Constructing autonomy: Indigenous organizations, governance, and land use in the Ecuadorian Amazon, 1964--2001.

Over the past two decades, indigenous groups across Latin America have been demanding and obtaining rights to cultural autonomy and self-determination from the states where they reside. However, indigenous organizations have limited resources to construct the alternative modernities they seek to build. Thus, they must form alliances with other organizations, such as state agencies, bilateral or multilateral organizations, extractive industries, and environmental organizations, most of which in turn attempt to influence land use and other issues of governance in indigenous territories. Indigenous leaders must also continuously work to build commitment to their plans, especially when their allies' visions for the development of indigenous territories have conflicted with those of their constituents. In this dissertation, I examine how indigenous people have pursued the construction of societies founded on consensus-based decision making and collective endeavor. I trace how they have done so from a position of economic marginality and alongside the shifting priorities of development organizations. I focus on one of the most comprehensive and longest-standing indigenous experiments with autonomy, the Rukullakta Agricultural Cooperative in the Napo Province of the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Cooperative began as a social movement in the late 1960s in response to the rapid appropriation of indigenous lands after the 1964 agrarian reform, and has remained entirely inhabited and administered by Kichwa Indians. I place this study within the larger context of the indigenous autonomy movement in Ecuador, examining how tensions of governance existing at the local level have been replicated and complicated as indigenous leaders from around the country, with their diverse cultures and histories of exploitation and political organizing, have attempted to build a national-level social movement and pan-indigenous identity over the past two decades. Finally, I analyze the interactions between international conservationists and Kichwa organizations in the Upper Napo and argue that the development visions and governance strategies of each are becoming increasingly disparate. This study is based on long-term fieldwork as well as the interpretation of archival and spatial data, including Cooperative meeting notes, aerial photographs from 1973 and 1982, and satellite images from 1977, 1992, 1997, and 2001.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyGeographySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123831/2/3106054.pd