Indigenous Struggles For Autonomy

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.

This book presents a variety of perspectives on the complexities and subtleties of indigenous affairs in a number of countries, including Norway, Nicaragua, Greenland, India, the U.S., and Brazil. The collected essays look at how indigenous peoples are organizing themselves politically to overcome their lack of national and international representation, and at the ways in which sympathetic non-indigenous peoples and institutions can contribute to the struggle.

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).

In a world of flux, as old territorial borders dissolve and new nations come together, who controls ideas, information, and creativity? Who patrols the new frontiers? This volume opens a window to the dark side of globalization and the struggles for autonomy it has generated from forest disputes to Indigenous land claims to conflicts between farmers and the patent owners of genetically modified seeds. The work of Palestinian poets, whose attachment to the land is explored in a powerful Coda, shows that a politics of place brings to the fore intense feelings of attachment, something common to all struggles over territory and 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).

"An essential work on autonomy and self-governance for scholars of Indigenous politics, Indigenous rights in the Americas, constitutional law, and multicultural citizenship regimes. Across the Americas, Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples have demanded autonomy, self-determination, and self-governance. By exerting their collective rights, they have engaged with domestic and international standards on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, implemented full-fledged mechanisms for autonomous governance, and promoted political and constitutional reform aimed at expanding understandings of multicultural citizenship and the plurinational state. Yet these achievements come in conflict with national governments' adoption of neoliberal economic and neo-extractive policies which advance their interests over those of Indigenous communities. Available for the first time in English, Indigenous Territorial Autonomy and Self-Government in the Diverse Americas explores current and historical struggles for autonomy within ancestral territories, experiences of self-governance in operation, and presents an overview of achievements, challenges, and threats across three decades. Case studies across Bolivia, Chile, Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, and Canada provide a detailed discussion of autonomy and self-governance in development and in practice. Paying special attention to the role of Indigenous peoples' organizations and activism in pursuing sociopolitical transformation, securing rights, and confronting multiple dynamics of dispossession, this book engages with current debates on Indigenous politics, relationships with national governments and economies, and the multicultural and plurinational state. This book will spark critical reflection on political experience and further exploration of the possibilities of the self-determination of peoples through territorial autonomies. With Contributions By: Orlando Aragón Andrade, Ana Cecilia Arteaga Böhrt, Verónica Azpiroz Cleñan, Frederica Barclay, Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor, John Cameron, Bernal D. Castillo, Magali Vienca Copa-Pabón, Elsy Curihuinca N., Dalee Sambo Dorough, Dolores Figueroa Romero, Ritsuko Funaki, Miguel González, Laura Hernández Pérez, María Fernanda Herrera Acuña, Amy M. Kennemore, Rodrigo Lillo V., Elizabeth López-Canelas, José A. Marimán, Pere Morell i Torra, Shapiom Noningo, Pablo Ortiz-T., Wilfredo Plata, Roberta Rice, and Consuelo Sánchez"--

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.