Rights, Resources, and the Social Memory of Struggle: Reflections and Black Community Land Rights on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast

Mapping Territories, Land Resources and Rights: Communities Deploying Participatory Mapping/Pgis in Latin America

“…Cochran (2008) assessed the value of "PRM" (participatory research mapping) in terms of empowering marginalised communities in eastern Honduras. In Nicaragua, Miskitu Indians actively produced and transformed knowledge -'the 96 very process of data collection transforms the object of inquiry' (Gordon et al 2003), who further argue that it 'becomes pointless to distinguish between original, essentialist attitudes, entitlements, and conceptualisations of land, and the constructed identities' which emerge from the participatory mapping activities -'they elide into each other'. Other PAR researchers have made similar discoveries and conclusions, for examples, Herlihy and Knapp (2003), and Chapin and Threlkeld (2001 Indigenous Landscapes: A Study in Ethnocartography).…”

Where would we be without them? Knowledge, space and power in indigenous politics

“…With the exception of recent efforts to use the ''collective memory of struggle'' as the basis for community mapping [12,64], many of these projects continue to rely on articulating their claims with environmental concerns and conventional notions of indigeneity. While the ability to link particular claims with putatively global concerns is often necessary to making mapping possible, that agency is emplaced within a field of political power that bears the indelible marks of colonialism.…”

“…Like indigenous knowledge more broadly, the perceived usefulness and validity of indigenous maps is often a function of their ability to contribute to the kinds of 'universal' knowledge organized by the natural and social sciences that forms the basis for modern forms of governance [9, p. 235, 10]. Nowhere is this more evident than with the growing use of mapping in rolling out decentralized models of development and conservation [11,12]. Throughout, old inequalities are often re-inscribed through recognition of indigenous rights, raising any number of immediate concerns for the future of indigenous mapping.…”

Eco-Apartheid and Global Greenwaves: African Diasporic Environmental Justice Movements

“…In 1990, just after defeating the Sandinistas in a democratic election, President Violeta Chamorro established the Bosawas reserve, funded in large part by the Nature Conservancy and the World Bank. Although new civil laws enhanced regional governments' rights to regulate natural resources and recognized indigenous people's right to the territories they traditionally occupied, the Chamorro government made the Bosawas decision unilaterally (Gordon, Gurdian, and Hale 2003;Kaimowitz, Faune, and Mendoza 2003). Regional governments and local communities ''were informed after the fact that they now lived within or near a 'national' reserve, moreover a reserve that began with restrictive land-use policies that were poorly thought out, poorly communicated, and totally unenforced'' (Stocks 1995:14).…”