INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
What are indigenous peoples? (Primarily summarized and excerpted from the research of Victor M. Toledo contained in INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND BIODIVERSITY)
Indigenous peoples are “ecosystem peoples”. The quality of their lives depends on maintaining healthy levels of local biodiversity. True indigenous peoples are identified by the presence of three factors: Cosmos (cosmovision or belief system), Corpus (the repertory of knowledge or cognitive systems), and the praxis (set of practices); an Umbilicus (or Axis) is present as a fourth, relational factor.
Cosmos
Indigenous peoples experience nature in a holistic modality that is imbued with a sacred quality. Nature is revered as the primary source of life; it nourishes, supports and teaches humanity. Nature is the source of life, the center of the universe, the core of indigenous culture and identity. Within the indigenous cosmovision each act of appropriation of nature must be negotiated with all that exists, and all things (living and non-living), through agrarian acts and symbolic exchange. All of life is regulated by a single and totalizing ‘set of rules of conduct’ wherein ‘all’ participates. Humans act and interact within a wider community of living beings, of which the earth herself is an inclusive member; and nothing is inalienable.
Corpus
Indigenous societies house a repertory of ecological knowledge that is generally locally derived, and is collective, diachronic (concerning the changes of phenomena across spans of time; the nature and quality of things over time and in motion), and holistic. Indigenous knowledge contains the nature of ecosystems and the ways that they can be effected, positively or negatively, over long periods of time. Cognitive systems have been generated by native societies that allow for the transmission of ecological knowledge. These cognitive systems allow for the sustainable management of native lands and wildlife. Indigenous knowledge is holistic because it is intimately linked with the natural world or Cosmos and allows for equilibrium to exist between the needs of the people and the sustainable management of local ecosystems. Indigenous knowledge keeps a detailed and encyclopedic information base of all living inhabitants, and the water and resource characteristics of native lands. Indigenous peoples have learned to positively manipulate nature in order to increase its biological diversity; they have figured out how to alter ecological components and processes to increase the value of the ecosystems they live in. They view themselves as a part of the landscape mosaic spatially. They increase biological and genetic variation by maintaining habitat patchiness and heterogeneity within their indigenous landscape mosaic.
The Praxis
The livelihood of Indigenous societies is dependent of the immediate ecosystems that they inhabit. They “subsist by appropriating a diversity of biological resources from their immediate vicinity. Thus, subsistence of indigenous peoples is based more on ecological exchanges (with nature) than on economic exchanges (with markets).” They are therefore forced to adopt survival mechanisms that guarantee an uninterrupted flow of goods, materials, and energy from ecosystems.” Indigenous cultures tend to adopt multi-use strategies that optimize the diversification of the sources of natural resources required to support households yearly. The multiple source resource gathering strategy of indigenous communities increases the carrying capacity of the land, moderating single source dependency effects, and stabilizing the dependability of ecosystem suppliance of basic needs. Indigenous communities integrate varied practices including agriculture, agro-forestry, hunting and gathering, forest extraction, fishing, the keeping of domesticated animals, and craft-making. Non-specialized production allows for maximum utilization of all available landscapes.
“Under the multi-use strategy, indigenous producers manipulate the natural landscape in such a way that two main characteristics are maintained and favored: habitat patchiness and heterogeneity and biological as well as genetic variation. In the spatial dimension, indigenous become a complex landscape mosaic in which agricultural fields, fallow areas, primary and secondary vegetation, household gardens, cattle-raising areas, and water bodies are all segments of the entire production system. This mosaic represents the field upon which indigenous producers, as multi-use strategists, play the game of subsistence through the manipulation of ecological components and processes (including forest succession, life cycles, and movement of materials).”
Due to a long-standing comprehension of ecological succession, indigenous communities utilize developmental ecological processes to enhance the ecosystems that sustain them. In both the macro and micro-environment, indigenous people favor ecological diversity. Indigenous multi-use strategies result in the creation of landscape mosaics which open cleared areas to entry by pioneering species. Pioneer species commence events of secondary biotic succession. Forests are dynamic systems (biomes) that rejuvenate themselves periodically through ongoing, long-term biotic succession processes. These biotic cycles help maintain soil viability and continuity of species involved in ecological succession. Indigenous cultures increase habitat heterogeneity by selectively clearing small patchwork areas; hence, new communities take root.
“The same diversified arrangement found in indigenous landscapes tends to be reproduced at a micro-level, with multi-species, multi-story crops or agroforests favored over monocultures. As a consequence, animal and especially plant genetic resources tend to be maintained in indigenous agricultural fields, aquaculture systems, home gardens and agro-forests (Gadgil, et al 1993). Poly-cultural systems managed by indigenous agriculturalists and agro-foresters are relatively well known and the recent specialized literature is plenty of case studies illustrating such designs. Especially notable are the home gardens and agro-forestry systems of the tropical and humid regions of the world, which operate as human-made refuge areas for many species of plants and animals, notably in areas strongly affected by deforestation. At farm level, it is broadly recognized that crop populations are more diverse in indigenous farming systems than in agricultural areas dominated by agro-industrialism. Therefore, indigenous peoples are recognized as key agents of on-farm preservation of plant genetic resources threatened by agricultural modernization (genetic erosion).”
The Umbilicus
The Umbilicus, or axis, describes the integrative relationship that links the Cosmos, Corpus, and Praxis of indigenous reality into a unifying matrix of coordinated elements. Due to the umbilicus, knowledge, language, nature and daily experience belong to the sphere of sacred reality contained within the Cosmos; furthermore, this sacredness becomes tangible at certain times and in the context of certain activity and mythological landmarks. Mystical experiences of altered sensory experience are considered elements common to ordinary life; sensory experience belongs in part to the mythos; and the mythos is invoked naturally in certain sensory environments. Indigenous peoples do not maintain a fragmented world view that would exist as a mere alternative to the religion and world view of western culture. The western world view contains two separate and incongruent reality concepts at once. One is that of a mechanistic reality that serves to define nature and physical reality but is alienated from an unrelated, disparate ethical or religious paradigm. These isolated belief systems are oppositional, and at worst, contradictory; at best they are juxtaposed and incompatible.
The umbilicus represents an axis that fuses the Cosmos, Corpus, and Praxis into a system of interdependent components that synthesize to form a unified whole in the indigenous mind. The function of this axis is that of a lens. The Cosmos participates in the practices and knowledge base of the people. It imbues action and understanding with the life, vitality and divinity implicit in the Cosmos. It is the totalizing set of rules of conduct, the Earth, and human participation in practical life, relevant to mythos. Interaction in pragmatic acts engages the mythos or Cosmos, while mythic activity engages the physical sphere of life.
The umbilicus is most clearly observed in the primary food source of a given indigenous tribe. The food may be Caribou, deer, buffalo, corn or wheat. As the central staple of the people it links the people within the Cosmos through practice; it contains the pivotal focus of the corpus to achieve its function; allotting ethical and practical knowledge to the corpus itself, to the Cosmos and the praxis. Should an indigenous community loose the means to acquire their central food supply, their indigenous identity becomes tenuous and subsequently endangered in maintaining . The messiah of indigenous people lives as flesh and or grain. Food is the umbilicus of the Earth and mythos. The Cosmos defines the corpus and the corpus the practices. The ecosystem is the umbilicus to the Cosmos. Indigenous people identify with a central animal or plant food. They exist in a state of mystic unity within the ecosystem they inhabit; even as they exist as a component of the ecosystem spatially, physically.
There are over 300 million ‘true’ indigenous peoples; that is, people native to ancestral lands who speak a language with roots that were, in whole or in part, developed upon that land. Indigenous languages are intimately related to the ecosystems they inhabit. Indigenous people live in 75 of the world’s 184 countries, and occupy virtually every biome existing on earth. Indigenous peoples are the original occupants of the territories where they dwell. They speak a language that developed according to the nature of life in an aboriginal ecosystem.
They are “ecosystem peoples”, who live directly off the land in a sustainable manner. Indigenous communities make decisions on a consensus basis; they have no centralized political institution, and organize their lives in communal fashion. Indigenous peoples conceive reality according to a harmonious ‘world view’. They possess a custodial perspective in relation to nature which they exercise according to a strict set of ethics. They maintain a ‘spiritual attitude’ toward life and occupy a paradigm of reality that is based on symbolic interchange with the natural universe, the land and natural resources. They experience a powerful relationship with the land and ecosystem to which they are bound.The sustainable development of community-based peoples, is one of the most important key mechanisms for conservation of planetary biodiversity. Sustainable community development is an endogenous mechanism that allows a local society to take control of the processes that affect it. The empowerment of local landholders, properly educated in local ecology, is a key solution to the future survival of humankind.
In order to preserve what remains of the earth’s ability to provide for human need, indigenous peoples must become legally acknowledged stewards of their lands; and be given access to information and suitable technologies to augment their natural abilities. The establishment of new resource-management partnerships between local communities and the state or other social institutions is critical to the future maintenance of biodiversity. Local stewardship in conjunction with external governmental and non-governmental agencies and institutions is the best way to guarantee effective protection of natural ecosystems, and the species and gene pools within them, worldwide.
While indigenous peoples hold traditional claims for 25 to 30 percent of the land area and resources globally, they only exercise control over a small portion of the area.2
The 20th century brought about unprecedented erosion of knowledge throughout world communities. A third of the languages spoken in 1900 disappeared by the end of that century. The extinction of languages often signifies the extinction of culture. In Brazil, an average of one indigenous culture a year has gone extinct this century, amounting to a third of all Brazilian native people since 1990.1
By the middle of the 21st century almost all of the world’s many ecosystems will be occupied by non-indigenous people. The knowledge necessary to sustain planetary health will have disappeared. The ability of the earth to sustain life will disintegrate due to the loss of specialized ecological knowledge. Attempts at conservation will prove nearly impossible.1
Human cultures, like plant and animal species, are becoming extinct at unprecedented rates. In fact, the fates of cultural and biological diversity are closely linked.3
Colonized endemic people* are estimated to number approximately 300 million persons; a figure equal to the number of ‘true indigenous’ peoples in existence. ‘Colonized endemic people’ are native peoples that lack principal indigenous characteristics. They are tribal people that have adopted the lifestyle of a conquering society, but still maintain a communal identity. If these people are added to the population of authentic ‘indigenous peoples’ we could double the number of tribal people on earth to 600 million.
‘Colonized endemic people’ are representative of the phenomenon of cultural erosion** in the world. They depict processes and products of conquest; cultural annihilation and assimilation; at various stages and in various degrees.
Colonized endemic people, or indigenous people subjected to external disruptive factors, often lose their ability to steward the land. The influences of market pressures, unsuitable technologies, or social disruption, can alter indigenous communities to become disruptive antagonists within their own environments.
*Evidences of cultural erosion include language loss, abortion of ecological-knowledge-interaction, environmental consumerism through materialism, the adoption of a competitive mentality, social alienation/ isolation, reality fracturing/cosmological disintegration, and a loss of spiritual function, individuation, and social cohesion. Ultimately cultural erosion leads to cultural extinction, save for a representative collection of songs, words, historical recollections and folk lore. What remains is a memory of a culture which once was a way of life.**The term ‘native’ as opposed to ‘indigenous’ could be extrapolated to include nearly any people. An English person is native to Great Britain, a Scot to Scotland. These two groups speak languages that once foreign, are now native to their countries. Both can be classified as colonized endemic people. Limited aspects of the ‘indigenous’ profile extend to a multitude of the world population. Individuals exist who know something of the land, its ecosystem, and how best to work with it. Scottish people retain clan identities, and have a known practice of using eagle feathers to distinguish leadership; both cultural features proceeding from their indigenous roots. Colonization is typically, a relative and not an absolute process. The Sámi of Europe have more fully preserved a lifestyle that retains characteristics familiar to their ancestors. They keep a large repertoire of songs that are used in a number of ceremonies, including a (arctic midnight) sunrise, sweat lodge and healing ceremonies. Ceremonies, the use of teepees, language preservation, the herding of reindeer for food, shelter, and clothing, and numerous other cultural practices begin to capture ‘true indigenous elements’ possessed by the Sámi. The fact that their food source is drawn directly from nature and that it is integrated within their Cosmos, identifies them as ‘ecosystem peoples’. This characteristic would be more difficult to produce for the English shepherd or farmer. Although sheep are a natural food source, allowing the shepherd direct reliance on nature, sheep do not occupy a place of central importance in remnants of the ancient British Cosmo-vision. There are however elements of wheat and bread in the English Cosmos. This Cosmos is fragmented, albeit residual, in the common English mind, and ceremonies have been reduced to simple gestures. Cardinal directional planting and harvesting gestures are remembered and practiced by a scarce minority of English farmers; these farmers survive as faint reflections of a lost indigenous identification. The indigenous culture of the British Isles was so severely displaced, that it neither recognizable, re-collectible, nor a part of the survival practices of the average Englishman; and only slightly more detectable among folklore of the Welsh. Compared with Sámi culture, the extent of colonization and existence of indigenous characteristics, is profound.
Indigenous peoples (IP) in Global 200 terrestrial eco-regions considered a priority areas by World Wildlife Fund for Nature.
Region Eco-regions Eco-region with IP % Total IP in eco-regions Number of IP in eco-regions.
World 136 108 79 3000 1445 48
Africa 32 25 78 983 414 42
Geotropic 31 25 81 470 230 51
Nearctic 10 9 90 147 127 86
Asia and Pacific 24 21 88 298 225 76 (Indo- Malayan) Oceania 3 3 100 23 3 13
Palearctic 21 13 62 374 111 30
Australasia 15 12 80 515 335 65
Source: WWF International, People and Conservation Unit, Unpublished Report, August, 1998.
