- Driven Out of Eden. Our quest for Paradise always appears to result in eviction or genocide

It is surely one of the most brazen evasions of reality ever painted. John Constable's “The Cornfield”, completed in 1826, and now hanging in the National Gallery's new exhibition Paradise, evokes, at the very height of the enclosure movement, a flawless rural harmony. Just as the commoners were being dragged from their land, their crops destroyed, their houses razed, the dissenters transported or hanged, Constable conjures the definitive English Arcadia. A dog walks a herd of sheep into the deep shade of an August day. A ruddy farm boy drinks from a glittering stream, his donkeys browsing quietly behind him. In the background, framed by great elms, men in hats and neckerchiefs work a field of wheat. Beyond them a river shimmers through watermeadows. A church emerges from the trees to bless the happy natives and their other Eden.

In the midst of the rural hell, Constable invents his heaven. It is a glittering lie, and we should not be surprised to read in the gallery's brochure that this is "one of the nation's favourite paintings, reproduced countless times and in thousands of homes". For what Constable has done is what human beings have always done, and continue to do today. Confronted by atrocities, we invoke a prelapsarian wonder. We construct our Gardens of Eden, real or imagined, out of other people's hell.

The timing of the exhibition is good, as it is in this season that we leave our homes in search of paradise. In doing so, we immiserate other people. It is not just the noise with which we fill their lives while pursuing our own tranquility. In order to create an Eden in which we may disport ourselves in innocence and nakedness, we must first commission others to clear its inhabitants out of the way. Like Constable, we are adept at hiding this truth from ourselves.

The Yosemite Valley in California was set aside by Abraham Lincoln as the world's first public wilderness. As the historian Simon Schama records, "the brilliant meadow floor which suggested to its first eulogists a pristine Eden was in fact the result of regular fire-clearances by its Ahwahneechee Indian occupants". The first whites to enter the valley were the soldiers sent to kill them. Eden, in an inversion of the Biblical story, was thus created by Man's expulsion. The colonists redefined the Ahwahneechee's managed habitat as wilderness in order to assert both a temporal and spiritual dominion over it.

America's Garden of Eden, in other words, is in fact its Canaan, the land of milk and honey whose indigenous people had first to be eliminated before the invaders could claim it as their birthright. The Mosaic doctrine of terra nullius (the inhabitants possess no legal rights to their land), which permitted the Lord's appointed to "smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth" has become the founding creed of the usurper all over the world. It continues to inform the land seizures in modern Israel, seeking now to turn itself into a walled garden; it continues to guide the expropriations upon which much of the global tourism industry is based.

In the second half of the 20th century, as the cost of international transport fell, governments discovered a powerful financial incentive to create, from the lands of the poor, a paradise for the rich. All over east and southern Africa, the most fertile lands of the nomads and hunter-gatherers were declared "primordial wilderness". The inhabitants were shut out; only those who could afford to pay were permitted to enter heaven. You can read about the Maasai Mara reserve on the Kenya Tourist Board's website, under the heading "Wilderness". It informs you that the indigenous people, the Maasai, "regard themselves ... as much a part of the life of the land as the land is part of their lives. Traditionally, the Maasai rarely hunt and living alongside wildlife in harmony is an important part of their beliefs." What it does not tell you is that the Maasai have been extirpated from the "wilderness" in which they lived in harmony with wildlife, because the tourists did not expect to see them there.

The government of Botswana has just completed its expulsion of the Gana and Gwi Bushmen from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, on the grounds that their hunting and gathering has become "obsolete" and their presence is no longer compatible with "preserving wildlife resources". To get rid of them, as Survival International has shown, it cut off their water supplies, taxed, fined, beat and tortured them. Bushmen have lived there for some 20,000 years; the wildlife is not threatened by them, but the freedom of the diamond mining and the tourism industries might be. Having expelled the Bushmen from their ancestral lands, the government now invites tourists to visit what its website calls "the Last Eden".

The precursors of these game reserves were the deer parks and other earthly paradises the aristocracy built for itself in Britain. In Stowe gardens in Buckinghamshire, landscaped by Capability Brown in the 1740s on behalf of the Whig politician Lord Cobham, is a valley called the "Elysian Fields", the paradise of the ancient Greeks. Hidden in the trees in the heart of paradise is a church: the only remaining evidence of one of the villages cleared to make way for the estate. You can scour the National Trust's literature for any reference to the people who lived there or in the other places which were turned into the grand estates it preserves, but you will be wasting your time. Britain's biggest NGO recounts the history of heaven, but shields its eyes from hell.

We deceive ourselves by precisely the same means in building our virtual Edens. Paul Gauguin sought his garden of innocence in the South Pacific, but found instead a society ravaged by French colonisation and venereal disease. Like Constable he painted paradise anyway: the tableau displayed in the National Gallery was largely copied from a frieze in a Javanese temple, into whose implausible Eden Gauguin inserted his ethereal Tahitians. Perhaps the most disturbing painting in the exhibition is Francois Boucher's Landscape with a Watermill. In the French countryside in 1755, the peasants were living on husks, grass and acorns, but Boucher has plump maids in white linen sauntering through their tasks, while boys lounge in bucolic splendour on the riverbank. The painting appears to have been produced to grace the walls of a landowner's home. Today, we find such lies repeated on our television screens, in the travel and wildlife programmes which seek to persuade us that all is well in the white man's playground.

Paradise is the founding myth of the colonist. Unable to contemplate the truth of what we do, we extract from our fathomless collective guilt a story of primordial innocence.

By: George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 8th August 2003

---

- Protected Areas and Indigenous Peoples

Nearly 30 years have passed since the World Conservation Union, at its 12th meeting held in Kinshasa, first acknowledged the need to respect indigenous peoples’ rights to their lands in the establishment of protected areas. The resolution called on governments and conservation bodies to recognise the value of indigenous peoples’ ways of life and to devise ways for indigenous peoples to bring their lands into conservation areas without having to relinquish their rights or be displaced.

Yet the great majority of protected areas established since then have violated these rights. For example, it is estimated that to date some 1 million square kilometres of forests, savannah, pasture and farmland in Africa have been redefined as protected areas yet in the great majority of these areas the rights of indigenous peoples to own, control and manage these areas have been denied. No one knows how many people have been displaced by these protected areas and little has been done to ameliorate the suffering and poverty that has resulted.

In the past 15 years, the conservation community has made more concerted efforts to develop principles and guidelines designed to reconcile indigenous rights with conservation initiatives. The Convention on Biological Diversity imposes obligations on governments to respect, preserve and maintain indigenous peoples’ knowledge, innovations and practices, and to protect and encourage their customary use of natural resources. At the same time major advances in international law have more clearly defined the rights of indigenous peoples and these advances have been consolidated in the form of a draft United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

It is now possible to point to international human rights instruments and treaties, and to the jurisprudence of the United Nations human rights committees which interpret them, and state with confidence that international law now recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples to:

- Self-determination
- Freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources
- In no case be deprived of their means of subsistence
- Own, develop, control and use their communal lands, territories and resources, traditionally owned or otherwise occupied by them
- The free enjoyment of their own culture and to maintain their traditional way of life
- Free and informed consent prior to activities on their lands
- Represent themselves through their own institutions
- Exercise their customary law
- Restitution of their lands and compensation for losses endured.

Through its resolutions and recommendations the World Conservation Congress has explicitly recognised these advances in international law and called on governments and its members to comply with them. In 1994, the IUCN revised its system of categories of protected areas to allow indigenous peoples, among others, to be the owners and managers of protected areas – previously the IUCN system had required protected areas to be controlled by State agencies. In 1999, the World Commission on Protected Areas adopted guidelines for putting these new conservation principles into practice. These guidelines place emphasis on co-management of protected areas, on agreements between indigenous peoples and conservation bodies, on indigenous participation and on a recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights to ‘sustainable, traditional use’ of their lands and territories.

Since 1997, the Forest Peoples Programme has jointly organised a series of conferences, with indigenous peoples to assess the extent to which these new principles of international law and conservation are being put into practice. A first conference held in Pucallpa, Peru, with the Asociacion Interetnica para el Desarrollo Sostenible de la Selva Peruana (AIDESEP) and the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), examined 16 cases of indigenous experiences with protected areas in Latin America. A second conference held in Kundasang in Malaysia, with the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, IWGIA and Partners of Community Organisations in Sabah (PACOS) looked at a further 12 cases in South and South East Asia. A third conference held in Kigali in partnership with the Communauté des Autochtones Rwandais (CAURWA) examined a further 9 cases.

The overall findings from this review are sobering but not entirely discouraging. In general, protected areas continue to be established and administered in violation of indigenous peoples’ rights and in ignorance of the new standards. Serious problems are faced by the communities as a result, in terms of impoverishment, forced resettlement, human rights abuse and cultural loss. However, in all regions, examples can also be found of protected areas where sincere efforts to apply these new standards are being made. These examples demonstrate that it is possible to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples and achieve conservation goals in the same areas.

The case studies also show that a number of serious obstacles stand in the way of an effective recognition of indigenous rights in conservation practice. These include:

- Entrenched discrimination in national societies’ attitudes towards indigenous peoples such that indigenous peoples’ ways of life are seen as backward, dirty or subhuman. In the context of conservation initiatives, the result may be a denial of rights and a feeling among affected peoples that they are treated as worse than animals
- Absence of reform of government policies and laws regarding indigenous peoples. Many governments, especially in Asia and Africa, pursue integrationist or assimilationist social policies towards indigenous peoples, designed to elevate them from 'backward' ways into the national mainstream
- National laws and policies with respect to land which deny indigenous peoples’ rights to own and manage their lands.
- National conservation policies and laws still based on the old exclusionary model of conservation. Few of the countries studied have adopted the revised IUCN protected area category system, which would allow communities and indigenous peoples to own and control protected areas.
- Conservation agencies and NGOs lack appropriate training, staff and capacity to work with communities.

These studies by indigenous peoples of their own experiences with protected areas, and the conclusions that flow from them, have important implications for conservationists gathering in September 2003 for the Vth World Parks Congress in Durban South Africa. If conservation organisations, including IUCN and WCPA, and State agencies are to ensure that existing and future protected areas are to be managed and established in conformity with indigenous peoples’ rights, then they must:

- give priority to reforming national laws, policies and conservation programmes so that they respect indigenous peoples’ rights and allow protected areas to be owned and managed by indigenous peoples;
- ensure that sufficient funds are allocated to national conservation programmes, and to the regional and international programmes that support them, to carry out these legal and policy reforms;
- retrain conservation personnel in both national and international bureaux so that they understand and know how to apply these new principles;
- encourage other major international conservation agencies to adopt clear policies on indigenous peoples and protected areas in conformity with their internationally recognized rights and these new conservation principles;
- combat entrenched discrimination in national and international conservation programmes and offices and, where necessary, adopt affirmative social policies that recognize and respect cultural diversity;
- support the consolidation of indigenous peoples’ organisations as independent, representative institutions;
- support initiatives by indigenous peoples to secure their territorial rights; and
- initiate transparent, participatory and effective procedures for the restitution of indigenous peoples’ lands, territories and resources incorporated into protected areas and compensate them for all material and immaterial damages in accordance with international law.

Clear measures to undertake these actions need to be introduced into the Durban Accord, which is the expected outcome of the Vth World Parks Congress. This is especially important as the successful uptake of the conclusions of the World Parks Congress will depend on debates at the VIIth Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity to be held in Kuala Lumpur in 2004. The credibility of the CBD will be greatly enhanced by full compliance with the human rights standards already established in other UN treaties.

Source: Forest Peoples Programme. For supporting documentation see www.forestpeoples.org

---

- “Salvaging Nature”: A review on indigenous peoples and protected areas

To coincide with the World Parks Congress, the World Rainforest Movement and the Forest Peoples Programme, are launching a new book, “Salvaging Nature: Indigenous Peoples, Protected Areas and Biodiversity Conservation.” Written by FPP Director Marcus Colchester, the book provides a detailed review of the experience of indigenous peoples with protected areas and makes strong recommendations for how the current and all too prevalent conflicts between the two can be overcome.

The first National Parks, established in the USA in the mid-19th century, entailed the violent expulsion of indigenous peoples from their lands, by the army. Prejudice against ‘redskins’ and a notion that nature had to be conserved as ‘wilderness’, set aside by the State for recreation purposes, required the removal of residents (see next article).

This ‘colonial’ model of conservation has been exported to the rest of the world and for over a century provided the dominant paradigm for establishing protected areas. The impacts on indigenous peoples have been dire. Ironically, as many conservation organisations now agree, the impact on the environment has also been severe. Creating protected areas by expropriating indigenous territories, destroying indigenous cultures and making enemies of the local communities not only creates horrendous management problems, but also often disrupts viable, biodiversity enhancing customary systems of land use. Top-down conservation of this kind also exacts a heavy political cost, weakening customary institutions and reinforcing the power of the State, which may all too often lead to abuse of power and human rights violations.

The rise of the indigenous movement since the 1960s has radically changed the context in which protected areas are being developed. International law and other norms now recognise indigenous rights and accept that Indigenous Peoples are a ‘Major Group’ that should actively participate in decision-making. The Convention on Biological Diversity requires member States to respect ‘indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles’.

Since the 1970s, conservationists have made an effort to correct their approach and have sought new means of accommodating indigenous peoples in protected areas, through establishing Biosphere Reserves, promoting Buffer Zones, experimenting with Integrated Conservation and Development Programmes and implementing Co-Management schemes. Too often these initiatives have failed to bring lasting benefits to local communities, largely because they have not build on customary institutions, have failed to recognise indigenous land rights and have not entrusted the indigenous peoples with management authority.

In the mid-1990s, a more serious policy shift was promised, which was welcomed by indigenous peoples. In a few areas, rights have been restituted, indigenous authority re-established and new partnerships based on trust between indigenous peoples and conservationists have been forged. Unfortunately, surveys show that these new policies, which accept indigenous peoples’ rights, are being applied in only a few areas. Most national conservation laws and policies are stuck in the old model of ‘Fortress Conservation’. Formidable, legal and institutional obstacles remain to be overcome if the new model of conservation is to gain currency (see previous article on Protected Areas and Indigenous Peoples).

There are currently some 60,000 protected areas in the world, the majority of which have been established on indigenous peoples’ lands without their consent. The conservation movement must give priority to addressing these peoples’ concerns if the protected area movement is to retain, or regain, its credibility.

Source: “Salvaging Nature: Indigenous Peoples, Protected Areas and Biodiversity Conservation”, by Marcus Colchester. The book, published by WRM/FPP is also available in Spanish and French. For copies of the book please contact: info@fppwrm.gn.apc.org or wrm@wrm.org.uy

---

- The Sorry Story of the World's First National Park

The world’s first ‘Park’, established in Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada in California was the homeland of the Miwok people. The startling landscapes of Yosemite, substantially an outcome of indigenous land use systems, were proposed for conservation by the very same settlers and miners who, twelve years previously, had waged the 'Mariposa Indian War' against the area's indigenous people - the Miwok. In this one-sided struggle, forces sanctioned by the US Government made repeated attacks on Indian settlements. Indian villages were burned to the ground to force the Indians out of the area and to starve or freeze the Indians into submission. The main proponent of the Park, LaFayette Burnell, who led the Mariposa Battalion, and who professed a take-no-prisoners approach to the Miwok, wanted to 'sweep the territory of any scattered bands that might infest it'. In common with the prejudices of the day, he thought of 'redskins' as superstitious, treacherous marauders, 'yelling demons' and 'savages'. Once the Park was established, it was run by the US Army for the following 52 years before being taken over by the newly established National Parks Service in 1916.

Expulsion from the Park deprived the Miwok of their traditional hunting grounds, grazing areas, fish runs and nut collecting groves. When they tried to take anything back from the whites, they were resisted with guns and then hounded out of the area again by the Mariposa Battalion. Ironically the very word ‘Yosemite’ is, according to Simon Schama, a term of abuse used by the Miwok to describe the Americans who were assaulting them and actually means ‘some among them are killers’.

In 1890, some years after their expulsion, the Miwok petitioned the US Government. They called for compensation for their losses and denounced the managers of the park for letting white ranchers and settlers invade the area with impunity.

“The valley is cut up completely by dusty, sandy roads leading from the hotels of the white in every direction.... All seem to come only to hunt money... This is not the way in which we treated this park when we had it. This valley was taken away from us [for] a pleasure ground... Yosemite is no longer a National Park, but merely a hay-farm and cattle range.”

Their pleas were ignored and further evictions of remnant Miwok settlements were made in 1906, 1929 and as late as 1969. The Miwok noted that the National Parks were not only being set up to preserve 'wilderness' regions 'unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations' but were also designed with a profit motive.

Yet the splendours of Yosemite, with its spectacular rocky eminences and the enormous Sequoia gigantea trees, also resonated in the American mind as ‘an overpowering revelation of the uniqueness of the American Republic’ and were thus signed over in a bill creating the world’s first wilderness park to the State of California in 1864 in the midst of a civil war ‘for the benefit of the people, for their resort and recreation, to hold them inalienable for all time.’

Extracted from: “Salvaging Nature: Indigenous Peoples, Protected Areas and Biodiversity Conservation”, by Marcus Colchester.

---

- Key Phrases in IUCN Resolutions on Indigenous Peoples (1996)

Resolution 1.49 on Indigenous Peoples and the IUCN calls upon members ‘to consider the adoption and implementation of the objectives of’ ILO Convention 169 and the CBD, ‘and comply with the spirit of’ the UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Resolution 1.50 on Indigenous Peoples, Intellectual Property and Biological Diversity recognizes ‘the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands and territories and natural resources, as well as their role in management, use and conservation, as a requirement for the effective implementation’ of the CBD.

Resolution 1.51 on Indigenous Peoples and Mineral and Oil Extraction, Infrastructure and Development Works calls on the IUCN and members to respect the rights of the world’s indigenous peoples, based on the ‘adoption and implementation of the objectives of’ CBD, ILO Convention 169 and ‘comply with the spirit and principles of’ the UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Chapter 26 of Agenda 21.

Resolution 1.52 on Indigenous Peoples on Marine and Coastal Areas recognizes ‘the role and collective interest of indigenous peoples taking into account the terms of’ the CBD, ILO Convention 169 and the UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Resolution 1.53 on Indigenous Peoples and Protected Areas calls on the IUCN Secretariat and members to develop and implement a clear policy on protected areas and indigenous peoples based on ‘recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands or territories and resources which fall within protected areas’.

Resolution 1.54 on Indigenous Peoples and Conservation in Meso-America recognizes ‘the rights of indigenous peoples taking into account the terms of’ ILO Convention 169, the CBD and the UN Draft Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Resolution 1.55 on Indigenous Peoples and Forests recognizes ‘the rights of indigenous peoples taking into account’ the terms of ILO Convention 169 and the UN Draft Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Resolution 1.56 on Indigenous Peoples and the Andes recognizes ‘the role and collective interest of indigenous peoples taking into account the terms of’ the CBD, ILO Convention 169 and the UN Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.