Paper short abstract:

Anthropologists and geographers are working with indigenous people to produce compelling evidence of their relationship with the land, but these collaborative representations require further ethnographic input to truly unveil the richness of those relationships within their socio-cultural contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Indigenous groups are being compelled by states to legitimize their land claims as a means to avoid dispossession in the name of development. Officers expect to work with property deeds, in-situ boundaries, official maps or signs of agricultural use, which they consider reasonable evidence. Yet, indigenous peoples' relationship with space can rarely be explained or validated through those means. Anthropologists and geographers are working with them to produce alternative ways of authenticating people-land relationships, which might involve elaborating social cartographies, documenting on-site ceremonial gatherings, or interviewing local residents. In Colombia, a 3D representation of the Muisca sacred landscape and a Wiwa representation of sites within spatial networks using a string map are examples of successful social cartographies which illustrate places as spiritually interconnected. However, these cartographies have proven inadequate to portray peoples' multi-generational attachment to land in a compelling enough manner so as to concede them land rights, even more when violence has led to displacement.

It is crucial for scholars working with stakeholders to make use of decolonial theoretical and methodological approaches to move beyond these useful, yet over-simplified, representations of the indigenous relationship with the land in order to find ways to expose its experiential, non-consumerist basis. In this paper, I propose that by looking at contemporary processes of memory-making based on affective responses to everyday dwelling, we can begin to push towards a shift in policy within which sincerity overcomes authenticity as a means to validate indigenous rights over the lands they inhabit.