Land, Indigenous Peoples and Conflict presents an original comparative study of indigenous land and property rights worldwide. The book explores how the ongoing constitutional, legal and political integration of indigenous peoples into contemporary society has impacted on indigenous institutions and structures for managing land and property. This book details some of the common problems experienced by indigenous peoples throughout the world, providing lessons and insights from conflict resolution that may find application in other conflicts including inter-state and civil and sectarian conflicts. An interdisciplinary group of contributors present specific case material from indigenous land conflicts from the South Pacific, Australasia, South East Asia, Africa, North and South America, and northern Eurasia. These regional cases discuss issues such as modernization, the evolution of systems and institutions regulating land use, access and management, and the resolution of indigenous land conflicts, drawing out common problems and solutions. The lessons learnt from the book will be of value to students, researchers, legal professionals and policy makers with an interest in land and property rights worldwide.

From sun-baked Black Mesa to the icy coast of Labrador, native lands for decades have endured mining ventures that have only lately been subject to environmental laws and a recognition of treaty rights. Yet conflicts surrounding mining development and indigenous peoples continue to challenge policy-makers. This book gets to the heart of resource conflicts and environmental impact assessment by asking why indigenous communities support environmental causes in some cases of mining development but not in others. Saleem Ali examines environmental conflicts between mining companies and indigenous communities and with rare objectivity offers a comparative study of the factors leading to those conflicts. Mining, the Environment, and Indigenous Development Conflicts presents four cases from the United States and Canada: the Navajos and Hopis with Peabody Coal in Arizona; the Chippewas with the Crandon Mine proposal in Wisconsin; the Chipewyan Inuits, Déné and Cree with Cameco in Saskatchewan; and the Innu and Inuits with Inco in Labrador. These cases exemplify different historical relationships with government and industry and provide an instance of high and low levels of Native resistance in each country. Through these cases, Ali analyzes why and under what circumstances tribes agree to negotiated mining agreements on their lands, and why some negotiations are successful and others not. Ali challenges conventional theories of conflict based on economic or environmental cost-benefit analysis, which do not fully capture the dynamics of resistance. He proposes that the underlying issue has less to do with environmental concerns than with sovereignty, which often complicates relationships between tribes and environmental organizations. Activist groups, he observes, fail to understand such tribal concerns and often have problems working with tribes on issues where they may presume a common environmental interest. This book goes beyond popular perceptions of environmentalism to provide a detailed picture of how and when the concerns of industry, society, and tribal governments may converge and when they conflict. As demands for domestic energy exploration increase, it offers clear guidance for such endeavors when native lands are involved.

This book is thus a multi-sited ethnography of territoriality with broad geographical and theoretical reach. Its mix of vivid description and complex theory will engage multiple publics. It is aimed at anthropologists, historians, and geographers who deal with Indian territory and sovereignty in Latin America, but it will also engage readers interested in what "place" means to native peoples and how they represent themselves to global publics. It will also be a good book for students who want to read an innovative ethnography about a quintessentially "traditional" Mexican Indian people's creative response to challenging historical conditions.

Winner of the 2020 Association for Political and Legal Anthropology Book Prize Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize Shortlisted for the New India Foundation Book Prize Anthropologist Alpa Shah found herself in an active platoon of Naxalites—one of the longest-running guerrilla insurgencies in the world. The only woman, and the only person without a weapon, she walked alongside the militants for seven nights across 150 miles of dense, hilly forests in eastern India. Nightmarch is the riveting story of Shah's journey, grounded in her years of living with India’s tribal people, an eye-opening exploration of the movement’s history and future and a powerful contemplation of how disadvantaged people fight back against unjust systems in today’s world. The Naxalites have fought for a communist society for the past fifty years, caught in a conflict that has so far claimed at least forty thousand lives. Yet surprisingly little is known about these fighters in the West. Framed by the Indian state as a deadly terrorist group, the movement is actually made up of Marxist ideologues and lower-caste and tribal combatants, all of whom seek to overthrow a system that has abused them for decades. In Nightmarch, Shah shares some of their gritty untold stories: here we meet a high-caste leader who spent almost thirty years underground, a young Adivasi foot soldier, and an Adivasi youth who defected. Speaking with them and living for years with villagers in guerrilla strongholds, Shah has sought to understand why some of India’s poor have shunned the world’s largest democracy and taken up arms to fight for a fairer society—and asks whether they might be undermining their own aims. By shining a light on this largely ignored corner of the world, Shah raises important questions about the uncaring advance of capitalism and offers a compelling reflection on dispossession and conflict at the heart of contemporary India.

On 28 February 2006, the Six Nations of the Grand River blocked workers from entering a half-built housing development in southern Ontario. They renamed the land Kanonhstaton, “the protected place.” The protest drew national and international attention to the issue of Aboriginal land rights and sparked a series of ongoing events known as the “Caledonia Crisis.” Laura DeVries’ powerful account of the dispute links the actions of police, governmental officials, and locals to entrenched non-Aboriginal discourses about law, landscape, and identity. It encourages non-Aboriginal Canadians to reconsider their assumptions – to view “facts” such as the rule of law as culturally specific notions that prevent truly equitable dialogue. DeVries not only reveals the conflicting visions of justice held by various parties to the dispute, she also seeks out possible solutions in alternative conceptualizations of sovereignty over land and law embedded in the Constitution.

In the summer of 1990, the Oka Crisis—or the Kanehsatake Resistance—exposed a rupture in the relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples in Canada. In the wake of the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, the conflict made visible a contemporary Indigenous presence that Canadian society had imagined was on the verge of disappearance. The 78-day standoff also reactivated a long history of Indigenous people’s resistance to colonial policies aimed at assimilation and land appropriation. The land dispute at the core of this conflict raises obvious political and judicial issues, but it is also part of a wider context that incites us to fully consider the ways in which histories are performed, called upon, staged, told, imagined, and interpreted. Stories of Oka: Land, Film, and Literature examines the standoff in relation to film and literary narratives, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous. This new English edition of St-Amand’s interdisciplinary, intercultural, and multi-perspective work offers a framework for thinking through the relationships that both unite and oppose settler societies and Indigenous peoples in Canada.