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- Convenors:
-
Tom Younger
(Forest Peoples Programme)
Angela Mera (Forest Peoples Program)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 October, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Indigenous Peoples in Peru challenge exclusionary state-led conservation strategies, and through the use, management and zoning of their territories they offer alternative ways of feeling-doing conservation, which must be recognized and strengthened to bring about a new paradigm.
Long Abstract:
In Peru, state-led conservation strategies continue to be guided by an exclusionary model that does not recognize Indigenous Peoples' rights, even criminalizing them. In San Martín, the Cordillera Azul National Park and the Cordillera Escalera Regional Conservation Area were created on Indigenous territories without Free, Prior and Informed Consent. This territorial overlap has made it difficult for the Kichwa people to access their traditional areas, affecting everything from the availability of resources to the transmission of knowledge related to the forest. In Amazonas, the Wampis Nation has denounced the Peruvian State's attempts to categorize a sacred part of their territory to establish an official protected area. However, the Indigenous Peoples in these two regions have been resisting this exclusionary conservation system. Through strategic litigation, the Kichwa people claim property rights over their affected territories while making visible the importance of their productive systems as alternatives to the dominant conservation model. The Wampis Nation has organized its territory creating its own categories of conservation and intangibility, but which as self-validated conservation proposals, still remain outside the imaginary of State environmental decision-makers. From an interdisciplinary perspective, this panel seeks to: 1) demonstrate the configuration of State power in conservation and the different resistances to its exclusionary model, 2) make visible the self-constructed proposals from the collective and rooted in the traditional forms of use, management and governance of the territories, and 3) show that they should be recognized and sustained by a new conservation paradigm at different levels.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 October, 2021, -Shapiom Noningo Sesen
Paper short abstract:
Wampis’ principles of care and conservation of territories and forests: challenging western logic of domination and destruction of nature, as well as to conservationist western approaches.
Paper long abstract:
The Wampis Nation exercises its right to self-determination in a territory of 1,327,760 hectares in the regions of Amazonas and Loreto in Peru, with 85 communities between the Kanus (Santiago) and Kankaim (Morona) rivers. We Wampis follow five principles of care and conservation of territories and forests. These principles oppose to the Western logic of domination and destruction of nature. They also rescue the essence of coexistence with nature by being part of it and not from a western conservationist sense of a "caretaker man" of objects. In addition, they value humans and nature in a symbiotic, convergent and egalitarian way. And they propose the integrality of nature, including human beings. For us nature is a perfect balance, everyone needs everyone including humans. That is why the Wampis nation have been becoming collectively aware of the importance of our ancestral wisdom. We have been highlighting as well the need to build a new Wampis profile for the future, and becoming aware that we can be enemies of our own destiny and to the collectivity, and therefore the need to address the key realm of education. Finally, to achieve the Tarimat Pujut or living well, it is necessary to apply the five basic principles of care and conservation of territories and forests.
Nelsith Sangama Marco Sangama
Paper short abstract:
Legal struggles by the Kichwa to recover the ancestral territory taken and overlapped by protected natural areas due to the exclusionary model of conservation
Paper long abstract:
In the San Martín region, Peru, the exclusionary conservation model that deprives indigenous peoples from their territories persists. It does so by creating protected natural areas without prior, free, and informed consent, and through arbitrarily imposing artificial boundaries from a distant cabinet over our Kichwa territory. These natural protected areas were created in places where our parents and grandparents used and cared for the forests for generations. For this reason, we the Kichwa decided to recover our territories by legal means through a range of demands among which are the cases of the community of Nuevo Lamas, Puerto Franco, Alto Pucalpillo and Mishkiyakillu. In addition, we presented a lawsuit against the land titling policy that affects our Kichwa territory when subordinating our indigenous property rights to the policies of natural protected areas, with the excuse that there were no local communities existing prior to the creation of these areas. We the Kichwa people are learning and strengthening in the process of building legal demands, and we will continue our firm struggle to recover our territory.
Luis Romero Rengifo
Paper short abstract:
Kichwa strategies for caring for nature and the possibilities of learning from ancestral knowledge for a healthy life and sufficiency for living well.
Paper long abstract:
The Kichwa in the San Martín region have developed their own strategies for caring for nature in their breeding spaces: farm, forest, water and the community; and in it the wide diversity of cultural practices have been circumscribed based on their traditional knowledge, which have conserved the diversity of native crops and their varieties; as well as their ways of providing fertility to soils. In the care of the forest and fallows, there is a regeneration process co-managed from their own knowledge and complemented with natural regeneration, taking into account the ethical cultural care for the breeding and managing of the forest in tune with climate change. In the same way, they have maintained a filial relationship with the yacu mother, taking care of water springs or puquios, such as streams and rivers, with their breeding: fish, churos, yucras, apashuras, among others. Everything this uni-biocultural diversity in the indigenous territories that the populations in the Amazon occupy, has made possible the sharing of their knowledge and the benefits they offer us for a healthy life and in sufficiency for living well.
Miguel Valderrama Zevallos
Paper short abstract:
State conservation practices in relation to the role of local population and their demands for recognition of traditional indigenous territories.
Paper long abstract:
It is proposed to analyze the forms of state management in updating the Master Plan of the Regional Conservation Area "Cordillera Escalera" that involves indigenous Kichwa populations. The analysis will account for the meaning of certain state practices in relation to the role of the population in the definition and future of this area, in a regional context in which the public agenda is marked by the emergence of demands for recognition of traditional indigenous territories. How are the main demands of the population configured by the regional government officials in the preparation of the Master Plan for the Regional Conservation area and what expressions do they reach? What effect does the state generate on the participation of the Kichwa population in decision-making and recognition of their territories? These will be some questions that we propose to address.