Mapping and documenting ancestral lands on the Heath river (Bahuaja-Sonene national Park, Peru, and Madidi National Park, Bolivia)
Principal Investigators: Miguel Alexiades and Roy Ellen
Co-investigators: Daniela Peluso, Daniel Rodriguez
Project dates: 2002-2009
Funding: Nuffield Foundation (2002-2005), British Academy (2003-2004), TreeS (2003-present), Faculty Office (2003), Darrell Posey Foundation (2005-2006), PPI/CIFOR (2005-2006), PPI/The Christensen Foundation (2005-2009)
Background:
The headwaters of the Tambopata, Heath and Madidi rivers, southern tributaries of the Madre de Dios and Beni drainage system, all converge in a broad swathe of extremely rugged montane forest in the Andean piedmont. This poorly studied area, a global biodiversity hotspot, is currently protected by the Bawaja-Sonene National Park, the Tambopata National Reserve (Peru) and the Madidi National Park (Bolivia). This area is also where the Ese Eja trace their ancestral origins to, and where most lived until earlier this century, when they began to settle on the lower reaches of these rivers. The headwaters of their ancestrally-occupied lands hold considerable symbolic, cultural and ecological importance for the Ese Eja, particularly those on the Tambopata and the Heath rivers, who still maintain contact with and depend on these currently uninhabited areas. Indeed, akin to other Amazonians, the Ese Eja landscape is richly inscribed with memories and with physical traces of history, inter-cultural contact and with socio-ecological change. One important dimension of this landscape is the topographical, ecological and geopolitical continuum that extends from the rugged and more inaccessible headwater regions to the lower, more accessible, navigable reaches of western tributaries of the Madre de Dios river. (Larger version of map above)
Through their interactions with different social actors and natural resource configurations, the Ese Eja have always positioned themselves, literally, socio-politically and ecologically, somewhere along this ecological and socio-political continuum. The fact that in the past century increased contact with the nation-state has led to a gradual migration down river, and that this process is associated with distinct changes in patterns of settlement, subsistence and social organization, means that different parts, features and characteristics of the landscape embody distinct and multiple historical memories, as well as social and ecological relationships. Links and relations to the headwater region are vital to the Ese Eja, not only in terms of their material subsistence, notably for fishing and hunting, but also in terms of their social and spiritual renewal, which provide people with a link to their ancestors, and their oral traditions referred to in the academia as myths. Ese Eja notions of identity and political consciousness, always in a state of flux, have begun to extend to a group level, which includes communities in Peru and Bolivia. Not surprisingly, the two national parks (Bahuaja Sonene National Park, Peru, and Madidi National Park, Bolivia) and their associated conservation and development initiatives form an important part of this political process, both in terms of informing notions of self and in shaping conflicts and strategic alliances.
Since 2002, anthropologists Miguel Alexiades and Daniela Peluso have been working closely with the regional indigenous federation (FENAMAD) and the Ese Eja to undertake, a thorough evaluation and reconstruction of this traditional territory, working with Ese Eja elders and younger people to document the social history of this region, including the places, names and associated knowledge of inhabited, used or otherwise socially important places.
Aims and Objectives:
The main goals of this project are to:
1) Document the ancestral use and occupation of what the Ese Eja refer to as their traditional territory: the drainage systems of the Madidi, Heath, Tambopata and parts of the Inambari rivers and their affluents. This includes not only locating past settlements and swiddens, but recording toponimies and oral traditions linked to space, as well as undertaking a genealogical and demographic reconstruction of the Ese Eja group up to the early 20th century.
2) To explore how the Ese Eja and other social actors, each implicated in different ways with the landscape, perceive and interact with this region and its resources, and how these different perceptions and management regimes interact and engage with each other amidst the region’s political and institutional environment. We seek to examine the Ese Eja landscape not only as a culturally and historically constituted space, but one whose significance, meanings and management is being continuously negotiated amidst growing governmental and non-governmental intervention, greater community participation in the market economy and increased involvement with indigenous organizations. Moreover, we pretend to use the landscape as a framework with which to explore environmental change across time and space. Each of these goals has several dimensions or broader aims, including:
1) To document specific sites of Ese eja ancestral use and occupation. This includes not only locating past settlements and swiddens, but recording toponimies, oral traditions and the history linked to the Ese Eja ancestral territory.
2) To salvage fragile and endangered historical knowledge, knowledge which is now beginning to be clearly valued by the Ese Eja themselves. Joined or trained by FENAMAD technicians associates, groups of Ese Eja elders and trained Ese Eja youths are traveling to the headwaters of the Heath and the Tambopata rivers, and their tributaries, locating precise locations of places of historical, ecological, economic or symbolic importance.
2) To develop participatory mechanisms (trips to the headwaters, workshops, community-produced maps and video) that in turn help re-energize the links between the Ese Eja and their ancestral territory, in turn helping to develop a platform for a more productive dialogue between the Ese Eja and the State, notably the park authorities, particularly in the context of ongoing efforts to design and implement a management plan for the park.
3) To assist the Ese Eja, both through project activities and outcomes (meetings,) in the process of strengthening their links to other Ese Eja, particularly across national borders, in an attempt to counteract the threats of socio-cultural extinction linked to their low numbers (1,500 people in total), scattered distribution and fragmentation, urbanization, and linguistic and economic colonization.
Achievements so far: A number of trips to the headwaters of the Sonene (Heath) and Baawaja (Tambopata) rivers have been carried out by the Ese Eja, using GPS and video technology to precisely locate places of social significance and collect oral testimonies linked to them. Over 300 named places and associated narratives have been recorded in a 400km stretch of the Sonene river along. Named and socially important features of the landscape include: natural features (e.g alluvial beaches and sand bars, tributaries, streams, lakes, cliffs), places of social or historical importance (old settlement sites, burial sites, old footpaths, sites associated linked to particular mythic events) and sites related to present subsistence (hunting, fishing, gathering) or past subsistence activities or forest management (old fallows and garden sites, forest plantations of fruit trees- including bananas, citrus fruits and peach palm- cultivated bamboos, fish poisons, etc.).