Life way, Livelihood, and Loss

A thread throughout this course has been to link issues among indigenous communities and your community — which may feel similar to an indigenous community by virtue of its longevity or identification with a life way. One way to build on this correlation is to examine how resource ownership, use, and sustainability can affect an indigenous or traditional community. Understanding how an economic livelihood informs an occupational identity helps connect how sustainability and resource allocation informs an indigenous identity. In this application, you will encounter a scenario in which the resources that you’ve come to depend upon are no longer available, and then you will evaluate the impact that this has.

To prepare for this Application:

· Review this week Resources, paying particular attention to the ways in which resource allocation, development, and changes to life way affect indigenous peoples.

· Identify a central resource upon which your own community, or a community you are familiar with, is dependent.

· For the purposes of this assignment, you can equate job identity with indigenous identity as a way to step into an indigenous viewpoint.

· Hypothesize a scenario (or describe a real scenario) in which this community loses the ability to utilize a resource for economic purposes. For example, did your hometown once support a productive coal industry that has now disappeared? Have shipping and dock work in your port town been replaced or relocated?

The assignment:

· Compose a 1- to 2-page paper in which you do the following:

Summarize how the loss of a resource that contributes to the economic livelihood of the community that you identified affects the well being of that community.

For example, how would this loss affect your status and a younger generation’s status?

Could you move? How would others view your community?

With this identification of similar circumstances in mind, evaluate the scope and impact of environmental change and economic development on indigenous peoples.

Articles

Aikau, H., & Spencer, J. (2007). Introduction: Local reaction to global integration: The political economy of development in indigenous communities. Alternatives: Global, local, political, 32(1), 1–8 .

Valdivia, G. (2007). The Amazonian trial of the century: Indigenous identities, transnational networks, and petroleum in Ecuador. Alternatives: Global, local, political, 32(1), 41–72.

Partlow, J. (2008, October 14). Doubt, anger over Brazil dams: As work begins along Amazon tributary, many question human, environmental costs. The Washington Post, A11.

Web Sites

· International Forum on Globalization http://www.ifg.org/programs/indig.htm

· Solar Cookers International SCI http://www.solarcookers.org/

· Tebtebba http://www.tebtebba.org/

· Survival International http://www.survivalinternational.org/

· The Indigenous Peoples of the World Foundation http://www.peoplesoftheworld.org/about.jsp

· United Nations CyberSchoolbus http://www.cyberschoolbus.un.org/indigenous/advocate.asp

· Kaninde (Brazil) http://www.kaninde.org.br/ The web sites above, useful in the Discussion this week, provide examples of collaboration with indigenous peoples. (Note that Kaninde is in Portuguese, but the page can be translated using online translation tools.)