Document(s) 5 of 23

This volume explores the relations between Indigenous peoples and development in the context of the rapid changes in civil society, the environment and globalization.¹ It does this in part by focusing on the ways development, state and markets are reshaping Indigenous communities and movements. But the editors assert that Indigenous communities do not just resist development, do not just react to state and market; they also sustain ‘life projects’.² Life projects are embedded in local histories; they encompass visions of the world and the future that are distinct from those embodied by projects promoted by state and markets. Life projects diverge from development in their attention to the uniqueness of people’s experiences of place and self and their rejection of visions that claim to be universal. Thus, life projects are premissed on densely and uniquely woven ‘threads’ of landscapes, memories, expectations and desires. Contributors to the volume try to capture these complex, substantive, power-laden, and sometimes contradictory features of Indigenous peoples’ agency. Granted, in most chapters Indigenous peoples’ struggles against development projects are the key element in the storyline. Yet I think that this is because, more often than not, development is in the way of life projects. One of the aims of our book is to contribute to an understanding of what these life projects are about, how they are furthered in spite of having development blocking their ways, and what they offer in terms of alternative paths to Indigenous futures.

As indicated in the previous chapter, the theme of Indigenous peoples’ agency in the context of the changing terrains in which development processes take place is explored in many of the chapters of this book as a counterpoint between ‘life projects’ and ‘development projects’. The editors see three key moments that need to be examined in this counterpoint: (a) the contrasts between Indigenous peoples’ life projects as place-based perspectives and the universalist visions that justify and shape development projects; (b) how Indigenous peoples pursue their life projects against those development projects being done at their expense and in the context of emerging structures of governance and subordination; and (c) how, in spite of Indigenous peoples’ willingness to share land and resources with other users, development projects are unwilling to recognize and seek to obscure coexistence.

These moments provide the thematic focus of each of the three sections in which the volume is organized: Visions, Strategies, Invitations. I take up each of these themes in more detail after I discuss why the editors find it is critical to focus on the interface between Indigenous peoples’ life projects and development.

Development and Life Projects

The ideas of development and of indigenousness have a long and intimate historical relation. It was the conceptual and legal-political problems that followed the discovery of hitherto unknown other humans in the ‘New World’ that helped set in motion the reconceptualization by Western Europeans of where and who they were and how they fit in time and history. In part because of their discovery of peoples and places not foreseen in medieval world-views or biblical and ancient sources, Western Europeans began to imagine themselves and their societies as distinctive agents in a progressive history (Elliot 1970; Dussel 1995). They came over time to see their own being as the result of development, ‘the active principle according to which new and higher stages of human society might emerge out of old and more simple ones: the driving motive in human history’ (Ferguson 1997: 153; see also Fabian 1983; Rist 1997: 25–46).

At the basis of this active principle that divided the human world into two (developed or modern, and underdeveloped or traditional) there was a third conceptual term, nature, which provided the ground, or departure point, of humankind’s voyage towards a secular paradise located at some point in the future. Paradoxically, advances on the voyage of progress were marked by the distance, implied by the dominion of humankind over nature, between society and nature. The more nature was mastered, the less humankind was dependent on nature, and the further humankind moved in the line of progress. With this background, and to the extent that Indigenous peoples were located closer to nature than the modern West, the dynamics of progress justified the treatment of the ‘Natives’, along with nature, as objects of domination. But where a common humanity with the ‘backward’ other was recognized by the ‘developed’ West, whether out of necessity as in the case where Indigenous peoples were allies, or out of adopting a self-serving tutelage, this situation of dominion was reshaped by the avowed aim of bringing the Indigenous other closer to the vanguard of progress and its supposed benefits. This basic storyline formed the core of several succeeding discourses and practices of dominant Western-educated elites about Indigenous peoples in many and diverse settings.

By the late twentieth century the social and environmental consequences of this conceptualization of continuous development began to erode the dream of unending progress and confidence in the mastery of nature by ‘modern man’. As a response, new and mutually contesting ways of conceiving relations among humans and between humans and nature have emerged, producing transformations in the eroding idea of development. These changes are ongoing in the midst, and partly as a result, of the continuing and ever-expanding incorporation of lands, resources, territories and peoples into the effective dominion of nation-states and global markets.

The editors believe that most development practices have furthered, and still further, the transformation of relatively autonomous and self-governing communities, which over the years have carefully developed an intimate relationship with their lands, into dependent communities easier to subordinate to transnational markets and nation-states. Yet, while Indigenous communities have opposed many of these development agendas, their agendas are themselves emergent, rather than a reaction to other agencies. That is to say, their life projects are socio-cultural in the broadest sense rather than narrowly strategic. Their life projects are also place-based but not limited to the local.

In contrast, development promoted by market or state-backed agents, with its claims to political necessities, the greater good and market demands in the context of globalization, appears to be disengaged from place conditions. Development as a practice and discourse embodies the European Enlightenment’s implicit project of making specific local world-views and values, those broadly described as modern and Western European, into universals. As a successor to imperialism and colonialism, development has extended the reach of those local world-views and values far beyond the place in which they took shape. I think that pointing out the place-basedness of development is critical to understanding how life projects are situated in relation to development. A place-based perspective provides a fruitful standpoint from which one can understand life projects, become more open and receptive to their visions, and refuse the Enlightenment pretence of universalism. I believe that this pretence is fulfilled when the world-views and values of modernity that are promoted by development are taken to be disembedded from place, made entirely abstract and equated ultimately with ‘the global’. Thus, situating life projects in contrast to development requires a discussion of place and how it is related to the politics and epistemology implicit in the ideas of local and global.

Like Escobar (2001: 152), I understand place as ‘the experience of, and from, a particular location with some sense of boundaries, grounds, and links to everyday practices’. I am also aware, with Escobar, that this experience is emergent and not a given. A previously implicit understanding of place, in anthropology and other disciplines, as a given and natural locus from which senses of community and identity derive, has been recently displaced by more complex understandings which conceive place as a process, as ‘embodied practices that shape identities’, in part through resistance to changing ‘strategies of power’ (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997). This perspective on place-making stresses the point that the immediate experiences of place and identity are inevitably constituted within larger sets of spatial relations.

Doreen Massey (1999: 18) has argued that place can be fruitfully seen as a knot made of a particular mix of threads (i.e. links and connections), ‘including local relations “within” the place and those many connections which stretch way beyond it’. I would add that, as the chapters by Russell, Rethmann, McGregor and Feit in this volume show, the links and connections that make place do extend not only spatially but also temporally, as previous ‘mixtures of threads’ are part of the genealogical make-up of contemporary constitutions of place. These chapters also remind us that place is ‘grounded’; that is, place is an emergent of the specific everyday engagement of specific peoples with specific landscapes, environments or ‘natures’ (see Dirlik 2001: 21; Escobar 2001: 6). Thus I will talk, for ease of presentation, of two kinds of ‘threads’ shaping place: vertical threads will refer to those links and connections that ground place in specific histories and landscapes; horizontal threads will refer to trans-place linkages in a spatial sense. Within the mutually constitutive relations between these vertical (history/‘nature’) and horizontal (trans-location) threads the specificity of places arises, thus contributing the elements with which people delineate their more or less stable but always porous boundaries that distinguish them from other lands and other peoples.

Within this brief discussion of the meaning of place, I can advance the argument that both development and life projects are place-based; that is, both are broadly socio-cultural praxes emerging from specific mixes of horizontal and vertical threads. What distinguishes them is the relative importance that each gives to horizontal and vertical linkages and what consequences these visions have for place-making. The chapters in the first section of the volume address the intersections of life projects and development projects, and their consequences, for these different visions.

Visions: The Particularity of Life Projects

Although it entails much simplification, let us say that development, as an expression of modernity, emerged from the addition to the vertical and horizontal links that made up medieval Europe, of horizontal links that were entirely unprecedented.³ The new horizontal links connected the emergence of modern Western Europe with the fate of another place, the New World, thus modifying the previous mix of threads. Yet the emergence of modernity has been marked by a persistent blindness to connections and hybridity not only between nature and society (Latour 1993) but also between the vertical and horizontal threads that make up place. The ‘moderns’ have imagined themselves and their place as pure and self-contained, as if the vertical links that made up the modern West were independent from the horizontal links that connected it to other places (see Blaut 1993).

The severing of vertical from horizontal threads allowed the moderns to raise this most disjointed sense of place to the status of a universal, and then, following another separation, concentrate on the horizontal threads to the point of neglecting the vertical threads. Thus modernity, a particular place project (see Dirlik 2001: 36), became a project of making other places whose only grounding threads extend horizontally to modernity itself.

Yshiro leader Bruno Barras clearly expresses in his chapter how life projects cut across this self-centred universalist project. In effect, he describes his people’s life project as being about the possibility of their defining the direction they want to take in life, on the basis of their awareness and knowledge of their own place in the world. The subsequent chapter by Mario Blaser provides further arguments showing that a central feature of Yshiro life projects is to cut across the imposition of universalist criteria. This feature contrasts sharply with the focus of development on applying general rules (ideas of indigenousness, for example) regardless of the specificity of a particular place.

Wendy Russell’s chapter highlights how development embodies the focus on ‘horizontal threads’. Indeed, the development programmes proposed to the Cree people of Fort Albany are concerned more with replicating models applied in other places than with attending to the specificity of this particular place. However, as she also shows, the universalist pretension of modernity (i.e. its fostering of self-centred horizontal threads) has not done away with vertical threads. On the contrary, everywhere, as in Fort Albany, people permanently connect newly emerging horizontal threads to their history and relation to the landscape, discovering and rediscovering ‘their own approach to life’. Russell shows that, to the extent that this approach to life is disregarded by the forces of development, a process of fast-paced and highly dysfunctional efforts to achieve accommodation between vertical and horizontal threads is set in motion, which generates endless new programmes and blueprints for development.

Precisely because development, as a project that privileges horizontal threads, is hegemonic, other place-based projects appear, by contrast, as favouring the vertical threads making up places, identities and traditions. This is because, in the face of relentless attacks–through colonization, assimilation and development–aimed at suppressing the vertical threads shaping their sense of place and identity, life projects are devoted in large part to permanently rebuilding and strengthening those vertical threads. But the appearance of a central focus on vertical threads also responds to the fact that the pursuit of life projects takes place in a field of power still dominated by the modern conception of separations (i.e. the disjunction of vertical and horizontal threads). Thus, in many cases Indigenous peoples find themselves in the situation of having to authorize their life projects in a very modern fashion as ‘authentically Indigenous’–that is, as if they emerged solely from vertical threads. Yet, given that some groups and organizations truly embrace this tendency to favour vertical threads, it is necessary to distinguish such place-based projects from both development projects and life projects. In effect, although they might be opposed to development, I do not see projects based on the primacy of vertical threads as life projects. Rather, in so far as they assume the same disjunction of vertical and horizontal threads as development does, these projects appear to us as the reverse image of the former.

The particularity of life projects, then, resides in their constant awareness that place and identity arise from the mutually constitutive nature of vertical and horizontal threads. Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred clearly states this point when he argues that to accept the dichotomies of the European world-view (including the distinction of Whites from Natives, which is another way of talking of places) as fixed and essential not only goes against traditional Native beliefs but also fosters the continuation of the status quo (Alfred 1999: 20). In her contribution to the volume, Anishnaabeg scholar Deborah McGregor points out that traditional indigenous knowledge, which is critical to Indigenous identity-making, emerges not only from a history of engagement with the landscape (the vertical threads) but also from the struggles that Indigenous peoples sustain with the newcomers (the horizontal threads). She argues that framing Indigenous peoples and their knowledge within the dichotomous terms of modernity amounts to losing the richness and complexity of their life projects, including their ingrained criticism of power asymmetries and the possibilities they can offer for the survival of ‘Creation’.

In short, the awareness of the complex, non-dichotomous but mutually constitutive connections between one’s own self/place and others grounds he common trait that allows us to distinguish life projects from other place-based projects. This common trait is the centrality of coexistence in their formulation. I will explore this point below.

Although life projects are one possibility among others, we must recognize that the field of power in which they must be furthered is nowadays dominated by one kind of placed-based project: development/modernity. The hegemony of development/modernity as a particular ‘regional discursive formation’ (Peet and Watts 1996: 16) means that the relations in the field are usually expressed in terms of binary oppositions in which development appears as the opposite to place-based, just as abstract is opposed to concrete, universal to particular and global to local.⁴ These binary oppositions, and particularly the last one, tend to obliterate the complexity of threads and the dynamics involved in place-making and, thus, make it hard to understand what life projects are about and how they are produced and advanced. This can be examined in more detail.

Global/Local, the Politics of Scale and Hybrid Networks

In a recent work, Arif Dirlik (2001: 24) pointed out that, given the ‘hegemony of the modernist marginalization of places’, one of the first tasks in disentangling the relationship of the local to the global involves the realization that the global is place-based as well. Building on Latour’s idea that the terms ‘local’ and ‘global’ offer points of view on hybrid networks that are neither local nor global, Dirlik suggests the term ‘glocal’ to capture the double process of localization of the global and globalization of the local. He argues that, given their hybrid nature, glocalities (i.e. places) must be compared in relation to the differences that arise between them from power asymmetries. As he puts it: ‘phenomena are all both local and global, but . . . they are not all local and global in the same way’ (Dirlik 2001: 30). This way of conceiving the differences between related and mutually modifying places in a network is very useful because it connects power and scale: to talk about the globalization of something implies the power of that thing to stretch out across space (see Swyngedouw 1997: 142). However, Dirlik insists on seeing the hybrid character of glocalities as emerging from binary oppositions between the subordinated local and the hegemonic local (i.e. development), which in virtue of its hegemony becomes global (see Dirlik 2001: 40). I believe that his and other analysts’ focus on binary relations obscures the complexity of place-making processes and the particularity of life projects in relation to other place-based projects.

Conceiving glocalities/places as the product of binary oppositions leads Dirlik to conceptualize ‘place as project’ in terms of a repudiation of development and as a defence of places against the encroachment of capital and states. This defence of place can succeed only by forging new forms of ‘supra-place relationships’ through a ‘reorganization of space from below’ (Dirlik 2001: 37–9; see also Appadurai 2000, 2002; Harvey 1996). Dirlik foresees that this reorganization of space may arise only to the extent that place can conceive itself as different and opposed to the globalism of modernity. Esteva and Prakash’s (1998: 13) description of grassroots initiatives, which they see as challenging the global project, is a good example of this. In effect, in trying to give voice to these movements, the authors affirm that they ‘are autonomously organized by “the people” themselves . . . both independent from and antagonistic to the state [which plays the role of agent for the global]’. Yet one could point out the hybridity of those grassroots movements, in the sense that they are not only related to institutions that promote globalism by opposition but also through collaboration, ‘spaces of truce’ and areas of unwilling mutual reinforcement. Dirlik might dismiss this argument because talking of hybridity in this sense might mean not recognizing ‘the continued importance of essentialized identities in politics’ and, thus, defusing the claims to alternative hybridities that are not driven by developmentalism (Dirlik 2001: 40). In other words, while these movements might be hybrids of ‘global modernity’ and local places, their claims of being ‘pure’ are central to their capacity to produce projects that are different from development. Yet I believe that by conceiving of places mostly in opposition to the globalism of modernity, these authors end up presenting a picture in which it is hard to think of the former as not being already overdetermined by the latter.

This is not a minor issue. In a recent discussion a group of anthropologists addressed the dilemma presented to those who are engaged in critical analysis but are also sympathetic towards Indigenous peoples’ struggles for environmental rights, self-determination and justice (see Brosius 1999). Is it complicity with the status quo to speak of the complexity behind what may appear or be presented as homogenous fronts and ‘pure’ agendas that are confronting each other? My own position is that showing how the terrain is much more than a struggle between two forces, and contesting the very assumptions that make it necessary to present struggles on these terms, are part of what life projects do. This is clearly demonstrated in my chapter below, where I show how the Yshiro leaders face a discursive field in which the struggle is not only against the encroachment of state and capitalist development but also against the encroachment of projects promoted by Yshiro supporters. The latter limit the Yshiro’s ‘essentially different’ identity to their (assumed) hunter–gatherer traditions (vertical threads). This example highlights how life projects involve, to a large extent, the transformation of power asymmetries that would position Indigenous peoples between mutually exclusive alternatives defined by others.

Analytical and political perspectives that rely on binaries hide from sight the fact that even though modernity constitutes an ever-present horizontal thread in the make-up of contemporary places, it is not the only one.⁵ If different places have different but nevertheless existing capacities to stretch out across space (i.e. to globalize), there is no reason to assume that the hybrid character of a place/project will emerge from its interaction with only one other place/project, even if the latter is hegemonic (i.e. stretches out the furthest). This calls for a clarification of what is meant by globalization and other related terms. If, as Escobar (2001: 150) argues, the ‘local and the global are scales, processes, or even levels of analysis, but certainly not places’, and we agree that places globalize when they stretch out, then we should not be talking of places as in relation to a single ‘global’. On the other hand, if we are talking of the global as the specifically modern way of stretching out by colonizing other places, then we should not be using globalization to refer to phenomena like the Zapatistas stretching out through the Internet (see Dirlik 2001: 27), since they do not seek the control of other places. Not even the qualification of ‘grassroots globalization’ helps the matter, for either it is a platitude (all stretching out is done from a place, if that is what the term ‘grassroots’ implies), or it glosses over the variety of stretchings out of non-hegemonic projects.

It is precisely the difference between forms of stretching out that must be added to power differentials and scales in order to clarify the specificity of life projects. Consider the example of the James Bay Cree campaign in Vermont, discussed by Glenn McRae in this volume. McRae argues that the Crees looked for the support of Vermonters in their campaign against the Great Whale hydroelectric mega-development project, not chiefly by inviting them to embrace the Crees’ cause (‘we are all Cree’), but by prompting Vermonters to consider their own situation in relation to the problem that the Crees brought to their attention. In other words, the Crees ‘stretched out’, not through ‘colonizing’Vermont but by redirecting Vermonters’ attention to the connections between their own self-images, traditions and landscapes (all vertical threads) and to the relations Vermont sustained with other places, as in its imports of energy (horizontal threads). I would argue that this way of stretching out reflects the Crees’ (and other Indigenous life projects’) awareness that promoting a balance of horizontal and vertical threads elsewhere is the only way to achieve balance in one’s own place. How Cree hunters cannot conceive of a balanced and sustainable relation with animals (what I have been calling vertical threads) by cutting connections (i.e. by not communicating) with the non-Cree is very eloquent in this regard (see Feit, Chapter 6).

As I mentioned above, the commonality across life projects is not their opposition to development but their focus on having a meaningful degree of control over (or, what is the same, having some degree of control over the meaning of) life as being-placed-in-the-world. This understanding requires careful attention to both horizontal and vertical threads. The beauty and the promise of life projects is that they trace a possible path towards the idea of unity in diversity. Indeed, what unites them is a focus on reaching a balance in the complex mix that produces places, yet the whole idea of balance depends on accepting that each place is, and must remain, unique. Because of this uniqueness life projects do not simply oppose development. It is true that, in trying to reach a balance between the horizontal and vertical threads constituting places, they stand in the way of development. In this sense, life projects consistently work to thwart the universalist pretensions of development. Yet because this is not necessarily the goal of life projects, they can on occasion strategically incorporate opportunities and openings offered by development.

Strategies: Networks and Grey Areas

There is opposition to development and the universalist pretensions of modernity, but I see this opposition as contingent, and thus I think that analyses dichotomizing the field of power in which life projects unfold are of little help. Instead of focusing on identifying ‘globalization from below’ (Appadurai 2000), ‘oppositional networks’ (Harcourt and Escobar 2001: 12), or ‘binary oppositions’ (Dirlik 2001), I find it critical to focus on the grey areas, those points in the networks connecting place-based projects in which there is not only opposition but mutual reinforcement, unwilling collaborations, turning points, indifference or sympathy. I also find it critical to recognize that these networks involve much more than two kinds of place-based project. Even when development and life projects might be the focus of our interests, we must keep in mind that sometimes their mutual relations are mediated by other place-based projects that do not respond to either of them. Thus most chapters in Part II refer, at least implicitly, to place-based projects that are neither life projects nor development, yet that often play a role in how the mutual relations of life projects and development are played out.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the chapters in Part II show that Indigenous peoples engage in a variety of alliances and partnerships with movements and organizations that have their own agendas and visions. These partners may range from environmental NGOs to neighbouring non-Indigenous communities and from professional associations to provincial governments. These alliances are central for Indigenous peoples’ struggles. Barbara Rose Johnston and Carmen Garcia-Downing’s chapter shows how transnational networks of environmentalists, human rights advocates and a professional association were mobilized to pressure the World Bank into addressing the violation of human rights suffered by the Pehuenche–Mapuche communities of Chile in the construction of a dam. But the chapter also shows that there are innumerable interfaces in the networks that connect these kinds of alliances and development institutions, and that these grey areas of connection can be used to create the appearance that something is being done while the development projects in question proceed. Moreover, as Brian Craik hints at in his chapter, in many such alliances the life projects of Indigenous peoples might be subordinated to the projects of their more powerful allies.

The case of the broad anti-mining coalition in Wisconsin analysed by Al Gedicks and Zoltán Grossman, and the James Bay Cree campaign against hydroelectric development analysed by Brian Craik, stand out because of their uniqueness: in these cases the Indigenous peoples involved have had a relatively high level of control over the direction of their struggle. These cases show what can be achieved when the appropriate conditions are in place. However, this situation is not enjoyed by the majority of Indigenous peoples. Thus the fact that Indigenous peoples promote their life projects in a hostile context and from a subordinated position must be borne in mind when evaluating the performance of their organizations in the complex transnational networks where struggles around development take place.

With the exception of a few relatively isolated instances, most contemporary Indigenous peoples are moving not from acceptable to bad conditions, but from bad to worse conditions. Of course, Indigenous peoples resist development projects that worsen their situations, but their life projects are not about resisting development; they are about the opportunity to live those life projects. Yet, as I said before, most chapters of the volume show Indigenous peoples struggling against or confronting different development projects.

Life projects are pursued as an uphill battle where the dominant values of development and evolutionary progress not only block their way but also continually subordinate them. As Brian Craik’s chapter shows, the strength achieved through organized resistance to development projects sometimes creates rare opportunities to further those life projects that have been consistently blocked by the dominant society. The paradox of being in a subordinate position is that these situations sometimes afford opportunities, because they provide something to bargain with: the capacity of Indigenous peoples to block (perhaps only temporarily) a project from some sector of the dominant society. Thus, Indigenous peoples’ struggles against development often involve much more than resistance.

For many non-Indigenous observers and allies, the situation appears in a different light. Many urban-based NGO allies start from a position in which resistance to a particular development project constitutes an attempt to maintain a previous status quo. Thus, their interest is very circumscribed, and a campaign is for them a win or lose game. Of course, this means that there are not many other connected issues that can be offered to such NGOs for negotiation. In contrast, Indigenous organizations cannot disregard offers to negotiate. In part, this is because–as former Assembly of First Nations National Chief Matthew Coon Come shows in his chapter on Canada–negotiations have something to offer when contrasted to development that is presented to them as a fait accompli, as usually is the case. It is also because–as Mapuche activist Aldisson Anguita Mariqueo shows in his chapter about development in Chile–a refusal of leaders or Indigenous organizations to negotiate may mean that governments or corporations bypass them and engage in one-to-one negotiations with community members. In contexts where attempts at organizing are only beginning or the leadership opportunities are very limited, this tactic can be highly successful, with deleterious consequences for the whole of the community. Finally, resistance to a project is seldom an end in itself. Rather, it is usually framed within the wider perspective of pursuing life projects. Thus, a deal offered to Indigenous peoples can be seen as an advance if it allows them to further some aspects of their life projects and improves their capacity to negotiate new openings for themselves.

How should we characterize such recurring strategies? In a recent article, Arjun Appadurai (2002) argues that facing the fact that today more than half the world’s population lives in severe poverty, a variety of visions of emancipation and equity have begun to circulate that are at odds with ideas of development associated with the nation-state. Among the diversity of grassroots social movements that uphold these visions, Appadurai distinguishes those that follow a politics of partnership–that is, ‘a politics of accommodation, negotiation, and long-term pressure [applied to states, markets and international organizations] rather than confrontation or threats of political reprisal’ (2002: 29). The political horizon of these grassroots movements is, through alliances, to gain long-term capacity in order to transform their circumstances; thus they have to display a ‘politics of patience’ in order that the urgency of the problems assailing them does not take over and lead to their being overcome by their more powerful partners’ interests (Appadurai 2002: 29–30). At a very deep level, Appadurai argues, these movements and their politics are shaping globalization from below (2002: 23). However, he says, although they provide some glimpses into a more democratic future, it is still to be seen whether the ethos and purpose of these local democratic projects can contain the ravages of development and the increasing mobility of capital that it fosters.

Invitations: Coexistence and the Politics of Resilience

The idea of a politics of partnership, its visions (i.e. political horizon), its prospects in the face of development and globalization, is an excellent entry point to discuss the topics addressed by contributors to Part III. Although many Indigenous life projects embody visions that assume the desirability and inherent possibility of their coexistence with other (human and non-human) users of land and resources, these ‘invitations’ to coexist are not readily accepted by states and other interested parties. Nevertheless, their searching for ways to enhance dialogue and mutual understanding is part of putting their own visions into practice rather than a means to an end. Thus, another peculiarity of Indigenous peoples’ life projects is that they embody a politics of partnership whose political horizon or vision is not situated in the future. This peculiarity, which is based on ontologies radically different from the Western ontology of modernity, implies that life projects must be lived even when the surrounding conditions are profoundly unpropitious.

In his chapter Pramod Parajuli argues that peasants and Indigenous peoples, who depend on the maintenance and regeneration of ecosystems for their livelihood, constitute a barrier to the motion of global capital. Having to ensure the ‘symbiotic connection between the human collectivities and the non-human collectivities’, they stand in the way of development. Yet, as I argued above, and as Petra Rethmann shows in her chapter on the ‘dreams’ of Native activists in the Russian Far East, development stands in the way of life projects to the extent that it impedes the fulfilment of their embodied visions of a good and meaningful life. Because these visions are in many cases informed by ontologies and conceptions of self and place that differ from those that inform development, I argue that a politics of patience does not appropriately describe the ethos I see in life projects. A politics of patience might well have a longer temporal horizon than development projects, as Appadurai asserts, but nevertheless it still conjures up images of a final goal and of instrumental reason that resemble modernist tropes and their ontology of object/subject. Perhaps this is related to the fact that the movement analysed by Appadurai comprised urban poor, whose leaders were ‘secularist in outlook’ (Appadurai 2002). In any case, I surmise that while Indigenous organizations certainly have goals to which, on occasion, they subordinate their means, the politics of life projects are not goal-oriented and thus cannot be described as a politics of patience.

I see life projects as a politics and epistemology of resilience that assume relations, flows and openendedness as their ontological ground. There is a growing literature that has shown how Indigenous non-dualist ontologies open up an ‘intellectual landscape . . . in which states and substances are replaced by processes and relations’ (Descola and Palsson 1996: 12; also the contributors to Descola and Palsson 1996; Ingold 2000). These ontologies are embodied in conduct but are also often codified in stories and prayers. The chapter by Mary Arquette, Maxine Cole and the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment (ATFE) provides us with good examples. The ethos that informs the stories and the prayers reproduced in this chapter (and the ontologies of which they are a part) does not envisage the value of partnership and coexistence in relation to an ulterior purpose but as the conditions of life itself.

An important body of literature has been devoted to how the lived experience embodied in these kinds of stories is conducive, in practice, to the regeneration of ecosystems upon which Indigenous peoples depend (see Grim 2001; Ingold 2000). In his chapter, Peter Harries-Jones discusses how these embodied traditions constitute forms of ‘life-politics’ that are in direct opposition to ‘wild globalization’. These life-politics, which are attuned to the cycles of recursion (regeneration) of the environment, actively try to bring disturbances caused by human action within a range that can be absorbed within those cycles. Harries-Jones sees the concept of resilience as a promising bridge between these life-politics and the science of ecology. I also find the concept very appropriate for describing the politics of life projects.

The concept of resilience is connected to the central characteristics of the epistemologies and politics of life projects. According to Harries-Jones, the concept ‘embodies inherent unpredictability and unknown outcomes of interactions between ecosystems and the human societies’; thus it refers to ‘the conservation of the ability to respond to change’. I argue that, in contrast to modern epistemology and politics, unpredictability and unknown outcomes of interactions are taken as ontological conditions in the epistemologies and politics of life projects. Before I discuss this in detail it is convenient to point out that modern epistemology and politics are based on an ontological dualism that resolves the tension between its two terms in some form of synthesis (temporary as it might be). In practice, if not in theory, this synthesis is sought through the control of one of the terms of the dualist relation by the other. In political terms this leads to domination of the self over the other; in epistemological terms, this leads to the dominance of the knower over the known and, thus, of uncertainty about the status of the known.⁶

Amidst their enormous variety, Indigenous ontologies (at least in the Americas) seem in accord on the futility and/or danger of trying to control others. For example, in Arquette Cole and ATFE’s chapter this is clarified by the idea that the different entities that populate the universe are ‘nations’, each with its own responsibilities to Creation, and that interfering with those responsibilities has catastrophic effects. Similarly, Yshiro mythology stresses the interconnectedness of everything that populates the universe, yet it also underscores that maintaining the universe as it is known depends on keeping the uniqueness of their own entities (Cordeu 1989a, 1989b, 1990, 1991a, 1991b, 1992a, 1992b). James Bay Cree cosmology sets human lives and animals in a world of persons bound by relationships of reciprocity and respect, a way of relating that Cree hunters extend even to those who deny respect to others, for to do otherwise because one insists one knows better is to reduce further the fabric of relationships that is the world itself. Knowledge in these ontological conditions cannot even be intended to be absolute. Knowledge is knowledge in context; it is relative. Given that one cannot have certainty about the results of interacting with others (humans and non-humans), the most sensible way of relating to others is always to try to conserve the ability to respond to change–in other words, to follow a politics of resilience.⁷

Life projects are about living a purposeful and meaningful life. In this sense, their political horizons cannot be located in the future, just as living in the present cannot be put on hold in pursuit of a future goal. Being forced to do that means a slow death, as Dawn Martin-Hill’s chapter on the Lubicon women shows. Life projects have no political horizon; they are the political horizon. They are not points of arrival, utopian places, narratives of salvation or returns to paradise. They are the very action of maintaining openendedness as a politics of resilience. That is why, as Parajuli and Harries-Jones point out, Indigenous movements seek autonomy and self-management. These constitute the best conditions in which to live life projects. However, as Harvey Feit forcefully argues in his chapter, this does not mean that, when these conditions do not obtain, life projects can be put on hold; they have to be lived even in the face of their denial.

Coexisting with Denial

Indigenous peoples’ politics of partnership have in some cases borne fruit, and there has been some recognition that Indigenous ways of conceiving relations among humans, and between humans and non-humans, deserve more attention. Throughout the 1990s constitutional reforms in Latin America and Canada recognized the rights of Indigenous peoples to maintain and foster their own ways of life (see Van Cott 2000; Sieder 2002; Lindau and Cook 2000). However, as Colin Scott argues in his chapter on Aboriginal rights and development in the Canadian North, this recognition is more rhetoric than practice. Indeed, the recognition of Indigenous life projects is in practice blocked by entrenched visions of development and social progress as ‘evolutionary inevitabilities’. Governmental decision-making is led by these visions as if they were not anchored in cultural values and political actions that are not universal in character and that, therefore, should be tested on the ground of experience. On the contrary, these visions are taken to be grounded in a reality that can be known with increasing certainty; thus, errors can be fixed and ‘done better’ the next time, but the visions and goals do not need to be revised.

Dawn Martin-Hill’s contribution lets us look into what development is as an experience for the Lubicon Cree women. Hers is a painful yet powerful reminder of the ravages of development. The suffering expressed by the Lubicon women is like the suffering caused by the loss of a loved one: one might eventually heal and learn to live with the loss, but one cannot ‘fix it’.⁸ Yet Martin-Hill is not just telling us a story; she performs her way of knowing and writing as a process that brings into sharp focus the importance of relationships, of responsibility and the costs of not honouring them. Knowing in this way is a life project that is carried out even in the midst of denial and suffering. As she expresses it, ‘the fact that we are here continuing to do what we do is testimony to our strength, resilience and beauty as Indigenous women . . . who hang in there no matter what.’

The ontologies that ground the politics of resilience of life projects demand a sense of responsibility that ‘denies closure; the actions, connections, and intentions are not causal but obscure ceremonies’ (Vizenor 1995: 675). It was to this kind of responsibility that Latour (1993: 41–2) referred when he argued that while the moderns have concentrated on purifying what exists as either nature or culture, thereby embracing a realist epistemology and becoming blind to the total effect of their operations, the wrongly called ‘pre-moderns’ have concentrated on the whole extent of relations: ‘It is [the recognition] of the impossibility of changing the social order without modifying the natural order–and vice versa–that has obliged the pre-moderns to exercise the greatest prudence.’ This prudence and the sense of responsibility attached to it cannot be delegated to abstract bureaucracies; it cannot be disregarded because other partners who share the world with us deny the connections that hold the universe together. This kind of prudence and responsibility have to be sustained no matter what.

How can life projects, their politics of resilience and their sense of responsibility towards Creation be fostered in the face of development and ‘wild globalization’? The contributions to this volume show some examples of how Indigenous peoples are doing it. They also make explicit the meanings and broadly cultural foundations of life projects. In the chapter by Mary Arquette, Maxine Cole and the ATFE there is an invitation to the New York Power Agency to join the Mohawk of Akwesasne in their life project ‘as we reflect and then proceed as partners in the restoration of balance and harmony in the world that we now share’. The editors believe that the answer to the question posed above is to accept these kinds of invitations to dialogue and coexistence. This implies not only a change in policymaking but also a change in the ways in which non-Indigenous peoples and institutions produce knowledge. The editors hope that in preparing this volume we have taken a step in this direction.

Notes

1. In this Introduction and in the context of the cases discussed in this volume, I use the term ‘Indigenous peoples’ to refer to ‘the descendants of the people who occupied a given territory when it was invaded, conquered, or colonized by a foreign power or population’ (Stavenhagen 1996: 148–9). Thus, some of our arguments may not apply to other Indigenous peoples living in countries where, like many in Africa and Asia, ruling groups are not necessarily the descendants of colonizing populations.

2. The term is introduced in the volume by one of our Indigenous contributors but seems to be gaining currency among grassroots activists in several places (cf. Escobar 1995: 212).

3. In this Introduction I use ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ as synonyms.

4. Peet and Watts (1996: 16) define a regional discursive formation as the modes of thought, logics and themes, but also the silences and repressions, that run through the discursive history of a particular region.

5. The tendency to think of hybridity in terms of the outcome of reproduction from two original stocks is just one of the several problems that besiege the use of hybrid as a metaphor (see Dirlik 2001: 26–30). Another one is that if it is not in contrast to a ‘pure’ state the term ‘hybrid’ is meaningless by itself. Given that hardly anybody claims the ‘purity’ of any phenomenon nowadays, I find the term ‘hybrid’ more confusing than helpful, precisely because it permanently brings back, even as a shadow, the idea of purity.

6. For a thorough discussion of the dynamics of this ontology in the relations between Europeans and Indigenous peoples of the Americas, see Dussel 1995. See Plumwood 1993 for a discussion of Cartesian dualism as an ontology of control and domination of nature, and Apfel-Marglin 1996 for a discussion of Cartesianism in relation to development.

7. In certain contexts, such as environmental movements, resilience might be seen as a goal, something that must be achieved. In the context of Indigenous peoples’ life projects, I see resilience as a self-performing ethos. I discuss the issue further below.

8. The attitudes of governments, corporations and part of the non-Indigenous public that ‘know’ that these processes are inevitable can only be considered sadistic when, faced with their ‘errors’ that cannot be fixed, they feel that there is no reason to stop development. This is like telling someone who has lost a child that, since the child cannot be brought back, he or she should not mind losing any remaining children.

References

Alfred, T. (1999) Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Apfel-Marglin F. (1996) ‘Introduction: rationality and the world’, in F. Apfel-Marglin and S. Marglin (eds), Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–39.

Appadurai, A. (2000) ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1–19.

——— (2002) ’Deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politics’, Public Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 21–47.

Blaut, J. M. (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, New York: Guilford Press.

Brosius, J.P. (ed.) (1999) Ethnographic Presence: Environmentalism, Indigenous Rights and Transnational Cultural Critique, Newark, NJ: Gordon & Breach.

Cordeu, E. (1989a) ‘Aishtuwente. Las ideas de deidad en la religiosidad chamacoco (Parte I)’, Suplemento Antropologico, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 7–77.

——— (1989b) ‘Aishtuwente. Las ideas de deidad en la religiosidad chamacoco (Parte II)’, Suplemento Antropologico, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 51–85.

——— (1990) ‘Aishtuwente. Las ideas de deidad en la religiosidad chamacoco (Parte III)’, Suplemento Antropologico, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 119–211.

——— (1991a) ‘Aishtuwente. Las ideas de deidad en la religiosidad chamacoco (Parte III Cont.)’, Suplemento Antropologico, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 85–166.

——— (1991b) ‘Aishtuwente. Las ideas de deidad en la religiosidad chamacoco (Parte IV)’, Suplemento Antropologico, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 145–233.

——— (1992a) ‘Aishtuwente. Las ideas de deidad en la religiosidad chamacoco (Part V Cont. y Parte VI)’, Suplemento Antropologico, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 167–301.

——— (1992b) ‘Aishtuwente. Las ideas de deidad en la religiosidad chamacoco (Parte V)’, Suplemento Antropologico, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 187–294.

Descola, P. and G. Palsson (eds) (1996) Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, London: Routledge.

Dirlik A. (2001) ‘Place-based imagination: globalism and the politics of place’, in R. Prazniak and A. Dirlik (eds), Places and Politics in the Age of Globalization, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 15–51.

Dussel, E. (1995) The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the Myth of Modernity, New York: Continuum.

Elliott, J.H. (1970) The Old World and the New– 1492–1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Escobar, A. (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

——— (2001) ‘Culture sits in places: reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization’, Political Geography 20, pp. 139–74.

Esteva, G. and M. Prakash (1998) Grassroots Post-modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures, London: Zed Books.

Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press.

Ferguson J. (1997) ‘Anthropology and its evil twin: “development” in the constitution of a discipline’, in F. Cooper and R. Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 150–75.

Grim, J. (ed.) (2001) Indigenous Traditions and Ecology, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School.

Gupta, A. and J. Ferguson (1997) ‘Culture, power, place: ethnography at the end of an era’, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–29.

Harcourt, W. and A. Escobar (2001) ‘Lead article: women and the politics of place’, Development, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 7–14.

Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell.

Ingold, T. (2000) The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge.

Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Moderns, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lindau J. and C. Cook (2000) ‘One continent, contrasting styles: the Canadian experience in North American perspective’, in C. Cook and J. Lindau (eds), Aboriginal Rights and Self-Government: The Canadian and Mexican Experience in North American Perspective, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, pp. 3–36.

Massey D. (1999) ‘Imagining globalization: power-geometries of time–space’, in A. Brah, M. Hickman and M. Mac an Ghaill (eds), Global Futures: Migration, Environment and Globalization, New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 27–44.

Peet R. and M. Watts (1996) ‘Liberation ecology: development, sustainability, and environment in an age of market triumphalism’, in M. Watts and R. Peet (eds), Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development and Social Movements, London: Routledge, pp. 1–45.

Plumwood, V. (1993) Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, London: Routledge.

Rist, G. (1997) The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, London: Zed Books.

Sieder, R. ed. (2002) Multiculturalism in Latin America: Indigenous Rights, Diversity and Democracy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Stavenhagen, R. (1996) ‘Indigenous rights: some conceptual problems’, in E. Jelin and E. Hershberg (eds), Constructing Democracy: Human Rights, Citizenship, and Society in Latin America, Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 141–59.

Swyngedouw E. (1997) ‘Neither global nor local: “glocalization” and the politics of scale’, in K.R. Cox (ed.), Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, New York: Guilford Press, pp. 137–66.

UNCED (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development) (1992) Agenda 21: Programme of Action for Sustainable Development–Rio Declaration on Environment and Development–Statement of Forest Principles–the Final Text of Agreements . . . United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, New York: United Nations Department of Public Information.

Van Cott, D. (2000) The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Vizenor, G. (1995) ‘Authored animals: creature tropes in Native American fiction’, Social Research, vol. 62, no. 3, pp. 661–83.

Document(s) 5 of 23