X-Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Message-Id: <v04011700b2cb89503f23@[128.253.55.14]>
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 09:30:27 -0400
To: Recipient List Suppressed:;
From: Native Americas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Supporting Indigenous Visions and Strategies in Latin America
The following is an article from the Winter 1998 issue of Native Americas, published by the Akwe:kon Press at Cornell University. For more information on how to stay informed of emerging trends that impact Native peoples throughout the hemisphere visit our website at http://nativeamericas.aip.cornell.edu.
Supporting Indigenous Visions and Strategies in Latin America
By Charles David Kleymeyer
We sat in a circle of school chairs in a small classroom with low
ceilings in Chimborazo Province, Ecuador. Present were approximately 25
leaders, men and women, representing an equal number of communities
belonging to a local indigenous federation. One of the leaders
translated my words into Quichua and theirs into Spanish, just to be sure
everyone was understanding what was being said. We had just finished a
two-hour discussion of the new grant agreement I had arrived with, which
described a project being funded by the Inter-American Foundation (IAF),
entailing training, sustainable agriculture, marketing and cultural
revitalization. There was a lull in the conversation and I asked if
anyone else had any questions or comments. One man stood up and hesitated
for quite some time. By Charles David Kleymeyer
"Ask anything," I reassured him.
He cleared his throat. Everyone sat quietly, waiting.
Finally he spoke: "Why do you do this?"
I spent the next half-hour explaining why I traveled thousands of miles from the capital city of an industrialized nation to analyze proposals from indigenous and Afro-Ecuadorian communities and federations, and then recommend funding for their self-designed and self-managed efforts to achieve socioeconomic and cultural change.
Colleagues in other bilateral and multinational institutions ask an equally challenging question: not why do the work, but why choose to concentrate such efforts on traditional peoples of various ethnic origins and how to go about it?
In the article that follows I attempt to answer the questions laid out above regarding support for indigenous peoples' development projects and their broader movements. I begin by presenting a few of the advantages of working with indigenous peoples. Then, I discuss some of the risks and difficulties involved in doing so. Finally, I comment on three relatively new approaches to this kind of work.
My analysis is based on my personal experience working with indigenous peoples since the mid-1960s, particularly in the United States, Peru, Guatemala, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador. Much of that work was done during nearly two decades at IAF. I am still learning, and the IAF is still learning. Speaking personally, I feel privileged to have worked so long with some of the most creative and energetic groups and individuals in this hemisphere.
Advantages of Working with Indigenous Peoples
Supporting indigenous peoples has a number of significant advantages.
First, Indigenous people have vast pools of cultural energy and creativity. This cultural energy and creativity enables them to carry out innovative projects and programs, and build social movements, against great odds. It also enables them to be productive in agriculture, crafts, conservation of natural resources and other expressive forms, at significant levels. After all, these are descendants of the people who developed historically renowned societies: Tihuanaku, Inca, Maya, Aztec, Anasazi, Moundbuilder, Iroquois and many others. Although empires came and went, the people continue.
Second, indigenous peoples have an unusual capacity to form effective coalitions, such as federations, confederations and campesino unions. These coalitions are the vehicles of development of the future, which will make many classic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) obsolete. These coalitions are major engines of empowerment, warranting support by outside institutions that are truly serious about enabling the disadvantaged to transform their historically vertical power relations with outsiders and bring about increased social justice and decreased impoverishment.
Two notable examples of such coalitions are the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE)-the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, and Coordinadora de Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica (COICA)-the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin. Each of these coalitions represents more than two million people, organized into federations of communities and confederations of those federations. CONAIE spans the three regions of Ecuador-coast, highlands and Amazon-and COICA is made up of the Amazonian confederations-of regional federations and local tribal groups-of all nine nations having territory in the Amazon Basin.
In just over a decade, CONAIE and COICA have emerged from the grassroots to become powerful agents for assuring land rights and general human rights, conserving and managing natural resources, and raising the quality of life and educational level of millions of economically disadvantaged Indian peoples. They have done this with relatively modest levels of outside aid, per capita and per annum, and immense amounts of sweat equity.
Ironically, in some years, the combined annual operational costs of CONAIE and COICA have been less than major bilateral and multinational institutions spend to maintain just one professional staff member overseas. Yet, to this day, CONAIE and COICA are constantly scraping to fund, at a minimally acceptable level, their next period of operations. This illustrates a dilemma in international priority setting.
Nor does an emphasis on working directly with indigenous coalitions preclude simultaneously supporting the best of the national and international NGOs that in turn support indigenous organizations. They frequently have special skills and access in themes such as human rights, legal aid, non-formal education, media, modern communications, technical assistance and training.
Third, in the area of ethno-development, indigenous peoples have special expertise and experience that could provide vital lessons to national governments and multinational organizations struggling with issues of human diversity and discrimination throughout the world. In fact, they have developed a broad and effective approach to poverty reduction and social justice that can be called "ethnodevelopment."
Indigenous people have other lessons to teach us, as well, particularly regarding sustainable systems of production and social organization and ways of stewarding natural resources. Many of their current efforts call upon a traditional conservation ethic and seek to revive or maintain ancestral technologies, blending their approaches with those based in western science, and in the process, literally drawing the best from both worlds, and doing so in ways that can benefit us all.
Fourth, indigenous peoples have an unusual capacity to mobilize resources needed to accomplish difficult goals. When people talk of resource mobilization, they often refer to just one kind of resource: money. But, there are at least four types of resource mobilization, three of which indigenous people excell in:
-- Human resource mobilization. Indigenous peoples have the ability to call upon an immense pool of womanpower and manpower to get the work done in projects and movement activities. In one case, a small federation of seven communities in Zocabón, Chimborazo, Ecuador built an irrigation system stretching more than 25 kilometers, by donating 700 days of free labor per family, plus their sand and gravel. When a conservative estimate was made of the equivalent financial value of this labor, it came to more than $1.5 million dollars, in stark contrast to the $50,000 in funding from the IAF, Swissair and others.
-- Material resource mobilization. In spite of the lack of currency, indigenous organizations often have considerable access to local resources such as soil, water, wood products, rock and other minerals, particularly for supplying infrastructure projects such as agricultural terraces and other soil conservation efforts, water systems, schools, community centers, roads, bridges and airstrips. Often these resources are held in common, or are at least community-controlled.
-- Sociocultural resource mobilization. Indigenous peoples can readily call upon their cultural heritage and social structures to produce necessary results. A key example is the array of dynamic labor traditions, such as the Andean minga or community work party, that have built the infrastructure mentioned above, planted and harvested communal lands for centuries. This is where the concept of cultural energy plays a key role. Many traditions and social structures, such as sacred observances, local political and religious systems, etc., serve as powerful generators of the cultural energy necessary to promote membership, participation and labor in development organizations and activities.
-- And finally, financial resource mobilization. The resource that indigenous peoples have least access to, and the one, of course, out of the four, that external support organizations are frequently best equipped to provide. Such differences in capacities are precisely what innovative partnerships are made of.
As shown by the Zocabón case above, a modest insertion of financial resources can often be leveraged with an immense amount of other resources.
Risks and Difficulties in Supporting Indigenous Peoples' Organizations
Many external support organizations report that it is not always as easy to work with indigenous peoples as some other groups, such as urban-based NGOs that are more accessible and that are structured and operate more like the external groups themselves. To illustrate:
-- Indigenous groups usually live in remote areas, speak non-western languages and in other ways function very differently from the world that external institutions know best.
-- Indigenous peoples' activities are surrounded by complex social and political sensitivities and considerations, which are difficult to predict, understand and navigate through.
-- Indigenous peoples' strengths are not always understood and interpreted as such. Likewise, when they make mistakes, outsiders are often left perplexed, open to misinterpretation and at a loss for how to proceed.
These factors can often be dealt with by calling upon the indigenous federations, confederations, coalitions,and consortia that are already available, as well as local NGO allies. These organizations are likely to be equipped to deal with misunderstandings, errors and unanticipated consequences.
These same organizations are available to confront the difficulties and challenges presented by indigenous groups with low levels of experience both with the ins and outs of funding, and with the administrative and other demands of the Western, bureaucratic world, such as legal registration, permits, contracts, property titles, bank accounts, financial accounting and audits.
Moreover, as with all groups, indigenous organizations have weaknesses and difficulties. They are susceptible to internal strife, conflict with other groups, imperfect leaders and occasional loose management or even corruption. External support organizations need to learn to rely on mutually reinforcing, new and revitalized partnerships and alliances-with indigenous peoples' organizations, and among themselves-to allay and preclude some of these problems. Outside groups can work better and more efficiently by going through CONAIE and COICA, as well as the smaller confederations and federations of the hemisphere.
Having mentioned some of the difficulties and challenges, let me add that based on my two decades of experience in international funding, some of the most careful and efficient grantees are the nascent, rural, so-called "unsophisticated" indigenous organizations. A good example is the Unión de Organizaciones Campesinas de Cicalpa (UOCACI), the Union of Peasant Organizations of Cicalpa, an Ecuadorian federation of more than 30 indigenous communities and organizations, located in Chimborazo. Over the 11 years of this multifaceted project, the UOCACI leadership has produced excellent financial and programmatic reports, demonstrating complete transparency and managerial acumen.
UOCACI has also demanded quality from support organizations. During one field visit to the project site, on a day with several additional visits scheduled for which I was already quite late, I stood up at what I thought was the end of the meeting when the president of the federation handed me the latest progress report. He put up his hand, smiling, and said, "Please, have a seat. We worked long and hard on this report, and now we are going to read it aloud, so that you and everyone else present can become acquainted with its contents and make their comments." For the next hour, the president read, page by page, a fascinating narrative report. And for another hour we discussed it. There would be no hit-and-run permitted against their vehicle of change! On subsequent trips, I scheduled half-day meetings with UOCACI and brought along other local grassroots leaders.
This would be an appropriate moment to look in the mirror. In their own modus operandi, external support organizations themselves present a significant set of risks and problems.
As individuals and as organizations, these outside organizations have an inborn tendency to subtly, or not so subtly, direct other peoples' development and to offer up their own ready-made solutions instead of responding to local initiatives. This distorts the grassroots development process and disempowers people by denying them ownership and partnership.
By and large, the representatives of these external institutions have learned to be culturally sensitive in their dealings across ethnic and class lines, but that does not always prevent them from supporting activities that are at some level culturally inappropriate. A few of the more visible examples: replacement of diversified subsistence farming with cash cropping, monoculture forestry and food production, the (not so) Green Revolution, exclusively western medicine, Amazonian cattle projects, imported structure of cooperatives and monolingual/monocultural education.
External support institutions can also be guilty of overfunding, underfunding, wrong-headed funding and funding with little or no transparency or accountability. Overfunding is similar to watering a garden with a firehose-gardens need water to grow and produce, but a firehose? Underfunding can starve an organization or prevent it from attaining its full potential. Wrong-headed funding places scarce financial resources in the wrong place or in the wrong way. Two examples are bricks and mortar projects that produce unused buildings, or indiscriminate food donations that weaken a populations' ability over the long term to feed itself. Another example is the insistence of some external organizations on supporting only projects, when the real necessity is to cover the core costs of grassroots organizations and even movements. This narrow approach is sometimes called "projectitis," and it can force groups to redesign their efforts into classic projects with restricted parameters and time limits. Finally, funding without transparency and accountability produces suspicion, distrust and lax management practices on all sides, a situation that, in the end, does no one any favors.
New Approaches to Working with Indigenous Peoples
Three of the relatively new approaches to working with indigenous peoples, equally applicable to the areas of grassroots development, human rights, the environment, cultural and biological diversity are: empowerment, ethnodevelopment, partnerships and alliances.
The first approach-empowerment-I will only mention, because to deal with it adequately, would call for a full article, if not a book:
-- Empowerment is an approach that puts issues of equity, change, preservation and development into the able hands of people themselves, letting them identify and confront their self-defined problems and challenges, on their own terms and for their own purposes.
-- Empowerment approaches enable people and their organizations to develop the tools and social structures for managing and transforming vertical or unbalanced power relations that have historically debilitated and impoverished them. Obtaining these empowering tools and structures entails mutually-reinforcing processes that include: coalition formation; gaining control over resources, production and benefits; developing skills and strategies; increasing knowledge and information; building and maintaining identity and tradition; navigating social space and context.
What has been learned about how people become empowered? What have the people themselves learned? These are questions that cry out for more attention.
The second approach is ethno-development. Ethnodevelopment is a process by which an ethnic group reaffirms and/or recovers its cultural heritage and identity, and employs this cultural background as a resource to improve the social, economic, cultural and political quality of life of its members. It does this by drawing upon its own cultural practices and ways of looking at things, to accomplish the following:
-- Get the work done, at the level of family, community, region and nation, in areas such as agriculture, manufacturing and crafts production, and in public works such as roads, schools, irrigation, and the conservation of soil, water, forests and animals.
-- Teach life skills and bodies of knowledge to young and old regarding such activities as production, political participation, health and healing, cultural survival, creativity and conflict resolution.
-- Participate effectively in local, regional, national and international political structures and processes, and enhance democracy through social discourse and debate.
-- Seize new opportunities, confront new problems that arise, and re-confront old ones in new ways through borrowing, invention, and rediscovery.
The ethnodevelopment approach, when coupled with empowerment, together form an important indigenous theory of development that deserves far more consideration than has been the case up until now.
The final approach is one that relies on partnerships and alliances-not only among indigenous groups, but also between those groups and NGOs or external support organizations. Partnerships and alliances are crucial to reaching the collective goals that are shared by indigenous organizations and their supporters. Those supporters need to consider financing indigenous people's movements-as delicate and complicated as that may be-as well as their projects, meetings and other activities. More resources can be directed to the self-managed and self-determined empowerment and cultural revitalization of indigenous peoples, because empowerment and culture form the very foundation of broad-base, sustainable development. By-products will emanate from such an approach. Two examples are reduced dependency of indigenous organizations on external entities, and new lessons and best practices that can be applied in many other settings.
Ailton Krenak of the Uniao Indígena Nacional do Brasil (UNI), the Union of Indigenous Nations of Brazil, speaking of the need to join forces to save the environment, said:
"We see it like this: It is as if we are all in a canoe traveling through time. If someone begins to make a fire in their part of the canoe ... it will affect us all. And it is the responsibility of each person in the canoe to ensure that it is not destroyed."
External support institutions would do well to join in the partnership that Ailton Krenak and others call for. Doing so will improve the providers, as well as their partners. These external providers would do well to cast their lot-and their considerable resources-with indigenous peoples' organizations, because these groups are in the vanguard of innovative efforts to transform our world-this 'canoe traveling though time'-into a place that is more just and equitable, with reduced human suffering and less environmental destruction.
The role of external support organizations should not be to "help indigenous peoples" or to "give them" financial or technical assistance. The real optimal role is to join forces with them, follow their lead, to combine resources and mobilize resources-human, material, sociocultural, and financial-and to meld traditional and western technologies in order to produce the broadest, deepest and most sustainable impact possible.
Native Americas Journal
Akwe:kon Press
Cornell University
300 Caldwell Hall
Ithaca, New York 14853
Tel. (607) 255-4308
Fax. (607) 255-0185
E-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://nativeamericas.aip.cornell.edu
<<<<=-=-=FREE LEONARD PELTIER=-=-=>>>>
If you think you are too small to make a difference;
try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito....
African Proverb
<<<<=-=http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
=-=>>>>
IF it says:
"PASS THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW...."
Please Check it before you send it at:
http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/blhoax.htm
