• Amazon Women
• Role and Status of Women in Land Use Control and Management
• Women’s Land Tenure Security and Community-Based Forest Management
• Women, Forests, and Adaptive Collaborative Management
• Women and Knowledge of Medicinal Forest Plants

- Amazon Women

It is not by chance that femininity is linked to nature, to the origins and to mystery. Women are those who make life, suckle the species, communicate oral tradition and are the jealous guardians of secrets.

When the conquest of El Dorado started, the great boa woman meandered from the memory of time through the Amazon forest. She was the cosmic serpent, the great river with her long and enormous arms of water, with her quiet havens and warm and fertile lagoons.

She told her stories to another great Lady, the Jaguar. To the mistress of lands and trees, of monkeys, tapirs and elks. The Powerful One, the one who gave birth to yopo, to ayahuasca and curare [native plants with special attributes], the mistress of the smell of cinnamon. Together they sent out the message to conceal the splendid cities imagined by Pizarro or Orellana, the golden thrones dreamt of by Vasco Da Gama, the precious stones sought by any other wealth-thirsty Spaniard. They disguised the ispingo [precious wood tree] with mantles of moss and orchids, they hid their children and with the sound of the manguare [drum], they called for the way to be closed to strangers.

Orellana and his men told about tall and strong women, armed with bows and arrows, with massive stone maces and thorny trunks that threatened them from the banks of the great river. These women commanded –so they say– many warrior men. One of them was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and after questioning him (?) they learnt of the power of these fearful women. They came from over sixty villages, where men were their servants and slaves and they were only allowed to approach them to fecundate them. The man also told them that in their vagina inhabited the many sharp-toothed piranha and if they possessed a women without her consent, this meant the most effective and painful castration.

The hallucinations and weariness of the Conquistadores, after weeks of terror, mosquitoes and fevers, within the unknown world of the jungle, was linked to the stories and threats of the indigenous man who, to keep them away from his village and the Indian women, did not spare imagination in his stories, told in an unknown language and receiving the creative input of the translator.

Thus was born the myth of the Amazon Women, very similar to Greek mythology but with the “savageness” attributed to the Indigenous people. The myth gave a name to the enormous river and to the surrounding forest.

Beyond the myth and the legend, the Amazons, the women who live in the basin, have been warriors, defenders of the malocas [round houses], and those mainly responsible for conserving the descendents of a people condemned to genocide and systematic disregard. In lullabies and in parsimonious stories to calm fear, they whispered in the ears of their children the history of their people, their origins and values. They taught their descendents to love the great spirit of the forest, while making the thin clay vessels or crushing yucca to make cassava. They showed them the difference between the leaf with serrated edges that kills and the one that is almost exactly like it, that cures. They instructed their sons on how to guard the fire on their long walks and their daughters to hide the seeds in the folds of their bodies, to plant them in propitious ground when they had finished running away from the usurpers and were deep in the forest.

Thin, small and smiling, only armed with a malicious grin, they disarmed the friars and missionaries with their cross and dressed the cosmic serpent with Mary’s mantle. And when it was time to fight cruelly or to poison the water, they did so. When it was time to leave their children in safer hands they did so, shedding no tears, in the hope of saving what was left of their ethnic group.

They were easy prey to slave traffic, to the dogs trained to leave them with no faces, to the lascivious Conquistadores, priests and settlers, to flu and smallpox, but even so, they continued singing to their gods and to their avenging spirits. They lost their husbands, their grandfathers and grandchildren, but continued giving birth to remain in the memory.

They also bled the rubber tree so that the milk –turned into tokens to buy at the rubber-tappers shop– would feed their children. They washed gold and broke rocks looking for onyx and diamonds to fill the chests of the great miners. They planted coca and chose the best leaves to swell the bank accounts of the Capos.

Today their skin is sore from the contact of the mist from crop spraying and the water contaminated by oil and gold exploitation poisons their body; they continue bearing children to resist usurpation.

Today they are the organizers, the teachers, the Indigenous leaders. Today they continue to be the mothers of knowledge, life, continuity, the guardians of the past. The great Amazons.

By: Tania Roura, Revista Iniciativa Amazónica Nº 8, November 2003, ALDHU

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- Role and Status of Women in Land Use Control and Management

The role of indigenous peoples and traditional knowledge systems in the conservation of biodiversity is so well known as a general fact that it needs no further assertion. The particular role of women however is less acknowledged and even where such acknowledgement is offered, is not accompanied by the concomitant offer of space on related platforms of discussion and decision making particularly by mainstream processes. North -Eastern India is a region with rich forests and wetlands, inhabited by over 250 indigenous peoples. This region of India has historically been contiguous with the northern region of Burma and of Bangladesh. Since villages of numerous peoples co-habit the same territory, interlaced in an intricate mosaic, self-governance and village level autonomy with tribal alignments extending over non-exclusive and geographically UN-integrated territories is a typical political configuration.

The cultures however different in many ways share the characteristic hunting gathering economic base that has led to the development of intricate codes of land use and harvesting of natural resources, within village populations, among villages and between different tribes. The only agriculture traditionally practiced is of staple cereals, cotton, small kitchen gardens and poultry.

A broad range of traditional land and water rights and use practices, all of them community or clan rather than individually controlled, adapted to the specificities of the variable terrain of the region exist among the different indigenous peoples. While actual legislation of the Indian system recognizes little of these systems, the peoples still adhere to customary practice wherever not actually obstructed or prevented from doing so. This is usually effective in matters internal to the community, but is problematic when the collective rights of the community require interfacing with state processes such as land acquisition for development or military bases or in re-settlement programmes.

Wet rice cultivation is practiced in the small valleys interspersing the hills and in the lower hill slopes. Swidden or slash and burn cultivation is practiced in higher slopes, usually for cotton, other cereals such as maize and legumes. The water, rivers, lakes and ponds and the forests are harvested for insects, vegetables, herbs, game and fish. Extensive lands are traditionally maintained by religious and cultural practice as bio-diversity preserves. Sacred groves, forests and water bodies have been preserved for millennia by powerful taboos against contamination and harvesting of produce.

With the advent of the State structures of resource control and management, the traditional control and practices have eroded. Partly due to greatly increased population pressures of migration into the region of mainstream populations and the discreditation of swidden cultivation practices, even marginal lands are brought under wet rice cultivation. Lands once protected by religious taboo against intensive exploitation are a bonanza for lumber, wood and bamboo industry, for monoculture plantations, for wildlife and environment conservation projects and even for mining. Indigenous control over these lands has been de-legitimized with the State expropriating all lands within its territorial boundaries under various laws and policies based on the principal of terra nullius characterizing colonial practice.

While each of these numerous peoples of the region has its unique social and cultural gender attributes, from the matriarchal to distinct patriarchy, the women commonly are responsible for a great deal of the economy, subsistence, cottage industry and indigenous market. Their activities include agriculture but also harvesting of produce from non-cultivated sources such as waterways, marsh and forest and also the management of buffer stocks and seed stocks. Women have inalienable rights by community laws over the harvesting of produce for consumption and sale. Single adult women, whether unmarried, widowed or divorced, also have customary rights to homestead and agricultural land from clan, tribe or village holdings. Every woman can claim land and resources to construct traditional shelters on community holdings of clan or village lands. She can also claim a share of the agricultural or other revenue generating lands and resources owned by the family, clan or tribe.

Based on kinship and village alignments, women have powerful traditional institutions and networks, which facilitate and support their responsibilities towards family and community. These networks are the main agency in organizing access to and distribution of resources and for support to individuals and sections affected by some kind of temporary dysfunction or problem such as illness or crop failure, which disable them from providing for themselves and their dependents. These associations, whether of kinship or friendship, whether formal or institutional also hold, share and transfer the information regarding agricultural diversity, the knowledge and stocks of traditional seeds and plantation methods.

With substantial access and control over land and water use, it is not surprising that indigenous women of this region have developed both formal and informal institutions and networks for protection of biodiversity. As most harvesting of vegetables and herbs is done by women, they are also naturally the authorities on the subject of the various species and their characteristics, their use and value. This knowledge is passed down through generations in those communities without formal systems by word of mouth among kin and by the apprenticeship of younger women to elders. Some few peoples have evolved formal systems of women’s trusteeship of knowledge and natural resources, such as the Meitei of the Imphal valley. Among this people there is a formal institution of priestesses known as the Maibi Loisang who have custody of such traditional knowledge and are also responsible for transmission in different formal methods and situations to different sectors of the community. The Maibi Loisang is also responsible for maintenance and preservation of the shrines of the numerous deities of land and water, natural shrines at what are evidently biodiversity conserves. Similar if less formal associations of female shamans, healers and elders exist among many other peoples of the region.

The relationship between fertility and regeneration, between female spirituality and the sacredness of the earth and its diversity, between sustainability and trusteeship rather than ownership and exploitation is the essence of indigenous culture, the essence of the significance of womanhood and women in indigenous society. It may also be the only ethic that can preserve and conserve our world for the future, any future at all.

By: Anna Pinto, CORE , e-mail: anastasiapinto@coremanipur.org

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- Women’s Land Tenure Security and Community-Based Forest Management

In Indonesia, the western part of Java -Halimun- is well known by its high biodiversity and cultural richness. In terms of community-based forest resource management systems, indigenous and local peoples of Halimun possess centuries of farming and knowledge about the tropical rainforests. They utilize the surrounding forest and land for various uses in models of swidden cultivation (huma), rice field (sawah), garden (kebon), mixed tree garden (talun) and various types of forests (such as Leuweung Titipan, Leuweung Tutupan and Leuweung Bukaan). These models are managed as one integrated system by men and women. It is well noticed that men and women contribute to their family’s welfare, often in complementary ways, and each type of contribution is indispensable, especially within poor families. With regards to food security, women make a bigger contribution to their families as a whole than men, because they are more involved in swidden cultivation and rice production.

Since 1924, under the Dutch colonial time, a part of the Halimun ecosystem area was set up as protected forest area to be changed in 1979 into nature reserve, and again in 1992 into national park up to nowadays. On the other hand, Halimun is also a big source of state income. Government tree plantations (since 1978); large scale estates of tea, cacao, rubber (1970s); and gold and other mineral mining (1990s), have been disrupting the ecosystem. Moreover, all those “development projects” have restricted and even more ended peoples’ access to and control over livelihood resources (land and other forest resources), entailing the disappearance of traditional knowledge, particularly that of local and indigenous women.

“Since the forest was cut down and converted into pine garden, the water quality for sawah [rice field] is no longer good. Apparently , this kind of water quality is not suitable for growing the local variety of paddy.” (Mrs. Annah). “Formerly, we could easily find ki beling [medicinal plant] surrounding here, but now, we should walk far to the Cibareno river to look for it.” (Mrs. Surni, a midwife)

In response to the many external pressures, environmental damages, constriction or even loss of local access to and control over the land, women from Malasari and Mekarsari villages work harder than before to provide food for their families by, among other:

- Becoming daily poorly paid agricultural-wage laborers (buruh tani), earning US$ 0.7 – 1.4 a day;
- Doing ngepak (arrangement between landless peasant women and land-owners for planting and harvesting paddy, earning two bundles of rice for each ten that they plant);
- Doing maro (local share-cropping, by keeping 50% of the harvest);
- “Illegally” cultivating small parcels of the “state” land managed by the State Forestry Company Perum Perhutani;
- Carrying out women’s “voluntary” day-care to support other women who would like to do ngepak or buruh agricultural works;

Whichever the combination of women's and their family members' efforts, however, the food supply often still does not meet the families’ yearly requirements: “I never sell the paddy that I cultivate. It is not enough even for my family,” said Mrs. Arti. “If there is no land, there is no food. If there is little land, there is little food,” expressed Mrs. Minarsih.

Malasari and Mekarsari women’s access to and control over land and other forest resources are insecure, and their families have no legal rights, protection and guarantees regarding the future use of the land. The general consequence is that, since the people are forced to cultivate in this “legal vacuum”, it is indeed very difficult for them to receive support and assistance. As a result, women and their children suffer most under hunger, malnutrition, domestic violence, and violations of other rights including the right to health, education, the freedom of speech and gathering.

In order to guarantee the sustainability and development of community-based forest resources management system, the certainty of independent rights in which that system is developed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities is required. The certainty of peoples’ --especially women’s-- independent rights should be adopted in natural resources related policies which acknowledge that the main actors in the natural resources management consist of women and men, with their different respective needs, interests, priorities and restrictions. The voice of Mrs Uun as one of women elders in Malasari village: “We have defended our land before, and we will defend it again” should be heeded!

In wrapping up this paper, in terms of manifested women’s independent rights on land and other forest resources, it is very important for us to define and bring into reality the issue of how women could improve their own life --for instance, their own prosperity level in terms of food quality, clothing, health (especially their reproductive health), education, security and safety feelings as well as leisure time for taking a rest and doing other private activities-- as a consequence of their participation in the many efforts to achieve a better life (welfare condition). These are basic and important conditions which should be highly considered by us as outsiders, such as governments (including policy makers), local NGOs and international cooperation agencies (including international NGOs) as well, when we plan to design “community-based” forest or other natural resource management projects in a participatory manner. Who exactly gets direct benefits from the project? Is it the women? Or, does the project even create overburdens for women? It is crucial to further analyze critical questions about how access to (and control over?) the land and other production factors provides direct positive impacts on the whole of women’s lives both in domestic and public domains.

Excerpted and adapted from: “Towards Sustainability and Development of the Community-Based Forest Resource Management System through Ensuring the Women’s Land Tenure Security (A Case Study in Malasari and Mekarsari Villages in Halimun Ecosystem Area)”, by RMI – The Indonesian Institute for Forest and Environment, E-mail: rmibogor@indo.net.id , sent by Ulfa Hidayati. The full document is available at http://www.wrm.org.uy/subjects/CBFM/RMI.rtf

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- Women, Forests, and Adaptive Collaborative Management

The Center for International Forestry Research has implemented a program called Adaptive Collaborative Management of Forests (ACM) for more than five years. At its most extensive, we worked in 11 countries (Nepal, Indonesia, Philippines, Kyrgyzstan, Malawi, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Madagascar, Bolivia and Brazil); and activities continue in eight. One of the striking elements of this work has been our success at involving women (and other marginalized groups) in our work with communities.

Our central method is participatory action research; and we have made an effort to attend to equity issues from the start. On each site there was at least one ACM facilitator whose role involved both action with communities and other stakeholders, and research on that action. It was a challenging task, to which most facilitators rose. Indeed, the more demanding the context and the problems, the more motivated and successful the facilitators appeared to be.

Although there is not space to describe the entire effort, I would like to provide some sense of the kinds of involvement and change that occurred.

In the area of Mafungautsi forest reserve, in Zimbabwe, women had been uninvolved in formal forest management. Activities pertaining to forests were deemed men’s sphere. After representatives from the communities were invited to participate in “training for transformation” (building on the empowerment work of Paulo Freire), women’s attendance and participation in formal meetings went up dramatically. The women also became involved in user groups, focused on particular natural resources. One of the most successful was a broom grass user group, which examined their experience with two harvesting methods (using participatory systems modeling techniques), looked at the implications for sustainability, and developed a new broom design that would favor the more sustainable method. These women have been able to improve sustainability, income generation, and their own empowerment in community affairs.

In several villages in Nepal, forest user groups that manage community forests met to consider their visions for their forests. In this process they identified a number of problems, including elite domination of decision-making and benefit sharing, lack of transparency in management, and gender inequities; and they made plans to address these problems. They also developed indicators that would help them determine how well they were meeting their goals. Since many people, particularly women, were illiterate, it was important to use visual symbols to record progress. The phases of the moon were used, with a new moon meaning little progress, a full moon, full accomplishment of the goal. The structure of meetings was also changed, so that more decision-making took place in smaller, neighbourhood meetings composed of people of similar caste and ethnic group, where women felt freer to speak their minds. During the course of this process, women became more willing to speak out and more regular attendees at community meetings. In short, they became more involved in decision-making and actions pertaining to community forests.

In Guarayo, Bolivia, a large forest management project was underway in the indigenous territory where ACM was operating. This project had paid little attention to gender in its efforts to train villagers to manage their forests for timber, considering women somewhat irrelevant for timber management. However, with careful analysis, three interesting issues emerged. First, “modern” timber management was as alien to men as it was to women. Neither sex was familiar with doing inventories, keeping records, or administration. Only wielding a chainsaw was beyond women’s capabilities. Second, the withdrawing of men’s labour from household work for logging and other timber management tasks had the potential to seriously and adversely affect women’s lives. All the tasks that men normally did would fall to the women. And finally, women’s views of the value of the forest differed from men’s. Women were interested less in the forest as a source of timber; more in it as a habitat for the animals that formed a significant part of family nutrition---making an intriguing link with the concerns of environmentalists.

Other intriguing results came from Zimbabwe, where women’s preference for behind the scenes influence rather than explicit power made researchers reconsider their assumptions; or where the involvement of NGOs in community action resulted in women’s gaining access to land, something that had not been theirs traditionally; from Brazil, where the diversity of women’s roles --and the inappropriateness of one-size-fits-all “development”-- was vividly portrayed through contrasting Acre and Maranhao; from Campo Ma’an National Park, in Cameroon, where enforcement of rules against hunting, a male activity, had serious adverse effects on the women who had sold the game.

This body of research has produced a rich treasure trove of material on women’s roles and on ways that women and other marginalized groups have been seriously involved in externally facilitated collective action. Our forthcoming book elaborates on the examples presented above (see Colfer, Carol J. Pierce, Ed. "The Equitable Forest: Diversity, Community and Resource Management", scheduled for publication in April 2004). This approach is an effective way to involve women meaningfully in formal management efforts; and to recognize the traditional roles they have always had in informal management of forests.

By: Carol J. Pierce Colfer, e-mail: c.colfer@cgiar.org , Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia

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- Women and Knowledge of Medicinal Forest Plants

In the framework of the South American Medicinal Plants Network, the Uruguayan Centre for the Study of Appropriate Technologies (CEUTA) is coordinating a collective activity for the recovery of traditional knowledge on the use of plants as medicine and as food.

We want to tell you about the experience of a group of women, gathered together since November 2002, when we held the first meeting on Women’s Cycles and Natural Medicine. At this first meeting, we shared visions and knowledge of plants that help us to keep healthy, considering the various stages of our feminine cycles.

We carried out an awareness-raising activity centred on our relationship with food and with our power to heal. We personally experienced the diversity and respectful dialogue of knowledge because women from the various corners of the country were gathered, having different occupations and situations (rural women, midwives, sexologists, herbalists, members of community groups).

Nelly Curbelo, one of the participants recalls: “We started in November 2002. Previously each one of us in our locations had worked with plants collected in our areas, remembering knowledge that has existed for a very long time: which were the uses for health and the important food input. At the first meeting the theme was feminine health in all its phases, folk knowledge, very deeply rooted traditions –some perhaps erroneous, but no doubt containing much wisdom– transmitted to us by our grandmothers and those before them, old women, herb doctors, and women who know how to live better and more healthily, using plants.

We reflected on the cycles of the moon and all the physical and spiritual harmony that we have in us and that surrounds us, that can make our existence a sacred temple to be cared for.

Closer in time, all this wealth has been set aside in the name of conventional medicine. It is for this reason that we want to restore that wise knowledge that is sometimes hard to reach because the people who have it are wary of “opening up” until they are sure of our good intentions and also because they have been devalued or, what is also sad, people have taken the knowledge of humble and ordinary people and made a profit out of it.”

At the second meeting in May 2003, we worked on the relationship we have with folk, traditional and university knowledge, the way in which each type of knowledge is received, the privileged opportunities for each knowledge, their own rationale and the relationship among them all. We had in-depth conversations on the relationship between the official health system in the region and the use of medicinal plants, community and folk experience, research and experience of folk knowledge in Uruguay and Argentina, their implications and results.

In December 2003, our third meeting was held in the forest along a river. The forest was our shelter and our inspiration to share both personal and group research on our native plants, to work on folk botanical descriptions, on traditional recipes and to exchange experiences on restoration and recovery of the opportunity to use indigenous flora.

Nelly continues with the story: “We met around the fire. The canopy of coronilla (Scutia buxifolia), rama negra (Senna corymbosa), guayabo colorado (Myrcianthes cisplatensis) and tala (Celtis spinosa) did what it could to protect us from the fine rain that from time to time was accompanied by the wind. There was a feeling, indecipherable to me, a mixture of spiritual grandeur and earthly safety. We enjoyed the silence full of messages, the nearby crystalline and untiring river, the silenced night elves, also the frogs and crickets leaving time and space to us.

At each of the meetings we learnt more, not only because of the subject that we were addressing, but also because intuitively and instinctively we captured feelings, knowledge, conclusions, that enrich, strengthening values, opening doors and leaving it clear that we are all at the same time teachers and students.

We started the first activity of the second day: before breakfast, inhaling that special forest aroma in the quiet morning, each one of us in silence, walking alone, choosing a route, observing suspended in time, going back too, until you feel chosen or you choose a grass, a shrub or a tree, and using your senses with all the love Mother Nature gives us.

Once I found "my plant" I sat next to it, feeling its texture, its smell, its taste if it lets me, the form of its stems, its leaves, if it has flowers, fruit, what its surroundings are like, which way it is oriented, if it is alone or has offspring, what other species accompany it and if they are complementary, the type of soil, seeing whether it prefers the sun, half shade or very shady spots or the caress of water. Perhaps I try to feel a bit like the plant, to share its knowledge and how much I can take of its life for my existence and health. I know I can only offer it care, respect and admiration, and if its contribution or message to me is silence: respect it with all the tenderness that led me to choose it.

This was a beautiful task. Once concluded we met to share our experience.

When we talked and shared this personal experience, such rich and valuable contributions were made by the other companions that they greatly enriched our previous knowledge.

When we are in syntony with our surroundings, living these meetings so intensely, we always feel moved and the time goes by and there is no time to be measured.”

This meeting was yet another input to the reactivation of the memory of the forest, which many of our ordinary country people hold, sharing their profound love for the places that they endeavour to shelter from depredating attacks. Thus, we gather the different contributions of women and men regarding knowledge and practices related with the good use and conservation of our ecosystems and environments. Thus, we are building up a folk pharmacopoeia on the forest.

By Monica Litovsky, CEUTA, e-mail: yuyos@chasque.net