Indigenous Peoples and Development in the Americas: Lessons from a Consultation Process
Reported by José Barreiro
Editor, Native Americas
American Indian Program at Cornell University
Summary: Various consultations among Indigenous peoples of the Americas conducted from 1984 to 1995 and featuring practitioners involved in community development projects have produced a set of development themes and topics of concern to Indigenous communities. These preliminary notes from the material shared by these consultations, held at Cornell University (Akwe:kon), Plenty Canada, Carleton University (Apikan), J.D. & C.T. MacArthur Foundation and United Nations Development Programme, are based on transcripts on record at Apikan (Ottawa), and at Cornell's American Indian Program. They are offered to stimulate participatory discussion on development work with Indigenous peoples' communities.


1. Latin America Indigenous peoples

The most widely accepted estimate for the total population of the 500 indigenous peoples in Latin America is 40 million, although recently evolving definitions of ethnicity tend to push the number up considerably. The largest enclaves of Native population are found in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Colombia, but there are Native nations in nearly every country of the Southern American hemisphere, including the Caribbean islands.
Most indigenous people are agriculturalists and are connected to their dominant societies through work and commercial trade. Others live in very
isolated areas of tropical forest; they fish, hunt, gather and practice primarily subsistence agriculture. Other groups yet between these two poles live in varying degrees of articulation with their respective national societies and maintain distinct modes of technology.
Population estimates are disputed because national census methods can distort actual numbers by restrictive language-based definitions of Native identity. The denial of identity has been rampant historically and is one method by which nation states have suppressed Native land rights. War, repression, dispossession and extreme remoteness, which kept Native peoples from meeting each other for many centuries, have been no largely overcome. International organizations of Native people have linked hundreds of communities and thus the process of mutual recognition and common representation vis a vis the international community has significantly strengthened in the past twenty years.

II. Indigenous Development Definitions:
North-South Partnerships
A major communications and development process among Indigenous people in recent years has proposed the facilitation of partnerships between Indigenous peoples of North and South as the formal basis for a major development programme. The present moment is unique in that a generation of people associated with the Indigenous peoples" Hemispheric communications movement are maturing into positions in several international institutions. Relationships built from long standing work thus form a professional base to begin sustained programs among Indigenous peoples, supporting objectives that have been identified and endorsed, including the generation of more consistent seed resources, institution-building professional assistance and community-accountable results for Indigenous communities. Initiatives at the J.D. and C.T. MacArthur Foundation in 1991-92 and via the Canadian International Development Agency (1990-95), generated intense discussions on development among Indigenous peoples just as global forces at work through the 1990s simultaneously generated new openings for Indigenous peoples at the international level.
After a decade of working groups on Indigenous populations, the United Nations General Assembly declared 1993 as International Year of Indigenous peoples, and subsequently, in 1994, launched the International Decade of Indigenous Peoples. Important North and South American institutions and several European countries prioritized initiatives on indigenous peoples development. With Bolivia as catalyst, the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) inaugurated the Fund for the Development of Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean in 1993. At the same time, the World Bank initiated a rewriting process on its guidelines on the protection of Indigenous peoples livelihoods, rights and biodiversity knowledge.
The unique hemispheric and global sense of Indigenous peoples generated by all this activity was reaffirmed by participants in a recent five year dialogue process originated by Plenty Canada and carried forward by the Apikan Indigenous Network (Canada), in collaboration with Cornell University's Akwe:kon Institute, First Nations Development Institute, Seventh Generation Fund and other Indigenous peoples' organizations. From South and Central America and the Caribbean, participants offered their own cultural reflections, (Maya, Miskito, Carib, Taino, Chorotega, Quechua, Aymara, Shuara), as the group hosted strategic discussions under the auspices of a roundtables titled Councils on Indigenous Peoples Economies (CIPE). The need for local decision making as well as for a Native-led discussion at the international level was signalled by this process.
The experience and research conducted over several years support these basic assumptions:
1. There exist
Indigenous Peoples with knowledge and experience related to Aboriginal governance based on its unique values, principles and decision-making who should be consulted as part of development processes;
2. The experience of
Indigenous governance is unique and represents a departure from what is no known in the NGO community, and that in the sharing of Indigenous culture, values and beliefs, this unique form of governance and experience is the key to establishing "New Partnerships"'
3. Key Indigenous
persons knowledgeable in governance can provide the experience and knowledge to recommend to the international community what actions and policies would assist Indigenous development;
4. There are
Indigenous Peoples with the experience and knowledge in developing appropriate policy, programs and projects related to Indigenous People's development;
5. There are several
Indigenous projects, initiatives, and NGOs that naturally exemplify the principles and practice of appropriate development within the context, values and culture of Indigenous Peoples;
6. There are
Indigenous NGOs and institutions which embody the principles and philosophy of the "New partnership," e.g. Pana Pana in Nicaragua, Meadow Lake Tribal Council in Canada, Plenty Canada, ADEEC in Guatemala and Cornell Akwe:kon in USA, that are contributing to the international dialogue, consciousness raising, and action on Indigenous Peoples development.
At a 1994 conference in Belize that focused specifically on partnership generation, several important links in the network induced representatives from Six Nations Reserve, in Ontario, to form the Six Nations International Development Agency (SNIDA), featuring a circle of community based Native professionals in the largest native community in Canada. Cornell university programs and departments also joined the network as training, documentation and research partners. Exploratory commercial fisheries links between Cree, Inuit and Miskito began during this time that have culminated in the first major developmental accord between Northern and Southern communities. (See Native Americas, Spring, 1996). Other major strands in the web of partnerships - which include book and publications projects, fisheries, resource generation projects and strategic planning projects, also emerged in 1993-1995.
Simultaneously, the political situation of Native people has improved in Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala in recent years. In Ecuador most significantly, the World Bank is negotiating what might be the first major international development program managed directly by native organizations.


III. Antecedents of Partnership and Sustainability in Native Culture
Antecedents to the current North-South Partnership approach can be found in the Iroquois and Algonquin longhouses. The Iroquois tradition of the White Roots of Peace, and the Algonquin Seventh Generation Fire are firmly represented in this emerging methods. Under the cultural auspices of the White Roots of peace, which according to Iroquois tradition, extend from the Great Tree of Peace to the four sacred directions, traditional Indian speakers went out through the nineteen seventies and early eighties to travel north, east, west and south. Hundreds of gatherings and meetings and a major communications effort emerged from this early canvassing of the contemporary Indian movement. Joined almost at the onset by strong representation of Maya traditional culture, the internationalization effort went on to gather the participation of several dozen other traditional societies and Native national organizations. Much of the Hemispheric networking among American Indigenous people starts with the White Roots of Peace - between Maya and Mohawk, Aztec and Seneca, Onondaga and Navajo and Mopoke, Hope and Aymara, Hackle and Winnebago, Purepecha and Lakota, Cree and Aymara, Quechua and Anishinabe, etc..
A primary principle of community development is featured in the tradition of the Seventh Generation. It refers to the need for a consciousness of the impacts of the decisions of today's leaders seven generations from now -- clearly a call for longterm thinking, or sustainability. This principle, which endorses the sustaining of
community cohesion and of ecological balance in human activity, is similarly expressed in the nature appreciation ceremonies that in various ways are found in all Native cultures. Consistently represented at international meetings, the spiritual call by native elders clearly appears as a central component in the Native to native discussions. In contrast to development initiatives that stress North to South top-down approaches of decision making, Indigenous opinion has focused on clear objectives toward the betterment of community life. Native peoples express high interest in meeting each other, sharing knowledge and in continuing to work together.

IV. Indigenous people and income generation
Consistently throughout the many conferences, cultural elders have been involved and the traditional aspects of Indigenous thinking have been incorporated and often endorsed. As well, the process also has supported business and income generation ideas and projects. This total approach to Indigenous futures is uniquely important in its intent to blend what are in some circles highly contentious positions, as some Indigenous support groups and some "indigenista" organizations have challenged income-generation projects as inherently destructive of Indigenous peoples.
However, as has been confirmed by Apikan/UNDP Scoping Missions in 1994 and 1995, most Indigenous communities are determined to seek both economic life and markets as well as sustainable and rational use of natural resources. The full variety of talents and energies, in all fields of training, must be recruitable to fulfill this mandate.
The opinion of most immediate consensus is that Indigenous peoples North and South want to meet and whenever possible work together to create partnerships. Secondly, Indigenous people, by and large, want to join the economic currents, want to produce and trade with the world. Thirdly, communities are very independent and want to formulate policy based on local needs and values. Fourthly, and always present, planning must stress the longterm, the sustainable elements, nurture nature, help it produce.
V. Factors in Indigenous Development
Below is an outline of factors in the dialogues of Indigenous Peoples and Development.
Factor 1: Indigenous Definitions of Development
The term development is always defined by the economic politics of the user. In recent history we have seen two major tendencies that defined development: the capitalist and the socialist. These two definitions struggled with each other intensely but always converged in the seemingly inherent need for industrial expansion, for urbanization and for the globalization of structures to govern people, natural resources and the environment. In the post Soviet period, that convergence continues and development is defined by this neo-liberal technocratic vision. This is evident in the endorsement of regional trade agreements by both major political parties in the U.S. as the emerging cornerposts of the global thrust to production and market. This type of progress, whatever its merits, is largely a process that invades agricultural, rural and rainforest regions, severely limiting family and community-level production of food and non-industrial products and accelerating human (Native) migration to urban areas.
In a sort of generic understanding (and critique) of this process, Indigenous people, particularly from communities with strong cultural and spiritual bases, have expressed unwillingness to accept this definition of progress and development. The land-based, community-oriented nature of Indigenous peoples' development approaches point out a different path to future outcomes. The significance attached to the Domestic Mode of Production (or subsistence economy) as a base of social safety to be protected, and not as a limitation to market activity or as an anachronism to be discarded, is widespread.
Factor 2. Indigenous Peoples' Points of Commonality
It has been assumed that Native peoples have no cultural commonalities because they emerge from such diverse ecologies and cultures. However, those Native communities seeking international resources and partnerships to carry on development projects have articulated rationales that are cohesive, practical and intellectually kindred. Particularly in the past decade, many indigenous peoples sought to improve their conditions and reached out to the international community for various forms of assistance. Despite the obvious diversity, however, a set of common concerns and principles emerged.
These principles, often represented in spiritual ceremony, include respect for place of origin, for the longterm future impact of actions taken in the present as well as the expressed importance attached to the glue of kinship and community. All are elements of sustainability.
Among the points of commonality:
Identity in the land and the protection of the earth
Land (and preferably territory) provides the base of sustainability for all other human factors, including the social, cultural, economic, political and spiritual. Indigenous people have great attachment to original land bases and stay and/or seek to return to the place of birth in their lifetimes. There is always concern if not always practical achievement for the continuation of Indigenous jurisdiction over the ancestral territory, as well as concern over environment and ecology of the home lands.
In the context of jurisdiction and political autonomy, traditional Indigenous political processes are characterized by the struggle to stay independent of both left and right wing idealogies, political parties and their often sanguine hostilities. This continues to seem justified in light of headlines in August, l993, (New York Times), twice documenting massacres of Amazonian Indians, in Brazil and Peru, by right and left wing elements respectively.
"The Decade of enlightenment" for Indians in Central and South America was the l970s. Communication among and within Native communities spread rapidly during a brief period of relative peace and prosperity. For example, the Maya of Guatemala made many international partnerships during the l970s. Particularly following the earthquake of l976, the potential for international assistance was greatly enhanced. In the same period, the Kuna in Panama were undergoing their own phase of revitalization, staking out new projects over their ancestral rainforests. In Nicaragua, during the l970s, the Miskito and Sumo formed their first region-wide Indian elders' council, made up of thirteen major districts. In Costa Rica, Honduras, even in El Salvador, Native peoples' outreach projects multiplied. Indigenous Mexico rekindled its cultural process also during that time and particularly since the events at Chiapas, there is growing political identification with authocthonous visions.
In South America, Indigenous cases and issues also emerged to public notice during the l970s. Remote areas were increasingly accessible and Native people from different regions and countries found it possible to meet. It happened in the Andes, with the Quechua and Aymara. It happened with the Mapuche across three countries and even in the dense and highly demarcated Amazon. Simultaneously, anthropologists and missionaries, and, increasingly, Native scholars approached the mass media with evidence of near-slavery conditions, massacre and other intolerable acts of violence directed at Indigenous peoples -- in Paraguay, in Chile, in Colombia, Peru. Guided by the needs expressed by the Native communities, the early polemic of protest evolved a movement for Indigenous human rights into a programme for Indigenous decision making that planted the seeds of networks to support culturally appropriate development.
In every consultation conducted with Native community leadership, participants from the Amazon, Central America and elsewhere expressed the desire to self-determined futures bases on land and community. When providing fundaments of their cultural interpretations, Indigenous speakers refer to the "spirituality" of Indian ways of life. There was unanimous expression the belief that Native spirituality is rooted in the land.
Maintenance of community cohesion in the face of new situations, incorporating business development
Presently a major question among Indigenous community development organizers is how to create better working community systems to balance against being overrun by "modernity" and/or economic exploitation from the outside. An often-asked question is: how can we balance between basic community enhancing values (generosity/reciprocity) and profit-making (capital-driven) production?
In many Native communities the change from common lands to individual fee simple title signals division and even dispersion. State policy, whether through the Allotment Acts of the United States or the Indian ejido destruction of recent Mexican legality, tends toward privatizing lands. There are some exceptions, ie. successful land claims in Canada and U.S., but the current trend is destructive of Indian communities's land holding patterns.
Pressures on Native traditional communities also come from the inside. Community members developing business enterprises can become impatient with the traditional leadership. Competing frames of mind as well as frames of time severely test communication and common community orientations. Disagreeable levels of accountability and lack of common understanding of tribal finances are recurring factors that often impede great potentials.
One dichotomy that arises in communities pits the circular and inclusive nature of traditional community values against the strict scheduling and capital-intensive, managerial nature of business. Just as often traditional community leadership "can not keep up with the speed at which communications now move through populations," )Tim Johnson, Mohawk, Six Nations, Canada.) "There is a need to get ahead of the problems with enhanced decision-making processes and more efficient structural capacity -- or risk getting run over. Sometimes antagonism runs high between traditional leaders and those business people who are forging ahead to create market opportunities. These developers are easy to dismiss in a cultural sense, but they are often the ones with problem solving capacity. To survive and prosper as communities, we must rationally use the best talents of both types of people. Just being against the new developments is not enough to succeed as a policy. Traditional groups need to speed up their administrative systems with the full incorporation of their values and principles."
This most important discussion, on the nature and requirements of income-generation, has widened considerably within the Native world. The stress on market and enterprise development in the partnership language prescribed by the consultations, which expresses respect for traditional knowledge, makes that discussion more inclusive.
Retention of traditional language, philosophies and cultural medicinal practices
Participants often said that language is culture and culture is language. Yet, Native languages are clearly in danger among many peoples. The wisdom of the older generations and the knowledge and values that create culture all need constant safeguarding.
An area needing preservation is in women's health and family/tribal knowledge of midwifery. "The women lose a great body of knowledge when they stop the midwives from operating, knowledge that was transferred by the generations from grandmother to mother and daughter. Encouraging multi-generational nurturing among women is the most important thing to survive and we can build on that. Midwifery pertains to control of reproduction and family ways." As they recover old methods and preserve and bring back these connections, the language of these traditional activities is recovered. "Our languages describe a way of life and a particular ecology. I hear the words of women's medicine by practicing women's medicine." (Katsi Cook, Mohawk).
Midwifery is one current way to rationalize the traditional and the scientific medical knowledge, both of which are useful, if analyzed correctly, according to Cook. "We need to be aware of and use the best of medical science but we must be careful not to throw away our basic preventive care practices, the use of natural medicines and the purification practices of our elders," she said. The midwifery network is one area of growing partnership, with projects in the making for training and assessment between aboriginal midwives associated with the Ontario College of Midwives and Indigenous midwives in Belize, Guatemala, Brazil and Bolivia.
The propagation of traditional medicines has high value in many Native communities. "We have very good medicines. Now we are systematically cataloguing and propagating them." (Mildred Levy, Miskito, Nicaragua.) Green medicine projects are important also to Mayas, Kunas, Aymaras, Mapuche and others. These types of primary economic activities are labelled as subsistence and demeaned as primitive by the some technocratic developers. However, green medicine is uniformly identified and endorsed by Indigenous community development participants as integral to the sustainability of village communities and the basis for continuing education in eco-systemic living.
Community guided Development
Development projects should always be community based. They should address problems identified by the community and analyzed through local and regional Indigenous people, enterprises and organizations.
Constant analysis of dependency creation and promotion is very recommended in development work. Even well-intended assistance is identified with its source and thus the sense of well-being and assurance engendered in the community returns to that source, seeks that source for continuing relief. Thus, community control and ownership become essential. The creation of Indigenous, community-based NGOs is a recommended goal. Who thinks it? Who does it? Who assists it? All these factors signal major directions for Indigenous peoples.
"It makes a big difference if the NGO is from USAID or the Catholic Church or any other outside agency, as opposed to an Indigenous NGO that the people can see themselves working in, thinking like them, coming out of them. Whoever facilitates the process, no matter how self-effacing, will signal to the community what and who the leadership is, where to look for direction? At the point that the community sees itself, its own members as the leadership, this is when they see that their own leadership is actually possible." (R. Teni, Maya Cack, Guatemala)
Simon Brascoupé (Algonquin, Ottawa) has synthesized several developmental models that are useful to Indigenous peoples. The "community-based" model is a bottom-up approach based on the ideas of consciousness-raising and empowerment ... [it] enables communities to sustain cultural continuity and decision-making, ensuring community cohesion."
Other models approaching self-determined development also articulated by Brascoupé include: Self-government, Culture-based and Traditional Way of Life. In Canada, self-government pertains to agreements negotiated by individual nations and the state. The Cree and the Inuit have settle claims and Agreements in advantageous terms under this model. The culture-based model incorporates Native cultural prescriptions to the community-based approach."...while Americans [tend to] dream of individual wealth, riches, and power, Native Americans [often] seek group objectives, spirituality and a relationship to the environment." The Traditional Way model brings up the fundamental values, "less about instrumental thinking that about process," it is about spirituality. "Elders have also pointed out that development should be based on respect. ...A growing body of literature," writes Brascoupé, in one of his reports, "demonstrates that subsistence economies can survive and develop in harmony with the market economy."
Native elders' mandate for independent thinking often roots back in the concern for food self-sufficiency. Food production is essential, locally and regionally, so that the community or kinship nation rounds out its cultural concerns and practices. Sometimes, common community work sessions are most associated with the traditional agricultural rituals and maintain social and spiritual cohesion. Family food production is often seen as the fundamental grass-roots insurance policy. It is also appreciated as the basis of social cohesion, ritual offering and spiritual ceremony. "When our full village Way of Life is working, there is nothing more fulfilling because it intimately relates the spiritual, the cosmological, the agronomical, the social and the economic. This is the Indian community, for instance, working around the cycle of corn, from clearing of the field to the harvest, distribution and use of the crops. From the blessings of the seed ceremony to the common harvest bees, where the whole community gathers each family's fields." (R. Ten)
In Nicaragua in the l980s and earlier in El Salvador (1930s and most recently in Chiapas, Mexico, Native people have fought state armies over the right to land for raising homesteading crops - including the valuable subsistence crops of rice, corn and beans. "To a great level, our people went to war against the Sandinista government to protect our village agriculture and our village elders' leadership," (Samuel Mercado, Miskito, Nicaragua). Since the end of that war and return of the Miskito refugees, Mercado's organization, Pana Pana, has concentrated in assisting village food production efforts, both in agriculture and in fishing.
"We are tyring to see what we can do for ourselves. Returning from the war, we realized that before these past ten years, our people, we were poor, but we had animals, gardens, we had all the eggs, fish. The land is productive and we have many people still who know how to work it," said Amalia Dixon, Miskito, Nicaragua.
The traditional (almost always modified) Indigenous family and community homestead production capability has been analyzed in the dialogue, at least in Latin America, as a base of low chemical input production and land use formula. It offers many perma-cultural, stacked-functions and closed-systems ideas that are increasingly studied by university researchers. (Jorge Quintana, Chorotega Nahoa, Nicaragua.)
The principle of cultural preservation is also practically expressed in fundamental Indigenous agronomic systems. Dr. Jane Mt. Pleasant, a Tuscarora agronomist at Cornell University, points out the dangers of yearly profit-sheet farming, where maximization of financial gain is put ahead of soil conservation and long term production. "Native farming systems in the northeast of the United States and Canada--the corn, beans and squash gardens-- have proven, long term qualities and are designed that way." These methods provide a total-circle system, sustainable and labor intensive."
Reinforcing traditional knowledge from the local to the regional or ethnic-wide level is a method often mentioned. Indigenous to Indigenous knowledge transfer has been stressed. One village may have families that manufacture cloth or blankets while another may know the best seed- selection methods or the manufacture of natural insecticides. "Composting is an old method of fertilizing in the Mayan highlands. Our organization ascertained the best traditional methods and added some of what we knew of appropriate technology developed in north American and Europe. This idea takes very well in villages concerned about chemical poisons and the loss of soil fertility." (Teni). Adds Felipe Gonzalez, a developmentalist also working in Guatemala: "People come from other villages to learn these composting methods, which shorten the time it takes to make compost by more than half. Now it is viable and actually people don't only use it themselves, they bag it and sell it to other villages."
Communities with long term commitments to their environment sustain memory of workability that can prove extremely useful in ecological preservation and improvement. However, this knowledge is not often identified and documented and it is used only sparingly. Indigenous NGOs are compiling and deepening their own knowledge base and spreading it among communities that hold limited genres and systems of knowledge. Both in Guatemala and in Nicaragua, indigenous NGOs often facilitate training of cultural practitioners from among varieties of villages depending on which ones still sustain what knowledge bases. By gathering the practical and important skills into workshop processes and them making them available where they no longer are practiced.
The forest is identified with life, with community wealth and well-being. The destruction of the forest, its animal and plant life, is seen the major cause of Indian people's poverty. Indigenous communities are often the poorest of the poor. "While 66% of the population of Guatemala is poor, almost 90% of the Indigenous population is poor by the same standards. In Mexico as the Indigenous population density increases so does the poverty estimate. In municipalities with 10 to 40% Indigenous, 46% of the population is poor. In municipalities with over 70% Indigenous, over 80% of the population is poor." (Harry Travinos, World Bank)
Indigenous poverty appears to intensify. Speakers refer to better times for Indigenous communities, when things were done well and people were fed, even though they did not participate in the industrial economy. Traditional methods of agriculture and the use of woodlots and fruitlots -- the forest, in many cases -- are identified with that past well-being. 

"They are destroying the forest in a very indiscriminating way, polluting the rivers and all of nature so we can hardly survive. There are ways that we can find a solution to the problem based on sustainable development to avoid damaging the natural ecosystem. We should plant the ground without depriving it from its productivity, have cattle without damaging the prairies, turning them into deserts, to increase fishing without using dynamite." (Enrique Shiriap, Shuara, Ecuador.) The Shuara have initiated a reforestation program, "handled by the Shuara community."
In Guatemala, an Indigenous NGO has instituted the Plan Ceiba, which runs traditional and contemporary forest appreciation and reforestation programs in village schools impacting a major watershed. "Sometimes villagers needing wood for fuel and heating needs do impact a forest negatively. But this is out of necessity, because large areas of forest are being cut indiscriminately for lumber. In those same villages, we are bringing in the elders to tell the traditional stories and we hear many concerns among village members for areas that are losing vegetation, the need to replant tress, what varieties and just how to do it. In all these villages it is not unusual that the entire population of the village will volunteer to plant trees and reforestate whole areas around them." (Teni). Plan Ceiba is documented in video tape with narration in English.
Native involvement with nature preservation projects is an identifiable phenomenon. The clear connection between native peoples and natural world preservation signals a theme of deep potential that might be more focused in the philanthropic community. Indigenous-led and controlled projects of traditional knowledge preservation have consequence for strategies and practices of ecological sustainability. Mac Chapin has aptly documented this phenomenon in his map, "The Coexistence of Indigenous Peoples and the Natural Environment in Central America." (Map, Research and Exploration, national Geographic Society, Spring, 1992).
The preservation of traditional knowledge extends to medicines and the collection and propagation of heirloom seeds or Indigenous germplasm. "From our own community in Tesuque Pueblo we have met with other Indian communities in New Mexico and Arizona, we want to work with one another to exchange knowledge of farming and to support one another. (Clayton Brascoupé, Tesuque Pueblo, New Mexico)
Among Miskitos, Kunas, Caribs, Shuara and other communities represented in the seminar series, forest conservation concepts abounded and projects are being organized. Medicinal plant projects are widespread yet quite conservative. Indigenous to Indigenous partnerships are particularly sought there.
Concern for developing resources and community bases in the marketplace
While homestead food and other production is seen as a base to work from, none of the participants spoke in isolationist terms. The need to develop income generating enterprises was articulated, coupled with the commitment to train and develop people in methods and practices of organizational infrastructure, and to conduct business and economic planning. As they strive to have the space to grow, educate and prosper, Indigenous populations have many skills and resources. The opportunity to meet the current "modernization" processes on better footing and equanimity is highly desired.
"We need increased training of Indigenous-based scientists and managers - but these must also be trained and monitored to operate in ways that safeguard and build upon the potential prosperity of Indigenous traditional wisdom, knowledge and methods." (Teni)
The relationship between North and South is crucial in this quest. The North is sought by the South to help in sustaining media access on cases of human rights abuses, as well as a place to secure information, seed grants and intermediary investment capital to start projects and ventures. However, what is sought is not simply capital and the results are not just measured in dollar dividends. "Perhaps Indian projects are not so profit oriented, that is, we are not looking to set up opportunities with vast investment returns. We are more looking to set up lateral-intensive enterprises that employ maximum numbers gainfully and operate at a gain, not at a loss, especially for the long term benefit of the community and local populations." (John Mohawk, Seneca, New York State)
The North looks to the South for sources of traditional, eco-systemic knowledge, for partnerships and in order to translate labor and natural resources into marketable products and opportunities. The exchange, when conducted with respect for community values and directions, can be the gruel of survival and the beginning of leveling the economic playing field for Indigenous peoples. "There are more and more Indigenous communities from the south coming to North America to strike this type of relationship, as well as for cultural exchanges." (Brascoupé, 1994)
A significant fall 1994 Scoping Mission set out to test the thesis of the cycle of conferences since 1990 with more direct queries and significant numbers. The mission team, Apikan in partnership with the UNDP country offices and Plenty Canada personnel, met with some sixty Indian organizations in five countries in Central America. The main recommendations based on the consultations from the mission and tabled at a session of the network organized in Washington, DC, October 11, 1994, were thus:
1. Trade and business development is a main element of the long-term solution, as contrasted with funds allocations for service projects that don't work toward income-generation. It should be addressed in all development projects.
2. The Fair Trade movement offers an excellent vehicle to develop profitable markets for indigenous trade products. A public education campaign should be developed, financed and implemented.
3. A Trade Development Strategy should be prepared for each country in the Latin American and Caribbean region.
4. North/South Indigenous schools linkages project should be initiated on a pilot basis.
5. Whenever desired by local Indigenous populations, Northern indigenous development technology and experience should be used as a model for Indigenous development.
6. A concentrated effort should be made by all stakeholders to assemble the financial and human resources necessary to assist with the development of sustainable Indigenous trade initiatives.
Factor 3: Barriers to sustainable Indigenous community-based development.
Intellectual and real barriers to sustainable community based development among indigenous peoples are interwoven. Among the major factors:
A. Unmitigated Resource Extraction
The consumerist and materialist prescriptions of the northern (global) market economies often clash with those of the Indigenous traditionalist model, which is more modest in its resource extraction and use.
The extraction of resources from third and fourth world regions to feed the northern industrial hemisphere is quite raped and pressured, often diminishing greatly the resources that might otherwise by legally and ecologically more properly used by Native, and other local peoples in those regions. The ability to plan and operate economically according to Native traditional prescriptions is hampered by the constant intrusions from external extractors. This is one level of activity, ie. The defence of territories and natural resources and people's labor, that takes up considerable energy away from more fruitful development activities. (A. Dixon)
B. Racism In the Ascending Concept of Civilization
Another major factor hampering Indigenous sustainable development is the ongoing attitude of racism against so-called inferior, underdeveloped, or primitive peoples. The much-accepted historical scale of savagery to civilization, with its inherent Euro-centric denial of Native intelligence has permeated most instructional bases and created a wall of disdain, paternalism and misunderstanding over Native decision making that is being reduced only with a lot of effort and perseverance. There are some prominent successes against this long standing stereotype. Witness in the US the major shift at the Smithsonian toward native professional directions and interpretations in its new national Museum of the American Indian. Witness as well the ongoing impact of Native viewpoints in the national media of Canada, an almost daily occurrence. Nonetheless, vigorous arguments for termination of native rights in both of these northern countries - a direct impact in post-NAFTA Mexico - are growing dangerously, often as part of right wing, fundamentalist positions in the United States and Canada.
C. Fundamental Resistance of Aboriginality by Nation-states
The fundamental resistance by nation-states to granting or upholding rights based on aboriginality, based in part on the paternalism justified by the barrier discussed in section B above, continually tempers the quest for rights. The inherent fear by nation-states is about the obvious affinity of Native peoples to lands that are precisely divided by international borders. This reality, repeated in nearly every border in the hemisphere, particularly when linked to the concept and practice of separate jurisdictions based on aboriginality, is a major cause for nation-states to vote against Indigenous declarations at the United nations and a major barrier to Native people developing as whole ethnic communities or kinship nations. Another sad result of this demographic phenomenon is that conflicts between nation-states, ie. The recent Peru-Ecuador war, which occur primarily along borders, often run over Native communities.
D. Unreliable or domineering partners. Political parties, unions, churches and NGOs often try to manipulate Indigenous community processes. There are myriad governmental lateral aid programs and NGOs with poor operational procedures and no restraints on arrogant or dictatorial behavior. NGOs fighting ideological fights or turf fights often inject controversy and factionalism where there needn't be any. The question of land rights and spiritual significance versus economic imperatives, trade, income-generation is thus often exacerbated by the polemics of extra-indigenous groups.
VI. The Shifting Paradigm
Western development models are under intense scrutiny these days. The total growth, profit-intensive, neo-liberal western scientific development model exhibits substantial problems, particularly in the accelerated creation of low-income urban populations, and in fostering the breakdown of social controls by destroying old mores without creating new forms of family and community supports. Indigenous peoples, among other self-defined local populations, are seeking their own solutions with ways of thinking not easily ascertained in the industrialized world. As concern over environmental degradation deepens and as the social fabric of Western industrial societies continues to disintegrate, interest and curiosity about American Indian cultures has grown.
Some of the public interest in Native ways is romantic, with expectations of mysticism on demand. But the deeper dialogue has been joined among thinking practitioners and academic researchers and has many genuine adaptations to offer. The principles of Indigenous cultures, as well as the mandates and positions of recent dialogue processes, such as the ones canvassed in this assessment, are drawing significant attention and increasing respect. The wholistic context, weaving social and economic and ecological factors into long term sustenance, provides frameworks and potential solutions to the fragmentary process of the West. Witness the launch of Native Americas, a quarterly journal published by the American Indian Program at Cornell that is dedicated to these issues.
Indigenous peoples are mentioned with some prominence in the resolutions adopted at the 1992 Rio Summit, United nations Conference on Environment and Development, (UNCED). Chapter 26 of Agenda 21 supports Indigenous led development, links it to the preservation of the environment and urges its "capacity-building" support. Similarly, Article 8 of the United Nations Biodiversity Convention calls for "respect for the innovations and practices of Indigenous and local communities..and...the sustainable use of biological diversity."
Simon Brascoupé, who compiled a 1993 brief of International Documents Related to Indigenous Peoples Development for the Apikan process, told one conference: "Indigenous peoples Development for the Apikan process, fold one conference: "Indigenous peoples are mentioned in these important international documents, in everything from the conservation of biological diversity to sustainable agriculture and rural development, calling for governments to "recognize and foster traditional methods of knowledge, emphasizing in particular the role of women relevant to the conservation."
Brascoupé also pointed to the Bruntland Report. "The authors felt rightly that Indigenous Peoples have a way of life and value system which respects the Earth and has been sustainable over long periods of time."
Interest in Indigenous peoples coincides with the growing interest in bio-diversity preservation. Indigenous village systems are increasingly looked to as potentially revealing of sustainable approaches to third world development.
The driving tenets of an Indigenous-led development necessarily emerge from deeply hld cultural constructs relative to humankind's spiritual and practical relationships in and with the natural world. Patient and forthright building upon community skills and resources and access to solution-oriented methodologies will lead to opportunities for prosperous community economics.
Finally, with its central notion of the community as base and as constituency, and neither simply the single family nor the mega-scale nation-state, the Indigenous model steps outside the usual social models. While seeking markets for existing products and assisting the building of enterprise, the Indigenous model suggested by the consultation processes identifies limitations in industrial development and suspects the thesis-antithesis approach that would dictate, for instance, job-creation to the detriment of longterm sustainability or vice versa. The model offers a contrasting goal to help stabilize and strengthen communities and thus to move toward prosperity. This is unique because it is genuine, emerging from practical forums for native people that sought solutions within the balance and creativity prescribed by traditional teachings.
It appears a good moment in the international context to consider Indigenous approaches to community development. A more wholistic paradigm is suggested by many researchers that is starting to influence policy. Native peoples' directions in development are made more feasible by this trend.
An Indigenous model calls for:
1. Gathering the native intelligentsia, sustaining the dialogue, formally, opinion gathering to open up thinking, planning and communications resources.
2. Maintaining high standards, practice, analysis, authenticity, documentation, accountability.
3. Being indigenous-led inclusive of people of all backgrounds, with caution about the all engrossing consultantship world that tends to exclude the exercise of organized Indian leadership.
4. Applying the ABCD strategy as endorsed by Indigenous participants in the Apikan conferences, ie. = North-South partnerships, assisting: B. Local empowerment: C. Access to resources: D. Enterprise/Project Enhancement
As Indigenous people coalesce the primary factors to the formulation of policy and models of practice, the processes initiated by Apikan, Plenty Canada, MacArthur Foundation and others have identified a wide core of Hemispheric players who can mobilize to incorporate proposals and explore the culture bases that can inform the development process without being limited by ideologically driven fact-patterns. Locally empowered communities can thus propose their own projects and find the way to discuss their various processes toward solutions. Viable proposals coupled to resources creates movement toward sustained enterprise.
VII. The role of Indigenous Partnerships
Respectful resource networking with Native peoples demands long-term commitment, the creation of friendships and family/community relations. Some speak of building silent trust, a concept that certainly goes beyond the measurements of standard evaluations. In getting together, the southern and northern Indigenous nations, particularly through their NGOs, are providing a common territory. "If we talk to each other, as Native people, we see we have undergone many similar experiences. There is a lot to share. We should send whole families in exchanges, work toward long-term community relationships." (Brascoupé) In fact, through women's organizations, both in Meso-America (Belize, Guatemala) and Native North American (United States and Canada), a midwifery training and family health educational partnership is in design with the First Environment Program and the Guatemalan Association for Cultural, Educational and Economic Development (ADEEC).
The Indigenous communities appear to be broadening self-directed development options. Despite quite limited resource allocation, nevertheless, by meeting with each other directly and devising ways to work together and by focusing specifically on the North-Sough partnerships approach, Indigenous peoples are catalizing energies and new working relationships.
Current trends provide an opening to Indigenous organizations and communities searching for support in reconstructing their communities from the disruptive effects of territorial, cultural, social and even spiritual impositions. The nearly one thousand proposals that came to the MacArthur Foundation as a result of its 1992 Initiative, form which thirty-six projects were funded, addressed a wide range of social issues and problems. The dire community needs of Indigenous peoples generated proposals directed at resolving economic and legal issues. Looking ahead, the question arises how to turn the experience of working together between Indians and philanthropic organizations into a stronger and more permanent relationship. What continuity will the norther foundations give to empower the indigenous peoples' movement in the full spectrum of preservation activities, from human rights to culture-based, self-sufficient development?
Among the Native communities of the hemisphere, at the international level, the present call is to make the Decade of Indigenous Peoples a real opportunity for community prosperity. In the words of Kuna leader Atencio Lopez: "We need more time and assistance over a period of concerted reconstruction. We have a way of life that is only no beginning to gain acceptance. Help us rebuild now. We'll show the world the true capacity and potential of Indigenous peoples."
Northern foundations must now lead the way in assisting Indigenous peoples to find the necessary resources to rebuild their societies, engage the modern world with a base in their own cultures and achieve prosperity by preserving and regenerating strong communities.
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