Indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon are challenging the forces of international development and globalization that predate their lands. Focusing mostly on the efforts of the Quichua Comunidad Sarayacu and the Huaorani, this paper discusses the power of an "authentic indigenous cultural identity" used as a powerful political and environmental preservation tool.

Indigenous Resistance to the Petroleum Industry in the Ecuadorian Amazon: Power, Identity and the Politics of Culture By Ashley Victoria Schaeffer Whitman College Environmental Studies – Politics December 1, 2004 Contents PART ONE - A Look from the Interior: a Foreigner’s Perspective 1 PART TWO - An Introduction to Power and Identity: The Paradox of Globalization 7 PART THREE – Political and Theoretical Debates 10 1. Evolution of Indigenismo 10 2. Neoliberal Globalization 12 3. Voicing Cultural Identity 16 4. The Debate on Indigenousness 20 PART FOUR - Neoliberalism in Ecuador 30 1. Development in the Ecuadorian Amazon 31 2. Background: Petroleum Politics in Ecuador 33 3. Neoliberalism taking hold: The entrance of Texaco and the ensuing environmental, social and cultural implications 38 PART FIVE - Indigenous people, NGOs, Oil, and the State: Making Identity through Struggle 42 1. A Case in Point: Indigenous Quichua 44 2. Creative Action through Collaboration 48 3. Foreign Influence on Indigenous Voice 50 -The Exoticization Project 53 -Counter Images 56 -A New Vision of the Ecuadorian Amazon? 58 4. Identity Construction 60 -Indigenous Cosmology 61 -Place as Identity 63 -Oppositional Identity 66 5. Balancing Development with Cultural Preservation 70 6. A New Political Space 77 -Risks Involved with Alliances and Negotiations 83 7. Negotiating Development in the Ecuadorian Amazon: At the Price of a “Traditional” Cultural Identity? 89 CONCLUSION: A Repositioning of Power, Alternatives to Oil Development, and Possible Solutions 91 BIBLIOGRAPHY 98 - One – A Look from the Interior: a Foreigner’s Perspective * * * * * In the undulating terrain where the Amazon basin meets the Andes, volcanic peaks loom above mist-shrouded hills. It is in this region, where two distinct climate zones join, that the Oriente is at its richest. Thirty million years ago, the Oriente was an embayment of the Pacific Ocean. Four and a half million years ago, the Andes thrust up from the earth, creating finely subdivided habitats – deep valleys separated by high ridges, with microclimates that change radically over short distances. Plants, and the insects and birds and other creatures that evolved with them, were isolated, encouraging such intense speciation that in its endemism – the presence of species that exist nowhere else – the Oriente may be the richest place in the world. Though it is about the size of Alabama, it is home to an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 species of plants, or up to 5 percent of all the plant species on earth. (Kane 1995: 26) * * * * * Our small plane wobbled from side to side as we hovered above the deep thickness of jungle, approaching the only signs of civilization for as far as my eyes could see; a paved runway, an airport, and small houses packed next to one another. The drone of the engine softened in the back of my mind as we neared the haze lingering above the green sea of trees. A brown river gracefully carved its way through the dense, seemingly impenetrable forest below. The landscape before me seemed to fit my preconceived notion of what the jungle would be like perfectly: a tropical realm of exotic species, rich abundance of life, and biodiversity found nowhere else on the planet. As an environmentalist, I thought of the jungle in terms of its ecological value; the tropical rainforests of the world served as the “planet’s lungs,” as an immensely important carbon sink, absorbing the insidious toxins produced by human activity and in turn converting it to pure oxygen. I did not find myself pondering the human realm of life in the forest, all of the indigenous groups that shape their livelihood based on the relationships they foster within the forest community. Instead, I imagined all the different levels of the complex and finely balanced ecosystem processes, overlooking the human component of the forest completely. My bus rattled along for hours, heading deeper and deeper into the jungle. Mud splashed violently and pot holes made me rock and bump up and down. At first the landscape appeared untouched, with brightly colored birds fluttering about and young children with dirty faces playing along the dirt road waving. But then I noticed huge, black pipelines snake along the road, strewing the mountainside in oily waste; denuded hillsides heavy with tropical rains and moisture looked as if they would collapse right on top of our bus. Although I had previously read about the presence of the petroleum industry in Ecuador, I was utterly shocked by my visions. The blatant contrast of nature and culture on such a fragile environment was more evident than I had ever witnessed. To fully comprehend the magnitude of the destruction caused by the extraction of oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon by Texaco, you have to see it, touch it, smell it, and walk in it as I did that afternoon. None of my past experiences prepared me for the environmental devastation that I beheld that day, and would continue to try to make sense of for the rest of my life. I would never forget. * * * * * July 28, 2004 – Segment from my field notes in the Ecuadorian Amazon We are on the Napo River heading southeast from the town of Coca towards the Yasuní National Park. Lush, green jungle life is shooting forth in all directions, surrounding my senses in moisture. This is one mother of a river, I think to myself. The water is brown and bubbly, and I see black pollution clouding out of the back of a large boat approaching us. The grips of civilization, development, and tourism are strongly ahold of this diverse country. I am hoping that in the National Park, the most remote part of Ecuador, we will get a taste of real Wilderness. At least that is what I was hoping for, but our Naturalist guide just informed me that even there oil exploitation is ravaging the land. Yellow, blue, and red are flapping in the wind overhead – la bandera Ecuatoriana (the Ecuadorian flag), sun reflecting off the vast waters of tropical stillness. The clouds clear a space above; clarity of cielo (sky). Red soils jut up from the banks, providing the nutrients for such abundance of rich life. * * * * * A small ecotourism company hosted the visit of my School for International Training study abroad group of college students. We spent three nights in an eco-reserve at Cabañas Aliñahui along the Río Napo in El Oriente, learning about the challenges of protecting such a place from the developing forces of the world beyond the forest boundaries. The last day an indigenous shaman and healer guided our group as we hiked, canoed and floated until we arrived to Río Blanco. Deep in the forest, we settled in an indigenous Quichua community nestled along the river. As the cultural component of our SIT program, we were staying in a “traditional” Quichua community that would provide us with an “authentic” indigenous cultural experience. We would learn some Quichua , teach Spanish to Quichua-speaking children, hike through the jungle with our shaman guide to learn the medicinal value of different plant species, and experience a taste of indigenous food and dance. After a delicious dinner of roasted cacao beans, plátano frito, yucca and babaco, we were told to sit down along the borders of the hut made of paja cotilla (a type of palm that the Quichua typically use as a building material since the structure had no walls), elevated on stilts to protect the living space from the rains and resulting mud characteristic of the daily tropical showers. Flames danced in the center of the floor as tribal chanting began to sound from the darkness beyond. Ten young Quichua emerged, fully adorned in ceremonial dress: brightly colored feathered crowns, spears, face paint, drums, females in white with their hair tied up in spirals and males with nothing but leather cloth covering their private parts. I watched in discomfort as they performed their “traditional” tribal ritual. Not one face showed a sign of passion or deliberation, emotion or deep sense of meaning. I did not get the impression that what they were replicating for us was sincere or genuine. Rather, their expressions reflected a feeling of embarrassment and uneasiness. It felt imposed and artificially created. I did not like the way their cultural performance made me feel, and it especially did not make them any more “authentic” in my eyes than they were before the ceremony. The insincerity of the performance raised many questions in my mind regarding their cultural identity, how they imagined and articulated their community identity on their own terms as well how they tried to imagine it for us as foreigners. Regardless of my momentary discomfort, my stay in the indigenous community caused me to recognize the human component of the forest for the first time, and made me realize how important the forest was to their survival. It engendered me with an acute sense of biological and cultural curiosity. From what I perceived during my stay in Río Blanco, their identity is very much connected to the land and waterways that sustain them. We ate freshly harvested vegetables, fruits, and roots from the ground, as well as fish from the nearby stream. I realized that during my initial state of shock when seeing the black oil pipelines snaking through the Amazon, my concerns focused on the environmental component of destruction whereas now, I was alarmed by the human impact of such large-scale development. Protecting an ecosystem was not just about preservation of la Pachamama (Quichua for Mother Earth); protecting an ecosystem is just as much about cultural diversity as biological diversity. * * * * * The town of San Carlos is a lush, green place of abundant rainfall and many rivers – all contaminated by oil. Ten-year cancer survivor and mother of six, Maria Garafalo is just one of some 30,000 native peoples affected by decades of oil exploitation in northeast Ecuador who are suing ChevronTexaco (the two companies merged in 2002). The Amazon Defense Front (FDA) is leading the fight, in close collaboration with the affected indigenous communities. The FDA first filed the suit against Texaco in 1993, and more than a decade later it is still on the case and awaiting a verdict (Hufstader 2004: 13). When Texaco pulled out of Ecuador a decade ago, it left behind catastrophic pollution that has been called “the Environmental Crime of the Century” (www.oxfamamerica.org). One of the world’s leading experts on oil remediation, Dave Russell, traveled to the many contaminated oil waste pit sites this year and assessed that “this is the worst ongoing environmental catastrophe in the world today after Chernobyl” (Fraser 2004). According to numerous scientific tests, the oil that spilled directly into the ground, rivers and estuaries, amounts to 50 percent more than what was spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. Now the people of Ecuador’s Amazon are demanding justice. (Forero 2003: 6). Texaco does not deny it spilled 16.8 million gallons of oil over 30 years, all the while dumping waste into unlined pits, but ChevronTexaco (the two companies merged in 2002) claims that it complied with the few environmental rules on Ecuador’s books at the time. With the help of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and environmental and human rights activists, San Carlos and 99 other communities are not backing down. Because they depend on the same oil polluted waterways for their drinking water, the people affected by the waste are hoping that this lawsuit will lead to a full-scale cleanup. In this revolutionary trial, hundreds of Amazonian natives (the plaintiffs) are holding ChevronTexaco accountable for their damage and struggling for their lives and their future, forging new identities in the process. Quichua community members swarmed outside the small courtroom in Lago Agrio, where early stages of the legal battle took place. This case of indigenous resistance made it to the front page of many newspapers, among them the October 2003 New York Times. Indigenous Quichua appeared wearing their ceremonial dress (body paint, feathers and traditional garbs) as both an expression of indigenous identity and a means by which they legitimated their right to a voice so as to acquire control of their ancestral lands and territories. The Amazon Defense Front has played a major role in transforming the affected communities from victims into committed, mobilized and empowered defenders of their own rights to live in a safe environment. This is an exemplary case of the possibilities that abound through a powerful alliance between non-governmental organizations and indigenous communities. Indigenous identities are articulated and projected internationally to gain legitimacy in their struggles. By working with the communities, FDA is creating representative organizations that help maintain unity and prevent the Company from arranging inadequate settlements with individual communities. Workshops were held to inform people about the case and its future prospects, and everyone’s ideas were listened to in a democratic debate (www.oxfamamerica.org). If this legal battle is successful, it could establish a new way for multinational corporations to be held accountable for environmental degradation in foreign countries. Such collaborative programs of education, decision-making, and participatory involvement are exactly what these communities need if they are to successfully organize a forceful resistance against the oil industry (Fraser 2004). To maintain the unity needed during the long legal process, the FDA’s founding president, Luis Yanza, worked with the plaintiffs to create a democratic body that runs by consensus -- a way to keep the legal strategy in line with community priorities and ensure democratic participation among indigenous groups. “Many people were dying here, but we didn’t know this was unusual,” Ermelinda Montenegro, another woman from San Carlos, said before the FDA began visiting communities. “Now we understand that the companies need to respect our rights, and we know we have to fight for a real clean up” (Hufstader 2004: 14). A 2003 survey financed by the state oil company Petroecuador found that of 1,017 families living near oil wells and pits, 957 said they were in some way hurt by pollution (Forero 2003: 7). Raising awareness about environmental issues and communities’ rights in order to create a useful model for other communities to follow will help put indigenous peoples in control of their own communities, their own futures and their own cultural identities. - Two – An Introduction to Power and Identity: The Paradox of Globalization Although neoliberal globalization is supposed to accelerate the process of cultural homogenization, the Ecuador case exemplifies otherwise as the indigenous people confronted with the life-changing forces of large-scale oil exploration are being empowered by capitalizing on their indigenousness and the eco-friendly image that they embody in the eyes of the world. I argue that the asymmetrical power relations created by state nationalism, development, and neoliberal globalization regimes have acted as a catalyst for the formation of identity-based movements in Ecuador. I will make the case that even though neoliberal globalization is supposed to accelerate processes of homogenization and destruction of indigenous identities, the Ecuadorian case suggests that globalization has given indigenous people new ways of creating vibrant, distinct identities. This process is achieved through, to borrow Thom Kuehls’ term, “ecopolitical resistance,” (Dalby 2002: 56) a form of political resistance that is inspired by the defense of the natural environment. I contend that although oil production in their territory is greatly threatening their lands and waterways, through indigenous resistance to the petroleum industry many Ecuadorian indigenous groups are involved in successful identity movements which is granting them the power to challenge transnational forces to protect their lands and livelihoods, and triggering them to rearticulate their cultural identity. This inquiry delves into the relationship between indigenous groups, non-governmental organizations, the oil industry and the Ecuadorian state. Power and identity serve as the cohesive framework binding all of these actors together. Recent indigenous activism associated with Ecuador’s current oil development projects will be used as a case study to address both the development of indigenous political identity and the use of cultural legitimacy as a tool, as well as to deconstruct traditional and modern views of indigenous culture in the face of globalization. The controversy over the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) and their impact on both the environment and humans inhabiting it is central to the debate about indigenous rights, globalization, and state control. The importance of indigenous struggles in the 21st century lies in their abilities to reconfigure international power structures to manage their own territories and futures. Many indigenous leaders look on as bystanders in the global negotiation over the future of their resources. Territory no longer exists which is not of interest to expanding world capitalism, either for its mineral wealth, oil deposits, pastures for livestock, tropical forests, medicinal plants, or water for irrigation and/or electric generation (Stavenhagen 1998: 138). Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world frequently face dispossession by encroaching populations of agricultural settlers, or petroleum and mining interests. Numerous native cultures have been damaged or destroyed by the destruction of land and rivers by such development. They are often victims of legal doctrines of “terra nullius,” based on Lockean assumptions that land and resources which have not been formally recognized as individual property by a state or colonial government are therefore available for resource exploitation (Dalby 2002: 57). When they lack the effective legal recourse or social organization to preserve their ecologies, cultures and modes of living, indigenous peoples are displaced by these processes of land enclosure and resource appropriation. As such, indigenous peoples, living at subsistence levels in remote locations, are the most likely victims of international and state development regimes. Indigenous communities all over the Oriente are involved in political conflict with oil industries, articulating new identities in the process of taking up revolutionary political roles in the negotiation of their ancestral territories. I outlined the present legal case between indigenous communities, their NGO representatives and ChevronTexaco to provide a context in which I will establish the political advancement of indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon whereby they are projecting their voices internationally and thereby gaining legitimacy in their struggles. Next I will provide a short discussion on the evolution of indigenismo since indigenous identity is understood based on one’s conception of indigenousness. I will then discuss competing theories of neoliberal globalization to establish the relationship between indigenous localities and international networks of power, and to discuss the resulting tendencies of such a global force, among them resistance movements (and thus resistance theory) and the forging of new identities. Pivotal to the debates on neoliberal globalization and the resulting power reconfiguration is a discussion on the changing role of indigenous voice as it has democratized and been projected internationally in response to indigenous confrontations with multinational oil. As neoliberal globalization reconfigures power and triggers indigenous groups to voice their identities and thus assert their rights, the realm of cultural identity is of underlying importance. I will deliberate the meanings, implications, and sources of an indigenous cultural identity in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Place-based identity, cosmology-based identity and oppositional identity construction will be introduced in the conclusion of this section and expanded upon later. Lastly I will establish the key theoretical framework on indigenous identity that shapes and gives meaning to both the arguments of the indigenous groups I write about as well as my own. - Three - Setting the Stage: Political and Theoretical Debates on Indigenous Identity Evolution of Indigenismo The changing significance of indigenismo (indigenousness) throughout history serves as a direct reflection of the ways in which indigenous identity has been shaped, imported, evolved, and finally come to be respected in the modern world. In Ecuador, old notions of indigenismo relegated indigenous people to irrational, economically backwards and politically excluded beings. From the time when Europeans first arrived on the shores of the Americas to conquer and settle until relatively recently, indigenous peoples suffered discrimination, exploitation and severe racism (Stavenhagen 1999: 133). When Roosevelt traveled to the Amazon in the 1940s, he looked upon the natives with a curious sense of degradation, calling them “wild, friendly savages” (Slater 2002: 41). But as the notion of the “Other” began to emerge in discourse critiquing modernity, the international community began to increasingly valorize indigenous peoples. Indigenous of mixed blood were thought of as less authentic and precious as they were “detribalized Indians” and not as “exotic” or “tribal” as their full-blooded relatives in character (Slater 2002: 156). In the 1950s the term indigenous was replaced with peasantry. Eventually a new strand of indígenista discourse emerged in the 1980s as “Amerindian organizations…permitted a reassessment of previous models. Neo-indigenista (new indigenism) discourses emerged” and continues circulating today, presenting a critique of indigenismo (Ibarra 1992: 175, cited in Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 70). This new concept of indigenism stresses autonomy and validity of multiple indigenous cultures, and the importance of respect for difference. Indigenous identity became representative of cultural identity and respected multi-culturalism (Radliffe and Westwood 1996: 70). The mestizos (mixed indigenous and Spanish descent) of Ecuador that often assume the more powerful roles in Ecuadorian government are of the elite class and therefore deny their indigenous blood. They disregard their shared ancestry, denoting it as “backwards, primitive” and of an “unruly nature;” Ecuadorian elite fail to perceive the indigenous groups as “noble savages.” This illustrates an important aspect of the indigenous struggles in Ecuador, for the Indian as Other is an image with drastically different implications for Latin Americans and the international public. Within Ecuador, national images of indigenous people are “subhuman and invisible,” whereas North American/European perceptions of the same term evoke fascinating, exotic and romantic images (Brysk 1996: 46). Only foreign actors and the indigenous actors themselves place value in indigenous ancestry. It is impossible to comprehend the creation and conceptual import of indigenousness without recognizing the historical impact of global modernity. The notion of indigenousness is thus very much a product of the modern world. It has been created and recreated in Ecuador through the escalating processes of neoliberal globalization that increasingly cause collisions between “modernity” and “primitive,” subsistence-based cultures. Neoliberal Globalization According to Viviana Hernandez, globalization is a multilayered and dialectical phenomenon which refers to the processes by which interactions between nations and peoples have been qualitatively expanding in economics, politics and cultural exchanges (Hernandez 1999: 17). The implications of this fact are great for indigenous peoples. For economies of the South, globalization entails a shift from domestic to export production, “commitment of an ever larger percentage of GDP to debt payment, decline in public responsibility for welfare, privatization of enterprises, and breaking up of communally based resources” (Nash 2001: 3). As such, transnational corporations and speculators reap the greatest rewards from this restructuring as neoliberalism promotes, above all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services (Sanchez Otero 1993: 18). Authors Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh suggest that an intrinsic part of this globalizing process is the homogenization of global culture (Barnet and Cavanagh 1996). The effect, as Hernandez believes, is a diminishing viability of traditional local cultures by accelerating the standardization of markets within the Western conceptual framework. Other authors, despite their investigations into indigenous resistance and rebellion in the past, nonetheless predicted a future of inevitable disintegration and assimilation (e.g., Kicza 1993, cited in Warren and Jackson 2002: 1). As the international system moves toward postmodernity, globalization creates new institutional links across borders, such as international organizations, integrated markets, and transnational social movement networks that restructure power, interest, and representation of indigenous peoples. These changes grant new actors access to power as they voice identities and messages across borders (Brysk 2000: 11). I contend that globalization therefore poses indigenous groups with both challenges and opportunities and negative as well as positive cultural implications: positive in the sense that it helps consolidate vibrant identities, but negative in its tendencies to homogenize and iron flat the rich variety of global cultures, negotiating biological and cultural diversity for Western standardization. James Mittelman believes that neoliberalism is a result of globalization and that “liberal democracy has not kept pace with its spread. In the space opened by this disjuncture, resistance to globalization is on the rise but cannot solely be understood as a political reaction. Rather, in the teeth of globalizing tendencies, resistance movements shape and are constitutive of cultural processes” (Mittelman 2000: 165). More concretely, neoliberalism refers to a specific set of policies that promote the reduction of the role of the state in the governance of domestic economic life and the increase of the role of the market in the guidance of the nation’s economy: These general policies include cuts in governmental spending, privatization of public agencies, trade liberalization, and deregulation of foreign trade. […] The neo-liberal agenda has as its main purpose to lead third world countries to ‘economic growth’ and not to ‘economic development for the people.’ In this process, powerless social sectors are devastated and with low possibilities of improvement. Resistance is the only choice. (Hernandez 1999: 18) Along these lines I contend that indigenous resistance to economic globalization is essential to the survival of indigenous cultures since neoliberal policies often impact most heavily on traditional territories and indigenous peoples because of their traditionally limited voice. Exposing the resistance of indígenas to the dominant power of multinational oil shows how struggle and rebellion deter and sometimes destabilize the thrust of world economic forces. The resistance of indigenous people, since they are subordinated groups in Ecuador, involves the need for unified and highly structured responses to the “hegemonic system of dominance.” In James Scott’s words, [s]ubordinate groups confront elaborate ideologies that justify inequality, bondage, monarchy, caste and so on. Resistance at this level requires a more elaborate riposte, one that goes beyond fragmentary practices of resistance. Resistance requires a ‘counterideology’ – a negation – that will effectively provide a general normative form to the host of resistant practices invented in self-defense by any subordinate group. (Scott 1990: 118) The success of movements of resistance depends on powerful counterideologies as well as the “social cohesion” among the victims of domination. This cohesion is aided by a unity in interest, worldview, and distinctive subculture – often one with a strong “us vs. them” social imagery which itself becomes a powerful force for social unity (Scott 1990: 135). Because indigenous culture generally embodies subsistence as a way of life, unity in opposition to neoliberalism has recently served as a powerful impetus for indigenous resistance. Suzana Sawyer uses the metaphor the “belly of the beast” to describe the nature of “postcolonial empires of neoliberalism” as a space where transnational capitalism and elite state rule work together in their quest to accumulate in the face of local opposition (Sawyer 2004: 2). She defines neoliberalism as a set of government policies that aim to privatize, liberalize and deregulate the national economy so as to encourage foreign investment and intensify export production (Sawyer 2004: 7). In light of the present political and economic agendas of neoliberal governments such as the United States or Ecuador’s, increasing globalization is almost unavoidable. In the face of this reality, indigenous peoples across the globe are struggling in increasingly diverse ways to secure their cultural survival and to find a new means of asserting their rights and autonomy (Smith and Ward 2000: vi). But they are also harnessing new technologies to sustain and strengthen their communities and identities, resulting in cultural irony as globalization presents both threats and challenges for indigenous peoples in their struggles to gain cultural legitimacy and respect. Following Max Weber’s understanding of cultural legitimacy, political actors seek and use meaning as a basis for power and identity. Along these lines, Alison Brysk states that globalization can strengthen local difference through access to information, audiences, markets, foreign policy processes, and transnational pressure points. Increasing interpenetration across borders is not a single process but encompasses linked subsidiary logics of interactions based on power. When these coincide, as they often did historically, globalization tends to erase the tribal village…but when the international relations of states, markets, and civil societies are disparate, local forces have increased opportunities to construct a response. In every case, the growing influence of information and norms in each form of international relations has shifted power toward identity politics. (Brysk 2000: 284-5) Michael Foucault’s ideas about power take Weber and Brysk’s insight to another level. Foucault provides the theoretical context in which many authors discuss and analyze the relationships among globalization, identity emergence, and social movements. In his own words, “power inequalities reconfigure themselves and reinsinuate their effect in always problematic, punctuated, often unpredicted ways. Power…produces new identities, territories and relations” (Foucault 1980a, cited in Sawyer 2004: 222). Foucault’s notion of power provides a constructive framework to analyze contemporary productions of power as a foundation for understanding the creation of cultural and thus political identities. Through the international projection of voice as an assertion of right, indigenous groups have revolutionized the traditional political roles in the public sphere. Voicing Cultural Identity An important aspect of the international, state and local power reconfiguration that results from globalization are drastic changes in the democratization of indigenous voices. Osman examines how globalization affects the democratization process and other political activities of the indigenous peoples of Sarawak. He illustrates how the democratization process can be an empowering one, thus enabling the actors to manage the effects of globalization in their lives. Opportunities for dialogue and heightened participation in the public realm are more important than ever in today’s globalized society as economic and social disparities rise. Due to the unspoken complexities characteristic of a world increasingly interconnected through technology, tourism, economics and international environmental problems, the importance of a newly emerging political space in which marginalized, oppressed, and exploited minorities have a democratic arena to have a voice is immense. Indigenous leaders, federations and communities are voicing their rights in a variety of international outlets such as international forums, human rights law, and international conventions to press for their goals (Warren and Jackson 2002: 1). As neoliberal globalization redistributes power and triggers indigenous groups to voice their identities and thus assert their rights, the realm of cultural identity is of underlying importance. Culture is the means of understanding the “imaginative worlds” within which “all actors operate, the forms of power and agency they are able to construct, and the kinds of desires they are able to form” (Ortner 1999: 7-10). Communities of political identity are shaped by cultural boundaries, shared consciousness, and the politicization of everyday life (Mueller 1992: 12). Where populations and their place are tied together, identities are expressed through “imaginative geographies” (Said 1978), by which the “differences and distinctions between ‘Us’ and ‘Them,’ and between ‘our place’ and ‘their place’” are imagined and articulated so as to provide a basis for a shared identity. This identity is articulated through a sense of sameness in social features and a sense of shared space/place, a “homeland” that offers groups a direct relationship between place and identity (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 22). Indigenous organizers have defined indigenous nationality as “a community of history, language, culture, and territory” (CONAIE 1989: 279, cited in Brysk 2000: 56). Thus, to make a claim to a cultural identity is essentially to articulate one’s positioning in the world according to one’s understanding of history and place. Stuart Hall believes that “cultural identities” have histories and that rather than being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, are subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power. Thus, he renders cultural identities unstable, temporary and contestable, always subject to rearticulation as they are simply a positioning rather than an essence (Hall cited in Li 2000: 152). This attests to the dynamic, changing, evolving nature of cultural identities. Therefore, along with the evolution and changes in cultures and identities throughout time, constructed meanings and perceptions of indigenous people have also been modified to fit the historical context. Tania Li argues that a group’s self-identification as tribal or indigenous is not natural or inevitable, but neither is it simply invented or imposed. It is, rather, a “positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices and landscapes of meaning and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle” (Li 2000: 151). She addresses the “fields of power” within which the discourse on indigenous people is taking shape in Indonesia to show how environmental activists and NGOs envision indigenous groups as tribal possessors of wisdom in order to help them strategically frame their identity. Radcliffe and Westwood discuss how national and community identities are “imagined” by exploring contentious notions of identity in Latin America. They present several different definitions for competing notions of national identity, which are useful in examining how indigenous identities are formed, articulated and expressed. As I stated in the introduction to this section, in this paper I focus on three sources of indigenous identity: place, cosmology and oppositional resistance. As McClure declares, identity is not what one is but what one enacts (McClure 1992: 124). Although the authors state that identities may abstractly arise from cultural resources such as ceremonies and practices, a key factor in their analysis pertains to the importance that lies in place, since the relationships indigenous people enact with their territory is a direct reflection of their identity rooted in birthplace or ancestral ties (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 133). As Poole (1992) explains, an identity is a collective sense of belonging to a specific territory as shared self-awareness, or as A. Smith (1991: 9) describes, as a sense of political community and common rights which reflect and reinforce a feeling of belonging bounded in place (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 16). Symbols of identity grant power, and thus it is at the level of the symbolic that social movements are most successful and compelling (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996:46). Body imagery such as feathers and tribal paint appeals to Western views of indigenous exoticism and primitivism; such visual symbols of cultural identity constitute a significant means of cultural performance. Clothing, local language, customs and rituals, and art exemplify symbolic expressions of identity. Indigenous cosmology and worldviews (i.e. wisdom granted through spiritual vision quests aided by medicinal plants or messages from the sacred boa, jaguar or anaconda) also provide indigenous peoples a means through which to imagine their tribal community. An additional source of unity in community identity results from shared histories of oppositional identity, such as opposition to the “Other” (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996:131), embodied in external forces attempting to dominate or negatively influence indigenous ways of life. Rather than being eliminated by modernity, many “traditional cultures” survive through their transformative engagement with modernity (Hoogvelt 2001: 170). Along the same lines, Tania Li argues that identity remains vague and impotent if it is not formed and nurtured by encounters of confrontation, under conditions of conflict (Li 2000: 158). When engagement between the state and indigenous peoples is framed within, rather than outside or in opposition to, the state’s discourse of development, no indigenous identity is articulated. Thus, Li’s main contention is that the preconditions for persuasively articulating indigenous identity are rooted in opposition, manifested in resistance to development projects (e.g. resistance to multinational oil) or such components of struggle (Li 2000: 150). According to Alison Brysk, identity politics involves an explicit appeal to identity for movement mobilization and external campaigns, the use of identity markers as symbols, and the politicization of cultural practices. Characteristic mechanisms of identity politics include symbolic appeals, information campaigns, and legitimacy challenges to dominant institutions and regimes. Brysk also says that the strategic use of information is an important channel of Indian rights movement influence. In their role as bearers of local knowledge and tradition (Brysk 1996: 35), indigenous groups possess what Bourdieu labeles “symbolic capital ” (Brysk 1996: 41). The transnational appeal of indigenous people is a result of the exoticism of native peoples in the modern world. The Debate on Indigenousness Although the category of being indigenous has often been used as an instrument of oppression by colonial powers, it is now emerging as a platform for indigenous mobilization of identity and political action. Identity-based social movements change politics through the strategic use of information as an important channel of indigenous rights movement influence. The value of indigenous communities’ information is linked to their identity as bearers of tradition (Brysk 2000: 35-6). Just as the notion of an ethnic identity consists of symbolic meaning for a cultural identity, the indigenous category is an artifact of colonial encounters like the labels “tribal,” “native,” “aboriginal,” and “Indian” (Carneiro da Cunha and Almeida 2000, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 5). Until quite recently, tribes were supposed to represent the past – “the part of human evolution that city people were done with; tribal remnants were irrelevant to our times except as museum pieces…” (Tsing 1999: 165). Bruce Braun refers to this phenomenon as “temporal displacement.” He suggests that the only way indigenous people can fit into the frame of the Amazon as nature is through their essentializing primitivism. In his own words, [T]he presence of humans can be admitted to the frame [of nature, as the absence of culture] only to the extent that it does not disrupt the landscape’s ability to signify nature’s premodern purity…[H]umans can enter the picture only insofar as their presence does not cause these landscapes to slide across the great divide from nature to culture. (Braun 2002: 88) Indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon can therefore only appear in one image: as “natural cultures.” For if present in any other view – as modern, technological peoples – the region would lose its identity as the exotic Other (Braun 2002: 88). Therefore, the “temporal displacement” of indigenous people from modernity and thus present day politics impedes a true understanding of the changing nature of indigenous identity. The term indigenous has evolved throughout history to denote different meanings based on the political context and power relations, but most recently it designates a group as vulnerable (Brownie 1992). As such, vulnerability has become a key component in not only how others construct meanings for indigenous identities, but also how indigenous leaders portray themselves and their people to the outside world. Although indigenous groups such as the Huaorani value independence and self-reliance as the core of their cultural survival (Kane 1995: 19), they do recognize their people’s vulnerability as their land is increasingly transformed by the petroleum industry and the colonization it brings. This leads to the ways in which indigenous leaders/groups capitalize on their indigenousness for international support and political power. Alliances with environmental groups, political parties, human rights organizations, and social movements have permitted the instrumental use of indigenous ethnicity (Dean and Levi 2003: 13), thereby politicizing cultural identity. Indigenous people employ their vulnerable status as a call for help, garnering attention and galvanizing political efforts around the world to protect their endangered lands and livelihoods. Tapping into this vulnerability entails the “reification of indigenous people as freeze-framed, dominated by the image of their past and trapped in time as a static, non-progressive culture” (Dean and Levi 2003: 14) and does not respect their potential as emerging political actors in the international arena, as educated and empowered individuals. Rather, it is predicated on their marginalized status as powerless and backwards Others. “Indigenousness” contradicts the essence of change; one loses authenticity if impacted or changed by dominant influences in society (Warren and Jackson 2002). Also at work here is a strategic conflation of engendered indigenous people and threatened natural environment. Because indigenous people, in the absence of modern technology, can be safely located outside history, and thus subsumed within nature, indigenous people are conflated with nature itself. Although indigenous may “use” nature – such as the use of trees to carve out a canoe – their use “is not viewed as being any different in kind from the kinds of marks that animals might make” (Braun 2002: 89). Indigenous people cannot be seen as “primitive,” or as “natural environmentalists,” or as innately in tune with nature and natural systems, or as living in some kind of “harmony” with the natural world, for to make any of these claims burdens indigenous identity with cultural constructions exterior to their own lives. But is it possible that some indigenous people see themselves as the “Other,” and at the same time have figured out ingenious ways to use that believed sense of self-identity as a conscious political strategy? Similarly, is it plausible to suggest that perhaps an indigenous vision of the earth is truly different from the modern scientific vision? If this is true, the two images are diametrically opposed and thus it is no surprise that international environmentalists and NGOs want to embrace the indigenous image of “noble primitives” (Snow 2004). In the 1992 Rio Declaration, the UN called for the full incorporation of indigenous peoples in development planning, yet some postmodernists dismiss the claim of “harmonious adjustment of Indians to their environment as essentializing romanticism” (Nash 2001: 17). This claim elucidates a key component of the political debate on indigenous identity and power: is the desire to preserve indigenous lands, cultures and livelihoods predicated on essentializing romanticism? The conflict between essentialist and constructivist perspectives is pivotal to the theoretical debate on indigenous identity. The constructivist perspective sees cultural identity as “imagined” in and over historical time, deeming all identities “fictive” – their “properties and origins traceable, mutable and vulnerable to deconstruction” (Field 1999: 195, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 14). Essentialism is basically the attempt at describing the ethnic identification of a particular group or people in terms of a set of essences (Field 1999: 194), defined in terms of a “transcendent spirituality, ties to place, common descent, physical differences, cultural practices, shared language, and common histories of suffering” (Warren and Jackson 2002: 8). While acknowledging the benefits of employing exotic visual symbols to “foster a politically effective transnational alliance of pro-indigenous and environmental activists,” the use of such symbols raises questions about the inherent contradictions of such cultural displays that “uncritically traffic in strategic essentialisms” (Dean and Levi 2003: 16). Although vulnerable to essentialism critiques, the use of ceremonial dress acts as both an expression of indigenous identity as well as a means in which groups legitimate their right to a voice in order to acquire control of their ancestral lands. Non-state actors such as social movements can use images, models, facts, and messages as forms of power in the international system (Brysk 2000: 48). Indigenous leaders therefore use “essentialism” to define their indigenous identities, secure the recognition of their peoples as indigenous and valorize their distinct cultural traditions. The dilemma, however, lies in the fact that “essentialism can be used to establish rights to a territory, thus making it an extremely useful term of self-representation,” yet, as Les Field points out, one that threatens identification if the assigned essences are lost or abandoned (Nash 2001: 19). This presents the indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon with great challenges, for as their role in the political and social structures of the nation changes in response to their struggles, they rearticulate their cultural identity accordingly. For example, in response to their peoples’ increasing territorial and resource threats due to neoliberal globalization (and more specifically the oil industry), a few indigenous leaders in Ecuador have taken up political roles in the government for the first time in the nation’s history. But this new role should not make a full-blooded Indian any less authentic as a respected indigenous representative for his/her people. Thus, an indigenous leader in a suit attending a conference in Quito with World Bank representatives is not any less authentic than an indígena wearing a feather head dress in a hut in the Amazon. Therefore, in terms of an indigenous leader’s perception, the newly articulated identity may be empowering, but in terms of outsiders’ perception, the indigenous leader may lose the cultural legitimacy and authenticity that they once had. The threat of “deculturation” as a loss of the symbolic and material reference of a cultural identity (Nash 2001: 25) is therefore more of an imported idea than a reality for the indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon. In the context of specific struggles against the petroleum industry, the Ecuadorian case is perhaps an anomaly in that many indigenous identities are being strengthened rather than eroded in the face of neoliberal globalization. Although some cultures such as the Tetete disappeared completely as a result of the oil industry, the Quichua and Huaorani are gaining political power and respect in their struggles. These native groups see themselves embracing their indigenous identity as a way to carve out a space for themselves in the emerging indigenous ecopolitics of the 21st century as rightful owners of valuable lands. Foreigners, however, may conclude that this process necessitates a “loss” of indigenous identity. But how is one to lose his indigenous identity if it is not an essence, but rather always changing? Protecting a culture is not about keeping it primitive, static, or undeveloped – it’s about allowing that group to take control of their own culture and change with time on their own terms rather than by externally imposed change. As Maybury-Lewis confirms, “cultural survival is a relative concept; it is not about cultural stasis. It involves a people’s ‘cultural control and continuity’ in the face of an ever-changing world dominated by global processes” (Maybury-Lewis quoted in Dean and Levi 2003: 29). As Randy Borman of Ecuador’s Cofán has put it, “My goal is to save a people. In achieving that goal, the culture may have to change. The question then becomes who manages the pace and content of cultural change” (Brysk 2000: 60). Their cultural identity is the very tool the Cofán are using to safeguard their culture for the future, but that very process has changed their cultural identity. When indigenous leaders travel from the Oriente to Quito for a protest or a conference with an oil industry, they bring their traditional identity to the modern world in order to show humanity what is at stake. They put forth their culture as a threatened resource in order to gain rights; in this very process that which is at stake is inevitably changed. What do indigenous leaders have to compromise to be successful political actors and project their voices? Cultural authenticity? “Traditional” identities? The very act of collaboration involves being willing to give something up. Indigenous, NGO and environmentalist collaboration means that many sacrifices must be made. If indigenous groups have to forge new identities in the collaboration process, but find benefits in their new sense of selves, then perhaps forgoing such changes has been valuable. Dean and Levi bring the meanings, constructions, and symbolisms embedded in the notion of indigenousness to the table by discussing the social and political implications of its use in historic and modern discourse. Their fundamental concern is cultural authenticity and the dangers presented by the expression of an indigenous political voice in the modern world. Although indigenous peoples’ failure to adequately voice their political and environmental concerns poses further risk to their land and culture, Dean and Levi contend, “the more they become savvy about the media, politically skilled and linked to the international community, the more they risk being seen as ‘inauthentic’” (Dean and Levi 2003: 2-3). This suggests that indigenous political activism puts forth an indigenous identity that lacks the romanticized image of the natural Other from which indigenous groups derive much of their symbolic capital, moral authority, and political clout. This political work naturally jeopardizes indigenous status as “primitive.” The civilized, politically active indigenous citizen slips out of the savage slot (Trouillot 1991) and as a result loses the cultural legitimacy tied to his/her now lost identity as noble savage that once offered that individual the prospects of a compelling voice in the international political arena. By not taking up the powerful new political role, however, the indígena must forfeit power and potentially endanger his/her very existence in the face of encroaching oil industries and other intensive external forces resulting from Ecuador’s neoliberal regime. How should indigenous people go about asserting themselves as guardians of their ancestral lands, capable of properly managing them, if they must lose their legitimacy in the very process of territorial defense? It is a fine balance of factors to negotiate cultural identity so as to strategically attain a well-projected political voice without losing the very oxygen that nurtures the fire of the indigenous movement. Movements do not merely defend identities but also develop them. A movement for cultural identity faces the paradox that identity is not primordial; it changes as one uses it (Brysk 2000: 50). By deconstructing the cultural parameters of identity formation, the understanding of indigenous resistance is enhanced, for the question of identity and how it is constructed is at the heart of efforts to reclaim territory and power over resources (Nash 2001: 26). The importance of this issue stems from the special niche within sustainability discourse that “tribal” peoples have. Many people believe that an essence of indigenousness is harmonious land-use, but few assess the damage actually done by them (i.e. forest cutting or slash and burn methods of land management). The focus tends to remain on environmentalists’ own hopes for forest conservation (Tsing 1999: 185). Although such “environmentally friendly visions of tribes provide powerful social movement impetus, they reinforce the differences rooted in hierarchical binaries that present great risks within indigenous movement discourse” (Li 2000: 173). By separating “us from them, traditional from modern, victim from aggressor, civilized from savage, or cosmopolitan from tribal,” indigenous groups have little space to “join the processes of modernization because they would have to renounce their identity as Indians” (Sawyer 2004: 35). This “duality spectrum,” in which indigenous are backward savages on one end and guardians of the forest on the other, draws on historical roots and contemporary legitimacy as a key element of the debates on indigenousness. Although indigenous rights movements rely on their very identity as exotic, tribal groups, international environmental and minority rights movements work to “transform the assumption that tribes are backwards remnants of archaic humanity to argue instead that the [modern] world needs tribal wisdom and tribal rights to preserve our endangered biological and cultural diversity” (Tsing 1999: 161). Although important to this discussion, indigenous identity does not have to be couched in terms of “binaries” or “dualisms.” I do not believe they should be categorized in such a black and white manner; perhaps they are neither “savages” nor “moderns.” Regardless, the negotiation of cultural identity has long been an important element in the debates on modernity, development, and globalization and largely depends on the ways in which indigenous peoples as well as the international community imagine the meaning of indigenousness. Summary of Part Three In this section, through the development of theoretical debates regarding indigenous politics, I have established that new opportunities and political realities are manifesting in the space of confrontation between neoliberal globalization and indigenous peoples. As globalization increasingly impacts indigenous groups, they are asserting their rights by voicing their cultural identities, which are not static but rather are in constant flux. These identities gain legitimacy through unparalleled attention from the international community because of the way in which foreigners conceive notions of indigenousness as a valuable, exotic quality. The theories in this section set me up to delve into the next section which illuminates the connection between neoliberal globalization and petroleum development in Ecuador. Theorists contend that although globalization is beneficial to dominant/elite political actors such as TNCs and free-market enterprise, it generally denotes negative implications for marginalized and minority groups, or the less powerful subjects of neoliberal policies. - Four - Neoliberalism in Ecuador The strong presence of multinational oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon is the most potent evidence of the country’s relatively recent adoption of and dedication to the neoliberal system of government. Although the oil industry as a product of neoliberal globalization is threatening the health of indigenous groups in many ways by endangering their cultural livelihood - their Amazonian territories - it has had an extremely positive impact on indigenous groups’ expression of identity in an ironic, paradoxical way. This section will provide the background information and framework for the rest of the paper in which I will argue that indigenous identity has been significantly altered due to the achievements of Ecuador’s neoliberal administration and policy regime. I will first provide a background on petroleum politics in Ecuador to show the extent to which the Ecuadorian government has dedicated its economy to the oil industry. I will establish the relationship between multinational lending institutions, transnational corporations, and thus the development of the Amazon to demonstrate the environmental, social and cultural implications of such neoliberal expansion. The political effects of oil production in Ecuador are immense, largely because of the ways multinational industry has come into conflict with an increasingly forceful indigenous movement. As a quintessential example of resistance to the encroachments and depredations on native lands and indigenous peoples by the global extractive resource industry (Gedicks 2001: 241), Ecuador serves as an instructive case study. Oil, Indigenous Communities and the State: Development in the Ecuadorian Amazon Multinationals wield a tremendous amount of power over the state. In the early 1990s, a group of American oil companies worked together against Ecuador’s president Sixto Duran-Ballen to take control over the country’s lands. Maxus, ARCO, Occidental, City and Oryx demanded changes in the country’s oil laws; in particular, they demanded an absolute guarantee that oil production would not be hindered by laws protecting nature reserves, national parks, or indigenous rights (Kane 1995: 228). Not only does the oil industry control the country’s economic export and debt, but its environmental and cultural biodiversity, as well. Along the Río Napo and even within the boundaries of Parque Nacional Yasuní (Yasuni National Park, Ecuador’s most remote jungle area) there are many petroleros (petroleum companies) exploiting the land. The National Park is between the Napo and Curaray rivers in Napo and Pastaza province with 6100 km² in reserve. It is known for its medicinal, ornamental and timber species, its large wilderness, diverse fauna including regional endemics and threatened species, potential genetic resources, watershed protection, ecotourism and high presence of Huaorani, Cofán and Quichua indigenous peoples. In addition to being a National Park area of conservation, it is an Ethnic and Biosphere Reserve (http://www.nmnh.si.edu/botany/projects/cpd). Oil fields are relatively recent additions to the cultural and biological diversity of Parque Nacional Yasuní. Supposedly, the government employs only modern technologies to drill for oil in this area as it is in a “protected” area. But according to Rodrigo, our naturalist guide from Coca that has worked in the area for 30 years, they only use archaic methods of development which necessitate “putting in roads and cutting down thousands of trees.” In his words, the roads present the gravest problem. The companies come in and bribe the indigenous communities living on the land with schools, money, tin roofs, etc. Many groups accept, except those who have economic alternatives like ecotourism, tagua (a seed used in arts and crafts), or timber species. Up until about five years ago, the Ecuadorian Government had the final say in where petroleros could and could not develop their industries, but in the past five years due to indigenous groups in politics, as well as the increasing presence of preservation and ecotourism programs, the indigenous people now have la última palabra (the final word). The Cofán and Quichua groups are the main groups here. (Suarez, Interview 2004) Our conversation concluded with his response to my question of why the development of oil is permitted in a National Reserve. It all comes down to a lack of alternatives and, of course, money. There are really only two choices for Ecuador’s economy, he says: tourism or oil; which is better? Historically, the lack of state assistance in indigenous land rights issues has been mostly filled by outside actors in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Multinationals constructed the majority of the roads, ports, and pipelines. The director of Ecuador’s Presidential Environmental Council says that, “the State has no presence” (Luis Carrera de la Torre, cited in Brysk 2000: 108); the head of Ecuador’s Amazon development agency complains, “the State will not define its responsibilities to the Amazon region…in environmental matters, we are disoriented and need international help” (Virgilia Rodriguez, director of ECORAE). A village leader from Ecuador’s highland Saraguro province described the unprecedented impact of foreign forces by saying “international presence has helped our development – and the state has never done anything for us” (Brysk 2000: 109). It is ironic that many traditionally thought positively of development, and thus that international oil companies were helping them. But now the very same communities are struggling against them. Background: Petroleum Politics in Ecuador The magnitude of petroleum politics is palpable. Wandering through the streets of Quito in the months that I lived there in 2003, I absorbed the political messages of frustrated citizens every day. Graffiti paints concrete walls of businesses, houses, and even church fences in phrases such as más petróleo = más pobreza, or fuera gringos y su Compañía. (More petroleum equals more poverty; get out gringos and your Company). Throughout the developing and developed worlds, the petroleum industry has been mired in controversy, conflict, and protest. Ecuador shares problems common to all oil-producing countries in the developing world: high levels of corruption, poverty, external debt, and political instability (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 41). Ecuador is the second largest producer of oil in Latin America, after Venezuela, and yet still remains one of the world’s smallest oil-producing countries (in production levels). Sixty percent of Ecuador’s national budget is funded by oil earnings (McMeekin 2004); continued oil exploration and production are widely deemed necessary to ensure the country’s wellbeing (www.american.edu/TED/ecuador). Yet “the myth of oil prosperity runs wide and deep,” states a report by the Rainforest Action Network, exemplified by the many petroleum-led strategies that have delivered nation after nation into a spiral of debt and dependency (Ordonez 2002: 12). Although state officials perceive the development of the Amazon as a lifejacket keeping the country economically afloat, economists call it a “resource curse” as it fails to incorporate long-term insight. In the short-term, an oil well might bring low-paying jobs, paved roads, and better schools into a community, but long-term it is likely to make a developing country corrupt, polluted and poor (Hufstader 2004: 13); the Company’s exit leaves the community devastated, “dejado con nada” (left with nothing) (Suarez 2004: interview). As one indigenous resident in the provincial of Pastaza said, “during early contacts, the company promised us that we would benefit from oil development forever.” But after production facilities were up and running, according to the same resident, Occidental changed, and many people felt “botadas” (thrown away), and “engañadas” (tricked); he said that their quality of life had been impaired, rather than improved and that “the majority of people here do not feel that they share in the benefits” (Kimerling 2001: interviews from 1998-2000 in Block 15). The community leader of Río Jivino said “at first, relations with the company were good. But now all of the comunas are in disagreement with the company. With small obras (works), it won the friendship of the dirigentes…now, it is abandoning the friendship…it has not complied with the agreements” (Kimerling 2001: interview). Only in the wake of an oil company’s presence will the community see that the benefits are temporary and that it is left in a threatened condition, with a loss of identity and a jeopardized natural resource base (Kimerling 2001: 80). The presence of Industry in indigenous territories puts stress on indigenous groups since the “withdrawal of capital from old industrial areas leaves the communities devastated in its wake, forced to resort to subsistence strategies that are no longer adequate” (Nash 2001: 2). When multinationals finish their work and leave, they take the majority of the oil profits and leave Ecuadorian communities in a state of environmental and social degradation. The main reason that economic debt worsens is that most of the profits do not stay in the country, yet state officials keeps pursuing the same route to dig the nation out of debt, not understanding the direct correlation between increasing oil development and rising national debt. Before oil development, Ecuador had a negligible foreign debt of $200 million and a poverty rate below 50%. Today, after 30 years of oil production, with an estimated half of the country’s reserves depleted, Ecuador per capita is the most highly indebted country in Latin America and the poverty rate approaches 70% (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 42). Due to Ecuador’s dependence on foreign capital, it has exerted little environmental control and has increasingly encouraged oil exploration (www.american.edu/TED/ecuador). The forces of multinational industry are increasingly developing sacred indigenous lands for oil and leaving behind an environmental disaster. The Amazonian indigenous groups have historically been pushed to modernize and join the rest of the nation in its march towards unimpeded development. Government and indigenous visions clash as national development seeks to make the people orderly while simultaneously redirecting their forest resources to national priorities such as profit and export production. The desire to tame and modernize the Amazon encouraged the proliferation of numerous development programs in the 1960. Many national governments in South America pushed for development, but the concerted drive to open up the Amazon also reflected strong pressures from the United States. The Kennedy administration instituted the Alliance for Progress in 1961, which offered sweeping economic aid to Latin American countries that promised to embark on paths to “modernization.” Investments in the Amazonian portions of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia by U.S. multinationals resulted. These companies were offered tax incentives if they were willing to invest in pursuits such as agribusiness, manufacturing, logging, oil exploration and mining – endeavors that eventually brought hundreds of thousands of colonists into the Amazonian region (Slater 2002: 136): In the 1960s, a number of Amazonian nations, backed by aid from foreign banks, launched intensive development programs designed to harness the forest’s riches and draw previously isolated sectors of the countries into modernization schemes. […] [T]he construction of extensive oil and gas pipelines cut through massive tracts of land inhabited by native peoples. The resulting deforestation made the Amazonian Rain Forest a focal point for a new international environmental movement that assumed increasing prominence. (Slater 2002: 12) Up until the mid 1950s, “progress” was always seen as a panacea in the Amazon, a cure-all solution for its inhabitants’ struggles to develop. But Claude Levi-Strauss’ trip to the Amazon in 1955 changed the symbol of the Amazon from “Second Eden” or “Hostile Wilderness” to “Disappearing World” to fit his sense of impending doom that distinguished him as framing the Amazon with worry instead of glorification or fear (Slater 2002: 50). The discovery of oil in the Amazon in the late 1960s marked the beginning of a new phase of Amazonian identity. This identity of the Amazon reflects the historical context of the early seeds of neoliberal globalization that at the time were beginning to sprout in South America. Ecuador joined OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Export Countries) in 1973 and brought about even more drastic transformations within the Amazonian region. Petroleum development became a national security concern (Sawyer 2004: 44). During the course of the 1980s three separate democratically elected regimes began introducing a neoliberal program that sought to increase export production (especially oil), open the economy to foreign investment and trade, and reduce the state’s productive and distributive functions. But it wasn’t until 1992 that neoliberalism transformed the country’s political-economic reality with a passion. As was the case with many indebted Third World countries, multinational lending institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) granted Ecuador loans only on the condition that it implement specific neoliberal economic policies (Sawyer 2004: 11-12). In 1990, Ecuador, working closely with the World Bank, re-drafted its Hydrocarbon Law to decrease state intervention and increase private involvement. In a departure from the original contract, low surveillance of multinational activity would not exist; oil companies assumed regulation themselves. The New Hydrocarbon contract gives oil companies more power and offers incentives that encourage corporations to minimize costs, which means fewer environmental regulations (Sawyer 2004: 96-97). Until 1992 when it finished production, Texaco used technologies that were long illegal in the United States to increase profits (Sawyer 2004: 44), and the resulting environmental consequences have been severe. In early 1994, the Ecuadorian government announced the seventh round of oil leases to open up ten new areas of the Amazon for oil exploration and production. The World Bank prepared a $20 million loan to the Ecuadorian government to privatize the state oil company Petroecuador (Treakle 1996). The new oil leases and the new law were met with harsh criticism by indigenous groups who have suffered the negative consequences of oil development for decades. In the late 1990s the Ecuadorian government signed an agreement with the IMF that requires Ecuador to open the Amazon for oil development in order to help pay increasing national debt (Grove 2004). The United States stands to gain a lot from further access to the Amazon’s potential reserves and already gets more oil from Latin America than from the Middle East (Grove 2004). An optimistic 1999 study by Ecuador’s Ministry of Energy and Mines suggests that the Ecuadorian Amazon could yield as much as 26 billion barrels of oil reserves, enough to rival Mexico and Nigeria (Grove 2004). With Ecuador’s new neoliberal policies in place, this feat could be a potential goal of state development regimes in the near future. Indigenous villages would increasingly be units of administration and the forest a national resource domain (Tsing 1999: 166). As one Indian leader noted in his address to ex-President Borja, the illusion of the riches of the jungle has seduced many, even the [Ecuadorian] State. In olden times, it seduced with gold, cinnamon…and rubber…today with lumber, petroleum, [and] land…[F]or Western civilization, the exploitation of these riches has constituted the base of their fortune. For our peoples, it has represented genocide. (Sawyer 2004: 53). This historical inequality strengthens identity and sense of self as indigenous people struggle to achieve a projection of voice that grants them respect and self-determination. Neoliberalism taking hold: The entrance of transnational corporations such as Texaco and the ensuing environmental, social and cultural implications Texaco is an instructive example of the way in which transnational corporations have historically interacted with the indigenous groups residing on the lands of development, and the response of the Ecuadorian state. The influence of globalization, neoliberal development and the internationalization of production makes international investment possible and gives transnational corporations (TNCs) and multinationals “unprecedented freedoms to locate their business where it is most profitable to do so, often at the expense of communities and their environment” (Newell 2001: 83). As such, multinationals are increasingly central to state environmental decision-making and patterns of resource use. Texaco’s entrance in Ecuador drastically transformed the Amazonian region and the relationship between indigenous peoples, multinationals and the state. The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest remaining humid tropical forest and contains the greatest biological diversity of any known ecosystem. A natural carbon sink, it is believed to contain 20-25% of the world’s flowing fresh water and is home to hundreds of ethno-linguistic groups of indigenous peoples whose health, well-being and cultural survival are closely linked with environmental quality (Kimerling 2001: 67). Dating back to the 1960s, Texaco brought unrestrained development and colonization to this area during Ecuador’s oil boom, devastating local communities and causing widespread deforestation, loss of land and wildlife, cultural disintegration, disease and a host of new social problems. Traditional indigenous groups like the Cofán, the Secoyas and the Huaorani, once numbering in the tens of thousands, were reduced to a few hundred each, and the Tetetes disappeared completely. Texaco’s main Amazon refinery was in Shushufindi, a Cofán indigenous village. Their population went from 3,000 to 300 in the time of Texaco’s presence from introduced diseases and environmental problems (Switkes 2003: 106). To save costs, Texaco dumped its toxic wastes directly into the environment, causing massive contamination of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and an array of health problems among local communities, including increased rates of skin and intestinal disease as well as cancer (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 42). The Rainforest Action Network found that Texaco alone spilled 17 million gallons of crude oil and constructed oil roads that opened more than 2.5 million acres of the forest to colonization. Currently, Ecuador’s rain forests are being cut down by oil companies and settlers at a rate of approximately 340,000 hectares a year (www.american.edu/TED/ecuador.html), not surprising as Ecuador has the highest deforestation rate in all of South America. As Judith Kimerling calculated in her 1996 study on Ecuador, contaminants in Amazonian Basin drinking water reached levels 1,000 times the safety standards recommended by the U.S. EPA (Sawyer 1996: 26). Over the course of three decades (from about 1963-1992), Texaco’s petroleum exploitation transformed the Northern region of the Amazon by contamination from thousands of miles of seismic grids, hundreds of oil wells and open waste pits, numerous pumping stations, and an oil refinery. Both directly and indirectly, these oil operations tore indigenous communities apart through disease and displacement, contamination and corruption (Sawyer 2004: 13). According to Judith Kimerling’s field research, Texaco’s development led to the construction of a network of 300 miles of roads that opened the Amazon to colonization and led directly to the clearing of more than two million acres of rainforest. Since then, however, it has gotten much worse. Alongside each exploratory well, huge toxic earth pits of untreated chemicals and industrial solvents are dumped into unlined, open waste pits. Even during the early years of Texaco’s operation in the Oriente, it was standard practice in the United States to process chemicals before directly dumping them into the pits (Sawyer 2004: 101). A 1999 study by the University of London discovered that the people of San Carlos (the location of the case study from Part One) experience up to 30 times the normal incidence of cancer (Hufstader 2004: 13). The pollution threatens the very existence of native communities in the Amazonian region, and they are increasingly voicing their opposition. Though Texaco is the best-known multinational oil company to carve its tracks through the Amazon, Occidental’s history in Quichua territory also illuminates the core issues of contestation between indigenous groups and multinationals. In 1998, Ecuador adopted a new constitution that, for the first time in the nation’s history, included a section on the collective rights of indigenous peoples. The problem is that while Ecuador recognizes and guarantees the rights of indigenous peoples, these rights are not enforced with legislation or regulations. The implementation of the rights to information and participation in environmental decision-making is the responsibility of the state but Ecuador has ceded both environmental protection and community relations in this region to Occidental (Kimerling 2001: 71). Both the state and the oil company prove to be incapable of implementing environmental regulations and ensuring indigenous participation; international NGOs and environmentalists have assumed this role. This is the direction of the subsequent section. In previous sections I established the association between globalization, indigenous territory and indigenous identity. In this section I have conveyed the extent to which the oil industry has directly affected indigenous lands, their social communities and cultural identities. What I have tried to establish, on a very general level, is that globalization affects the natural environment, which shapes indigenous identity, and consequently that globalization affects identity. Now I am prepared to address exactly how it is that indigenous identities are being altered in the Ecuadorian Amazon in the process of projecting their voice. I will argue that it is through resistance and struggle against the powerful forces of neoliberal globalization and its production of petroleum development that indigenous groups are crafting their indigenous identities. - Five - Indigenous people, NGOs, Oil, and the State: Making Identity through Struggle “We strive for a way to balance the competing demands of nature and culture, self and society, local and global, change and tradition. We struggle above all for choice, control, and dignity in managing the larger forces that surround us. Identity, balance, self-determination are the anchor points for universal human rights” – Alison Brysk (Brysk 2000: xv). The struggle between Amazonian indigenous groups and the state over resources and territorial defense created the context for a well-articulated indigenous identity to emerge. The emergence of a group’s self-identification manifests through struggle and conflict (Li 2000), and thus the various indigenous groups of Ecuador have crafted their identity based on a distinct relationship to notions of history, culture, place, democracy, citizenship, development and power. The development of a new political space in the 21st century through indigenous empowerment in Ecuador is aided by the collaboration among indigenous leaders, environmental activists and international NGOs. The fear of losing cultural and biological diversity that is often expressed by international environmentalist and human rights organizations is creating a space for indigenous empowerment and a realm to articulate their voices through appeals to environmental protection. Through this collaboration and support, based largely on a powerful indigenous identity and cultural legitimacy, the Ecuadorian indigenous movement exemplifies the new way in which the adoption of captivating labels of indigenousness are transforming into strategic methods of gaining political power in resource struggles. The resulting discourse opens up a landscape of new prospects in the public sphere, creating a space for democratic debate between the state and the tribes as well as international appeal. Political policy is reconfigured and new possibilities abound. Globalization has meant the emergence of often dynamic and innovative hybrid cultural forms and elements for identity construction (Yúdice et al. 1992). Such hybridization of cultural forms and bases for identity is widespread in Latin America (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996:19) and results from the power channeled through mechanisms of state power, reaching as far as distant Amazonian communities. In the face of conflicting interests and notions of community, Amazonian indigenous nationalities have been actively involved in creating their own senses of place. These indigenous groups are presently demonstrating the process of negotiation over place and identity in a context of “counter-hegemony,” a powerful resistance occurring as a response to the threats of external pressure (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 109). Confronted with the cultural pressures presented by multinational oil companies (discussed in the last section), indigenous leaders, communities and federations have attempted to clarify their own places and territories upon which their livelihoods depend, countering nationalistic, hegemonic images of the Amazon as an empty space (terra nullius) needing development. Indigenous groups offer their distinct cultural identities to stress that their territory is not desolate but rather “widely inhabited by groups who already use the resources in a sustainable manner” (CONAIE 1989, cited in Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 125). Such counter-images of indigenous identity will be explored later. A Case in Point: Indigenous Quichua The Sarayacu community of indigenous inhabitants is opposed to oil drilling on their land, an area called “Block 23. ” The community is home to roughly 2,500 Quichua, whose rights to an area of 132,000 hectares were officially recognized in 1992 (Valente 2004). The conflict dates back to 1996, when the Ecuadorian government signed an agreement with the Argentine oil company Compañia General de Combustibles (CGC), awarding it the concession to exploration Block 23. The Quichua, however, were not consulted before this deal was struck, as they should have been in accordance with the Ecuadorian constitution. The ongoing conflict has become increasingly tense since 2000, as a result of repeated invasions by the oil company, the pressure exerted by the Ecuadorian government, and the advance of military groups on the community’s territory. When CGC tried to enter Sarayacu land to explore for oil in late 2002, the indigenous community mobilized into 25 “peace and life camps,” strategically placed along their territorial boundaries (Handler 2004). Painted in a traditional black dye called wituk, and armed with traditional chonta (palm wood) lances, residents formed a human wall to keep out oil workers. The Ecuadorian government of President Lucio Gutiérrez has now militarized the area in an attempt to ensure that the project goes ahead, claiming that it will bring “development and jobs to the region” (Valente 2004). The Sarayacu believe that these concessions are a threat to their livelihood and their culture. “Our people’s future is threatened. We are living in a constant state of fear,” Marlon Santi, a community leader from Sarayacu voiced into an international reporter’s recorder early this November (Valente 2004). As Ecuadorian-American Karen Marrero says, if oil drilling begins in Block 23, “it will completely destroy [the Sarayacu] way of life” because they share their Amazon homeland with spirits of the jungle. “If the jungle is destroyed, the [spirits] will run away…if that happens, how are they going to live?” (Grove 2004). On a typical day, Sarayacu men fish and hunt in the jungle while women gather bananas or dig yucca in the fields. Despite the possibility of new jobs that would come with oil development, which has enticed at least some indigenous peoples in the area, the Sarayacu remain opposed to the concessions. Marlon Santi voices that “petroleum development has been a disaster in Ecuador, generating environmental, social and cultural crises, and ultimately causing the extinction of indigenous peoples. We want to maintain our way of living, free of contamination, in harmony with nature.” Santi uses environmentalist rhetoric, drawing on his people’s “harmonious” relationship with nature, to effectively voice his community’s indigenous identity. Another strategy employed by indigenous spokespeople is to engender a feeling of concern in the international community. Sarayacu elder Sabino Gualinga says: During my 80 years of life I have seen many changes. What we defend today is not what existed in the old days. […] With pain we observe how many species were exterminated [in nearby areas from oil companies], species that today we cannot encounter. In the lakes we found immense anacondas dead, dolphins, freshwater otters, caymans, and little by little the beings of the rivers and mountains searched for refuge. Just recently they are recovering again, because the wise Mother Nature can recover again, but that takes many years and perhaps the species that existed before will not return. (www.sarayacu.com) To date, the Quichua community has been successful in managing to block oil company operations on their land with the help of international campaigns denouncing the illegal encroachment on their territory and the potentially devastating environmental effects (Valente 2004). As such, they have formed a powerful alliance with international environmentalists and non-governmental organizations to fight for their Amazonian land, and the diversity of life that relies on it as a form of cultural survival. EarthRights International, a non-profit that documents human rights and environmental abuses worldwide, has taken on the struggles of comunidad Sarayacu. This collaborative approach to territorial and cultural struggle has brought the indigenous group into the limelight, offering them new opportunities for voice projection and political activism. On September 21, 2004 the Ecuadorian network Gamavisión signaled a warning that Sarayacu land and culture are in danger. But the alliance between Sarayacu and NGOs has not only brought their struggles to national attention; internationally through internet communication, newspapers, journals, and academic discourse, the resistance of the Quichua community of Sarayacu has been projected world-wide. Sarayacu elder Sabino Gualinga traveled to New York City to look for help at the United Nations in 2000, and contacted the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) to take their case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In July of 2004, their case won. That victory prompted heightened discussion and meetings in Quito, which provided the indigenous group with access to democratic debate and participation. In addition, representatives of the Quichua community traveled to the Argentine capital to request President Néstor Kirchner’s intervention in the conflict, since the oil company threatening entrance in their territory is Argentinean. The delegation staged a demonstration in the capital’s largest plaza, supported by local indigenous, social, and environmental organizations (Valente 2004). The struggle and resistance of the Quichua community of Sarayacu in the Ecuadorian Amazon is exemplary of how the articulation of a group’s self-identification through struggle and conflict against a development project can result in the emergence of new possibilities for indigenous peoples through political empowerment and democratic debate. Indigenous identity and cultural legitimacy are used as political tools to thwart the forces of neoliberal globalization and the entrance of multinational oil in native lands. The Sarayacu community joined forces with political, cultural and environmental supporters to successfully articulate their identity and assert their rights to a greater measure of cultural autonomy and self-determination. Every strategic tool available was utilized to take advantage of their symbolic capital. Indigenous spokespeople made reference to “tribal elders,” “tribal ecological wisdom,” the specific tribal place central to the group’s identity and culture, the presence of allies and sympathizers, and the powerful external force threatening destruction. Alliances are forged and media attention appropriately awarded as an “outcome of the cultural and political work of articulation through which indigenous identity is made explicit” (Li 2000: 163). Indian rights movements such as that of the Sarayacu Quichua become internationalized through transnational relationships with inter- and non-governmental organizations, creating networks of non-state actors which operate relatively autonomously of state interests (Brysk 1996: 39). Ecuador’s own government has historically been known to ignore its indigenous peoples’ struggles, and only through their internationalization does the government recognize them. As Brysk notes, because of a lack of government interest, some Latin American indigenous groups (such as the Quichua de Sarayacu) first gain access to their own governments through international organizations (Brysk 1996: 42). The next section will highlight the dynamic relationship between struggling indigenous groups and their international NGO and environmentalist representatives. Creative Action through Collaboration: NGO, Environmentalist and Indigenous Alliances As discussed earlier, the stigma of being primitive and exotic was at once degrading to indigenous culture, created by the state together with political and cultural discrimination. However, this stigma has recently created a new politics for emerging indigenous empowerment in Ecuador through the alliance between indigenous leaders and environmental activists, NGOs and the “exotic” appeal to the modern cosmopolitan urbanite. A new role for indigenous leaders is arising out of the approval by green developers and environmentalists, forming alliances between the two (Tsing 1999: 162). As one native of the Amazon said, no one in the outside world hears our voice nor do they know that we exist…it’s just trees and parrots…But even if they don’t want to listen to us, perhaps they will still hear the voice of nature in which trees and parrots have always lived with people…perhaps in listening to nature, they will come to hear us, also and the future will be different, and better than the past. (Slater 2002: 204) Belief in the sacred character of the earth as perceived by environmentalists and indigenous peoples has thus facilitated a powerful alliance. Cosmopolitan interest in nature and its preservation brings Amazonian natives a voice because through international attention on biodiversity, outsiders can’t help but hear the voices of those living there and unintentionally protect them, too. With the right leadership stance, it is possible to enter into collaborative projects in which indigenous concerns assume the “aura of urban professional environmentalism. These collaborative layers then form the space of local articulation for so-called global environmentalism” (Tsing 1999: 199). Increasingly, indigenous peoples are forging political alliances with environmentalists, feminists, youth groups, and people of color (Burger 1990, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 99). The “cultural renaissance” underway in a number of indigenous communities has generated considerable interest in a “traditional” ethos and worldview, governance, subsistence, arts, crafts, ethnobotany, and healing (Dean and Levi 2003: 99). Indigenous have garnered international interest based on the appeal of such features; a fascination with the possible alternatives to modernity provides landscapes of imagination. Such spaces challenge dominant power regimes from the margins. The social effects of “shifting rhetoric, narratives, and the reformulations of identity and community that they engender” open new doors of possibility as “tribal elders are made in the mobile spaces found within coercive international dreams of conservation and development” (Tsing 1999: 159). In Ecuador, for example, shamans and indigenous leaders attract an immense amount of international attention for their amazing capabilities to cure ailments with native resources from the Amazon, feats that even modern medicine cannot achieve. This grants them special importance and respect. Such international attraction has offered tribal elders in remote Amazonian communities new prospects of power, exemplified in Sarayacu. Sabino Gualinga has effectively transformed his ordinary village into an object of international fascination and thus induced a call to protect the land and his people’s rights to forest use. He created discourse that united environmental preservation and ethnic pride by “constituting the village as an object of respect for those interested in the conjunction of forest protection, community resource management, and ethnic pride” (Tsing 1999: 168). This is an exemplary case in which an indigenous leader capitalizes on the indigenous identity that foreigners provide them with in order to gain power. As Li asserts, activists draw upon the arguments, idioms, and images supplied by the international indigenous rights movement, especially the claim that indigenous people derive ecologically sound livelihoods from their ancestral lands and possess forms of knowledge and wisdom which are unique and valuable. But the discourse on indigenous people has not simply been imported; it has, rather, been inflected and reworked as it has traveled. (Li 2000: 155) As the Sarayacu case demonstrates, such international attraction ultimately sparks national attention, resulting in the heightened legitimacy of indigenous platforms for struggle. Therefore, an international interest in both environmental conservation and tribal preservation galvanizes forces globally and puts the spotlight on specific communities. But as Li notes, for an exhaustive understanding of Ecuador’s indigenous struggles it is critical to recognize that this international indigenous identity rhetoric that grants them power is not wholly imported. Rather, a key variable in the process of identity construction is the fact that indigenous leaders themselves take on this identity as shape-shifters and adjust it to fit their particular desires. Foreign Influence on Indigenous Voice: Benefits and Challenges Associated with International Identity Construction Recently, international concerns with degradation of fragile environments have focused attention on rainforests and their long-time residents. NGOs focusing on issues of conservation and development have joined state officials in negotiating the role of indigenous communities (Tsing 1999: 160). Environmental preservation has therefore brought global attention to the role of indigenous peoples since they are those inhabiting the land of desired protection. Indigenous peoples’ custodianship of their habitats has only of late been recognized by international agencies (IUCN Inter-Commission Task Force on Indigenous Peoples 1997). Environmentalists now considering efforts to oppose the destruction of natural environments must take into account not only the cultural traditions of indigenous populations but also the full social organization and ritual responses that maintain conservation practices (Nash 2001: 17). As international movements for environmental conservation and indigenous rights draw attention to the political and ecological importance of marginalized indigenous communities threatened by neoliberal globalization such as petroleum exploitation, the question of indigenous voice and identity becomes extremely important. How can foreigners accurately voice the desires and identities of peoples completely unknown to them and with whom they share only a love of the forest? Or as Tsing asks, what does it mean to speak of or for a “tribe” in the 21st century (Tsing 1999: 196)? Some argue that outsiders’ “true concern” is the forest, not the people living within it (Slater 2002: 150). Regardless of the genuine concern of foreigners, the point is that international actors are increasingly speaking for indigenous peoples and articulating this voice globally. But how can foreign actors so distant from the Amazon really speak for the people who are directly impacted by the decision? One Huaorani individual critiqued the way in which international forces administer and try to impose top-down change from the exterior: My God…an enormous amount of money is spent on “saving the rainforest,” and so much of it is being wasted. You have all these wealthy groups just sitting around in New York or Washington talking about things, and meanwhile we lose more and more of the forest. You can’t just do it from the top down. There has to be some kind of real communication between here and there. (cited in Kane 1995: 108) Communication is key if foreign actors really hope to make a difference in the development practices of multinationals in Ecuador. Although groups such as the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) have a legitimate, if not obligatory, role in opposing oil exploitation in the Oriente, it is essential that when such an external group sits down with an oil company to negotiate a deal for Huaorani land, at least it gets to know the Huaorani people first (Kane 1995: 77). An instructive example illustrates the difficulties and challenges inherent in the negotiation of indigenous land as an outside actor as well as the necessity of bringing indigenous groups a voice. NRDC attorney John F. Kennedy, Jr. tried to negotiate with two coordinators of an Ecuadorian coalition of environmental groups so that they would support Conoco in developing Block 23 on Huaorani land. The deal failed last minute, however; in the eyes of the Ecuadorian Government it threatened state power with hidden agendas and overwhelming foreign influence. The military controls most of the oil-producing land in Ecuador, and it looks harshly upon foreigners. “They bring a mountain of bad ideas,” one military worker voiced. “Outside influences” were blamed whenever the indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon began to agitate against oil development (Kane 1995: 23). Indigenous groups have resisted against the oil industry since its arrival in the 1960s, but only in the last decade since international environmentalists and NGOs have given them a voice, or as some argue, spoken for them, has anything really radical transpired. The Exoticization Project A strong tendency to “exoticize” indigenous identity and culture poses challenges to the attempts of speaking for an indigenous group as an outside actor. The idealization of natives as rich beyond measure in tropical realms of nature portrays images of indigenous people as “good stewards of their ancestral lands.” (Slater 2002: 38). Slater discusses the symbolism of the Amazon as an exotic realm of nature, appealing to the urban cosmopolitan worried about saving the rainforest from destruction. As Thomas Friedman says, “the most interesting and diverse tribes in the Amazon live in the most pristine, unpolluted, undeveloped regions” (Friedman 2000: 301). This projection of the Amazon parallels the projection of indigenous identity as exotic, tribal, and primitive, a culture to protect against the sullying forces of the outside world. It parallels ways that NGOs portray indigenous identity and use particular images to further their own interests. The idealization of indigenous cultures of the Ecuadorian Amazon, although often part of the process of international actors “speaking for a tribe,” is a source of empowerment for indigenous groups that adopt such identities. An example is the way indigenous rhetoric over the past decade has increasingly been laced with “eco-speak.” This phenomenon is illustrative of the new role indigenous are assuming as they use sophisticated modern environmental science terminology to defend their claims as protectors of the forest. As a representative of OPIP (Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza – the northern region of the Ecuadorian Amazon) claims in a speech to an oil company: “we defend the last frontier of uncontaminated selva (jungle) remaining in Ecuador. […] For centuries we have been the defenders of the rainforest…we live in and defend part of the large Amazon Basin, the lungs of the world and the patrimony of all living species on the planet” (cited in Sawyer 2004: 53). For an indigenous representative to declare on her own that her homeland is “the lungs of the world,” she would have to be educated on the ecological processes of a forest and the role of a tree in the absorption of toxic carbon dioxide and the emission of cleansing oxygen to the atmosphere. In the isolated communities of the Amazon this is a highly unlikely prospect. This adoption of science as a part of an indigenous case for rainforest preservation is not a problem per se, but faces harsh social science critique. My argument critiques the tendency to “colonize” the public political speech of indigenous leaders with images and concepts that are clearly western-scientific in origin, yet because I am arguing for their sovereignty, they should, like environmentalists, act in their own indigenous self-interest, and increase their political power by adopting a scientific rhetoric familiar to western policy makers. For before they adopted such terminology and vocal self-definition, indigenous assertions were silenced, unheard or flat out ignored. The majority of indigenous leaders participating in “eco-speak” have acquired their specific styles of speaking and choice of vocabulary from foreign environmentally-conscious NGOs, activists, and leaders. The Amazon as one of only ten remaining “hot spots” of ecological biodiversity on the globe rightfully determines indigenous groups as “crusaders of the rainforest, the last patch of tropical Eden left on Earth” (Sawyer 2004: 15). When the overly-used, often misleading word of sustainability gets utilized, it is no doubt a sign of international influence. The Inter-Commission Task Force on Indigenous Peoples makes the case that since “indigenous peoples are responsible for most of the world’s cultural and biological diversity and since their knowledge systems embody the principle of sustainability, we must ensure their empowerment” (IUCN 1997: 21, cited in Nash 2001: 26). The contents of this statement, although of utmost truth and salience, illustrate the way in which indigenous are empowered through imported and then altered images of indigenous identity. The greatest advantage of drawing on romanticized, exotic images of Amazonian indigenous groups is increased international interest in indigenous issues, which can have a variety of effects. Indigenous struggles often gain legitimacy and cultural authenticity as well as heightened national importance, sometimes resulting in increased international funds and/or economic and political resources to employ in their resistance movements. The unconcluded legal battle between indigenous communities near Lago Agrio and ChevronTexaco exemplifies this perfectly because the natives would have never garnered the (inter)national attention and legitimacy that they managed to receive without the help of international actors. The Amazon Defense Front empowered the marginalized communities and projected their identities internationally. Environmental NGOs in the United States galvanized individuals to undertake in political demonstrations and boycotts in front of the ChevronTexaco headquarters in California. This was all accomplished through the environmentally-oriented vision of Amazonian indigenous and the exotic, tribal source of engagement between citizens of modernity and their Others. The images and identities of the Ecuadorian Amazon constructed by and for an international audience (those that aim to gain attention and support) have effects that ripple across the international community. For example, the image of a fierce jungle portrayed in multi-media sources such as a poster, movie or book depicts images of savage-like Indians. Similarly, a representation of the Amazon as a pristine, exotic environment serves to further naturalist’s belief that such a place is a quintessential realm of untouched Nature (Slater 2002: 95-101). This dualism between fierceness and exoticism influences international perceptions of indigenous identity to such a degree that it can affect U.S. lawmaker votes on foreign aid bills proposing to go to countries such as Ecuador. Successful images of indigenous identity therefore affect the extent to which international NGOs and U.S. cosmopolitans politically and financially support cultural and biological diversity preservation endeavors (Slater 2002: 8). If the power of constructing images of the Amazonian region and its peoples is of such vital importance to their protection, can we begin to paint a new vision? By acknowledging that the cherished association between indigenous legitimacy and representations of the Exotic Other is a conventional but not necessary connection, the international community will realize the importance of seeing indigenous peoples representing themselves for who they are, rather than permitting them to speak only when they cater to the confused logic of our own colonial longings. (Dean and Levi 2003: 27) The Ecuadorian Amazon is as much of a social as a natural creation. International participation in its identity construction and global interest in its preservation make it so. By seeing more in the Amazon than its romanticized wonders it is possible to perceive its development problems in a new way and to listen to the platforms of its inhabitants’ struggles in a new light. Counter Images Although in the past decade this often employed selective magnification of the Amazon and its inhabitants has provided indigenous struggles political and environmental legitimacy, it portrays only certain images that conceal and exclude larger identities (Slater 2002: 16). Contemporary indigenous struggles such as those originating in the Ecuador’s Oriente reveal the emergence of indigenous voices through counter-images of indigenous identity. Although many indigenous leaders generally have few qualms about aligning themselves with Western concerns for tropical conservation, they vehemently denounce ecological imperialism. As one indigenous representative of OPIP explicitly maintains, an integral component of indigenous identity is sustainable use of the tropical forest, but theirs was not untouched, virgin forest. “Ancestral forest management practices,” he claimed, “shape the ecology of the forest, as equally as the cultural identity of those who live in it” (Sawyer 2004: 53). International NGOs and environmentalists often mention the sustainable practices of indigenous groups but seldom talk about their forestry patterns/management practices. By leaving out the details of indigenous peoples’ way of life that don’t further environmentalists’ constructed vision of them, criticisms regarding foreigners’ use of ecological imperialism arise. Are harmonious, ecologically friendly indigenous communities a myth? Various individuals have attempted to debunk the myth that peaceful natives are natural conservationists under any circumstance. John Oates provides evidence that “traditional” societies of the world are not natural conservationists. On the contrary, “whenever people have had the tools, techniques, and opportunities to exploit natural systems they have done so” (Oates 1999: 55). This proposed reality is attributed to the rapid social change, as well as a decrease in lifestyles with “traditional” qualities, brought about by neoliberal globalization and the resulting roads, colonization and introduced materials due to the development of the oil industry in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Joe Kane lived with the Huaorani for several extended periods of time and attests that on their own, they do not perceive their Amazonian lands through the eyes of what North Americans would call a conservationist or an environmentalist. Rather, according to Kane the Huaorani men whom he traveled with for months actively used the forest’s resources in daily life for travel, construction, and basic survival. Slater warns against the conflicting environmentalist vision of indigenous identity that imposes upon indigenous people a desire to preserve their lands and cultures as exotic realms of the Other rather than helping indigenous groups to pursue their own visions of development and identity articulation. “Rooted in our cosmopolitan imagining of a utopian space to cherish the forest, we are conflating loving the forest with living in it” (Tsing 1999: 186) and thus romanticizing indigenous peoples’ lifestyle and identity. This brands outsiders culpable of remaking indigenous culture in their own image. However, in the space where international environmentalist understandings of science and ecosystem management confront tribal/local knowledge of ancestral territories, formulations of new identities present the prospects for altered social positionings and identities (Tsing 1999: 163). A New Vision of the Ecuadorian Amazon? “[Amazonia] is neither the salvation of the country nor the lung of the world, but a region which is necessary to know very well in order to search for development alternatives for the Amazonian peoples” -- Valerio Grefa, President of CONFENAIE, Ecuador (Grefa 1993: 418, cited in Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 125) This quote by Valerio Grefa has many significant implications. First, although the Ecuadorian Amazon is valued by the entire world as a biodiverse “hot spot,” it is replete with complex and intricately detailed processes of life. It is not simply a lush, green haven of ecological importance. Rather, it is a mix of indigenous peoples, colonists, missionaries, developmental industries such as mining and petroleum, roads, and rivers, all coexisting in an interconnected forest. Its protection requires an immense amount of detailed research and compromise since there are so many players. The negotiation of the Amazon’s protection cannot be carried out from a distance, as many environmental groups seem to prefer. Finding a space for compromise in development in the Ecuadorian Amazon must entail extensive participation from all seats at the table. As the coordinator of the World Conference for 400 indigenous representatives said to the Earth Summit, “the key reason for environmental degradation and poverty is that governments don’t allow indigenous peoples, the real guardians of nature, to participate in decision-making processes;” instead, they impose unsustainable models of development and conservation on indigenous peoples and do not recognize their fundamental rights (Kimerling 2001). Could voice and heightened levels of participation be granted through petroleum resistance? The creation of a new vision for the Amazon in the 21st century is at hand. This vision incorporates not only biologic life but also the human inhabitants of the forest for the first time ever. The manifestation of this new vision is aided by the increasing power of indigenous voice and participation. The increasing presence of indigenous leaders in magazines, newspapers, television, documentaries, and the internet has contributed to a growing public awareness of indigenous activism and signaled a new role of indigenous people on the international stage and furthered the new vision of the Amazon as home to diverse peoples. I have demonstrated that although the category of being indigenous used to be an instrument of oppression by colonial and national powers, it is now emerging as a platform for mobilization of identity and political action through international identity projection. I will now argue that in their struggles against the multinational oil industry, indigenous groups have come to recognize their own regionally-based cultural identities. This occurs through a process whereby they adopt the exotic identity projected onto them by the international community and then balance that identity with their own traditional and local identity constructions. How Indigenous Groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon Construct and Imagine their Identities Although incentives for and aid in organizing political mobilization may arise in global sites of power (Enge and Whiteford 1989: 8, cited in Nash 2001: 22), it is important to recall that “it is at the level of…communities that…traditions are kept, local organizations forged, class or ethnic consciousness developed, [and] quiescence or rebellion chosen” (Nash 2001: 22). Therefore, even while indigenous identities are being transformed by environmentalists, NGOs, and other international actors, it is essential to remember that ethnic identity or resistance is first articulated and organized at the community level. The origin of indigenous identity is thus highly local (Brysk 2000: 57), despite its transnational character and the fact that it is made up of all kinds of global influences. Consequently, it is immensely important to examine the ways in which indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon construct their own identities in attempts to create legitimate claims over their land. Tsing calls this work of “magic” and “seduction” a “staging of community identity and resource rights to transform exotic stereotypes into community design” (Tsing 1999: 180). But the real question remains as to how indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon themselves “imagine their communities,” to borrow Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase (Anderson 1991). I contend that this identity is realized through their indigenous cosmology that positions them spiritually within the realm of their place, their distinct relationship to their territory, and resistance that shapes their oppositional identity. Indigenous Cosmology Throughout the entire region of the Ecuadorian Amazon, “myth, oration, dance, music, sartorial and corporeal art, architecture and the organization of private and public space” (Roe 1995: 98, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 231) serve as the basis of indigenous identity construction and expression. The sacred deployment of “oral-based tradition and the performance of sacred rites and mythical histories reaffirm indigenous people’s ostensibly legitimate ties to flora and fauna, and – most importantly – land” (Chirif et al. 1991, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 231). Whereas religion is the prime source of unity and common identity among Latin Americans, indigenous cosmology and worldview provide a means through which to imagine a tribal community. As one traditional Huaorani song script reads: “When I die I will make no sound. / I am like the jaguar. / I have no fear” (Kane 1995: 40). The spirits of the boa, anaconda and jaguar are present in daily life of the indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon; they serve to guide leaders in their vision quests, grant them energy and understanding. Although Quichua is a commonly-spoken language among many indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon, the distinct languages of these groups also function as a source of unity in their local identities, as each group possesses its own dialect. Indigenous identity is also rooted in relation to birthplace and the ancestors that still exist among the places of dwelling (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 133). Indigenous peoples’ rights are thus anchored in local and moral worlds entwined in translocal networks of power and identity formation (Dean and Levi 2003: 10). As one indigenous leader expressed in a Cultural Survival Sovereignty Conference, “we were put on this land by the Creator and we are responsible for its stewardship” (Bishop 2001: 63). She refers to her unique relationship with a particular traditional territory. This notion of “I belong to this land” as opposed to the classic Western articulation of “this land belongs to me” serves as the foundation of indigenous worldview and informs their traditional way of life in its entirety (Bishop 2001). This marked difference between Western views of land and indigenous conceptions of territory denotes a definite divergence in world view. Western conceptions of land lead to feelings of private ownership and economic value. The indigenous communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon, on the other hand, view their territory in a light of reciprocity and community ownership. In a dramatic contrast to the Quichua notion of “I belong to this land,” the Western discourses of Lockean liberalism are premised on a powerful distinction between environment and humanity, nature and civilization, one that extends the theme of nature as an external entity for the extraction of a hostile nature in “need” of taming indigenous lands and cultures (Dalby 2002: 64). In its deployment of neoliberal policies and economic interests, the Ecuadorian state uses the Western, “modern” mode of thinking that conceptually breaks down places and cultures to reduce them to component resources that can be appropriated and exploited. Amazonian indigenous groups, as their cosmology incorporates them into the animate world, are increasingly resisting against morally demeaning state practices. The indigenous groups of the Oriente enjoy a relationship to the spiritual realm that is as important as their relationship to their physical place of existence. Place as Identity Because the Amazon is so isolated, the remoteness of place is the primary source of belonging that shapes indigenous identity in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Although a large portion of the region has been opened to oil development, the southern Amazon which is inhabited by mostly Shuar and Achuar has not yet been exploited; it remains today an area of relatively unspoiled tropical rainforest (Bruno 2003: 24). Indigenous communities of the central and northern portion of the Oriente, such as the area that Huaorani and Sarayacu Quichua inhabit, remain very isolated in contrast to even the most rural settings of my North American homeland regardless of oil development. The only mode of travel in Río Blanco and along the Río Napo (two of the Quichua communities that I stayed in) is by hand-carved canoe and a couple of motor-boats that navigate the rivers, and by foot. The only way to enter the Quichua comunidad Sarayacu as an outsider is by plane; the natives of the area travel solely by foot and river. The Quichua have never had much money, but have never viewed themselves as poor by any means as they have traditionally had access to a wealth of renewable natural resources that provide secure sources of food, water, shelter and medicine. In Ecuador, land ownership, no matter how poor in quality, has always been the true measure of wealth in its ability to provide subsistence (Kane 1995: 23). Gardening, hunting, fishing and gathering in Amazonian forests, swamps, rivers and lakes have served as the core of human sustenance. But multinational oil’s degradation, destruction and contamination of natural resources have created poverty and identity struggles among the indigenous people who use them (Kimerling 2001: 65). Although I argue that identity is strengthened through conflict and opposition, this spoilage of indigenous territory greatly hinders their expression of identity because indigenous identity and survival are based on the concept of territory as identity. Indigenous understanding of location encompasses a source of cultural reproduction (Brysk 2000: 61). But as multinational oil whittles its way through fragile landscapes, indigenous localities are reconfigured, not erased or destroyed. Therefore, the ecological impact of the oil industry is not directly eroding cultural identities, but rather causing indigenous groups to rearticulate them in response to the changing nature of their homelands. Land (tierra) is assigned by the Ecuadorian nationalistic government in 50 hectares to homesteaders, or colonos. Such colonos are required to convert rainforest to pasture should they like to maintain legal title. Territory (territorio), conversely, denotes an ancestral space of indigenous sociality. In Quichua, indigenous people articulate this claim as ñucanchi rucuguna huiñay causana pachamama (“the land where our ancestors have always lived”) – the domain in which cultural integrity was sustained and nurtured” (Sawyer 2004: 48). State land blocks and the colonos inhabiting them socially dehumanized Amazonian worlds, where “rivers, ridges, groves, and forests had been imbued with specific histories, mythologies, identities and rights” (Sawyer 2004: 51). The nationalistic land allotments as a mosaic of arbitrarily placed land chunks insulted the cosmology of indigenous people and triggered a deeply felt aspiration to reclaim their rights and territories by embracing their cultural identity. National and oil industry methods of dividing up indigenous territory into land blocks greatly impact their indigenous identity. As an OPIP indigenous representative says, “Las nacionalidades indígenas in Pastaza, we consider our territory to be a single whole, an indivisible unit. We define it along the lines of traditional alliances and our identity as nationalities” (Sawyer 2004: 5). Indigenous have had to reconcile the preservation of their own lands and cultures by having to confront alien systems of land use: Land must not be a business or a market stall, for our land is our mother. But our only guarantee that our land not be expropriated or invaded by [the oil industry] is to legalize our ownership of it according to the law of the nation [even though the state would still have right to the subterranean resources]. We are committed to rediscover and revalue this land, with all its resources that are our life. (Miguel Tankamash, Shuar, cited in Weinberg 2001: 11) Because the Amazonian areas where these indigenous groups reside are so rural and isolated (despite the increasing road systems being constructed by the oil industry), the land is their primary source of engagement and belonging which shapes their identity. Land rights are central to the question of the survival of indigenous peoples and their cultures. Since the “relationship to their territory is deeply spiritual, the severance of that link is often destructive to their identity” (Erica-Irene Daes, U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, cited in Paneth 2002: 12). Although this claim may fall suspect to yet another Western imposition of “essentialism” upon indigenous people, this statement attests to the importance of the relationship between place and identity since the very survival of indigenous communities depends on the resources sustaining them. An “indigenous or tribal identity asserts the unity of people and place because only indigenous people can legitimately claim that their very culture, identity, and existence are tied up in the unique space that they occupy” (Li 2000: 168). Therefore, because of the inextricably linked relationship between indigenous land and identity, the most prominent and compelling approach in framing opposition to the oil industry is the focus on a loss of unique tribal identity and way of life. In the face of frequently incompatible official notions of territory and community, Amazonian indigenous groups have been actively involved in the creation of their own senses of place. Faced with several multinational oil companies encroaching on their territories with the consent of the government, the response of indigenous federations has been to “attempt to clarify their own ‘places,’ namely the territories upon which their livelihoods depend…[I]ndigenous groups in the Oriente have countered prevailing images of the area and its inhabitants, in order to create a more realistic imaginative geography” (CONAIE 1989, cited in Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 125). Thus, as the final element that actively shapes indigenous identity and serves as an additional source of unity in their imagined community, indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon region have shared a history of oppositional identity to the “Other” (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 131). Oppositional Identity Dean and Levi contend that key to determining and maintaining an indigenous identity is the meaning conjured up by ethnic relations. “A group’s ethnic identity ‘consists of its subjective, symbolic or emblematic use of any aspect of a culture, or a perceived separate origin and continuity in order to differentiate themselves from other groups’ (DeVos 1995: 24, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 5).” Thus, a central defining characteristic of indigenous peoples is cultural and racial difference. This has historically produced domestic marginality but simultaneously garnered international recognition (Brysk 2000: 46). By transforming powerlessness into a highly respected and globally projected voice, indigenous leaders of the Ecuadorian Amazon have sculpted new roles for their peoples through the exotic appeal of their “otherness.” Indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon, with their own identities, traditions, customs, social organization and worldview, never found a place in the process of “nation-building” that state elites embarked upon since the early 1800s. This resulted in severe cultural discrimination; despite legal citizenship rights (Ecuadorian indigenous peoples were not even viewed as citizens until recently) they were excluded from equal participation in the economic, social and political systems (Stavenhagen 1998: 135). Although indigenous people represent about 40 percent of Ecuador’s population, historically they have been excluded from influencing political and economic processes. As the Ecuadorian state increasingly disavowed its role as the protector of its people through neoliberalism (which put oil companies directly in charge of indigenous lands), the indigenous political movements increasingly oriented their struggles around questioning the authority of the state (Sawyer 2004: 10). A global model of economic reforms that sought to modernize and normalize indigenous groups of Ecuador unintentionally produced rebellious political subjects – “people who resist, challenge, and subvert the state’s agenda to privatize, liberalize, and deregulate the nation’s economy” (Sawyer 2004: 15). Along these lines, indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon have effectively challenged multinational oil, World Bank lending, and neoliberal modernization policies. As political expressions of resistance to such exclusionary and destructive state modernization policies, indigenous groups have unintentionally adopted resistance as a key source of identity production. As James Scott would argue, the movement of indigenous resistance in Ecuador puts forth indigenous identity as a “counterideology” to petroleum production and serves as the “social cohesion” among indigenous victims of domination. But because the politics of opposition changes identities, indigenous identity is anything but stable (Sawyer 2004: 87). Both the deconstruction and the reconstruction of indigenous identity are triggered by territorial invasion and a threatened way of life due to the petroleum industry. In a context of cultural paradox, “globalizing forces have exacerbated political, economic, and social inequalities while simultaneously provoking the proliferation of oppositional identities and counter-dreams” (Sawyer 2003: 16). As has been shown throughout time, globalization stimulates identity emergence as the processes of history and the articulation of identity and difference reconfigure the boundaries of power from the margins. Whereas the effects of economic globalization have in general been disastrous for indigenous peoples, the current crisis has also opened up new perspectives for them, as the Ecuadorian case shows. The will to resist and to prevail generates a mobilizing effect that leads to the greater empowerment of indigenous organizations and peoples (Stavenhagen 1998: 135). In Ecuador this has lead to new political relations in which indigenous groups have found the political respect and recognition to successfully challenge the very source of their greatest threat, multinational oil. These indigenous groups have also pushed for “counter-hegemonic notions of place and identity” that are produced and re-created by popular subjects in relation to national territory (Radcliffe and Westwood 1996: 109). Engagements between the state and the indigenous people of Ecuador have not been framed within the state’s discourse of “development,” but rather outside or in opposition to the state’s political and social agenda (Li 2000: 161). Thus, the Ecuadorian case of indigenous resistance against the hegemonic “Other” (embodied in the state’s implementation of neoliberalism which has introduced multinational oil) portrays an example of the process of negotiation over place and identity which is generating the emergence of new, oppositional identities. Through shared identities of economic backwardness, social and cultural discrimination, and political exclusion and marginalization (Stavenhagen 1998: 136), all indigenous communities, peoples and nations are linked together. As such, they consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in [their] territories. [They are] formed at present non-dominant sectors of society and determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems. (Cobo 1986, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 146) Struggles over resource use are simultaneously struggles over territory and thus identity. The identity of the indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon is essentially the way they place themselves in the world. The position they take depends on their historical and present relationship to the “Other.” Their identity is thus articulated through their social positioning and is subject to change because no part of their identity belongs to them; indigenous identity is not simply an essence fixed in time. Identity is vulnerable and always subject to rearticulation. Each group has acquired their cultural identity based on their indigenous cosmology, their relationship to the place that surrounds them, and through their resistance and historic struggles over identity, culture and power. In Ecuador, the cultural identity that each group has acquired and articulated has gained national recognition through international awareness. Indigenous groups are now gaining legitimacy through their claim to distinct cultural identities. As a result a new way in which indigenous groups are imagining their identities is through international attention from environmental and human rights groups (essentially international collaboration with the environmental movement). Indigenous groups are granted a voice through cultural legitimacy and thus creating a space for political participation in the public realm. Contemporary threats to their ancestral lands and livelihoods have pushed them to embrace their “traditional” identities in order to resist the oil industry. This has given rise to new identity articulations demonstrative of politically active and technologically savvy indigenous groups that are more connected to the global political and economic systems. Through symbolic capital, indigenous groups are using cultural legitimacy to effectively challenge the oil industries in their territories. In response to this mounting indigenous power and authority, oil companies are trying to negotiate with them and bribe them into acquiescence. Some indigenous individuals buy into their ploys, others resist even more strongly. The next section will explore this interplay between the Oil industry, native peoples and national agendas to show that the power of indigenous resistance to multinational oil can be weakened by community betrayal, leading to indigenous identities that become imposed or forced. Balancing Culture and Development: Multinational Oil and Indigenous Groups The relationship between multinational oil and indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon is one of conflict, corruption, violence and division. Wherever multinational oil operates in Ecuador, local communities become divided as some families remain loyal to the indigenous organizations supporting them, such as OPIP (Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza), and others are bought out by the Company. Those bribed by the industry are deceived by the prospects of an improved way of life with a more stable economic status. But, as the case of ARCO and the indigenous people of Pastaza proved, oil companies intrude on people’s lives and transform their sense of identity, with the state’s blessing. The compensatory “gifts” that the Company awards communities when they consent to development on their lands forever change local senses of self and symbolize the industry’s attempts to fabricate the illusions of an imminent betterment for indigenous people with “progress” and “modernity” (Sawyer 2004: 59). As one indigenous representative of OPIP wrote in a letter addressed to an ARCO chief executive, “there is not one compañía petrolera that has integrally respected the indigenous peoples and their traditional territory” (Sawyer 2004: 71, letter written 1993). The problem is that oil companies go to the Oriente to extract oil for profit, and no other reason. Oil companies have a hard time respecting traditional territories when the reason for industry existence is development. Most simply, it is a direct clash of interests and reconciliation is a long shot. But it is essential to remember that local identity issues do not solely result from industry pressure, but rather manifest in response to greater structural factors on an international level. The state’s commitment to neoliberalism as it struggles to survive in the global arena places indigenous communities directly in confrontation with TNCs. Therefore, in situations where an indigenous individual “sells out” his territory to the Company, thereby dividing his tribal community, he is not really the one to blame. The compromise of indigenous identities can thus be viewed as more of a consequential process of globalization than a disruption of community peace when considering the global state of affairs. The industry’s strategies of penetration are similar regardless of the exact location in that they fracture community unity, corrupt local leaders, create problems of indigenous dependency on “trinkets,” provide brief community works that do not last long and are often under-funded, bring violence through the militarization of oil blocks, and then pull out when their work is done, leaving the community devastated. In the face of such a threat, a key strategy of power for indigenous groups is to unite and derive their power from the unity of a cohesive momentum of resistance. If the communities become divided and split, they have indeterminate identities; their authority and strength weaken. Oil companies use this weakness as a strategy and enjoy greater ease of development when they successfully divide communities against one another in order to shift the attention away from the oil industry (Sawyer 2004: 76). A case between the Huaorani and Conoco illustrates this point. The Huaorani had been empowered by their strong sense of self and unity against the Company for decades. All of the Huaorani communities rejected the Company’s entrance outright except one, however, called Toñampare, which divided the Huaorani people. The leader of that community, Nanto, secretly signed a deal with the Company and his community supported it because, as he told them, they would receive most of the “benefits,” although short-term (Kane 1995: 216). Such benefits range from a temporary school, bags of rice, a community project such as a chicken coop, or, as in the case between Nanto and the Company, direct payments to the indigenous leader who ‘sells’ his community’s territory to the Industry. When in Quito to talk to the president of Conoco, a few Huaorani tribesmen caught sight of Nanto in the Conoco headquarters. According to observation and what they later learned, Nanto was wearing all new material possessions, receiving weekly sums of cash from the president of the company himself, and possessed a transformed identity as a puppet of the Company (Kane 1995: 225). The division this presents within an indigenous group greatly increases the prospects of heightened development in its territory as indigenous opposition is the only force preventing the complete spoilage of their lands. The Company always has legal (state) permission to enter indigenous lands, but it seldom does so without the permission and negotiation contracts with its peoples. The indigenous leaders who decide to collaborate effectively negotiate their community identity and sense of dignity. In a 1993 meeting between ARCO officials and indigenous communities, the president of OPIP voiced his position on the situation of community division: La compañía is fomenting division and social chaos within Indian territory and we demand that ARCO stop its divisive and dangerous practices. That it stop buying the consciences of community leaders near its well with insulting trinkets […] Texaco has taught you well: fomenting division among communities weakens indígenas’ rights, concerns, and any opposition. Without opposition you can go about your operations without a thought to the social and ecological destruction you cause. – Héctor Villamil (Sawyer 2004: 4) Whereas resistance through indigenous unity provides a compelling challenge to the Company’s development ventures, division ruptures the influential sense of self-respect and pride embodied in a unified indigenous identity. The Company prevails and cultural and biological diversity is sacrificed. Because community separation between complete unity and absolute division among indigenous groups is not black and white, many groups struggle to balance the extent of development that they wish to undertake while trying to avoid losing a strong sense of cultural and ethnic identity. On the one hand, they want to carry out innovations; however, on the other hand, they are still tied to a traditional culture that does not support innovative efforts (Tsing 1999: 176). “We do want development,” said Santi, the coordinator of Sarayacu’s anti-oil campaign called Kampari (Voice of Resistance), “but we want to maintain our ecosystem and our traditions” (Handler 2004). Most indigenous groups of the Amazon want some of the benefits of development and modern social services -- like education, health care, roads, running water, and electricity (Apell 1985: 137-43, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 155) –but they do not desire to give up their cultures and identities to get them. The only exception to the appeal of partial development may be the Huaorani. The Quichua, the Cofans, the Shuar might depend on the government, missionaries, tourists, anthropologists, even the Company, but the “Huaorani depended only on themselves and the forest, which were as one and had never changed and never would” (Kane 1995: 218). Those pushing for village development and the furthering of national directives contend that indigenous groups are stuck in tradition and must be open to change as a way to convince or negotiate with them to entertain the possibilities of development. Many indigenous elders will “long for development at the same time they hold on to markers of tradition,” (Tsing 1999: 199), but some leaders are more willing to let go of tradition. One puzzling phenomenon in Ecuador which I have personally witnessed is that many communities are too easily convinced to modernize and are actually eager to acquiesce to the Company’s bribes. During my visit to an indigenous community along the Napo River in the summer of 2004, our naturalist guide Rodrigo explained to us, pointing, that rundown shack used to be a school. The nearby community was so eager to have the school built, they hardly considered the consequences of oil development. The Company presented the offer with so much optimism that the community readily accepted. Years later, the same community struggles to survive on such polluted lands. (Suarez 2004: interview) As Rodrigo explained, once the oil industry pulls out, the community feels tricked and they are left with what feels like nothing, even though at one point that “nothing” was everything. As such, oil companies transform indigenous groups’ identity and self-determination, making them dependent on the short-term “improvements” that disappear along with the Company. The disconnection between indigenous groups that perceive and envision rapid environmental destruction as progress that they appreciate and welcome versus those that see it as a threat to their very existence and cultural health presents a paradox within the indigenous movements of resistance against the petroleum industry. This disunity also symbolizes the incongruities between environmentalist visions of ecological preservation and indigenous conceptions of a healthy, animate environment. Whereas an indigenous community may welcome electricity and a new school, hidden under the guise of negotiation gifts from the company, an international NGO or environmentalist may condone such an acceptance and impose their own values to keep that indigenous group as the Other: exotic, preserved, wild Nature. The goal of the oil industry’s community negotiation projects is to alleviate the tensions that form between indigenous groups and the Company, for even when an indigenous leader signs a development contract s/he may not fully understand the consequences. The environmental and social effects of multinational oil are far more severe in life than on paper. The example of Occidental Petroleum and a couple of the communities in the region where it extracted petroleum illustrates this point. When Occidental decided to develop in the Amazonian communities of Río Jivino and Limoncocha, it approached the community head at Río Jivino. For its 40 hectare center of extraction the Company happened to choose the community’s most important hunting area. Occidental asked to “buy” this land. Occidental was not technically obligated to ask permission to work there, based on national law, but knew that buying out the land from underneath the people would save a lot of time and money in quelling the people’s complaints with “gifts.” With the company’s bribes and offers, the community sold that portion of their land (Kimerling 2001: 75). As part of the negotiation phase for the remainder of the area of development, Occidental Petroleum promised to provide the two communities with a chicken farm, a carpentry project and a handicraft project. But according to community members the outcome was a failure. The carpentry project was really an abandoned workshop as few supplies were granted; the chicken farm was “chickens and sheds, but no feed;” the handicraft project was a “house, but no tools” (Kimerling 2001: 76-77). The illusion that an oil company is generous, will bring great riches, and is concerned about the people that it interacts with has devastated many communities with the propaganda of empty gifts. The relationship between multinational oil and indigenous communities continues to be one of conflict, miscommunication and hostility. The trend of oil companies buying off local communities to facilitate the smooth flowing of their operations has been common (Sawyer 1996: 27). Community division among indigenous groups creates a challenge for indigenous resistance against the petroleum industry as the strength of unity is shattered and identity becomes uncertain. The petroleum industry produces new identities, dispositions, senses of knowing, and possibilities of being among indigenous peoples (Sawyer 2004: 9). Offering communities false promises inevitably leads to the negotiation of natives’ sense of self and independence. But the resistance triggered by industry development opens up doors of possibilities, too. As indigenous communities struggle to defend their cultures and identities in the face of multinational oil, they are greatly aided by the international community which projects their voice internationally. Indigenous struggles are increasingly reified as their international audience writes about them and puts them at center stage in contemporary critiques of modernity and globalization. The new political space that this opens up for indigenous groups is achieved through the power of an indigenous identity. Perhaps unintentionally yet quite conveniently, in the very process of defending their traditional identities, indigenous peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon are carving out new, empowered identities with international help. Reciprocal Empowerment for NGOs and Indigenous Groups through International Identity Projection: A New Political Space Emerging in Ecuador Through a politics of identity and internationalism, Indian communities gained voice in the village. An Indian rights movement that had been mobilized across borders reached out to send the world a message about identity…Overlapping social movements for indigenous rights mobilized at the local, national, regional, and global levels; they also militated through a transnational issue-network of advocates and supporters. Because the whole world was watching, marginalized citizens were able to transcend the limits of their own states. This process of international information politics…forged a new social movement and fostered a new form of identity. (Brysk 2000: 104-5) Oil development in Ecuador has gone through three overlapping stages: an initial period of widespread neglect by the state and abuses by the industry ; a second one of conflict, organizing and protest ; and a third era of dialogue (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 42). The focus of this section is on the latter. The convergence of indigenous advocates with international human rights advocates as increasingly powerful protagonists for change opens up a space for dialogue on alternative development in what Nash terms the “new world disorder” (Nash 2001: 19). This new political space establishes alternatives to mainstream, hegemonic systems of thought and development through increased dialogue and political participation at the local, national and international level. Indigenous movements have in recent times become linked with global NGOs concerned with issues of environmental damage and human rights deprivation. It is in these “transnational spaces” that “new forms of governance are emerging which may enable the human species to survive in a globally integrated world that permits alternative ways of survival and coexistence” (Nash 2001: 3). In Ecuador, the indigenous movement of resistance against the oil industry has opened up a transnational space with networks of collaborations and alliances across the globe. This newly emerging political space, facilitated by media coverage and electronic communication, provides a global arena for protest that might never have been broadcast a few decades ago. International actors help indigenous leaders frame their struggles in a way that garners immense interest and support. Natives are increasingly emerging as real people with legitimate identities, capable of using international environmental organizations to fight for local land claims (Slater 2002: 149). Environmental groups with a traditionally conservationist focus began to work more closely with communities in the Amazon to strengthen their own campaigns and agendas for sustainable development. This coming together at the local level was mirrored and supported by an international initiative between northern NGOs and indigenous federations in the nine Amazon countries, who established the Amazon Alliance in the early 1990s. Although “sustainable development” was the initial reason for the alliance between indigenous and environmental groups, both constituencies have been reciprocally empowered, especially since in recent years environmental groups have come more to respect the importance of an indigenous cultural identity. A 1992 Washington meeting to assess the plight of Ecuador’s Huaorani in oil development leasing involved representatives from thirteen NGOs. Among those present were Cultural Survival, The Nature Conservancy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Wildlife Conservation International, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Rainforest Action Network (Brysk 2000: 75). At the international level there have been concrete successes for both Ecuadorian indigenous groups and international NGOs/activists. During the same year, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund filed a petition on behalf of indigenous communities against Conoco, a U.S. oil company negotiating exploration rights to a block of rainforest that included Huaorani ancestral lands. With the help of the Rainforest Action Network, Huaorani leaders campaigned in the international media to raise awareness and the pressure successfully drove Conoco out of the country (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 43). For indigenous peoples, the imposition of development activities in their lands without consent is tantamount to colonization of their territory by outsiders and violating their fundamental rights (Kimerling 2001: 66). Denying people the right to participate fully in organizing and cultivating the processes that constitute their cultural world produces extreme forms of disorientation and disruption. As such, participation is key to a group’s sense of cultural identity and sense of self, ownership and security (McIntosh and Maybury-Lewis 2001: 4). Indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon want to have a voice in democratic politics and debates; they do not want to feel like bystanders in a global negotiation over their lands as the state decides which petroleum companies will enter and which will not. Ivan Ignacio from Bolivia said, “[w]e know that our democracies are corrupt and full of lies; that this industry of democracy produces lies and is manipulated by corporations. Meanwhile, we are left outside the discussion” (Gandhi 2001: 34). Although many indigenous people of Ecuador probably share the same sentiments as this Bolivian indigenous leader, the extent to which Ecuadorian indigenous groups have been empowered, legitimated and heard in the past decade sets them apart from the struggles of other indigenous people such as the Ogoni of Africa and U’Wa of Colombia against multinational oil. The Quichua, Huaorani, Cofán, Secoya and Siyona have used their traditional identities to gain a place in the democratic sphere of Ecuadorian politics. The grounding of association and mobilization in culture and tradition, and its affinity with conservation agendas, is crucial to the political acceptability of community organizing. It also provides a space in which otherwise isolated indigenous groups can affirm their positive identities and articulate, substantiate, and defend their claims (Li 2000: 170). With (inter)national support and collaboration, environmental and human rights activists are opening a window for indigenous political voice and action in Ecuador. Indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon have proclaimed their cultural rights at conferences, meetings with oil companies, in letters to the United States, and other origins of power. The focal point of their political platform pertains to their environmental ethics and cultural vulnerability in the face of multinational oil. These platforms have been recognized with greater value by many social actors, including the oil industry. ARCO officials openly claimed that they think dialogue is “very important” within the indigenous groups of Pastaza, in order to clarify misinformation regarding their activities and inform indigenous people of where their projects are going (Sawyer 2004: 4). Multinational oil has only recently voiced its intentions to ensure political participation among the indigenous groups impacted by its development. United Nations and World Bank development directives frequently reflect such mandates for participation, urging the “informed participation” of all indigenous peoples impacted by their project developments, although they often go unimplemented (Treakle 1996). Because international interest has effectively drawn attention to the importance of voice and participation of marginalized players in the field of power, oil industries are pressured to follow suit. Indigenous voices are greatly empowered when they are articulated in response to a conflict such as a threatening development project. An example of this is the resistance of the Sulawesi tribe (known as the Lindu people) to a large-scale dam project in Indonesia. The identity of the Lindu as indigenous people with valuable knowledge and ancestral rights to their land was firmly established in the context of opposition to the hydropower plan and the threat of forced resettlement. Their campaign involved confrontational encounters with national authorities, media attention, collaboration with national and international NGOs, and activities organized by Lindu indigenous leaders to heighten awareness within their community (Li 2000: 165). Every component of the Lindu resistance mentioned above has been or is presently occurring between multinational oil, indigenous communities and the Ecuadorian state. In June 2001, six international oil companies representing Canada, the USA, Italy, Argentina and Spain received permission to construct a new pipeline, financed by banks from Germany, the US and Italy. The goal was to pump 500,000 barrels a day out of the Amazon basin, over the 12,000-foot Andes Mountains, crossing the slopes of the volcanically active Mt. Pichincha and down the steep western slope to the Pacific port of Esmeraldas. The project was to cost $1.1 billion, but the actual price which includes the loss of primary jungle, indigenous homelands, and protected habitats, is incalculable. The pipeline passes straight through Latin America’s most important “protected” bird reserve with 450 species, many of which are found nowhere else on the planet (Tarbell 2003: 16). Initially, when huge tractors and hundreds of workers were ready to denude the heart of the Mindo-Nambillo Preserve, installing an oil pipeline on a seismically active mountain and potentially spilling thousands of gallons of petroleum down two pristine watersheds, the project clearly did not meet the safety standards. But after the area’s mayor received $900,000 for a potable water system, he signed the contract of approval (Tarbell 2003: 17). In response, environmentalists and indigenous rights advocates formed Acción por la Vida (Action for Life) and became the central force in an international coalition to block the pipeline, galvanizing resistance efforts and filing lawsuits. Rallying hundreds of students from the capital city, activists and eco-tourist entrepreneurs they went to the site of construction and protested. A few huge tractors turned around and did not enter the construction zone. Journalists from Brazil, Germany, Peru, Italy, Colombia, the US and Ecuador were present (Tarbel 2003: 17). Despite years of resistance, the pipeline was constructed in late 2003. This case of resistance against the pipeline in the Reserve, although conclusively defeated, illustrates how reliance on NGO alliances and media attention to project political platforms globally does garner attention and short-term success. It is also exemplary of the importance of community-based efforts of resistance, in addition to international achievements. Just like identity articulation, the origin of resistance lies in the locality; the core of indigenous identity and resistance creation is local. This is an agenda with powerful backers but also substantial enemies. Its local deployments, however, do not depend entirely on the international play of this agenda; instead, they involve attempts by [indigenous advocates] to pick up on important local concerns…to contextualize international agendas and shape them in new ways. Notions of community, territory, and culture are reconstructed and new tribal discourses as it is interpolated with tribal deployments in governmental administration, commercial enterprise, regional doctrine, research and tourism” (Tsing 1999: 198). Local concerns of indigenous groups are shaped, molded, and contextualized through political discourse in international agendas on cultural and ecological preservation. Risks Involved with Alliances and Negotiations Although alliances between indigenous people and environmentalists are reciprocally beneficial and empowering, they are unstable and politically “risky” for indigenous peoples (Conklin 1997, cited in Dean and Levi 2003: 243). The newly emerging political space in Ecuador developing through dynamic collaborations among NGOs, indigenous federations and peoples is giving voices that have been silenced for hundreds of years a place to be heard. However, there are also negative implications and risks for indigenous peoples associated with such collaboration. Environmental and NGO focus on the ecological realm of the Amazon is problematical for the newly emerging political space. Although Amazonians have demonstrated skill in turning outside images to their own ends, the long-standing focus on a select portrayal of indigenous identities has shut the bulk of the population out of relevant dialogues and political processes that directly affect their lives (Slater 2002: 16). Negotiations and decision-making processes between oil companies and indigenous groups, although improving democratically, unfortunately run high risks of manipulation of indigenous peoples by both petroleum industries and NGOs. A growing support for indigenous rights has provided an important backdrop to the participatory negotiation and agreement processes between multinational oil and indigenous communities. Awareness of community rights has played a role in strengthening negotiations as changes in indigenous consciousness and communication has mobilized a new form of politics (Brysk 2000: 21). However, multinational companies place pressure on indigenous groups and end up manipulating them; this hinders the democratic dialogue between corporations and the indigenous subjects of their development projects. Instances between the Secoya and Occidental, the Huaorani peoples and Maxus and Conoco, as well as the Machiguenga of Peru and Shell (Chatterjee 1997: 16) demonstrate how many agreements are mere formalities intended to provide cover for oil operations and are pushed through with material promises and legal, political and military pressure (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 45). One of the main problems is that although indigenous groups are gaining rights and increasing power to a legitimate voice, the power ultimately lies in the hands of the dominant power: multinational oil. The bottom line, as the spokesman for Maxus says, is that “the oil is going to come out of the ground. We don’t have to negotiate with the Huaorani; we don’t need their approval. But we’d like to be good neighbors. We’d like to be fair” (Jimenez, Jorge, cited in Kane 1995: 158). Although a new political space is emerging in Ecuador that is greatly benefiting indigenous groups through the projection of their voice, one element to be wary of is that this realm of dialogue, voice and political debate is only achieved with the help of international actors. This foreign dependence is not inherently harmful, though NGOs could potentially manipulate indigenous groups for their own benefit and end up negotiating a deal for the tribe that completely contradicts their indigenous cosmology or sustainable land use patterns. It would be ideal if indigenous could eventually wield enough power to achieve total self-representation, overcoming their necessity of depending on their external crutch to move forward. They are moving in this direction, especially with the aid of national indigenous alliances, but without international NGO knowledge and political effectiveness, indigenous leaders are often taken advantage of. Language barriers, misinformation, material enticement and an overall lack of information on the part of indigenous groups lead to the buying-off of their lands and thus their cultural identities. International actors such as environmental activists and human rights lawyers are well educated on indigenous land rights, constitutional law and other specific features of indigenous struggle. Indigenous platforms may draw on moral, philosophical, cultural and more recently environmental rhetoric while the former possess years of practiced, specialized political jargon that successfully pin points inequalities and makes legal cases for environmental justice. Rather than providing a context for democratic dialogue, corporations often “negotiate” by bribing indigenous leaders. In the art of negotiation, therefore, there is a fine line between the cultural and political empowerment of indigenous groups and industry manipulation of tribes. While dialogue increasingly prevails in Ecuador, it is not the only option. A number of groups, such as the Sarayacu community of Quichua, continue to seek a halt to oil development in the Amazon. Among the more successful efforts, the Achuar have established a thriving eco-tourism business and are pursuing different forms of sustainable development in order to hold oil companies at bay. The World Bank and Latin American Organization of Energy have stepped in with an ambitious set of initiatives aimed at promoting community oil industry negotiations throughout South America. These two institutions have undertaken a series of trainings for indigenous leaders. Fair negotiations and real guarantees relating to environmental, social and cultural impacts are next to impossible without the more active and progressive intervention of the state and civil society (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 46). As oil development expands deeper into the Ecuadorian Amazon, the increasing attention given to dialogue brings new opportunities and risks for indigenous communities. Opportunities to voice struggles, cultural identities, and testimonies to cultural sovereignty; risks that indigenous leaders will give in to silent acquiescence upon the Industry’s drop of a dollar, a promise of a school or more land. Even the most progressive treaties, laws and codes have never contemplated indigenous communities’ right to refuse oil in their territories. The very act of negotiating predicates that development will take place (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 47) as the only factors in question are the extent of operation and the date of initiation. In the 1990s, the Huaorani were frustrated and wrote a letter to the Rainforest Action Network. It said that Conoco was discussing the life of the Huaorani in meetings in which the Huaorani were not present. On their own land, the Huaorani were being treated as if they were guests. The letter expressed absolute opposition to oil exploitation in Huaorani territory (Kane 1995: 9). Many environmental and human rights groups claimed to be working on behalf of the Huaorani, or the land they lived on. Letter-writing campaigns, boycotts, lawsuits, grants, and foundations were being pitched by CARE, Cultural Survival, The Nature Conservancy, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Wildlife Conservation International, the Sierra Club, and many others. But when Joe Kane, author of Savages, called each and every organization to ask how to contact the Huaorani, not a single one could. “But for all the ruckus being raised, all that could be said with certainty about the Huaorani, whoever they might be, was that the American oil companies coveted their land and American environmentalists their voice” (Kane 1995: 10). The community of Sarayacu, unlike many other Quichua communities, is unwilling to accept offers of financial compensation in return for oil contracts and thus remain completely shut out of the dialogue and negotiations that are transpiring over their lands. The complete refusal to both development and negotiation leads to total exclusion of an indigenous group. Heightened tensions, violence and military pressure results, exemplified in the frequent hostile encounters that the Sarayacu community experiences with the Ecuadorian military. Negotiation, therefore, exists within a realm of paradox. It opens doors for participatory political roles and the freedom of voice while simultaneously setting up indigenous groups for manipulation, especially if the process of negotiation occurs without the help of an NGO or other non-State actor. The presence of entire communities, especially the tribal elders, is necessary in the processes of negotiating activity in an indigenous group’s demarcated territory. Thus, although the increasing dialogue between indigenous groups, the State, indigenous federations, NGOs, and multinational oil companies is empowering and supposedly democratic, it still marginalizes indigenous peoples. They are not granted the opportunity of refusal but rather at best a say in the negotiation of their cultural identity as it directly relates to the degree and magnitude of development on their ancestral lands. Those possessing the greatest jurisdiction over indigenous lands are proponents of top-down development policies and do not perceive development as a great threat to indigenous identity. The will to resist is strong. Indigenous groups all over the Ecuadorian Amazon are struggling to maintain their lifestyles in the face of an ever-encroaching oil industry by embracing their identities as a tool, their culture as a resource, to challenge the power structures influencing their lives. Indigenous people take on new participatory, political roles in the negotiation of development in the Ecuadorian Amazon: At the price of their “traditional” cultural identity? Conversation between an American journalist and a Huaorani: A: “Do you know what an Eskimo is?” H: “Yes. An indígena who lives in the snow in America.” A: “Yes.” H: “And their land has a lot of oil, does it not?” A: “Yes, it does.” H: “And they fought the Company, did they not?” A: “Yes, some of them did.” H: “And now they have a lot of money but they are not indígenas anymore.” A: “It is true that many of them do not live as they once lived.” H: “So they lost.” * * * * * The comments of this Huaorani suggest that in the process of negotiation with an oil company indigenous groups must also negotiate their “traditional” or “authentic” cultural identity. But some indigenous groups like the Huaorani that have been forced to deal with the presence of multinational oil development within their demarcated land boundaries still have thriving cultures. So then where is the line that separates an “authentic” cultural identity from a defeated, eroded cultural identity? Identities naturally change and evolve. Indigenous identity is not static; it is made through engagements with the modern world and constantly rearticulating itself through engagements of conflict and struggle. Yet there is a huge difference between an altered, rearticulated identity and an imported, forced identity transformation. In this paper I tried to establish that indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon are reshaping their identities by engaging with multinational oil and assuming more modern political roles in the public sphere; thus their identities are evolving, not solely being imposed upon. The distinction lies within the realm of intent. I believe that when indigenous groups embrace their “traditional” identities in struggles as an instrument of power to assert their rights to self-representation, land claims, cultural autonomy and sovereignty in the face of the oil industry, their cultural identities inexorably change. This very process of identity articulation involves the transcendence of conventional indigenous capacities to wield power. If successful, indigenous groups are granted more of a voice in the negotiation over their lands and livelihoods. In order to fight against the forces of modernity, indigenous have had to learn how to work within the system as well as from the outside. Initial indigenous efforts were based on resistance from the exterior, and as indigenous people became more politically savvy and empowered, they started sculpting a space for themselves to resist within the framework of the state, attending UN conferences, taking up roles in the national government, and collaborating with international organizations. As I have argued, there is a difference between the forging of a new identity through struggle and a changed identity through selling out to industry. But indigenous identity does not have some mythical “eternal essence.” Rather, it is constantly being negotiated as groups interact with modernity. Although there is no exact boundary, I believe that indigenous groups living in urban settings are just as “indigenous” as their ancestors who lived in the forest so long as they maintain their social positioning within the communities of their tribe, their oral traditions, and their spiritual ties to the moral realm. However, I argue that indigenous people may be “losing” their “traditional” cultural identities through their interactions with the oil industry through two processes. First, some individuals are selling out their community’s land and accepting all the negotiation money themselves, taking up new lifestyles, and thereby transforming their identity. Secondly, their new roles as political leaders and activists are challenging the dramatic binary that drastically separates the exotic “Other” that is primordial and “savage-like” from Western “modernity.” Indigenous Quichua leaders are articulating their “traditional” identity (maybe the identity that belongs to the “Other”) to gain access to the power of modernity and in the process blurring the binary that has historically been an essential piece of western discourse that constructs indigenous people as “Other.” Through resistance to the petroleum industry in Ecuador, indigenous leaders are crossing the imaginary border between the realms of modernity and primitivism, forging new identities. Indigenous groups are harnessing the new power available to them in this political space that is neither archaic nor modern. Conclusion: A Repositioning of Power, Alternatives to Oil Development, and Possible Solutions Until recently the voices of indigenous peoples have been frequently marginalized from discussions of international environmental issues. Their emergence into the discussion of global politics in the last decade has been closely tied to questions of tropical deforestation and cultural destruction. Political alliances with environmental and human rights organizations are complicated by and plagued with cultural misunderstandings and hidden complexities. But as the Ecuador case illustrates, indigenous voices and identities are being projected internationally and through this process successfully challenging the forces that have brought the petroleum industry to their rural homelands. Although the role of international actors is extremely (and often too) important in the process of voice projection, political participation and environmental justice for indigenous groups, it is noteworthy that some indigenous groups of the Ecuadorian Amazon are redefining the parameters of power that regulate their lives in the political realm. From an earlier paradigm where indigenous activism meant self-appointed foreigners speaking on behalf of groups, present possibilities yield new opportunities for an indigenous repositioning of power occasioned by the growing recognition that many groups have generated their own spokespeople and agendas for engaging the state and international NGOs (Warren and Jackson 2002: 6). Repositioning indigenous power from top-down to bottom-up would allow indigenous leaders to articulate their own identities and not run the risk of outsiders imposing their environmental values on them and remaking indigenous culture into what they believe it should be in accordance with the exotic, romanticized “Other.” I do believe this is a feasible prospect, though it would require a tremendous amount of communication and heightened contact among indigenous groups within the Oriente region to bring together the scattered sites of indigenous power. Although the collaborative efforts of environmental groups working with communities in the Amazon have strengthened campaigns for sustainable development and garnered much attention for indigenous peoples and their rights, there still remains a lot of work to be done. I believe that there are some solutions worth exploring, as well as addressing who the possible agents of change may be, and from where they may come. Change requires opposition organized at local, national and international levels because when the state serves as the agent for neoliberal development, efforts to oppose globalization and international interests will fail (Chilcote 2003: 131). Additionally, these struggles are inherently international due to the mix of political actors, and thus the agent of change must also be transnational, even if the impetus starts from within the shadows of a rural community. The meaning of “development” in the modern world is predicated on notions of economic benefit rather than social or environmental health. The neoliberal agenda intentionally leads “developing countries” to “economic growth” rather than to “economic development for the people.” As Hernandez states, in this process powerless social sectors are devastated and with low possibilities of improvement (Hernandez 1999: 18). Development should be redefined so as to take into account not only economic costs and benefits, but social and ecological threats as well. Many oil wells in fragile landscapes such as the Oriente acquire approval based on their calculated economic costs that overpower the economic losses, when the social and ecological losses are incalculable. Along the lines of reassessing the meaning of development, greater corporate accountability and responsibility of investors for development projects needs to be established. Second, alternative energy sources and the funds to research them need to be explored. In the aftermath of the September 11 “terrorist” attacks, energy security and an increased reliance on Western Hemisphere resources have been proclaimed national priorities with an unprecedented urgency. Politicians immediately started calling for expansion of the free-trade system and industrial penetration into the most remote regions of the American continents. Much of the destruction [of the Amazon] is driven by our energy consumption patterns. The oil and gas exports from the Amazon mostly go to the U.S. Over 20 percent of U.S. oil imports last year came from Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia. Venezuela has overtaken Saudi Arabia as our top source of foreign oil. We have to demand an end to drilling and exploration in frontiers and culturally sensitive regions, and demand that the World Bank stop funding this development. The ultimate challenge is to reduce our dependence on oil – because from the Arctic to the Amazon, it is our appetite for oil that drives the destruction of some of the last wild places, and the indigenous peoples that live there. (Weinberg 2001: 17) Since Ecuador may be one of the very few remaining countries with untapped oil reserves according to the present state of global oil peak, it is in the state’s best interest to clean up the waste left from past petroleum development and start enforcing responsible development. Phasing out all oil development in the Ecuadorian Amazon would be ideal, but oil revenues constitute 60 percent of Ecuador’s income. Although oil development is extremely valuable to Ecuador’s export economy, if future generations of indigenous communities expect to coexist with thriving forest ecosystems, alternatives to the extractive industry must be explored. Capital wealth as the greatest source of modern-day power presides over the majority of other global interests. The development of oil resources has repeatedly impeded democracy and fostered social instability. The oil extraction industry typically concentrates wealth and power in the hands of a select few elites and provides many incentives for corruption and iron-fisted rule that silences indigenous voices and stifles the growing waves of resistance. While studying abroad in Ecuador, I learned that about 90 percent of the country’s wealth lies in the hands of roughly a dozen families. Why? The petroleum industry consumes over half of the nation’s economy and yet it continues to sink deeper into foreign debt. The United States of America consumes 25 percent of the world’s oil while possessing less than four percent of global oil reserves (Nixon 2003). Easing US reliance on foreign oil is not the only solution; a good start would be to reverse the Bush administration’s rollbacks in financing research into fuel efficiency and renewable, clean energy resources. Third, environmentalists who propose that indigenous communities flat out reject oil companies and their offers need to work with those communities to find alternative ways to generate income and achieve culturally appropriate sustainable development (Kimerling 2001: 81). The promotion of alternative market niches to buffer the impacts of globalization on communities is another resolution. Through green marketing and community capitalism, the promotion of alternative market niches (for example cultural handicrafts, eco-tourism or sustainable development and alternative energy sources) is possible, though they are inherently limited options in the context of global market integration (Brysk 2000: 290). A Quichua group started up a very successful alternative project called Kallari Project, a marketing cooperative spanning 15 towns and villages in Ecuador’s Napo province. Kallari, which means “ancient” in Quichua, aims to help indigenous people make a living without destroying the forest through artisan and farming production (Farnan 2002). The Achuar people have established a thriving eco-tourism business and are pursuing different forms of sustainable development, while holding oil companies at bay (Jochnick and Garzon 2001: 46). However, ecotourism has its setbacks, as well. La Mitad del Mundo tourist haven on the equator near the city of Quito is a national attraction, but runs the risk of turning indigenous peoples and cultures into “folkloric national citizens and international tourist commodities” (Dean and Levi 2003: 20). However, the Cofans have devised a program that is run by the local people and provides them with an economic alternative to working for the oil industry. From 1987 to 1995 the number of visitors to the Amazon grew by an average of 12 percent a year, making it one of the few bright spots in the Ecuadorian economy (Kane 1995: 195). Fourth, addressing indigenous land rights in (inter)national land agreements is critical. The issue of land rights is highly contested, and the fact that land rights are not addressed in any existing agreement of venue only exacerbates the problem. Although the emerging UN declaration does recognize land rights, monitoring and implementation are problems (Brysk 2000: 189). Not until 1992, when 2,000 Pastaza Indians marched to Quito demanding communal land rights, did indigenous peoples acquire legal title to over one million hectares of their territory. Yet, as one of indigenous peoples’ greatest obstacles, while indigenous land title precludes further colonization, it provides no legal control over petroleum activity within them (Sawyer 1996: 28). Ostensibly, the Ecuador oil concessions are granted only after consultation with local peoples. But in nearly every case, native peoples have had to fight to have their land rights respected (Weinberg 2001: 10). U.S. foreign aid and trade agreements should incorporate some version of the World Bank’s requirement that all projects be evaluated for their indigenous impact; much more effective international laws are needed (Barsh 2001: 13). In 1982 the World Bank adopted its first policy toward indigenous peoples. This policy, updated in 1991, is called Operational Directive 4.20: Indigenous Peoples and provides policy guidance to: a) Ensure that indigenous people “benefit from development projects” and b) Avoid or mitigate potentially adverse effects on indigenous people caused by Bank-assisted activities. Operational Directive 4.20 recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples and urges their “informed participation” in Bank activities that affect them. However, although leading us in the right direction, O.D. 4.20 seems rather ineffective since “the Bank does not routinely apply its indigenous policy to projects that have only an indirect negative impact on indigenous peoples” (Treakle 1996). Transnational efforts should continue to bring indigenous peoples and issues onto the political agenda and encourage their active participation in democracy. Increasing global governance, citizen campaigns, and strategic attention to key issues such as land rights can buffer globalization. Greater awareness, monitoring, institutional reform, and support of local movements can deepen democratization (Brysk 2000: 301). * * * * * My reaction of discomfort to the Quichua cultural performance in Río Blanco, as discussed in the introduction, shows my eager tendency to deconstruct the meanings beheld in the environment around me. As a social scientist, I am both intrigued by and critical of cultural symbols and identities. In this paper I have embraced the ideas and visions of several voices and different global positions of power, but the voice that ultimately sparked my interest in indigenous politics in Ecuador was that of the rainforest itself. But my passion to protect the ecological diversity of Ecuador helped me understand that I cannot attempt to take in the land and its crises without also being concerned about the cultural implications. 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