New Paradigm Conservation Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon

Authors: Stephan Schwartzman and Barbara Zimmerman Source

Ongoing alliances between indigenous peoples and conservation organizations in the Brazilian Amazon have helped achieve the official recognition of -1 million km2 of indigenous lands. The future of Amazonian indigenous reserves is of strategic importance for the fate of biodiversity in the region. We examined the legislation governing resource use on indigenous lands and summarize the history of the Kayapo people's consolidation of their 100,000 km2 territory. Like many Amazonian indigenous peoples, the Kayapo have halted the expansion of the agricultural frontier on their lands but allow selective logging and gold mining.

Prospects for long-term conservation and sustainability in these lands depend on indigenous peoples' understandings of their resource base and on available economic alternatives. Although forest conservation is not guaranteed by either tenure security or indigenous knowledge, indigenous societies' relatively egalitarian common-property resource management regimes (along with adequate incentives and long-term partnerships with conservation organizations) can achieve this result. 

Successful initiatives include Conservation International's long-term project with the A 'ukre Kayapo village and incipient large-scale territorial monitoring and control in the Kayapo territory, and the Instituto SocioAmbiental (ISA) 15-year partnership with the peoples of the Xingu Indigenous Park, with projects centered on territorial monitoring and control, education, com- munity organization, and economic alternatives. The recent agreement on ecological restoration of the Xingu River headwaters between ranchers and private companies, indigenous peoples, and environmentalists, brokered by ISA, marks the emergence of an indigenous and conservation alliance of sufficient cohesiveness and legitimacy to negotiate effectively at a regional scale.

Introduction 
Amerindian territories in the Brazilian Amazon comprise more than 1 million km2, or approximately 21% of the Brazilian Amazon (ISA 2004). The territories reside in 400 legally recognized "indigenous lands" that are in- habited by some 200,000 people, or about 1% of the regional population (ISA 2004). Twenty-nine territories exceed 1 million ha (WCMC 1992). State and federal protected areas comprise about 14% of the Amazon, and 2% (130,000 km2) of the region consists of protected areas or portions of them that overlap indigenous lands (Ricardo 2001). Indigenous lands encompass a much broader range of ecosystem types than all other protected areas combined (Peres & Terborgh 1995; Fearnside 2003; Nepstad et al. 2005). Conservation scientists are increasingly convinced that indigenous territories, given their size and protected status, will be a decisive factor in the ultimate fate of Amazonian ecosystems. Indigenous lands and other protected areas act as the principal barrier to forest cutting and fires along the "arc of deforestation"-the front line of forest destruction moving north from the south and southeast of the Amazon-where 80% of deforestation is concentrated (Alves 2002; Nepstad et al. 2001; Nepstad et al. 2005).

The Kayapo indigenous territories of Para and Mato Grosso and the Xingu Indigenous Park provide a striking example of this barrier effect and show that the presence of Amerindian peoples has halted an intense wave of deforestation for nearly two decades. Long-term conservation is not guaranteed by either recognizing Amerindian lands or creating protected areas, but strategies for long-term sustainability differ between the two. Projected new infrastructure investments and agricultural expansion in the Amazon are likely to increase deforestation and pressure on indigenous lands and protected areas alike. These likely threats will require new strategies and new investments to both types of areas if their ecological integrity is to be guaranteed. Legislation, Resource Use, and Threats to Amerindian Territories The Constitution of Brazil of 1988 (Art. 231) assures Amerindian peoples' rights to their social organization, customs, languages, beliefs, and traditions and to the lands they have traditionally occupied. 

The National Indian Foundation (Fundacao Nacional do Indio [FUNAI]) is the federal government agency responsible for upholding indigenous policy in Brazil. Although indigenous lands are property of the federal government, indigenous peoples are accorded permanent occupation and exclusive usufruct rights, except for mineral and water rights, which remain under government control. Lands "traditionally occupied" by indigenous peoples are those "permanently inhabited by them, those used for their productive activities, those indispensable to the environmental resources necessary to their well-being, and those necessary to their physical and cultural reproduction, according to their uses, customs and traditions" (Constituiciao da Republica Federativa do Brasil, Art. 231, Section 1). 

The legal status of resource extraction on indigenous lands remains ambiguous. Although in 1973 FUNAI managed most of the indigenous societies' relations with the outside world, its guardianship has in practice long since been superseded. Indigenous peoples now deal frequently and directly with loggers, miners, local businesses, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the media, and state, federal, and municipal agencies and are themselves largely responsible for monitoring and control of access to their territory. Resource extraction in indigenous areas is usually conducted on an unregulated basis, if not flagrantly illegally, and there is currently no institutional means to legalize or regulate it. Although indigenous peoples have won legal recognition of their land rights to substantial territories, legal parameters for resource use on their lands remain vague.

New Paradigms
In the absence of clear rules or standards, indigenous groups have adopted pragmatic approaches that depend on alliances with regional, national, and international actors. The Kayapo case illustrates how indigenous peoples in the Amazon have won control of substantial territories. The colonization frontier reached Kayapo lands early in the 1980s, and the government became unable to enforce the laws that protect indigenous lands from invasion, encroachment, and resource extraction by third parties. Ranchers, colonists, loggers, gold miners, and illegal land speculators, supported by road construction that promotes frontier expansion, began to flagrantly violate the integrity of Amerindian lands in southern Para and Mato Grosso states. In the late 1970s, the Kayapo numbered around 1300 in seven or eight villages in southern Para and northern Mato Grosso (Bamberger 1979). The only recognized but then still undemarcated Kayapo land was some 2.8 million ha surrounding the eastern villages (CEDI 1982).  Figure 1. Forest-cover change in the region of Kayapo and Parana indigenous territories between 2000 and 2003. Black lines delimit one Panara and four Kayapo ratified indigenous territories.

In dramatic confrontations in the 1980s, the Kayapo reinvaded ranches, took hostages, seized river crossings, and expelled thousands of gold miners from their territory. These actions reinvented their warrior tradition as part of a political and public relations campaign that proved effective in winning land struggles. During the late 1980s and 1990s, Kayapo chiefs began to selectively allow mahogany logging or gold-mining concessions in exchange for cash, but they were largely able to prevent outsiders from occupying their lands. Ironically, the illegal logging of mahogany contributed to the persistence of forest in the southeastern Amazon: the Kayapo invested part of the returns in protecting their lands. The Kayapo now number more than 5,000, and their officially ratified territories cover some 11 million ha of continuous forest in Para and Mato Grosso.

 For more than 20 years, the Kayapo have almost single-handedly protected their territories from invasion. But the Kayapo lack the resources for surveillance and enforcement to deal with a second wave of deforestation and invasion spreading out from the Cuiaba-Santarem Highway. Most logging in that region is illegal and undertaken without the required management plans. Loggers reenter forests several times to remove timber as markets develop, roads improve, and transportation costs decrease. These logged forests become degraded, are prone to fire, become infested with vines and weeds, and lose up to half of their canopy cover. Unlike agriculture, logging and gold mining pose a more insidious threat to Amerindian lands and cultures because these activities do not necessarily result in loss of territory. As a result, Amerindian groups may view these activities as economic opportunity rather than invasion. Although gold-mining activity on Kayapo lands tapered off in the 1990s with declining gold prices, mahogany logging continued until international pressure led to government action in 2002. Kayapo lands were once rich in mahogany.

Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon valuable timber species on Earth, but after more than a decade of uncontrolled logging, mahogany is scarce. Inevitably, prices for other timber species will rise in the absence of mahogany as transportation costs decrease with better roads, as regional timber stocks outside Kayapo lands are depleted, and as Kayapo communities are again pressured to sell timber. Although the light intensity of mahogany logging (<1 tree extracted/ha) did not se- riously compromise forest ecology, a higher intensity, multi-species harvest would be permanently damaging (Zimmerman et al. 2001). A recent study by the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment shows that approximately 25% of Kayapo lands in Parai and Mato Grosso are vulnerable to logging of a suite of high-value timber species under the present road network. 
Although necessary, tenure security for indigenous peoples is not tantamount to sustainable management. Typically, indigenous peoples will need new institutions to manage resources. But control of access to resources in frontier no-man's-land is the sine qua non of any strategy for sustainability in large tropical landscapes, and Amerindian peoples have largely achieved this thus far (ISA 2004).

The conservation issue in the Amazon needs to be addressed next. Amerindians in the Amazon generally see animals, plants, rivers, and forests as the basis for reproduction of their societies, although they may have no cultural restriction against resource extraction (at times to the point of exhaustion of a particular resource; Turner 2000). Conservationists have sometimes oversimplified traditional knowledge and resource management as benign conservation strategies and externally induced change as detrimental to sustainable practices (Brandon 1996; Berkes 2004). Social and cultural change may not always com- promise long-term sustainability, however, whereas what is considered traditional knowledge may be neither tra- ditional in the sense of ancient and unchanging nor nec- essarily beneficial for the resource base. Both traditional indigenous institutions and recent social and cultural in- novations have at times enabled environmental gains and at other times have jeopardized the sustainability of the territories currently protected. For example, Kayap6 social organization was charac- terized recently by intense, often violent factionalism and chiefly competition based on leadership in warfare (Verswijver 1992). The wide geographic distribution of Kayap6 villages in the 1970s-the basis of subsequent suc- cessful land claims-is largely a result of this process. But chiefly rivalry, transposed from warfare and ritual wealth, led to internal competition for logging and mining deals and the apparent windfall of goods they provided. For the Xicrin Kayap6 people, the historical process of contact with frontier society, which began in the early decades of the twentieth century, was at least as much driven by Xi- crin strategies to access the wealth of outsiders for their own social and cultural motivations as it was by an ex- ternally induced process (Gordon 2003). In the Xingu Park, in contrast, traditional knowledge has preserved a wealth of indigenous cultigens while impeding the assim- ilation of the concept of finite natural resources (Ricardo 2001). In sum, traditional or indigenous knowledge may be more hybrid and less static than is often recognized and more dynamic and adaptive than indigenous peoples' own representations may lead us to believe (Dove 2002; Schwartzman 2005). Indigenous societies do nevertheless generally conform to the criteria that sociologists have identified as requisite for successful common-property resource management regimes (Ostrom 1990; Becker & Ostrom 1995; Morrow & Hull 1996; Gibson et al. 2000): (1) clear definition of the resource and its users and the ability of users to sus- tain legal claims to or effectively defend the resource from outsiders; (2) clear criteria for membership as an eligible user; (3) rapid access to low-cost, internally adap- tive mechanisms of conflict resolution; (4) fair decision- making rights and use rights among users (as in egalitarian Amerindian society); (5) no challenge to or undermining of institutions created and defined by users by any other authorities; and (6) user communities are accustomed to negotiating and cooperating with each other. Although Amerindian societies possess these attributes associated with successful common-property regimes, development and predatory resource exploitation from outside will exert high levels of pressure. For the long- term preservation of forest ecosystems, Amerindians need economic alternatives-congruent with their cul- tural norms-that they can control. Conservation and de- velopment projects with Amerindian communities, there- fore, must be designed around normative indigenous val- ues of equity, cooperation, and reciprocity that are ex- pressed in terms of local authority achieved by consen- sus and common-property access, rather than relying on western normative values of competition, exclusive rights to resources, and centralized management author- ity (Chapeskie 1995). Examples of Conservation Alliances with Indigenous Societies Kayapo and Conservation International The Kayap6 have drawn on their social institutions and collective organization to forge their own forms of re- sistance and accommodation to Brazilian society. Un- like other politically active Amazonian groups, they have neither joined nor cooperated with any interethnic  Historically, Kayap6 leadership was vali- dated by securing resources from beyond the village boundaries (e.g., leading long hunting treks or raiding the villages of other Kayap6 or Brazilians). With con- tact, the requisites of leadership changed. Fluency in Por- tuguese, basic literacy and arithmetic skills, and familiarity with Brazilian administrative and economic institutions became essential assets. During the years of mahogany logging that introduced foreign concepts to the Kayap6 society, the collective organization of Kayap6 communities remained strong. In several villages that had allowed extraction of mahogany and gold, communal control was eventually asserted over the younger leaders who had par- layed their skills as intercultural mediators into political and economic dominance in the community. This control meant either that communities stopped extraction activ- ities altogether on their land or made their leaders share the profits. Conservation International do Brasil (CI-Brasil) began working with the Kayap6 of a single community, A'Ukre, in 1992, with the objective of giving this community an economic alternative to selling mahogany logs. The A'Ukre conservation enterprise is an ecological research station and biological reserve that attracts researchers be- cause it is ecologically intact with a full complement of timber tree species. The site is protected from logging and hunting and is embedded within a much larger wilder- ness area-itself protected from deforestation. Ecological research generates direct benefits for the community in the form of user fees for communal use, employment, training, and administrative and technical support in the outside world. Recognizing the benefits from their grow- ing research station enterprise, this community chose to maintain an 8000-ha mahogany and ecological research reserve in lieu of continuing to sell mahogany for short- term gain (Zimmerman et al. 2001). Once gold mining and mahogany logging on Kayap6 lands was interrupted, the Kayapo began organizing asso- ciations to access support for community needs. Conser- vation International do Brasil provides substantial tech- nical, administrative, and financial support and related project implementation needs for the two main Kayap6 NGOs: Associacao Floresta Protegida (AFP) in Para state and Instituto Raoni (IR) of Mato Grosso state. Both or- ganizations are implementing territorial surveillance and conservation and development projects (research station, Brazil-nut extraction, and piqui fruit harvest, among oth- ers) with funding obtained principally by CI-Brasil and in partnership with FUNAI. The FUNAI does not have nearly enough resources to uphold its constitutional obli- gation of protecting indigenous peoples and their lands. The NGOs can help fill this gap under the partnership model used by the AFP and by the IR. The role of the AFP, IR, and FUNAI is to support Kayap6 surveillance and development initiatives as long as they act to preserve social and environmental integrity. The AFP, IR, Kayap6 leaders, and FUNAI design and help coordinate surveil- lance strategy among guard posts and communities; the AFP and IR support administration, infrastructure, and training for implementing the strategy; the Kayapo per- form the ground surveillance and occupation of their ter- ritory; and FUNAI provides legal authority, coordination, and administration of field activities and involvement of other federal authorities. In addition to ongoing support for the local Kayapo NGOs, CI-Brasil provides the means for the Kayap6 lead- ership, dispersed across a vast expense of territory, to meet annually. These meetings serve as a collective fo- rum for achieving consensus, an important principle of Kayap6 society, and unite leadership and reinforce tra- ditional Kayapo political institutions. Fortified by their institutions, the Kayap6 have been among the most po- litically successful and strongest defenders of indigenous rights of all peoples of the Brazilian Amazon. Xingu Indigenous Park and Instituto SocioAmbiental Unlike the Kayap6, the various societies in the Xingu In- digenous Park have not permitted logging or gold min- ing on their territory. The Xingu Park, about 2.6 million ha in northern Mato Grosso, was created in 1961, largely through the efforts of the renowned indigenists, the Villas Boas brothers. This area is now inhabited by some 3700 people of 16 distinct ethnicities and has been continu- ously inhabited for at least 800 years (Heckenberger et al. 2003). The Xingu tribes (Xinguanos) have repeatedly turned back illegal loggers, held and seized the equip- ment of intruders hunting and fishing in the park, and defended the boundaries of the area from surrounding ranchers throughout the 1980s and 1990s, despite ex- pansion of the agricultural frontier around the park. A paternalistic regime of "presents" was instituted by the Villas Boas and continued by FUNAI, whereby chiefs' al- legiance to park authorities was ensured by "gifts" of trade goods. As the Indians' need for outside goods grew, this system of presents collapsed and opportunities to gener- ate income, outside of a handful of FUNAI jobs and the sale of handicrafts and artwork, were extremely limited. In the 1980s it was also becoming clear that the original design of the park, leaving the headwaters of the major tributaries of the Xingu River unprotected, was flawed. Water quality began to deteriorate, with increased silta- tion and turbidity (Ricardo 2001). Starting in 1990, one of Brazil's principal indigenous rights and environmental organizations, the Instituto SocioAmbiental (ISA), set up a project in the Xingu Park and helped the Xingu peoples organize the Xingu Lands Indigenous Association (ATIX), in an effort to achieve greater political and economic au- tonomy. ISA and ATIX undertook a territorial monitoring and control project, building and manning control posts, patrolling borders, and maintaining the demarcation of park boundaries. Alliances with Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon instituted a bilingual education program, concentrating on the training of indigenous teachers and, with ATIX, mapping resource use and studying economic alterna- tives. The fact that the Xingu groups did not permit logging or gold mining on their territory may in part result from the absence of mahogany in the area but is also undoubtedly owing to ISA's long-term partnership and investments in economic alternatives. After nearly a decade of dialogue, research, and pilot initiatives, 28 villages in the north- ern and middle Xingu are producing certified organic honey-1.8 tons in 2003. The ATIX cooperative has a contract with one of Brazil's largest supermarket chains, which currently buys the entire output. The ISA-ATIX partnership has developed into an im- portant example of frontier governance (Nepstad et al. 2002). In 2003 the organizations conducted a field sur- vey of environmental conditions of the upper headwaters of the Xingu and found that about one-third of the orig- inal vegetation cover had been cleared. They identified soil erosion and water supply as major problems within and outside the park. Ranchers, soybean farmers, and colonists had, to a greater or lesser extent, ignored stip- ulations of the forestry code requiring each property to maintain 20% of its original forest cover, especially along rivers and streams. The team found ample evidence of pesticide pollu- tion of watercourses. Based on this survey, ISA organized a series of meetings with local landowners, businesses, ranchers' unions, and state and federal producer's orga- nizations, including the powerful National Confederation of Agriculture, seeking avenues for dialogue on address- ing environmental degradation of the headwaters. Staff from ISA identified the restoration and protection of ri- parian forest as one issue on which dialogue was feasible and organized a meeting of ranchers, business, colonists, environmentalists, and indigenous peoples in Canarana, Mato Grosso, in 2004. Participants reached an unprece- dented agreement in favor of restoring and protecting riparian forests. In essence, ranchers, soy producers, en- vironmentalists, and indigenous peoples agreed to seek subsidized official credit for landowners to restore and protect riparian forest in the Xingu headwaters. The nov- elty of this meeting was the emergence of sufficiently organized and representative stakeholders to allow a ne- gotiation capable of changing regional-level processes. Conclusion their undemarcated lands resulted in a continuous north- south corridor of some 14 million ha of protected forest. With the Brazilian government's creation of 5 million ha of new protected areas in the adjacent Terra do Meio region, in the wake of the tragic assassination of Sister Dorothy Stang, there is now a 22 million ha corridor of protected forest areas in the Xingu River basin-the largest in the world. Social and cultural changes in the Xingu and among the Kayap6 have demonstrably resulted in increased pres- sure on natural resources and losses of traditional knowl- edge. But they have also resulted in dynamic new strate- gies with enormous positive conservation value. The innovative negotiation brokered by ISA and ATIX with regional and national agribusiness promises to achieve a precedent-setting, regional-level resource management process. Although it could be said that the Xingu groups have adopted a more "sustainable" resource-use strategy than the Kayap6, the same aggressive independence and warrior tradition that led the Kayap6 to broker their own deals with regional economic interests also motivated their strategy of territorial consolidation. Their profits from logging and mining partially funded these gains and the protection of their territory. The Kayap6's financial independence, costly though it has been in terms of re- sources lost to the communities, allowed the group to make critical interventions in key moments for national policy, such as the Constituent Assembly of 1988. What may prove most important to conservationists is that in relation to outsiders, both Kayap6 and Xinguanos are or- ganized and cohesive enough that with adequate support they can control access to their lands and negotiate with other social and economic actors on a regional scale. More than enough knowledge and experience of fron- tier expansion, Amerindian societies, and the functioning of successful common property regimes exists for conser- vation NGOs to forge further wide-reaching, long-term alliances with Amerindian tribes for the conservation of Amazonian ecosystems. Investments in territorial control and economic alternatives for Amerindian peoples form the basis of long-term conservationist and indigenous al- liances that can affect frontier expansion and forest protection at a significant scale. The challenge is to devise long-term investment strategies that remunerate indigenous peoples for the ecosystem services of the lands they protect, directly linking development benefits with con- servation.

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