An update from the B.A.A. on Indigenous Peoples’ Day
In selecting the fall date for the Boston Marathon, the Boston Athletic Association (B.A.A.) in no way wanted to take away from Indigenous Peoples’ Day or celebrations for the Indigenous and Native American Community. We extend our sincere apologies to all Indigenous people who have felt unheard or feared the importance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day would be erased. We are sorry.
In meeting with representatives from the Federal and State Recognized Tribes, we recognize there are immediate next steps we can take, as we continue meeting with these groups and planning for October:
Prior to the start of the Boston Marathon, a land acknowledgement will take place to recognize that the race travels through Indigenous homelands. The B.A.A. is better understanding the trauma experienced over centuries by the Indigenous People who lived on these lands, and we will work with the Federal and State Recognized Tribes on this land acknowledgment.
The B.A.A. will donate to the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Newton Committee working through its fiscal agent, Newton Community Pride, and intended to support the work of the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Newton Committee, to fund their first-ever Indigenous Peoples’ Day Celebration.
The B.A.A. will celebrate Indigenous runners, Ellison Brown (Narragansett, champion of the 1936 and 1939 races) and Patti Catalano Dillon (Mi’kmaq, three-time runner-up), through its banner program across Boston. The B.A.A. will also recognize another champion, Tom Longboat from 1907, as well as other top Native American finishers in race history, through campaigns, features, and programming.
The B.A.A. will recognize Indigenous athletes participating in the 125th Boston Marathon over race weekend and on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
In planning for Boston Marathon weekend and race day, the B.A.A. will continue to work with Indigenous runners and organizations who seek to strengthen Native youth and families through running. More information on this programming will be shared when it is finalized.
We are committed to continuing to work with Indigenous Peoples in the lead up to Indigenous Peoples’ Day and in the future.
Indigenous peoples are finally getting a say in global conservation policy
The General Assembly of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, will gather next week to shape a collective strategy to protect the world’s increasingly at-risk flora and fauna. Representatives from more than 217 nations and territories, 18,000 experts, and 1,400 NGOs, businesses, and scientific institutions will vote on recommendations and motions that will mobilize money and build political momentum for global conservation efforts. And now, for the first time in the IUCN’s 73-year history, Indigenous peoples will finally get a seat at the table.
Twenty-three Indigenous organizations, representing groups from every continent, will join this year’s IUCN’s General Assembly as members, meaning that they can introduce motions; vote for or against resolutions and recommendations; and participate in working groups.
“We’ve been fighting for 40 years to be included in the U.N.’s international system and other international spaces to defend the identity, culture, and lands of Indigenous peoples,” said José Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, who leads the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin, or COICA, a group that congregates the biggest national Indigenous associations from nine Amazonian countries. “[We know that] if we don’t go [to international meetings], solutions will not come to us.”
In addition to COICA, other new Indigenous members to the IUCN include the Highlanders Association from Cambodia, the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee, and the Inuit Circumpolar Council, from Canada, among others.
COICA plans to introduce a new and urgent motion — the main mechanism to influence IUCN’s policy — to the General Assembly on Friday, proposing a target of preserving 80 percent of the Amazon rainforest by 2025. The plan, which they have called “Amazonia por la Vida,” or Amazonia for life, requires that the region’s governments legally recognize as autonomous 100 percent of Indigenous lands in the Amazon, ban deforestation-linked activities, and suspend all future licenses for mining, oil extraction, and other extractive industries in the rainforest. The motion also proposes that banks and financing partners should prioritize funding for projects that include Indigenous peoples in the region, and respect their human rights.
In addition to participating in the General Assembly, Indigenous groups will lead the World Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nature on September 3, a side event to the main IUCN conference in Marseille, France that will exclusively highlight the contributions of Indigenous peoples to conservation and climate goals. They will also potentially meet with France’s President Emmanuel Macron, and with United States and European Union climate and biodiversity officials.
Getting Indigenous groups a seat at the IUCN table has been a decades-long battle, explains Kankana-ey Igorot peoples activist Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Previous to this year’s conference, Indigenous peoples could technically join the IUCN as members under the category of NGOs. But the distinction irked many Indigenous leaders. “They are not just simply NGOs,” Tauli-Corpuz explained. “They are peoples, they are nations, and of course, they are communities.” As a consequence, they stayed out of the member’s assembly, participating only in the event’s forums and exhibitions. (COICA enrolled as an “environmental actor” in 2010, but never participated).
The turning point came in 2016, during the IUCN Assembly in Hawaii. For years, Indigenous peoples had been raising concerns about how conservation areas, often supported by the IUCN and other conservation organizations, were violating their rights. That year, Tauli-Corpuz, who was then the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, sat in front of the Assembly and presented a report detailing the ways in which many conservation areas across the world were harming Indigenous communities, from expropriating their land — forcefully displacing them — to denying them self-governance, access to livelihoods, and causing them to lose cultural and spiritual sites.
“[We wanted to tell the IUCN members] ‘We have lived in these territories, these ecosystems since time immemorial,” Tauli-Corpuz said. “And yet our knowledge is not really taken into account in a very serious manner. And our governance over our ecosystems is also not supported by state laws or by the conservation organizations.”
Despite occupying just 20 percent of land worldwide, Indigenous communities live in areas encompassing 80 percent of the earth’s biodiversity. Researchers have found that in certain regions, like the Amazon, Indigenous peoples are more effective than governments in protecting natural resources.
Yet despite this data, Indigenous groups only administer 5 percent of the world’s protected areas, and receive less than 1 percent of climate funding.
On August 9, 2016, after Tauli-Corpuz’s testimony, the IUCN Assembly approved the motion to create a membership category for Indigenous peoples. The decision was history-making: It was “the first time in IUCN’s history that a new membership category has been established,” Aroha Te Pareake Mead, chair of IUCN’s Commission on Environmental, Economic and Social Policy, said in a statement at the time.
As soon as they heard the announcement, Indigenous communities in the Amazon started working towards becoming members, Diaz Mirabal said. Last year, they joined the Congress of Protected Areas of the Amazon Basin and drafted the plan with international environmental organizations. This is a proposal, he said, that unlike the Paris Agreement and international agreements, comes from the communities themselves, addressing the key issues that defenders need to protect biodiversity.
“We often say that governments negotiate [green funds] over Indigenous lands with banks, with other governments on the table, and we’re often under the table trying to get whatever scraps fall,” he said. “But no more. We want to be equal partners.”
Indigenous Peoples Harness Space Technology to Stop Deforestation
Satellite observations have long been used to detect deforestation, and a new study shows that giving Indigenous groups greater access to these data can improve response times and reduce tree cover loss.
In the Peruvian Amazon, deforestation is being driven by illegal gold mining, logging, and clear-cutting for cultivation of crops like palm oil and coca. Between 2001 and 2016, the Peruvian Amazon lost nearly 2 million hectares of forest.
More than one third of the Amazon rain forest falls within the territory of more than 3,000 formally acknowledged Indigenous groups, but the size and inaccessibility of Indigenous Peoples’ territory in the Amazon mean that timely alerts from satellite data can make a big difference in their existing antideforestation patrol efforts. For example, alerts can allow communities to take preventive actions, such as blocking the rivers where loggers entered.
To determine the effectiveness of timely deforestation alerts derived from recent satellite data, Indigenous Peoples in the Peruvian Amazon teamed up with scientists and conservation organizations. They analyzed deforestation rates in Indigenous communities with access to alerts about deforestation in their territory and compared them with rates from groups using other patrol methods.
The findings, published in July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), showed that from 2018 to 2020, there was a notable reduction in tree cover loss among communities with access to satellite data.
The study suggested that governments should provide Indigenous communities greater access to satellite data. “As a policymaker, you want to know: If a monitoring method works on this site, it might work somewhere else,” said Tara Slough, assistant professor of politics at New York University and lead author of the paper.
Training Locals to Monitor Forests
In 36 out of 73 participating Indigenous communities, researchers trained local people to use a combination of two smartphone mapping applications (Locus Map and Global Forest Watcher), with monitors receiving monthly deforestation alerts from Peru’s national GeoBosques deforestation-monitoring platform, which uses NASA’s Landsat data. They could then head out with the phone, document the problem area, see what activities were going on, and make a report to the community council.
Wendy Pineda, a project coordinator for Rainforest Foundation US—the rights-based forest protection organization that funded the research project—has been working for more than a decade to bring more high-tech monitoring tools to Indigenous communities.
For this study, each of the noncontrol communities designed its own monitoring plan, tailored to existing and potential threats in its area. For example, a Ticuna community in Buen Jardin de Callaru that was heavily threatened by land invasion from coca farmers was encouraged to send its monitoring data of 7 hectares of deforestation to Peru’s Environmental Prosecutor’s Office. As a result, the invaders left, deforestation halted, and the community is now the beneficiary of a reforestation project.
“Indigenous Peoples have done [forest monitoring] for their entire existence and will continue to do so, only now they can be more decisive, thanks to technology.” “Indigenous Peoples have done [forest monitoring] for their entire existence and will continue to do so, only now they can be more decisive, thanks to technology,” Pineda said. “Satellite imagery and technology…only complemented and enhanced the effectiveness of their plans.”
Jorge Perez is president of the Indigenous People’s Organization of the Eastern Amazon (ORPIO), which has long fought for land rights and preventing deforestation. ORPIO’s member communities participated in the study, and according to Perez, they are the ones who know the territory, know its problems, and feel the impacts of deforestation.
According to Perez, the satellite information aided Indigenous monitors in responding more quickly to sites where illegal deforestation was taking place. More immediate notification also allowed authorities, like the Ministry of Environment and the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office, to build the case against those engaged in illegal activity.
“Communities are experiencing the positive impacts of the intervention, so many continued to monitor even when funding ended and the pandemic began,” Pineda said.
Empirical Evidence
Ane Alencar, director of science for the Amazon Environmental Research Institute who wasn’t involved in the PNAS study, said empirical evidence of deforestation reduction helps generate strong arguments and ideas for policymakers. “Communities are experiencing the positive impacts of the intervention, so many continued to monitor even when funding ended and the pandemic began.”
“In this case, the availability of real-time information on deforestation…seemed to end up empowering the communities to do peer enforcement,” Alencar said. Consistency is key, she warned: Over time, the effect of community empowerment may fade away if offenders perceive that there are no consequences.
One criticism of the PNAS paper is that none of the authors are from Peru, raising the specter of colonial science, in which local collaborators contribute to a major paper in a prestigious journal published by scientists from the Global North but don’t receive the academic benefits of being named as authors.
“I think it is very important to engage local actors or experts in scientific studies, since they are aware of the context and they are able to redirect and enrich any discussion or conclusion, while avoiding any possibility of misinterpretation of the results,” Alencar said.
Back in the Peruvian Amazon, Perez said he wants more climate funding, including a recent commitment from Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, to arrive directly to Indigenous communities to help them to continue to defend their territory.
“Even if funds run out, we are able to continue to use this knowledge,” he said.
—Andrew J. Wight (@ligaze), Science Writer