Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas: A New Paradigm Linking Conservation, Culture, and Rights ed. by Stan Stevens (review)

MANY INDIGENOUS PEOPLES live in or near places whose economic underdevelopment leaves them with a relatively intact environment. As central states have begun to value biodiversity, they have also begun to designate such Indigenous spaces as protected areas, such as national parks, conservation areas, or wildlife refuges. These states often remove Indigenous residents or restrict how they can use their customary lands.

Conservationists have traditionally not been sensitive to these human costs, and have tended to trust the state to protect these parks and refuges. They now appreciate better that the state may lack either the capacity or the will to protect wildlife from natural resource extractors. Some also understand that local communities, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have developed many practices that effectively manage natural areas in a more sustainable way than do state agencies.

As a result, the time is ripe to reconsider the relationship between Indigenous peoples and protected areas. Editor Stan Stevens’s four chapters review the history and summarize a “New Paradigm” for the relationship between Indigenous peoples and protected areas. That paradigm begins by affirming Indigenous peoples’ rights. Those rights mean that Indigenous peoples are not just another “stakeholder” among others, but that protected areas can be established on their customary territories only with Indigenous peoples’ free, prior, and informed consent. Those rights also mean that Indigenous peoples must take a major role in management.

The New Paradigm believes that Indigenous peoples will often have goals that resonate with those of conservationists. They have been living in their landscapes for a long time and depend on their natural resources. Indigenous peoples have preserved sacred sites and other culturally important areas. In the modern world, they can serve as park managers and as guardians of protected areas’ natural and cultural landscapes. Of course, they also have the right to choose economic development of their customary lands.

The book’s elaboration of the New Paradigm is thought provoking in many ways. Its claim that states should repatriate preserved areas that were designated without the prior consent of Indigenous peoples has the greatest disruptive potential because this would disestablish almost all protected areas except the most recent. The authors do not confront that politically difficult implication, instead examining more incremental issues such as reclaiming hunting and gathering rights, moving toward comanagement, or repatriating relatively small areas.

This kind of incrementalism often appears in the chapters on developed countries. Australia’s Indigenous Protected Areas provides one model for developed countries to start to repatriate some rights to Indigenous peoples. A chapter on three Alaskan national park units provides hopeful accounts of how the Tlingit have repatriated cultural objects and human remains through the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, have made their heritage visible in a cultural center in Sitka, and have reasserted hunting and gathering practices in Glacier Bay.

The challenges differ in developing countries, where states are still creating large parks, wildlife refuges, and buffer zones, and where Indigenous peoples are more likely to be part of those conversations than they were a few decades ago. However, the New Paradigm’s call for greater participation by Indigenous peoples in local conservation would seem to apply equally well to local, non-Indigenous communities—especially since the book does not try to define Indigeneity.

Indeed, Stevens notes that some countries in the Global South define all their citizens as “Indigenous” because they were all the objects of colonialism. Such questions of definition matter in places like post-apartheid South Africa, where the black majority has emerged from colonialism in which it was treated as Indigenous peoples. It now controls a state apparatus that views protected areas in some ways similar to its colonial predecessors. The New Paradigm will need to develop its analysis of such cases.

By focusing on Indigenous peoples as collectives, many contributors also tend to overlook internal disagreements within Indigenous communities. Some chapters...