Land Rights and Monitoring Revitalize Indigenous Peoples’ Connections to Ancestral Lands

“We have lived here for years, but we did not truly know our territory,” explained Jackson García Barrera, one of over 200 community forest monitors that Rainforest Foundation US (RFUS) supports in the Peruvian Amazon. His community, Santa Rosa del Caño, received an updated and expanded land title last year through an innovative process RFUS developed in collaboration with the national Indigenous organization, Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), and the Loreto Regional Government. Santa Rosa del Caño is one of over 50 communities in Peru that RFUS supports through the community forest monitoring program Rainforest Alert.

The Peruvian government’s formal recognition of Indigenous land rights is a crucial foundation for environmental conservation¹. It helps decrease deforestation and forest degradation globally² and in Peru³, while also safeguarding biodiversity⁴ and carbon stocks⁵ essential for mitigating climate change. “In the past, anyone could come and do whatever they wanted,” said Gladis Grandez Castillo, Santa Rosa del Caño’s women’s leader. Now, the community has the legal basis to assert its control over their lands and protect their forests.

Edilson Pinto Pérez, leader of the nearby community of San Juan de Barranco, described how securing land titles has allowed them to protect wildlife: “Before, Colombians would come here and no one would say anything because it wasn’t our land. They would remove lots of currasows, howler monkeys, even peccaries. Now we don’t let outsiders in.” Community forest monitoring, in turn, ensures that these forests are effectively safeguarded on an ongoing basis, and RFUS’s approach to monitoring using smartphones, satellite imagery, and drones has been linked to measurable decreases in deforestation and improvements in community governance⁶.

While securing land tenure and monitoring communal lands is pivotal to reducing deforestation and protecting biodiversity—it can also enable Indigenous peoples to deepen their cultural connections to and understanding of their ancestral lands as being more than what outsiders see—and what they have long pressured Indigenous communities to see—as merely a source of timber, coca, and other commodities.

Amazonian Indigenous people, especially in the Peru-Colombia-Brazil borderlands where the communities highlighted in this story are located, have long faced forced displacement, exploitative labor conditions, and threats from a range of commercial actors. Most notoriously, brutal rubber barons in the late 19th and early 20th century enslaved and forcibly displaced many Indigenous communities. Since around the 1970s, loggers have threatened Indigenous communities⁷—especially those without land rights—by cutting trees on their lands without their permission, exploiting community documents to launder illegally harvested timber from other areas, among other abuses. As drug traffickers have shifted coca cultivation from historical hotspots in southern Peru to these borderlands, Indigenous communities have been coerced by economic need, and, at times through direct threats, to allow illicit coca production and processing in their forests. All of these different threats have pushed Indigenous Amazonians ever further into commodifying their forests, undermining Indigenous subsistence practices, traditional knowledge systems, and overall cultural connections to their territories.

With land titles in hand and active forest monitoring in place, change is underway. Pablo García, leader of the Buen Jardín del Callaru community, notes that in the past, they did not regularly spend time in the forested parts of their territory. Beria Macedo, another monitor from Santa Rosa del Caño, also never really went into the forest until she became a monitor; instead, she says she “just stuck around home and the gardens.” Many people in the communities did not even know where the borders of their territories were prior to the titling and monitoring work. Now, monitors trek for hours, crossing through swamps, suffering bee stings and tree falls, encountering six-foot snakes, caimans [a crocodile-like reptile], and even some difficult-to-explain phenomena like massive tracks and strange trembling on the forest floor. In some communities, they have started to identify and report on the presence of medicinal plants and culturally valuable dyes in their forests. Edilson Pinto Pérez highlights how “we have recovered a lot of our culture as Ticunas. We have the species nearby that we need for dyes, like achiote [annatto] and huito [genipap]…we used to go to Colombia to look for them, but now we have everything here.”

Revitalizing the multi-faceted cultural connections that Indigenous communities in the Amazon have with their forests is a long-term endeavor. By supporting communities to secure rights to their lands and providing resources and training for them to monitor their forests, RFUS has facilitated this process. We will continue to do so as our Indigenous partners build on this foundation and explore new ways of connecting with their forests, including through wildlife monitoring.

Securing land rights and protecting forests from outside threats is an important first step; supporting Indigenous peoples’ long-term, culturally rooted knowledge systems and practices of care for their territories is essential to lasting forest protection and collective wellbeing. As Gladis from Santa Rosa del Caño put it, “I just hope that our youth, our children know even more [in the future].”

This International Day of Forests we honour the profound and vital connections that humans share with forests, and celebrate how some of our Indigenous partners are rediscovering those connections to their lands.
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Sources:

1. Garnett, S.T., Burgess, N.D., Fa, J.E. et al. A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation. Nat Sustain 1, 369–374 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0100-6 ↩︎
2. Sze, J.S., Carrasco, L.R., Childs, D. et al. Reduced deforestation and degradation in Indigenous Lands pan-tropically. Nat Sustain 5, 123–130 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00815-2 ↩︎
3. A. Blackman, L. Corral, E.S. Lima, & G.P. Asner, Titling indigenous communities protects forests in the Peruvian Amazon, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 114 (16) 4123-4128, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1603290114 (2017). ↩︎
4. O’Bryan, C.J., Garnett, S.T., Fa, J.E., Leiper, I., Rehbein, J.A. et al. (2021), The importance of Indigenous Peoples’ lands for the conservation of terrestrial mammals. Conservation Biology, 35: 1002-1008. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13620 ↩︎
5. Frechette, A., Ginsburg, C., Walker, W. A Global Baseline of Carbon Storage in Collective Lands. Rights and Resources Initiative. (2018) ↩︎
6. K. Baragwanath, E. Bayi, & N. Shinde, Collective property rights lead to secondary forest growth in the Brazilian Amazon, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 120 (22) e2221346120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2221346120 (2023). ↩︎
7. Navarro, R. Authorized to Steal: Organized Crime Net works Launder I llegal Timber from the Peruvian Amazon. Center for International Environmental Law (2019). ↩︎