Native Folks Try to Protect Earth on the Brink

If you like to drink uncontaminated water, or eat or breathe, then you’re interdependent with the natural world. Yet, today, many of Earth’s fragile ecosystems are threatened or simply vanishing. Indigenous communities have long understood the importance of stewarding natural resources. Can the rest of the world respect that?

Biodiversity flourishes in protected Indigenous territories as compared with nonprotected areas. The healthy ecosystems and abundant wildlife in these territories make them an effective, as well as a cost-efficient, model for reducing carbon emissions and preserving endangered habitats. At a time when the global climate crisis has grown increasingly urgent, perhaps these facts should get more attention.

“The Indigenous people say the idea of ‘them and the land’ doesn’t exist. They are the children of the land. They are the land,” Haroldo Heleno, a regional coordinator of Brazil’s Indigenous-rights group CIMI, told OZY. (CIMI is an acronym of the Portuguese name Conselho Indigenista Missionário.)

If we stop to consider that our bodies are made from the nutrients we eat, which originated from plants that grew in soil (even if those plants were subsequently processed beyond recognition into packaged foods, or eaten by animals, whose meat, milk or eggs we later consumed), then all people are, in a sense, made from the land. Those who live in colonial cultures, however, may be less likely to feel any such connection to the ground beneath their feet, as such connection may not be emphasized during childhood or widely valued in adulthood.

The Indigenous people say the idea of ‘them and the land’ doesn’t exist. They are the children of the land. They are the land.

Haroldo Heleno

There are an estimated 476 million Indigenous peoples across the globe, making up just over 6% of the world’s population. While a single definition of “Indigenous” cannot capture the associated diversity, according to the United Nations, Indigenous refers to people who have, among other shared qualities, a “historical continuity or association with a given region or part of a given region prior to colonization or annexation.”

Indigenous customs, traditions and languages vary immensely, from nomadic pastoralists in East Africa to hunter-gatherers in Southeast Asia. Yet a common thread runs through most Indigenous cultures.

“Our relationship with the environment is a harmonious one,” Agnaldo Francisco, an Indigenous leader of the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe people of Brazil, told OZY.

Some Indigenous peoples in Australia and California, among other places, use controlled fire to remove invasive species, create new habitats for wildlife and reduce the risk of major wildfires. Elsewhere, Indigenous communities restore degraded lands and shores, such as the Indigenous peoples living in the Canadian Pacific Northwest, who have revived native plant and shellfish populations. In a co-management project with the Finnish government, the Sami people have adapted their fishing methods to revive salmon populations after they noticed a decline in numbers.

Meanwhile, the Kisimbosa territory in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo is home to the Bambuti-Babuluko Indigenous peoples of Walikale, whose land covers nearly 14,000 acres of mountainous tropical forest and is home to thousands of species of flora and fauna. The traditional land management techniques of these Indigenous people have allowed several groups of chimpanzees to be reintroduced into the area.

Sometimes, modern conservation efforts can’t see the forest for the trees. In attempts to save species from extinction and keep land untouched, some conservation projects have removed Indigenous peoples from their lands and prevented traditional activities like hunting and fishing.

Ample research has long shown historic colonialism and capitalism as the driving forces behind Indigenous people’s loss of rights. Indigenous homelands and their associated natural resources have been transferred to colonial settlers since the 15th century, and conflict between Indigenous communities and colonial governments persist today.