Indigenous peoples across the world have fought long and often bloody campaigns for recognition and rights to their ancestral lands. As economic development pushes deeper and deeper into frontier territories, particularly in Latin America, Africa and South-East Asia, the pressure on their lands has grown, sparking conflicts between indigenous communities and governments and companies.
More often than not, these conflicts have centred around the apparent inconsistency of traditional livelihoods with modernity and economic development, and indigenous groups have typically been cast as enemies of progress. Increasingly, however, indigenous leaders have positioned themselves as the core of a global conservation movement, protecting vulnerable ecosystems from exploitation and providing an exemplar of how to sustainably use and manage land.
This has been driven in part by a stirring of a global indigenous identity, founded on common experiences of marginalisation and repression and fostered by a generation of leaders able to articulate to a global audience the significance of highly localised conflicts. Among its most prominent figures is Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, who, as UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, has taken her search for a common cause from her home in the Philippines to the Sami people of Northern Europe, to the Guarani-Kaiowá in Mato Grosso, Brazil, and the Ogiek and Sengwer in Kenya’s Cherangani Hills.
On the way, she has identified a new – or at least, re-emerging – threat to the hard-won rights of indigenous communities: a global drive to fence off vast parklands as conservation zones to preserve biodiversity and prevent deforestation. Many of these initiatives, Tauli-Corpuz says, fail to recognise that lands are occupied, and that the communities that live on them are central to their preservation.
In spite of all these parks that have been set up, the biodiversity continues to be eroded. Maybe there’s something that’s not being done right
“Protected areas in indigenous territories are better kept and in a better fashion,” she says. “That in itself should be a fact that is better recognised, and instead of [governments] imposing their own systems, they should respect the right of indigenous peoples.”
Tauli-Corpuz’s assertion – that lands occupied by indigenous groups tend to be better preserved – is backed up by a growing body of research that challenges the conventional wisdom that conservation is best served by creating uninhabited landscapes. She has documented the eviction of indigenous communities in several major conservation initiatives, including the Boumba Bek and Nki national parks in Cameroon, the Kanha tiger reserve in India, the Chure conservation of Nepal and the El Cocuy national park in Colombia.
Not only are rights being violated, she says, the initiatives are unlikely to be effective: “In spite of all these parks that have been set up, the biodiversity continues to be eroded. Maybe there’s something that’s not being done right. And one of the things I think that’s not being done right is respecting the efforts and systems of indigenous peoples in terms of biodiversity conservation and sustainable use.”
Tauli-Corpuz, a leader from the Kankanaey Igorot people of the Philippines’ Cordillera region, cut her teeth in the 1970s, organising indigenous groups during the regime of Ferdinand Marcos. The Marcos government was brutal in its repression of anyone who stood in the way of its economic plans, and many indigenous activists were killed. The story was repeated across the region, and in South and Central America. Although abuses on that scale are now rare, indigenous activists still face violence, as exemplified by the assassination of the Goldman Prize-winning Honduran conservationist Berta Cáceres in March of this year.
“The prevailing mindset is still that indigenous peoples are backward, their ways of living have to be modernised, their territories have to be used in more profitable ways,” she says. “I think there still hasn’t been a major shift in the way that governments regard indigenous peoples.”
This persistent marginalisation of indigenous voices has allowed governments and multilateral organisations to ignore them, and meant that their rights are not preserved within the global conventions and agreements on climate change and conservation.
“I think there is less scrutiny, because I think the dominant thinking is that conservation is good, so raising these issues relating to these adverse impacts is not something that’s popular,” Tauli-Corpuz says. “I think that for respect of human rights… whenever climate change mitigation or adaptation is happening, whenever biodiversity activities are taking place, that’s something that needs to be constantly pushed, so that governments will not really abdicate their responsibility to respect and promote these rights.”
