Monday, February 1, 2016

Indigenous People Don’t Have Boundaries

“Participatory  mapping  has  allowed  indigenous  groups  to  produce  and  to  varying  degrees  distribute  counter-representations of indigenous landscapes, including boundaries that delineate ‘their’ lands from those of the state and other indigenous groups.” (p. 253) Increasingly indigenous peoples are utilizing cartography and Geographic Information Systems to assert their claims to land, to seek “more equal participation in the management of indigenous lands, and to press for state and international recognition of their cultural exceptionality.” (p. 253) Countermaps by indigenous people, however, are not a simple attempt to reconfigure formal political boundaries, but instead a “complex cultural productions informed by contested processes of place-making and by tensions regarding the meanings of authenticity among indigenous actors.” (p. 253)




The map above is the product of a mapping project to delimit Pemon lands in Venezuela. For the purpose of boundary-making for territorial demarcation, the existence of “traditional boundaries between villages needed to be obscured.” (p. 269) Their argument was that “indigenous people don’t have any boundaries,”  and therefore a borderless landscape was portrayed to better integrate the different lands inhabited for generations by Pemon.

With this map, the “rebordering process and negotiations for land rights continue. The  work  of  the  government commission assigned the responsibility for demarcating indigenous lands has been stymied by procedural conflicts, and the requirements for adequate documentation of indigenous occupancy of  traditional  lands  have  been  tightened.  In  January  2007,  a  new  Ministerio  de  los  Pueblos Indígenas was established and is now overseeing the demarcation process, but as of date, no land titles have been secured by Pemon leaders.”  (p. 271)
Geographic Information Systems therefore provide a great tool to indigenous activists by revealing the less visible boundaries that often facilitating state control in indigenous lands, and thus helping activists in their struggle for indigenous land rights.


Source: Sletto, B. (2009). Indigenous people don't have boundaries': reborderings, fire management, and productions of authenticities in indigenous landscapes.cultural geographies, 16(2), 253-277.


I have acted with honesty and integrity in producing this work and am unaware of anyone who has not. –Ilka Vega

5 comments:

  1. Social sustainability can be maintained with this GIS outlet, and urban planning can reflect this type of GIS data in order to be more inclusive of indigenous opinions on land use. Interesting!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Social sustainability can be maintained with this GIS outlet, and urban planning can reflect this type of GIS data in order to be more inclusive of indigenous opinions on land use. Interesting!

    ReplyDelete
  3. In Dr. Mello's Sacred Space and the Environment class we discussed the idea of boundaries, reading a case study on a Native American group and how their ideas of town boundaries differed from mapped-out political boundaries. There was a very real knowledge among the people in the area of the cultural difference between one town and the next, yet there was no clear "boundary" separating each town.

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  4. A comparison of this map and a map of historic land disputes that occurred during the establishment of the political boundaries would be interesting. Seeing where indigenous groups were disputing boundaries then could strengthen the argument for these boundaries, especially if a large degree of overlap were present.

    ReplyDelete
  5. A comparison of this map and a map of historic land disputes that occurred during the establishment of the political boundaries would be interesting. Seeing where indigenous groups were disputing boundaries then could strengthen the argument for these boundaries, especially if a large degree of overlap were present.

    ReplyDelete