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“A map,” we are told
by general dictionaries and the glossaries of cartography
textbooks, “is a representation of the surface of the
earth, or any part of it, drawn on a flat surface, and
the positions of countries, kingdoms, states, mountains,
rivers, etc.; as, a map of Europe, or a map of Illinois.”
And indeed for most of us, maps are little more than
this. We use road maps to find our way about and atlases
to locate far-away places we read about in the news.
In short, they serve the rather limited – and generally
benign – purpose of helping us orient ourselves geographically.
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PReviews
of Indigenous Landscapes:BLIC
From Human
Ecology From
MesoAmerica
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As corporate and government
money flow into the three big international organizations
that dominate the world’s conservation agenda, their
programs have been marked by growing conflicts of interest—and
by a disturbing neglect of the indigenous peoples whose
land they are in business to protect.
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Texto
completo en español
Portugese
translation
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A landmark project reveals
a remarkable correspondence between indigenous land
use and the survival of natural areas. Maps may be famously
variable in accuracy, but generally speaking they are
no more "objective" than are movies, novels,
speeches, or paintings. Even if painstakingly accurate,
they heavily reflect the interests of those who paid
to have them made. Those interests may be political,
commercial, or scientific. In the second half of the
twentieth century, world maps emphasized the preoccupations
of the Cold War, with a primary emphasis on international
borders. The globes we had in classrooms showed a world
made up of nations. Until recently, most maps showed
very little or what some of us now believe to be critical
to the future of life....
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At
11 P.M.. on the evening of June 10, 1990, Padre Jesus
Erice's heart ceased to beat altogether and he died quietly
in bed in the port city of Colon. This marked the end
of a full and vigorous life, one that had taken him from
the Basque province of Navarra in Northern Spain, where
he was born in 1911, to the Caribbean shore of Panama,
where he had spent the last fifty years of his life as
a Claretian missionary. For most of his time in Panama
he had lived among the Kuna Indians in the region of San
Blas, a relatively isolated stretch of coastline characterized
by numerous coral reefs and tiny islands, mangrove-fringed
estuaries, and dense mainland forest running from the
Bay of Mandinga east to the Colombian border.
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At all levels - from
peasant farmers in the Amazon Basin to concerned scientists
worldwide - there is growing alarm that the pace and
scale of environmental devastation threatens not only
individual communities but nations, and may eventually
upset the ecology of the planet. As the prospect of
denuded forests, contaminated rivers, and massive rural
to urban migration looms closer, Latin Americans are
beginning to react: Conservation groups are forming,
the media are becoming a regular forum for environmental
debates, and technicians are experimenting with alternative
development schemes.
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A
year ago I was walking through a shopping mall in northern
Virginia when I passed by a tobacco shop. A life-sized
wooden Indian, clutching a handful of cigars,was guarding
the door. Someone had taped a sign to its chest that read:
“Happy Columbus Day.” Shortly after, I came upon a statementmade
by President George H.W. Bush in 1989, on the eve of the
500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in
the Americas. He called the Admiral’s landfall “one of
the greatest achievements of human endeavor,” and added,
“I strongly encourage every American to support the Quincentennary,
and to discover the significance that thismilestone in
history has in his or her own life.”
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The mapping of indigenous
lands to secure tenure, manage natural resources, and
strengthen cultures is a recent phenomenon, having begun
in Canada and Alaska in the 1960s and in other regions
during the last decade and a half. A variety of methodologies
have made their appearance, ranging from highly participatory
approaches involving village sketch maps to more technical
efforts with geographic information systems (GIS) and
remote sensing. In general, indigenous mapping has shown
itself to be a powerful tool and it has spread rapidly
throughout the world.
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