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June 13, 2005
The Power of Maps, or how I learned to love geography and community empowerment
Work last week seemed especially slow with the exception of a truly stimulating meeting on Thursday. My coworker David Elliot, the only other American in the office, had been gone in the field since I arrived. This meeting was a great introduction to him as he presented his work from the past few weeks.
Dave was working within the Territorial Defense and Land Titling branch of Pachamama. His actions were attempting to support the Achuar, Shuar, and Shiwiar nations in the management and governability of their lands. In other words, he was running training workshops to aid them in the process of gaining legal land titling for their territories. Specifically, he went with a geography professor from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito to various communities in the Central-Southern Amazon and led workshops on mapping, providing community level experiential training to promote demarcation and GPS mapping. The need for this activity comes from the requirements in the land titling process of having accurately demarcated maps.
Rather than training a couple people who then would move to a city with their new skills, Dave performed broad-based training which seeks to empower local communities in their more accurate demarcations of the borders of their territories. Understanding mapping and GPS technology and then utilizing this technology to benefit their communities furthers their goals. It gives them power and advances their struggle for land titling.
This understanding of mapping is incredibly important with the high level of internal migration taking place. If a community gains title over its land and then moves for various reasons a few years later, they have to start the process over again. But with the tools and knowledge, this process will be much easier and take less time. Dave evidenced one community, Yusuntsa, as demonstrating such migration. They had 58 people in 1996, but the population has risen to 94 this year. Dave proposed three reasons for the migration: 1. The community is located farther east in the Amazon, and thus people are able to hunt there. Hunting in these regions is prohibited by law, but not easily enforced. However, most of the good game has already been hunted to extinction in western regions; in Yusuntsa there is ample game. 2. In 1996 there was a higher percentage of women (52% women vs. 40% women in surrounding villages), so many men may have moved to Yusuntsa to marry. Their migration along with the subsequent children produced represent the growth in population. 3. The growing population may also represent an Achuar strategy to populate an as-of-yet untitled territory in order to claim and title the land for themselves.
Thus, these mapping workshops aim to aid communities like Yusuntsa in the process of land titling and empower them in their battle to retain their lands against the pressures of intrusion from petroleum developers.
Posted by Lee Gilman at June 13, 2005 07:55 PM
