Volume 62, No. 4, Winter 2003
Maps of, by, and for the Peoples of Latin America
Peter H. Herlihy and Gregory Knapp
This article, and the collection of essays it introduces, discusses the development and use of participatory mapping (PM) in Latin America. The methodology, with roots in participant observation and collaborative research, represents the fullest involvement of local people who are trained to do research or applied work with the researcher, facilitator, or team. PM transforms cognitive spatial knowledge into map and descriptive forms. Two types exist: one type, including participatory action research mapping (PARM) and participatory rural appraisal mapping (PRAM), uses mapping for social action; the other, participatory research mapping (PRM), aims at research. The PM approach developed among geographers and anthropologists studying indigenous populations in Latin America. The articles in the collection detail five different PM projects working with about 20 different indigenous populations, living in some of the region’s most important conservation lands in Mosquitia, Veraguas, Darién, and western Amazonia. The projects show how PM has become a “keystone activity” in a wide range of research and development work. This novel methodology for collecting geographic information is helping to meet a variety of research and societal needs. Indeed, the superior results from some applications challenge even the most deeply rooted norms about the construction of cartographic knowledge.
Key words: participatory research, participatory mapping, indigenous peoples, Latin America
Participatory Research Mapping of Indigenous Lands in Darién, Panama
Peter H. Herlihy
This article describes a participatory research mapping (PRM) project to document the subsistence lands used by the indigenous populations of the Darién Province, eastern Panama. The region is the historic territory of the Kuna, Emberá, and Wounaan peoples, with a biosphere reserve, two indigenous comarca homelands, and one of the most active colonization fronts in Central America. Having fought for recognition of their land rights in the face of encroaching outsiders, indigenous leaders were well aware of the power and importance of cartographic information. Indeed, the Darién was the most inaccurately mapped province in the country, and indigenous leaders embraced the idea of a mapping project to document their expanding settlements and natural resources. Community representatives were trained to complete land-use assessments using questionnaires and sketch maps. They worked with a team of specialists, including the author, to transform this information into standard cartographic and demographic results. The project’s simple design brought outstanding results, including the first large-scale mapping of indigenous lands in this little-known region. The methodology shows how indigenous peoples can work with researchers in data collection and interpretation to transform their cognitive knowledge into standard forms, producing excellent scientific and applied results while enhancing their ability to manage their own lands.
Key words: participatory mapping, indigenous peoples, Emberá, Wounaan, Kuna, rain forest, Panama
Participatory Mapping of Community Lands and Hunting Yields among the Buglé of Western Panama
Derek A. Smith
Indigenous peoples living in the rain forest regions of Central America have detailed mental maps of streams, topography, and land cover of large areas surrounding their villages. They also have the skills to make important contributions to geographic research that can help them manage their natural resources and defend their historic rights to their lands. Participatory research among the Buglé of western Panama incorporated several local investigators who, among other tasks, facilitated community mapping sessions and administered weekly questionnaires on hunting activities in their respective communities. Part of their work consisted of drawing sketch maps showing the locations where game animals were captured. Local investigators and the author together plotted these hunting kill sites onto 1:50,000 topographic base maps. Over 1,500 questionnaires were administered and roughly 1,300 kill sites were documented, showing the spatial distribution of hunting yields of 59 households over a period of eight months. Although the participatory methods were not free from difficulties, the research process made it possible to produce detailed maps of game extraction over a considerable area—maps that would have otherwise been impossible to create. The local investigators were thus active participants in the production of information that will help explain the relationships between indigenous peoples and their environment and provide new understanding of the impacts of subsistence hunting on wildlife populations.
Key words: participatory mapping, indigenous peoples, hunting, rain forests, Buglé, Panama
Mapping Dreams in Nicaragua’s Bosawas Reserve
Anthony Stocks
The advent of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology has occasioned a plethora of mapping processes throughout the world concerned with indigenous rights. Yet many of these projects and processes seem to end with the maps, occasionally to the detriment of the people subject to the mapping. This paper argues that mapping is a necessary but insufficient goal if the aim is to further indigenous land and resource rights, especially in a context in which there are many more powerful forces, hostile to the empowerment process. The paper uses the case of the Bosawas International Biosphere Reserve to illustrate parallel processes of mapping (with appropriate documentation), protection, political harmonization, institutional strengthening, and appropriate scientific input that have been employed there. All of these processes together have begun to make a difference, and the colonist agricultural frontier that threatens indigenous lands within the reserve has been notably slowed, although secure land and resource rights have continued to evade Nicaragua’s indigenous people.
Key words: mapping, Bosawas, Mayangna, Miskitu, Nicaragua
Mapping the Past and the Future: Geomatics and Indigenous Territories in the Peruvian Amazon
Richard Chase Smith, Margarita Benavides, Mario Pariona, and Ermeto Tuesta
Since the early 1970s, indigenous Amazonians of Peru have received property title or other forms of government recognition to over 10 million hectares of tropical forested land. The largest single area is in the Río Galvez Basin, east of Iquitos near the Brazilian border, where a 400,000-hectare native community was titled to the Matsés peoples in the 1990s. Developing and implementing management plans and related economic initiatives for these areas is the next urgent chapter in the long history of their struggle for survival and recognition. The authors examine both conceptual and methodological steps to establish a map-based Native Communities Information System (SICNA) as the foundation for future land-use planning in Peru’s indigenous territories. The information system includes two types of data for Peru’s native communities: geographic data that include the hydrographic system with community boundaries among other elements, and tabular data on demography, ethnic affiliation, legal-administrative status, housing, education, and resource use. The two data types are interconnected digitally through a Geographic Information System (GIS). The authors describe two cases in which these mapping and data-gathering techniques are put to use: 1) for delimiting a proposed communal reserve to protect currently untitled resources vital to the survival of 23 communities in a large area in the northern Peruvian Amazon; and 2) for reaffirming historical and cultural links of the Amuesha people to a territory lost to colonists over the past century in Peru’s central jungle region.
Key words: mapping, GIS, indigenous peoples, Peruvian Amazon
Rights, Resources, and the Social Memory of Struggle: Reflections on a Study of Indigenous and Black Community Land Rights on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast
Edmund T. Gordon, Galio C. Gurdián, and Charles R. Hale
In early 1997, the three authors accepted a research contract, funded by the World Bank, to carry out a diagnóstico (research and analysis) of the communal land claims of some 130 indigenous, Garífuna, and Afro-Nicaraguan communities on the Atlantic (Caribbean) Coast of Nicaragua. This essay makes the diagnóstico itself the subject of analysis, summarizing the research results and examining their impact. After a brief overview of the role of land claims in the history of coast peoples, we present a summary of the research project’s conception, methodology, and principal findings. Two substantive analytical sections follow. One examines the contradictory positioning of this research—funded by the World Bank, administered by the state, yet conceived to advance the interests of community members who perceive the state as their long-term adversary. The second reflects on theoretical insights gained from this type of research, in which the very process of data collection transforms the object of inquiry, and in which ?research subjects? actively produce the knowledge that forms the basis of the study’s analysis and conclusions. Within this second topic, we focus primarily on how coast community members conceive and justify their rights to communal land and how these formulations help us think beyond the morass of ?invented traditions,? the tension between ?essentialist? and ?constructed? identities, and other Western social science conundrums. We conclude emphasizing the obstacles and challenges that will lie ahead, as these communities continue their efforts to achieve legal recognition of their communal land claims.
Key words: race, land rights, Nicaragua, Miskitu Indians, Creoles
Narrating Place and Identity, or Mapping Miskitu Land Claims in Northeastern Nicaragua
Karl H. Offen
This paper draws from my participation in mapping Miskitu community land claims in the spring of 1997 to discuss the relationship between the mapping process and an identity politics of place in northeastern Nicaragua (the Moskitia). In community fora that formed the critical element of the mapping process, Miskitu community intellectuals passionately narrated Miskitu history with recourse to Moskitia geography and the places to be mapped. These public narratives resonated with and mobilized community audiences because they combined authoritative Miskitu identity signifiers, such as the Miskitu flag and biblical lessons, with commonplace toponyms and cultural landscapes. In narrating the relationship of Miskitu identity to Moskitia places, community intellectuals simultaneously critiqued the conventional wisdom of Nicaraguan historiography and transformed the initial aim of the mapping project by shaping the meaning of “community lands” for community members. In this way, the mapping project merged a cultural politics of place with those of identity.
Key words: place, identity, mapping, Miskitu Indians, Nicaragua
