Indigenous Peoples, National Parks, and Protected Areas: A New Paradigm Linking Conservation, Culture, and Rights

Chapter 11. Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Territories and Areas in the High Himalaya: Recognition and Rights in Nepal’s National Parks - Stan Stevens

261 chapter eleven Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Territories and Areas in the High Himalaya Recognition and Rights in Nepal’s National Parks Stan Stevens In Nepal, as in many other parts of the world, Indigenous peoples continue to protect sacred natural sites, collectively manage forest and grazing commons, and maintain sustainable land-use practices even after their territories have been expropriated and made state-administered protected areas. As in many other countries—and notwithstanding international treaty obligations and guidance from the IUCN and CBD—these customary practices are often ignored or suppressed by state authorities despite their cultural, livelihood, and conservation significance. This violates Indigenous peoples’ rights to territory, culture, self-governance, and access to and management of lands, waters, and resources, while diminishing protected areas’ conservation effectiveness and potential. This chapter examines the conservation and human rights dynamics created by the overlap in the high Himalayan region of Nepal of national parks and Indigenous peoples’ territories, institutions, and practices that meet IUCN criteria for Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs). Here a set of inhabited protected areas has 262 • Moving Forward been established in the customary territories of Indigenous peoples in a Fourth World social and political context. Although many of their institutions and practices have been officially ignored or supplanted, Indigenous peoples continue to uphold values and maintain customary land-use and management systems that make important contributions to conservation. In some cases, they have adapted or expanded these to address new conservation challenges and goals. In this chapter I examine the status of Indigenous peoples’ ICCAs and rights in four large, inhabited high Himalayan national parks, particularly Sagarmatha (Mount Everest/Chomolungma) National Park and World Heritage Site (SNP).1 Nepal’s National Political and Social Context The country of Nepal, a Hindu kingdom from the establishment of the state in the late eighteenth century until 2008, has an ethnically diverse population of 26 million that includes fifty-nine state-recognized Indigenous peoples who together constitute 37 percent (2001) or more of the total population. The 2002 National Foundation for Development of Indigenous Nationalities Act defines Adivasi janajati as those ethnic groups or communities that “have their own mother tongue and traditional customs, distinct cultural identity, distinct social structure and written or oral history of their own.” A traditional homeland or geographic area is also often considered to be an important characteristic (LAHURNIP n.d.). The customary territories of these peoples, while not yet mapped, appear to compose the majority of Nepal’s total land area and almost all the high Himalayan region. None of Nepal’s Indigenous peoples, however, have legally recognized territories or reserves. Current national law does not recognize customary territories, collectively owned land, customary law, Indigenous peoples’ governance systems, or customary land-use and management practices. These Indigenous peoples’ territories, along with scores of formerly independent states, were incorporated into the kingdom of Nepal by conquest. Since the unification of Nepal, a Hindu high-caste ethnic elite has dominated national society, politics, and the state bureaucracy. For Indigenous peoples, the result has been generations of discrimination and oppression. From the perspective of the Nepal Indigenous peoples movement, Nepalispeaking upper Hindu castes are a dominant national ethnic elite that has socially, politically, and economically excluded and marginalized Nepal’s diverse Indigenous peoples for two centuries. This ethnic elite is said to have used control of the Nepal state to expropriate Indigenous peoples’ Indigenous and Community Conserved Territories in the Himalaya • 263 customary territories (forcibly annexing many of them into the Nepal empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through military conquest), nationalize Indigenous peoples’ collectively owned lands in the 1950s and 1960s, impose new governance institutions, and attempt to coercively assimilate Indigenous peoples to create a single national culture based on their own religion, language, and customs (Battachan 2000, n.d.; Lawotri 2001; Gurung 2003; Tamang 2003; Upreti and Adhikari 2006; Anaya 2009b; Gurung 2009; Stevens 2014; Limbu n.d.). Most of the Maoist revolutionary forces that fought in the 1996–2006 People’s War that led to the end of the monarchy and to the declaration of a federal republic were Indigenous people. The interim government’s 2007 agreement to ratify the International Labour Organization Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries (ILO 169)—the first country in Asia to do so—and vote in the UN General Assembly in favor of the...