Standing up for their rights: in Brazil, Indians from various indigenous groups stage
a protest over territorial boundaries.
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Taming
the Wild West
On June 30,
1864, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Land Grant bill, giving 39,200
acres of federal land encompassing Yosemite Valley to the state of California for
public enjoyment and preservation. The creation of the first national park took place
during the disruptions of the American Civil War at a time when a devastating series
of “Indian Wars” was being waged to subdue Indian autonomy. Thus the startling landscapes
of Yosemite, substantially an outcome of Indian systems of land use, were proposed
for conservation by the very same settlers who, twelve years previously, had waged
the “Mariposa Indian War” against the area’s indigenous people—the Miwok. The main
proponent of the park, LaFayette Burnell, who led the Mariposa Battalion and professed
a “take-no-prisoners” approach to the Miwok, wanted to “sweep the territory of any
scattered bands that might infest it.”
Once the Park was established, it was run by the U.S. Army for the next 52 years
before being taken over by the National Parks Service.
The Miwok petitioned the U.S. government in 1890. They called for compensation for
their losses and denounced the managers of the park. “The valley is cut up completely
with dusty, sandy roads leading from the hotels of the white in every direction…
All seem to come only to hunt money… The valley has been taken away from us [for]
a pleasure ground….” Their pleas were ignored and further evictions of remnant Miwok
settlements were made in 1906, 1929 and as late as 1969.
What the Miwok had noted was that the national parks, set up to preserve “wilderness”
regions “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations” were also designed with
a profit motive. Indeed, the first parks of Yosemite and Yellowstone, were created
largely as a result of pressure from the railway-building lobby, which sought to
increase the numbers of fare-paying passengers by routing their tracks near scenic
sites for what today we have reinvented as “eco-tourism.”
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For
over a century, millions of indigenous people around the world were driven off their
land in the name of nature conservation. While local communities are regaining the
right to manage these protected areas, their struggle often runs up against deep
prejudice
Creating protected areas
to conserve nature is a recent invention, born in the tumultuous rush of land grabbing
during the American conquest of the west. This was the time when pioneers, the U.S.
cavalry, gold miners and Indians struggled to impose their different visions of life
and land use on the continent.
When the first national parks were created (see
box),
one single vision had excluded the others. The 1964 U.S. Wilderness Act formalized
this ideal notion of nature as wilderness, untouched by humans. It stated that national
parks were to preserve areas “where man himself is a visitor who doesn’t remain.”
The reality, however, was different: most of these areas were inhabited, used, managed
and owned by indigenous peoples. Indeed, nearly all the most important protected
areas in the United States are owned or claimed by Indians.
Many indigenous peoples remain perplexed by western views of what conservation means.
“My Dad used to say ‘that’s our pantry.’ We knew about all the plants and animals,
when to pick, when to hunt,” remarked Ruby Dunstan of the Nl’aka’pamux people, who
have been trying to prevent the logging of their ancestral lands around Stein Valley
in the Canadian province of Alberta. “But some of the white environmentalists seemed
to think if something was declared a wilderness, no-one was allowed inside because
it was so fragile. So they have put a fence around it, or maybe around themselves.”
An
export model
Over
a century, the U.S. model of nature conservation has been exported worldwide. In
Africa, the practice of mass exclusion of indigenous peoples to make way for protected
areas intensified in the 1960s and has continued to this day. The Central Kalahari
Game Reserve was originally set up for the benefit of the resident hunting and gathering
San, but they are currently being expelled from the area by the government of Botswana.
Some one million square kilometres of forests, pasturelands and farmlands have been
expropriated in Africa to make way for conservation over the course of a century.
No one has been able to document how many indigenous people were displaced as a consequence,
but they must number in the millions.
Early
warning
One
widow belonging to the Twa people recalls how she was expelled from the Congo’s Kahuzi-Biega
National Park in the 1960s.“It was early in the morning. I looked through the door
and saw people in uniforms with guns. Then one of them forced the door of our house
and started shouting that we had to leave immediately because the park is not our
land. I first did not understand what he was talking about because all my ancestors
have lived on these lands. They were so violent that I left with my children.”
Denied their traditional lands and livelihoods, these Twa—traditional hunting and
gathering “pygmies”—now eke out an existence in a number of squatter camps on the
fringes of their once-extensive forest territory. They suffer extreme malnutrition,
landlessness, demoralization and despair.
We likewise lack accurate statistics about Asia. In 1993, an estimate by the Society
for Participatory Research in Asia suggests that in India alone, as many as 600,000
tribal people have been forced off their land due to the setting up of protected
areas.
Concerns about the social impact of protected areas were voiced from their inception.
By the 1970s, UNESCO had developed the idea of “biosphere reserves,” in which strictly
protected “core zones”—the old type of protected area—were to be encircled with “buffer
zones,” where provisions were made for the local inhabitants to continue their traditional
lifestyles and engage in controlled community development projects. Conservation
agencies implementing projects along these lines could get them listed by UNESCO
to gain international recognition of their efforts. However, while enlightened for
their time, the management of these experimental reserves has not been markedly successful
from the local peoples’ point of view. They continue the tradition of imposing outsiders’
views of nature on local peoples’ lands.
A review of buffer zone projects, carried out by the World Conservation Union in
1991 concluded that they had been, for the main part, “disappointing…Local people,
often with good reason, frequently see parks as government-imposed restrictions on
their legitimate rights. Patrolling by guards, demarcation of boundaries and provision
of tourist facilities will therefore not deter them from agricultural encroachment.”
The report also noted that the best buffer zone projects had “not been short-term
aid projects but initiatives taken by local community groups or resource managers
who […] made creative attempts to solve the day-to-day problems which they faced.”
A well-documented example of these difficulties is the Amboseli National Park in
Kenya. Established on Maasai lands, it initially denied them access to dry season
pastures and watering points. The Maasai showed their resentment for the loss of
their livelihoods by spearing rhinos, lions and other wildlife. To compensate the
Maasai, a “buffer zone” was built up, with World Bank support. New watering points
were established outside the “core zone” and compensation fees were planned. Promising
at first, the project broke down—compensation went unpaid and the water supply system
deteriorated.
In the Philippines in the early 1970s, World Bank plans to fund the construction
of dams on the Chico River, which would have displaced some 80,000 Kalinga and Bontoc
people from their ancestral lands in central Luzon, led to co-ordinated resistance
and the emergence of strong local associations promoting land rights and autonomy.
Similar struggles in the Americas, Asia and Africa have resulted in the emergence
of vigorous national and international coalitions of indigenous people, which have
pushed their demands at the United Nations and other international bodies.
The movement has been dramatically successful in obliging a re-evaluation of international
human rights principles. As a result, existing conventions have been reviewed and
new ones developed which recognize that indigenous peoples have the right to own,
control and manage their traditional territories and to represent themselves through
their own institutions. Recently the UN established a Permanent Forum to address
their concerns.
The same movement has also demanded that conservationists change their thinking and
practice. For example, in 1998, tribal people in southern India forced out of the
Indira Gandhi National Park as part of an “eco-development” scheme funded by the
Global Environment Facility, successfully addressed their concerns to the World Bank
Inspection Panel. Communities impacted by the Bank’s projects can appeal to this
independent body if they believe the Bank is not adhering to its principles. Their
complaints were upheld.
Rethinking
old ways
By the
1990s, it became clear that very many of the protected areas imposed against the
will of local residents were failing to achieve their conservation objectives. The
denial of indigenous rights only meant that protected areas seeded their own failure
by surrounding themselves by hostility. The Manas Tiger Reserve in Assam (India),
for example, enclosed part of the traditional homeland of the Bodo. Local resentment
led to three quarters of the rhinoceroses being killed.
To align with the changes in international law, the World Conservation Union revised
its systems of categories of protected areas to accept that indigenous peoples may
own and manage protected areas, not just state agencies as previously required. In
the 1990s, the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), the World Conservation Congress
and the World Commission on Protected Areas all adopted new policies and resolutions
which strongly endorse indigenous peoples’ rights and promote the co-management of
protected areas, based on negotiated agreements.
Putting these principles into practice, however, is easier said than done. In many
countries, laws on protected areas automatically extinguish residents’ rights of
natural resource use, free movement and access. Implanting the “new model” of conservation
implies undertaking major national reforms.
Indeed, because of deeply held prejudices, governments in many countries continue
to deny indigenous peoples’ rights and seek to assimilate them into the national
majority through forced relocation, re-education and by breaking up their communal
lands, as in Malaysia and Indonesia. National policies towards indigenous peoples
thus also need reforming if conservation is to wear a human face. Recent changes
in the Venezuelan constitution recognize indigenous peoples’ rights to their “habitats”
and a law has just been passed encouraging Indians to map and demarcate their own
lands to regularize their rights in these areas.
Community-based conservation also implies real challenges for indigenous peoples
themselves. Regaining control of their territories may mean reactivating long-submerged
systems of self-government. Changes in indigenous economies will also need to be
addressed—many indigenous peoples have adopted new ways of farming their lands, harvesting
timbers and other natural resources. Many now hunt with new weapons and use industrial
technologies to process and transport crops. Customary systems of regulating access
to these resources now need rethinking if they are to be effective. In the Brazilian
Amazon, the WWF is now working with the Xavante Indians, to help them devise new
strategies for managing their reserves. The aim is to strengthen traditional ways
of managing resources with new knowledge about environmental limits.
As the International Alliance of Indigenous-Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests
noted in 1996: “Indigenous peoples recognize that it is in their long-term interest
to use their resources sustainably and respect the need for environmental conservation.
They recognize that the expertise of conservation organizations can be of use to
their self-development and seek a mutually beneficial relationship based on trust,
transparency and accountability.
World
Rainforest Movement: www.wrm.org - www.forestpeoples.org
International Alliance of Indigenous-Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests: www.gn.apc.org/iaip
Survival International: www.survival-international.org
World Conservation Union: www.iucn.org
Worldwide Fund for Nature: www.wwf.org |
