Reimagining U.S. Federal Land Management through Decolonization and Indigenous Value Systems

U.S. Federal Land Management Areas (FLMAs) are grounded in settler colonialism, including Indigenous land dispossessions and violations of Tribal treaties. This critical thought-piece is written by Indigenous scholars to reimagine FLMAs (especially recreation areas) through decolonization and the Indigenous value systems embedded within the “four Rs”: relationship, responsibility, reciprocity, and redistribution. We reweave conceptions about parks and protected areas, reimagine park management, and reconfigure management foci to reflect Indigenous value systems shared by Indigenous peoples. We emphasize a need for Tribal comanagement of FLMAs, the inclusion of Tribal land management practices across ecosystems, and the restoration of Indigenous land use and management rights. Land and recreation managers can use this paper to 1) decolonize park management practices, 2) understand how Indigenous value systems can inform park management foci, and 3) build a decolonized and reciprocal relationship with Tribes and their ancestral landscapes.

Framing Land Governance Issues in Indigenous and Settler Media within Canada

This comparative study examines how the framing of Indigenous land governance issues—such as resource extraction activities on Indigenous territory and treaty negotiation—in Indigenous media differs from that in corporate news. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis were applied to 66 news texts published in 2018 in large corporate newspapers, such as the National Post, and small Indigenous news outlets, such as Eagle Feather News. Researchers found that Indigenous media connected land governance issues to contemporary issues, such as racism and control over child welfare, as well as historical colonialism and Indigenous-Settler relations, while corporate news generally excluded any discussion of these contextual factors. While the main news frame in the Indigenous press was Indigenous people were not consulted, the dominant frame in corporate news was Indigenous peoples have already been adequately consulted. Corporate news discourse valorized Indigenous traditional territory solely based on its presumed “economic value.” By contrast, Indigenous publications offered a counternarrative, one that positioned land and the rest of the natural environment as something that has absolute value, and as indivisible from all living things, including people.

Remote spatial analysis lacking ethnographic grounding mischaracterizes sustainability of Indigenous burning regime

Scientific research that purports to evaluate Indigenous fire regimes in the absence of ethnographically contextualized ecological data runs the risk of exacerbating the fire blame game and providing evidence to support distorted narratives advanced by anti-Indigenous advocates. Spatial analysis of fire scars in Indigenous territories can be an effective tool for characterizing cultural fire regimes in terms of distribution and frequency, especially when qualified by linkages to different local ecosystems. A recently published article drew on fire scar mapping from satellite imagery to assess anthropogenic fire distribution and frequency in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, Central Brazil. The authors use their findings to characterize A'uwẽ (Xavante) use of fire as unmanaged and a model of unsustainable use of cerrado resources. In this article, we discuss Aguiar & Martins's recent paper in light of our long-term research on A'uwẽ hunting with fire in the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land, arguing that A'uwẽ hunters do burn according to established cultural protocols, manage their use of fire for conservationist purposes, and do not cause environmental degradation by burning.

Redrawing Relationalities at the Anthropocene(s): Disrupting and Dismantling the Colonial Logics of Shared Identity Through Thinking with Kim Tallbear

What does it mean to respond to the Anthropocenes, plural, when doing science education? Specifically, can we critically engage with the Anthropocene, singular, without responding to the multiplicity in which Indigenous land and its many facets within the global community were at risk of destruction from Man? In this work, we contemplate the urgency of the inclusion of Indigenous philosophies and ways-of-knowing within the arching body politic, giving space to these practices that have been otherwise silenced within and beyond Western colonial frames. We argue that if the ways of thinking and practicing science and science education continue to stem from settler colonialism, capitalism, and toxicity, having previously and continually been responsible for the erasure of Indigeneity, the response within the Anthropocene will be multitudinously harmful. Here, we turn to Dakota scholar, Kim Tallbear, (Native American DNA: Tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic belonging, University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and her work in the intersections of identity, science, settler relations, and Indigeneity with the use of provocative imagery to the innate feeling of and within the Anthropocene(s).

Land, land banks and land back: Accounting, social reproduction and Indigenous resurgence

This paper situates Indigenous social reproduction as a duality; as both a site of primitive accumulation and as a critical, resurgent, land-based practice. Drawing on three distinct cases from British Columbia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and Bua, Fiji, we illustrate how accounting techniques can be a key mechanism with which Indigenous modes of life are brought to the market and are often foundational to the establishment of markets. We argue that accounting practices operate at the vanguard of primitive accumulation by extracting once invaluable outsides (e.g. Indigenous land and bodies) and rendering these either valuable or valueless for the social reproduction of settler society. The commodification of Indigenous social reproduction sustains the conditions that enable capitalism to flourish through primitive accumulation. However, we privilege Indigenous agency, resistance and resurgence in our analysis to illustrate that these techniques of commodification through accounting are not inevitable. They are resisted or wielded towards Indigenous alternatives at every point.

REDD+ Governmentality: Governing Forest, Land, and Forest Peoples in Indonesia

<p>Aimed at lowering forest carbon emissions through financing improved forest governance and socially inclusive land and natural resources use, the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus) program is attracting widespread interest and investment in Indonesia. REDD+ introduces new governmental rationalities, in which forest carbon is used as a standard to measure a country’s performance in keeping its tropical forests intact and defines the financial rewards the country will receive. REDD+ is one factor in an emergent new political conjuncture in Indonesia that is opening up to the possibilities for reworking forest governance. This thesis employs Foucault’s concept of governmentality to examine how governmental technologies are formed, contested and implemented through REDD+ and some of the early impacts the program is having (Foucault, 1991a). Drawing on grounded empirical data and inspired by a ‘not-quite neoliberal nature’ framework (de Freitas, Marston and Bakker, 2015) I show how place-based discourses, politics, actors, and interests are shaping the way REDD+ unfolds in Indonesia. This is achieved through three case studies focused on the REDD+ Taskforce; the One Map Initiative; and an Indigenous land claim in a community in Central Kalimantan. Findings from the three case studies show how current deficiencies in forestland governance have been problematized where there is no clarity over who has rights to forestland, who owns the concessions and where they are. Thus, addressing current complexities is becoming the Taskforce’s priority through series of governmental technologies including the One Map Initiative. Meanwhile, activists are making use of this opportunity to render visible Indigenous land rights in an attempt to subvert focused technical fixes to more open social justice ends. By discussing the messy actualities of developing, implementing and responding to governmental technologies the thesis problematizes pro- and anti-REDD+ debates. Rather than view REDD+ governmental technologies through “a programmer’s view” (Death, 2013) as a finished or rigid project implemented on others, I see it as an ongoing attempt to govern human – forest relationships that are shaped by contestations and resistances. Thus, the thesis makes an important contribution to neoliberal nature literature by showing that neoliberal governmental programs, such as REDD+, should be seen as sites of struggle, with different actors experiencing and engaging the program in different ways. As such, this thesis highlights how neoliberal mechanisms can be co-opted by particular actors in order to achieve diverse economic, social and environmental goals. Through engagement with governmental technologies the landscapes of forest politics change in both enabling and constraining ways.</p>