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- Convenor:
-
Maria Fernanda Esteban Palma
(British Museum)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Borders and Places
- Sessions:
- Thursday 17 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The panel invites geographers and anthropologists to explore the theoretical and methodological challenges of understanding indigenous territorialities within the academy and beyond; hoping to find decolonial alternatives to unveil the nuances of such relationships.
Long Abstract:
Indigeneity has been constructed both as a category for political action and as a form of academic enquiry, and the recognition of non-western ontologies and epistemologies has facilitated collaborations between these two spheres. Indigenous territoriality, for example, is one of the areas that benefits the most from the insight of anthropologists and geographers, mostly so when approached from a decolonial research framework. While westernized imaginaries of indigenous people still depict them as the archetypal carers of untouched ecosystems where they live in isolation, researchers can unpack and expose the multiple dimensions and struggles indigenous people must navigate to understand, strengthen and, ultimately, publicize their relationship with the lands they inhabit. Knowing the limitations of the traditional cartographic representations of space with regards to their social, cultural and political dimensions, this panel invites us to engage with the affects, agencies and semiotics that shape indigenous territorialities. In doing so, we hope to explore how alternative theories and methods can help us to better understand indigenous territorialities in ways that are more useful to indigenous people in their political action and more meaningful to us as academics.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 17 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper wants to examine the political category of ancestry, applied to indigenous territory. An ethnographic study, conducted in the Peruvian Amazon forest, highlights how the rhizomatic native vision of the environment can incorporate and reinterpret a genealogical-genetic model of land.
Paper long abstract:
Kichwa indigenous people of the Peruvian Amazon Forest have been facing, for several years, a territorial conflict due to the establishment of a Regional Conservation Area on their homelands. In order to question the legitimacy of native claims, the Regional Government of San Martín puts forward the hypothesis of the Andean kichwa migration. On the other hand, several NGOs hope to help this native people, using some biomolecular investigations (Sandoval et al., 2016; Barbieri et al., 2017) that scientifically certify its Amazonian origins and, consequently, its ancestral relationship with the surrounding territories. However, the natives seem lukewarm to the uncritical acquisition of a strategic discourse based on the rhetoric of 'temporal primacy' and continue to consider their own territorial claims using a "relational model" of the environment (Ingold, 2000). Thus, despite having assimilated an ancestral-genetic discourse, they reshape it in light of a native conception of territory. The latter, far from being considered an inheritance transmitted from one generation to the other, is seen as a complex network of present and active relationships between the living, the dead and medical plants. This ethnographic case highlights a big misunderstanding about the concepts of "ancestry" and "territory" whose meaning, in the native sphere, overcomes limits imposed by national jurisdiction and legal terminology. It is, in fact, in the permanent presence of ancestor's intentionality (accentuated by the consumption of plants) that we can identify the real meaning of the ancestral link between natives and territory.
Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic studies conducted among the Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok, I propose in this presentation a critical reflection on the problems of Indigenous overlapping claims in the context of comprehensive land claims negotiation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper describes the incompatibilities between the logic of state sovereignty and Indigenous relational territorialities in the context of comprehensive land claims. As part of the Canadian comprehensive land claim process, the federal and provincial government compels the indigenous people present at the negotiating table to frame their claims within fairly narrow boundaries, constraining them to appropriate and use discursive strategies related to ethno-territorial state nationalism and sovereignty (Nadasdy 2012, 2018; Sletto 2009; Thom 2009, 2014, 2015). The obligation to prove exclusive occupation is problematic in that it does not take into account the principle of territorial and resource sharing that is at the core of Indigenous relational territoriality for many First Nations in Canada (Charest 2001; Feit 2004; Nadasdy 2012; Thom 2014). Based on ethnographic studies conducted among the Atikamekw Nehirowisiwok and in relation to the work of different researchers (Op cit.), I propose in this presentation a critical reflection on the problems of Indigenous overlapping claims in the context of comprehensive land claims negotiation.