Indigenous Wellbeing and Enterprise

Self-Determination and Sustainable Economic Development

Rick Colbourne, Robert B. Anderson, Rick Colbourne, Robert B. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367349639
• eBook ISBN: 9781000753967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In this book, we explore the economic wellbeing of Indigenous peoples globally through case studies that provide practical examples of how Indigenous wellbeing is premised on sustainable self- determination that is in turn dependent on a community's evolving model for economic development, its cultural traditions, its relationship to its traditional territories and its particular spiritual practices. Adding to the richness, geographically these chapters cover North, Central and South America, Northern Europe, the Circumpolar Arctic, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania and a resulting diverse set of Indigenous peoples. The book addresses key issues related to economic, environmental, social and cultural value creation activities and provides numerous examples and case studies of Indigenous communities globally which have successfully used entrepreneurship in the pursuit of sustainable development and wellbeing.

Readers will gain practical understandings of the nature of sustainable economic development from a cross- section of case studies of Indigenous perspectives globally. The chapters map out the international development of Indigenous rights and the influence that this has had on Indigenous communities globally in asserting their sovereignty and acting on their rights to develop sustainable governance and economic development practices. Readers will develop insights into the intersection of Indigenous governance with sustainable practice and community wellbeing through practical case studies that explain the need for Indigenous- led economic development and governance strategies, which are responsive to local, regional, national and international realities in developing sustainable Indigenous economies focused on economic, environmental, social and cultural value creation.

This book will be useful for Indigenous and non- Indigenous business students studying undergraduate business or MBA programs who seek to understand the global context and the varied experiences of Indigenous peoples in developing sustainable economic development strategies that promote community wellbeing.

1Invitation to ethical space

A dialogue on sustainability and reconciliation

Reg Crowshoe and David Lertzman

Introduction: towards shared ethical space

Sustainability holds potential to reconcile long-term interests of industrial-settler societies with Indigenous peoples. Yet, such reconciliation is not a given, nor will it be easily achieved. The very meaning of sustainable development will have to be re-thought and re-imagined. The theories and practices of sustainability will need to be decolonized and indigenized in order to emerge as a shared space between cultures (Lertzman, 2010). Cree scholar Willie Ermine (2007) suggests such shared intercultural domain is also an ethical space of engagement. We maintain that such shared ethical spaces will unfold through processes of authentic intercultural dialogue and exchange, and that these shared spaces offer the possibility for new insights into human identity and responsibility with emergent outcomes across cultures to address shared challenges of sustainability.

This chapter opens by framing the subject of sustainability and Indigenous peoples in global and Canadian contexts. Drawing from themes of ecological and cultural diversity indicating impacts of consumer-based industrial societies on Indigenous peoples, lands and lifeways, we make the ethical case for sustainability and reconciliation as a moral imperative of human development. This global perspective frames not only the ethical context of discussion but also the pedagogical argument for intercultural learning on sustainability in deep dialogue with Indigenous peoples. In the main body of text that follows, we present discussion of traditional Indigenous Piikani (Blackfoot) philosophical teachings’ role modeling authentic intercultural dialogue with relevance to sustainability. This shared ethical space opens doorways to learning, reconciliation and indigenization.

The discussion is between co-authors Dr Reg Crowshoe, a Blackfoot spiritual leader, cultural educator and former elected Chief, and Dr David Lertzman, an academic practitioner with over 20 years’ involvement in the field and multiple adoptions into Indigenous families. Our dialogue serves as a reflective basis to infer foundational themes and principles of sustainability from an Indigenous, in this case Piikani (Blackfoot) perspective. This provides the ground for entering into consideration of an indigenized frame of reference, an axiology as it were, for sustainability. Thus, the final section re-frames the conversation with a focus on foundational themes and values as an offering for others seeking to engage in such dialogue, wherever they are on Mother Earth, to reflect upon and gain new insights for entering shared ethical spaces of human identity, sustainability and reconciliation. Foundational themes we put forward in the chapter’s closing section include: i) creation, relations and Ginmapiipitsin, the spirit of sanctified kindness for all; ii) natural law and ethics, framed in the axiom life is environment, environment is life; iii) insight into human identity, articulated in the axiom we are the land; and iv) cultural analogues for sustainability with shared purpose and self-determination for all.

Sustainability and reconciliation: an ethical imperative

Humanity is at a crossroads. As a single species we now use more than the planet can provide. We have transgressed the threshold to “ecological overshoot”, consuming at least 50% of the global goods and services that ecosystems are able to regenerate (Rees and Wackernagel, 2013). This has been going on for some time. Accounts indicate human demand likely exceeded the biosphere’s regenerative capacity in the 1980s (Wackernagel et al., 2002). Positive correlation between income and per-capita ecological footprint is no surprise in a world where a wealthy minority of market-based economies consume vastly more than their share of planetary resources, externalizing their ecological deficits to the poor (Rees, 2002).¹ Thus, it should come as no great shock that the poorest, most vulnerable people are those most directly impacted by ecological decline. Moreover, humanity’s consumption of natural capital is growing annually as forests are cut faster than they can regrow, fish are being depleted more quickly than they can regenerate and natural resource extraction has increased some 45% in the past 25 years (Wackernagel and Galli, 2012). Certain sectors are outpacing others, such as metals extraction, which has increased almost 60% since 1980 (Behrens et al., 2007). On top of all this, anthropogenic climate change is altering the global climate, posing significant risks to both natural and social systems with likely irreversible changes to the global climate system as a whole (Molina et al., 2014).

Perhaps the starkest example of humanity’s impact on the planet is loss of biodiversity. As a direct result of human intervention in the biosphere we are witnessing the greatest rate of species extinction on Earth since the demise of dinosaurs 65 million years ago (Wilson, 1999). According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), humans have increased species extinction to over 1,000 times the background rates typical of Earth’s history. This staggering impact of humanity on the rest of life is starting to come back on us. Thus, while the implications of biodiversity and its loss are well known for ecosystem resilience and health, we are only just beginning to understand how human wellbeing depends upon biodiversity, and is threatened by its loss. We do know that the connection with nature for human health and wellbeing functions across diverse cultural, religious and symbolic mediations where cultural meanings facilitate pathways to human health, including both material and non-material ecosystem services with evidence that biodiversity loss impacts human health via cultural pathways (MEA, 2005; Díaz, 2006; Clark et al., 2014; Sandifer, Sutton-Grier and Ward, 2015; Small et al., 2017; Mekonnen and Sintayehu, 2018). These connections are particularly significant for Indigenous peoples whose core identities are intimately bound with the lands and waters of their traditional territories, upon which they depend directly for their means of survival.

More than 370 million Indigenous peoples encompass some 5,000 distinct cultural identities spread across 90 countries worldwide (UN, 2009). Their territories, upon which they depend for survival, cover about 20% of global land surface yet hold 80% of the planet’s biodiversity (Sobrevila, 2008). Indigenous peoples make up just 5% of the world’s population, yet comprise upwards of 90% of the Earth’s cultural diversity, speaking roughly 70% of the world’s remaining 6,000–7,000 languages, half of which are threatened with extinction this century and even more of which are losing the ecological contexts that keep their languages alive (Posey, 1999; Toledo, 2001; Sobrevila, 2008). Thus, the areas of greatest biodiversity on Earth hold the planet’s greatest cultural diversity in a symbiotic relationship of ecology and culture; where those ecosystems are strong, so are their languages; where those languages are threatened, so are their ecosystems (Nettle and Romaine, 2000). Even though much of the Earth’s remaining natural resources occur within their territories,² Indigenous peoples continue to struggle for a determining voice in the decision-making processes that control the stewardship and extraction of those natural resources.

Indigenous peoples are disproportionately impacted by the industrial extraction of natural resources, yet have reaped historically little benefit from such activities (O’Faircheallaigh, 2013). From Europe to Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Americas, industrial resource extraction has led to various ecotoxicological, human health, socioeconomic, cultural and political impacts on Indigenous peoples, accompanied also by human rights violations. In the Western Amazon, for example, where some Indigenous peoples still live in voluntary isolation, petroleum development has been attended by sexual exploitation, sickness and mortality from pollution, disease and violence (Kimerling, 2006; Napolitano, 2007; Napolitano and Ryan, 2007; Finer et al., 2008; Orta-Martinez and Finer, 2010; Schmall, 2011). This is the same region where, in an earlier generation, tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples were enslaved, tortured, raped, murdered and wiped out by disease as part of the rubber boom (Hardenburg, 1912; Taussig, 1984; Kimerling, 1994; Davis, 1996; Hvalkoff, 2001; Napolitano, 2007; Napolitano and Ryan, 2007). The disparities and vulnerabilities of Indigenous peoples due to social, historical, political, economic, health and other material factors are well documented (Gracey and King, 2009; King, Smith and Gracey, 2009; Reading and Wien, 2009; Reading and Halseth, 2013). It is shockingly absurd that in spite of their contiguity with the Earth’s greatest natural wealth, Indigenous peoples are among the poorest, most politically and economically marginalized peoples of the planet (O’Faircheallaigh and Ali, 2008; Sobrevila, 2008; UN, 2009).

Indigenous peoples provide the longest sustained examples of human adaptation to and use of the environment. Given their dependence upon healthy ecosystems to maintain traditional ways of life, Indigenous peoples have a fundamental stake in sustainability. Their traditional ecological knowledge and resource management systems contribute to the maintenance and conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem management, offering alternative paradigms for sustainable development (Posey, 1999; Berkes et al., 2000; Toledo, 2001; Toledo et al., 2003; Lertzman and Vredenburg, 2005; Sobrevila, 2008; Lertzman, 2010; Martin et al., 2010). This notwithstanding, ongoing attrition of Indigenous peoples’ territories and cultures places increasing constraints on traditional land use and its practices, rendering Indigenous subsistence economies and their associated social processes less viable. One of the more pernicious features of global industrialization is that as consumer society inexorably grows, Indigenous peoples’ territories shrink.

This dynamic of consumer society growing at the expense of Indigenous peoples, their territories and ways of life underscores a base ethical problem for consumer-driven industrial civilization and its expansion. It is clearly unethical to sacrifice the viability of Indigenous peoples and their ways of life for the sake of industrial resource extraction to feed consumer society (Lertzman and Vredenburg, 2005), yet this dynamic has been unfolding since the emergence of colonialism, founded in precepts of the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’ and ‘Law of Conquest’.³ The notion that Indigenous peoples and ecosystems upon which they depend are somehow expendable – inevitable (if regrettable) casualties of economic progress – is deeply embedded within the thinking of modern society. At its core is a value judgment that privileges settler-colonial and eventually industrial society in a morally superior status of developmental eventuality superseding that of the land’s first peoples including their ways of life, lands and resources. This arguably genocidal⁴ thinking lies at the root of the ethical problem whereby the unsustainable consumptive behaviours of industrial societies are maintained through resource extraction at the expense of Indigenous peoples and their traditional ways of life.

As industrial society expands in its search for raw materials into progressively remote, ecologically salient regions where much of the world’s natural resources remain, most Indigenous communities will confront the presence of industrial incursion into their areas. Many Indigenous peoples have resisted the penetration of extractive industry into their territories, often resulting in ongoing, organized opposition and at times violent conflict.⁵ Others have engaged with industry and collaborated on productive projects at times to diversify their options for community economic development and perhaps offset declines in traditional lifestyles.⁶ Whatever position they take, Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination as recognized in international law with free prior informed consent, or ‘FPIC’, for any projects, investments or activities that may occur in their areas.

Self-determination is the foundational principle of international law for the rights of Indigenous peoples and is the basis for free, prior and informed consent (Ward, 2011). While self-determination is considered ‘hard law’, FPIC, which has received particular attention since the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN, 2007), is considered ‘soft law’. This notwithstanding, FPIC indicates the direction of such international legal thinking becoming a defining issue for resource-rich states and global extractive industries (Doyle, 2015). Doyle (2015) suggests that FPIC should form the basis for renegotiating the relationship between Indigenous peoples and all the actors who impinge on their territorial dominion around the world. This will ensure that “the response to questions and challenges posed by modernity’s increasingly pervasive reach are provided by Indigenous peoples themselves” (Doyle, 2015, p. xiii). Thus, implementing FPIC may help reconstruct some of the foundations for self-determination so brutally ruptured during early and subsequent encounters of colonialism while providing a transformative instrument towards achieving reconciliation.

Honouring self-determination through free, prior, informed consent indicates a pathway framing a basis for entering an ethical space of engagement with Indigenous...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Invitation to ethical space: A dialogue on sustainability and reconciliation
• 2 Coyote learns commerce
• 3 Resistance to ‘development’ amongst the Kogui of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
• 4 Consultation or free, informed and prior consent?: A comparative legal analysis of Indigenous consultation during natural resource activities in Australia and Canada
• 5 Towards measuring Indigenous sustainability: Merging vernacular and modern knowledge
• 6 The Inuit: Sustaining themselves, the Arctic and the World
• 7 Self-gentrification as a pro-active response to tourism development: Cases of Indigenous entrepreneurship in mainland China and Taiwan
• 8 What is a river?: Cross-disciplinary and Indigenous assessment
• 9 Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) in Galiza: Indigeneity or peasanthood?
• 10 Sustainable development through Indigenous community-based enterprises
• 11 Andean enterprises: A case study of Bolivia’s Royal Quinoa entrepreneurs
• 12 Relational and social aspects of Indigenous entrepreneurship: The Hupacasath case
• Index