Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

CHAPTER 3
Indigenous Federations and the Market:
The Runa of Napo, Ecuador
Dominique Irvine 1
I. Introduction
Indigenous peoples throughout the Amazon
Basin are under duress as they confront challenges
that are transforming their lives and the
landscapes they inhabit. New roads—though
often muddy and potholed—have been carved
into the remote rain forests they call home and
have opened access to outsiders. Even as communities
reorganize to ward off incursion by
settlers and uncontrolled extraction of
resources, changes have been set in motion that
tie indigenous peoples more tightly to market
economies. As a result they face not only
external pressure but the internal challenge of
developing new ways to manage, without
destroying or depleting, the resource base they
have conserved for millennia.
The struggle to develop new land-use models that
combine conservation and economic goals is
urgent because indigenous peoples’ control over
their territories is in peril. Threats come not only
from lumber trucks, oil rigs, and encroaching
colonization, but also from environmental
reserves that appropriate traditional lands but
exclude local inhabitants from reserve oversight.
This case study explores how one group of
indigenous people in Ecuador developed new
tools to meet these challenges.
Their experience has implications for the entire
upper Amazon, where rivers tumble precipitously
from the Andes to the lowlands of Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and western Brazil, and
where development pressures have accelerated in
the past 25 years. In Ecuador, oil discoveries in
the late 1960s led to road and infrastructure
development that paved the way for lumber interests,
colonization by small-scale subsistence
farmers, and establishment of large African oil
palm plantations. Newcomers arrived with the
notion that the land was unoccupied and unused.