Mapping Indigenous presence
In a never-more-apt use of the familiar phrase by Pascal Fletcher for Reuters, Indigenous Peoples are "literally putting themselves on the map ... " Centuries after European explorers planted flags and named Indigenous places for their sponsors back home, expressing possession of territories they would soon misrepresent in legal doctrine as terra nullius or "no man's land," new technology is enabling Indigenous Peoples to map their territories in a manner courts of law can't ignore. Evolved mapping technology has become a powerful force for establishing Indigenous presence on land and sea.
Peter Poole, a geographer who has trained many community mapping teams in Geographic Positioning Systems-based techniques, and a consultant to First Peoples Worldwide, relates a case in point from the 1990s in Canada. "In the early 1990s, Crees in Quebec found that they had become invisible ... when their Grand Council launched a campaign to stop the James Bay II Hydroelectric project. Brandishing satellite images, the proponents of James Bay II insisted that the land to be inundated [by the hydroelectric dam] was no longer being used. Next day the Cree Hunter Support Program GIS printed reams of maps and records based upon the hunting and fishing records that hunters kept so as to qualify their families for price and supplies support. These records showed that supposedly empty land to have been under active but invisible use for the preceding 20 years. The Cree negotiators explained that it was just their way of treading lightly upon the earth. 'It just looks like terra nullius.'"
Throughout the Americas and Southeast Asia, and now in Africa, various national and international high courts are resorting to maps for insight into the longevity and staying power of Indigenous land tenure.
In Belize, Maya communities in the southern district of Toledo began to map out their customary ancestral homelands in the 1990s, issuing the landmark Maya Atlas in 1997. Part oral history and part hard science, the atlas was generated by and for Maya communities. Far from being state-of-the-art, it was based on hand-drawn sketch maps of community lands. But the data was precise; it just wasn't "geocoded," in the jargon of cartography. A few years later, when Sarstoon Temash Institute for Indigenous Management, a community-based Indigenous organization, became engaged in Geographic Information Systems and Geographic Positioning Systems, those same data sets from the atlas were retrospectively geocoded. More recently, the Maya in Belize have used advanced maps to bolster their case for customary ancestral lands, while aerial photo-mosaic maps and remote sensing have proved their potential in a variety of applications, from evaluating conservation programs to monitoring extractive industry activities, to tracking changes in land and forest use on Indigenous community land.
Generally, the multiple computerized layers of Geographic Information Systems, together with a sister satellite technology, Geographic Positioning Systems, have brought a comprehensiveness to maps that no previous methodology could match. New generations of GIS/GPS mapping applications have proved a quantum leap in map accuracy. Gregory Ch'oc, executive director of Sarstoon Temash Institute for Indigenous Management, describes the impression precise maps can make on policy makers and judges as the Maya pursue land claims based on customary title, use and management. "Before, there wasn't this tool and we were sitting before policy makers, telling them why the land was important to us, what the river means to us. But developers, they come in with a map of what they want to do and how they want to do it. That is where we have been able to tilt the scale."
GIS/GPS mapping highlights the usefulness of specific Indigenous land and moves it to the forefront, Ch'oc explains. The Maya can match the maps of developers and provide visual support for statements about established practice. "Indigenous Peoples are able to pinpoint and identify their territories and its uses."
The pinpoint accuracy of high-tech digital mapping, the credibility that precision cartography can add to other records – all this is playing out to Indigenous advantage in courtrooms, policy offices and corporate headquarters from British Columbia to Sarawak, from Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville to Ecuador and the Fiji Islands.
In two related Supreme Court of Belize decisions from 2007 and 2010, Maya communities there have won not only claims to customary land, but also Supreme Court orders that the government officially document, identify and protect "customary property rights in land in accordance with Maya customary laws and land tenure practices."
At issue then are rights to both customary land and customary land management practices. In the case of the Maya, the court held, "these practices have evolved over centuries from patterns of land use and occupancy of the Maya people. They claim that the property rights that arise from customary practices are critical to their physical and cultural survival."
So property rights without companion rights to land management would be problematic at best for the Maya culture, at worst an exercise in assimilation. That is where GIS/GPS mapping became essential. With GIS/GPS-generated maps in hand, as a visual synthesis of other evidence, the Maya have been able to convince the courts of their customary presence on the land, and of their customary relationships to the land's resources.
In all likelihood, however, the complex Maya land management system for maximizing resources could not have been communicated visually, outside Maya culture, prior to the advent of GIS and GPS. As the Cree can attest, it might have looked like terra nullius to an older generation of satellite images. But absent precise visual information on the patchwork of multiple-use land plots associated with Conejo and Santa Cruz villages, each of them showing variations in management according to geography, family capacity and village leadership, even more technologically advanced impressions might well have been anarchic. At the very least, in contrast with the orderly presentations of practiced developers, the Maya might have seemed to present aspirations and collective memories rather than customary management and usage patterns.
An example of the difficult fit between conventional perspectives on asset management and Maya traditional practice went on display in Midway village in 2007. Consultants to an energy company were carrying out an environmental assessment required by a SATIIM court action against the national forest department. It emerged at a First Peoples Worldwide mapping workshop that transactions between the village and the consultants had thrown into high relief, for the villagers, a near total lack of knowledge and understanding by Belizean outsiders of traditional Indigenous management strategies. The basic issue of access to forest resources, the very definition of land as an asset, stood poles apart in the view of the villagers and the consultants.
In court by contrast, with maps in hand as an adjunct to oral testimony and specialist affidavits, the Maya have provided a convincing visual synthesis of a complex, time-tested land management system for maximizing resources.
Even so though, the Belizean government's hostile response to court-ordered accommodation of the Maya demonstrates a hard truth of mapping. In cartographer Poole's words, "Once demarcated, Indigenous land does not become territory that outsiders will automatically respect, but rather territory that its occupants can legitimately defend ... The most urgent problems facing Indigenous Peoples are how to get others to respect their land rights, how to demarcate those lands, and how to monitor and defend them."
Notes
These records showed that supposedly empty land to have been under active but invisible use for preceding 20 years
Fifteen years later, when negotiated agreements permitted the stalled project to go forward, the Cree were at the table. Their free, prior and informed consent in the project provides Quebec with half its drinking water. [RETURN]
Throughout the Americas and Southeast Asia, and now in Africa, various national and international high courts are resorting to maps for insight into the longevity and staying power of Indigenous land tenure
A minimal list includes Australia, Belize, Canada, New Zealand, Sarawak and Suriname. [RETURN]
In Belize...
Formerly British Honduras, fully independent since 1981. It has been a logging center from colonial times. [RETURN]
New generations of GIS/GPS mapping applications
The most advanced of new systems, in active use in the Republic of Congo, permits Indigenous Peoples to carry GPS-enabled handsets loaded with software. They can touch culturally appropriate pictograms on the handset screen (i.e., icons) that stand for water holes, hunting grounds, medicinal plants, particular trees or tree stands, or anything else. Then a receiver, powerful enough to communicate with satellites through thick forest canopy, uploads specific locational data into an existing GIS map or a saved Google Earth map.
The technology, along with some of the opportunities and concerns it raises, is precisely described at this Web address: http://ictupdate.cta.int/en/Feature-Articles/Logging-the-forest
A news account is available here:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/10/11/us-congo-pygmies-map-idUSL1159901220071011?sp=true
A more comprehensive view of logging in the Congo Basin, including paragraphs on the advanced mapping project described above, is available here: http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8265:central-africa-logging-in-the-congo-basin-what-hope-for-indigenous-peoples-resources-and-their-environments&catid=55:africa-indigenous-peoples&Itemid=77 [RETURN]
Maya communities
Maya communities are the plaintiffs of record in landmark decisions of the Supreme Court of Belize to recognize Indigenous land claims and customary land management rights. But the Garifuna, Indigenous Peoples of southern Belize and neighboring Guatemala, have allied with the Maya in the same cause. One Garifuna community and four Maya communities border Sarstoon Temash National Park; each of these five buffer zone communities participates in park management. [RETURN]
complex Maya land management system for maximizing resources
Finding for the Maya, the Supreme Court of Belize cited several affidavits that bore out Maya oral testimony. Together they make a strong record of the complex Maya land management system for maximizing resources. The 2007 judgment cites the subsequent quotations as evidence.
Maya land management practices begin with a collective conferral of rights on individuals, " ... a mixture of quasi-private use rights with collective decision-making. ... Families can claim and retain agricultural plots over long periods of time. Each family is responsible for its own agricultural work and reaps its own harvests. Other farmers may provide assistance ... but the family or household is usually the central organizing unit within the Maya land management system. The collective aspect of this system is the community decision making regarding how land is distributed among households. Maya communities strive to distribute farmland equitably. They also seek to ensure that all members of a village have access to communal or shared forest areas that are used for hunting, fishing, collecting water and gathering various resources."
Elsewhere in the judgment, we learn why: "This is because each Maya farm family in Toledo requires access to a variety of land types in order to grow and gather all the crops and resources they need to survive in any given year. Each family needs several acres of dry-season cornfield land in a wet spot or along a riverbank, several acres of upland wet-season land for corn, and slightly wetter upland fields for rice. They also need access to secondary and primary forest for wild foods, hunting, and construction materials, access to common grazing for livestock within the village, and access to rivers for potable water, bathing, laundry, food processing and fishing. No single 40- or 50-acre plot of land can contain an adequate amount of each of the necessary kinds of resource. The variety of resources available is therefore often more important than the total amount."
Family need and labor capacity also influence collective decisions on land occupancy. Other norms for land management include "ecologically sound rotating and permanent agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting, and gathering; and reciprocal obligations of land and community stewardship."
The resulting system of land occupancy and use is essential to Maya culture, but also a godsend to Belize. Stable enough to encourage long-term investment in permanent annual crops, "yet flexible enough to allow Maya farmers to respond to market opportunities," it has often made Toledo district "the primary source of national foodstuffs" in Belize.
As global food stockpiles decline, prices rise, and climate change alters growing seasons – altogether putting a premium on variety of resources – a proper comprehension of customary Maya land management would seem to hold some potential for new paradigms in collective agriculture. [RETURN]
Conejo and Santa Cruz villages
Conejo and Santa Cruz are the plaintiff villages of record in the Maya land claims case against the government, decided in the Supreme Court of Belize in 2007. By the time of a subsequent 2010 judgment, also foursquare in favor of Maya customary rights, 36 other Maya villages of southern Toledo district had joined the lawsuit. [RETURN]
the Belizean government’s hostile response to court-ordered accommodation of the Maya
In this regard, the government of Belize has a mixed record at best. It has continued to grant timber and oil concessions on Maya land, defying a judgment from the Supreme Court of Belize. It has continued to portray court-recognized Maya property rights as the "Balkanization" of Belize. Most recently, Prime Minister Dean Barrow has insisted the government will honor contracts to drill for oil in Sarstoon Temash National Park, though the nation's National Parks Act forbids it. In the ensuing outcry from a resistance coalition, Yvette Alonzo, executive director of the Association of Protected Areas Management Organizations, charged that the government hasn't gotten its capacities for environmental protection up to the level of court requirements – or for that matter public demand: Belize is 26 percent protected area, with an offshore barrier reef that UNESCO has threatened to de-list as a World Heritage Site. The government is in contempt of court over a legally binding agreement with SATIIM to co-manage Sarstoon Temash National Park, a protected area in a district where Maya communities possess court-confirmed customary rights. The government appealed the court judgments in favor of the Maya at the end of March.
The relationship hasn't always been smooth, then, but not every bump in the road has been a result of bad faith. "There's a gradual acceptance by the government of community-based sustainable resource management," Ch'oc said, as reflected in a new national forestry policy.
SATIIM continues to patrol the forest in tandem with government officers, providing a first line of defense against the illegal farming, fishing, hunting and logging operations that have degraded the forest ecosystem and its biodiversity, which is of global significance. In addition SATIIM, well aware of the link between poverty and the poaching of protected area resources, has incorporated alternatives for a sustainable livelihood into its management plan. Residents in five so-called buffer zone villages around the forest have devoted acreage to organic cacao, which they can sell for export through the Toledo Cacao Growers Association. The new household income will be used to purchase resources the forest provided in the past. [RETURN]
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