Indigenous Peoples and Conservation Organizations

82 The Sirionó in Bolivia
research that helped spark local interest in sustainable
management, and then examine efforts
by an exceptional local NGO, CIDDEBENI, to
help the community develop an integrated
resource management plan.
3.1 Game Counts and the Seeds of
Resource Management
Some of the first seeds for sustainable management
were sown in 1987, with field research
undertaken by anthropologist Allyn M. Stearman
from the University of Central Florida. Stearman
studied Sirionó natural resource use and recorded
a 90-day measurement of game and fish extraction.
The Sirionó found the process and their
visitor interesting, and this paved the way for a
two-year study by one of Stearman’s dissertation
students. Despite pressure from the missionaries,
who saw their grip being loosened, the community
decided to participate in the study because
they saw how the research could prove to outsiders
that the Sirionó were using a much larger
territory than the village of Ibiato.
The follow-up study began in 1991, and was targeted
at measuring the game, fish, and honey
used by the Sirionó over a long enough period to
enable an estimate of the territory required for
sustainable harvests. 3 Community involvement
was tremendous because people saw how this
information would buttress their claim to the
land. Foreign scientists and Bolivian university
students were welcomed into the community and
given open access to what was hunted and caught
and gathered. Many friendships formed as biology
students worked hand in hand with Sirionó
assistants in measuring the game, fish, and honey
harvests, and the close collaboration insured that
the skill for measuring future harvests was transferred
to members of the community. Six
Sirionó were trained in detailed data collection,
while various hunters helped weigh game and
took detailed field notes about their kills.
Measurements were made by observation during
the 1991 harvests and by self-monitoring the next
year. During 1992, 19 of the approximately 46
hunters monitored their own game harvests,
faithfully registering their game in booklets supplied
through grants from the Biodiversity
Support Program (BSP)/WWF, and the Wildlife
Conservation Society (WCS). Results showed
wide variation between the 1991 and 1992 harvests
taken in by most of the 19 hunters’ 11
households, but average daily biomass harvested
per person (0.34 kg) did not differ significantly
(Townsend 1997). The monitoring would not
have worked so smoothly without the widespread
literacy instilled by the mission school, but the
hunters’ thoroughness and persistence probably
stemmed from their excitement in finally finding
a practical way to apply little-used writing skills
to benefit their community. Perhaps personal
pride in hunting prowess also played a part, but
the rationale for boasting was minimized since
the research focused on numbers rather than
exact details of hunts. Since game is seldom
secretly brought to Ibiato anyway, what was new
was not knowledge about a specific hunter’s
ability but a growing awareness about the total
collective harvest. This experience in self-monitoring
created baseline data to show hunters
changes in the abundance or scarcity of game,
and woke community interest in resource management.
Some of the hunters continued to fill in
their data booklets years after the study ended,
and what they found fueled suspicion that game
was not as plentiful as before. Eventually this
would lead them to request that a way be found
to renew the monitoring on a formal basis.
3.2 An Integrated Community Forest
Management Plan
A major step forward took place in 1996, when
CIDDEBENI, a local NGO that had assisted the
Sirionó since the early days of the indigenous
rights movement, intensified its involvement.
The NGO had focused its attention on securing a
territory, supporting the Sirionó during the
protest marches, and providing counsel during
the negotiations that followed. It advised the
community about the legal hurdles that had to be
surmounted and provided technical assistance for
land demarcation. With CIDDEBENI’s help, the
Sirionó reconnoitered where their ancestors once
roamed freely and used Landsat imaging and
GPS technology to delineate the 30,000 hectares
in the San Pablo Forest that was given to them by
Presidential Decree 22609. They focused on
high ground that was at least 5 to 10 kilometers
from the road, did not overlap with cattle ranches
on savanna lands or timber concessions in the
forest, and was contiguous with the area speci-