thick descriptions, and testimonies, Kuxlejal Politics focuses on central spheres of Zapatista indigenous autonomy, particularly governing practices, agrarian reform, women’s collective work, and the implementation of justice, as well as health and education projects. Mora situates the proposals, possibilities, and challenges associated with these decolonializing cultural politics in relation to the racialized restructuring that has characterized the Mexican state over the past twenty years. She demonstrates how, despite official multicultural policies designed to offset the historical exclusion of indigenous people, the Mexican state actually refueled racialized subordination through ostensibly color-blind policies, including neoliberal land reform and poverty alleviation programs. Mora’s findings allow her to critically analyze the deeply complex and often contradictory ways in which the Zapatistas have reconceptualized the political and contested the ordering of Mexican society along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, and class.
The importance of Indigenous self-determination was enhanced when the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007. Yet, as this volume's contributors suggest, much more work is needed in terms of understanding what Indigenous self-determination means in theory and how it is to be achieved in practice.
Reclaiming Indigenous Governance examines the efforts of Indigenous peoples in four important countries to reclaim their right to self-govern. Showcasing Native nations, this timely book presents diverse perspectives of both practitioners and researchers involved in Indigenous governance in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (the CANZUS states). Indigenous governance is dynamic, an ongoing relationship between Indigenous peoples and settler-states. The relationship may be vigorously contested, but it is often fragile—one that ebbs and flows, where hard-won gains can be swiftly lost by the policy reversals of central governments. The legacy of colonial relationships continues to limit advances in self-government. Yet Indigenous peoples in the CANZUS countries are no strangers to setbacks, and their growing movement provides ample evidence of resilience, resourcefulness, and determination to take back control of their own destiny. Demonstrating the struggles and achievements of Indigenous peoples, the chapter authors draw on the wisdom of Indigenous leaders and others involved in rebuilding institutions for governance, strategic issues, and managing lands and resources. This volume brings together the experiences, reflections, and insights of practitioners confronting the challenges of governing, as well as researchers seeking to learn what Indigenous governing involves in these contexts. Three things emerge: the enormity of the Indigenous governance task, the creative agency of Indigenous peoples determined to pursue their own objectives, and the diverse paths they choose to reach their goal.
In recent years, Indigenous peoples have lead a number of high profile movements fighting for social and environmental justice in Canada. From land struggles to struggles against resource extraction, pipeline development and fracking, land and water defenders have created a national discussion about these issues and successfully slowed the rate of resource extraction. But their success has also meant an increase in the surveillance and policing of Indigenous peoples and their movements. In Policing Indigenous Movements, Crosby and Monaghan use the Access to Information Act to interrogate how policing and other security agencies have been monitoring, cataloguing and working to silence Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism. Through an examination of four prominent movements — the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the Idle No More movement and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation — this important book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, the criminalization of dissent and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance. In one of the most comprehensive accounts of contemporary government surveillance, the authors vividly demonstrate that it is the norms of settler colonialism that allow these movements to be classified as national security threats and the growing network of policing, governmental, and private agencies that comprise what they call the security state.
