Defending the land with maps.

• Author: Denniston, Derek

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES HAVE OFTEN LOST THEIR LAND BECAUSE THEY COULDN'T "PROVE" THEY OWNED IT. BUT TWO PROJECTS DEMONSTRATE THAT BY MAKING MAPS, THEY CAN HELP TO DEFEND THEIR ANCIENT RIGHTS AGAINST THE INCURSIONS OF NEWCOMERS.

In January 1989, two boatloads of pisteleros (hired guns for a cattle rancher) came down from the headwaters of the Patuca River in eastern Honduras and pulled up on the shore of Krautara, a village of the Tawakha Sumu Indians. Armed with pistols and submachine guns, they unloaded their chain saws and sacks of food. They proclaimed legal title to all of the surrounding land, even though they carried no papers. For three months, they occupied the Indian village, forcing one family from its home and clearing at least 20 hectares of lush tropical rain forest for cattle pasture. The next year they returned to burn more forest just over the next hill. This was just one of the proliferating bands of cattle ranchers, loggers, and landless peasant farmers that in recent years have been encroaching on Indian homelands that cling to the last remote forests, savannas, and wetlands of Central America.

European explorers of the western hemisphere labelled any lands unsettled by their kind as "uninhabited." Sadly, this colonial ignorance of indigenous peoples has persisted to modern times; the lands inhabited by Indians are usually considered vacant, and are still not recognized as theirs. Securing legal protection for their homelands is perhaps the fundamental challenge indigenous peoples face in preserving their way of life--and preserving the ecosystems that are essential to it.

What threatens to make this problem far worse is the expected doubling of the Central American population to 60 million people within the next 25 years. With no uninhabited arable land remaining, the only way for peasants to find new land to log, ranch or farm is to grab it from those not powerful enough to defend it. "Conflicts over land rights have become the most incendiary and deadly issue in Central America, and by far the biggest threat to the cultural survival of its indigenous peoples," says Mac Chapin, director of the Arlington, Virginia-based Native Lands, a program of the Tides Foundation that works to secure indigenous land fights.

Two years ago, Indian leaders and cultural activists in the northeast corner of Honduras decided to remedy the political invisibility of the Indians of the Mosquitia region by carefully mapping where and how these Garifuna, Pesch, Miskito, and Tawahka Sumu tribes lived. They put together a project that would help the Indians create a detailed, graphic record of their homelands. While land-use maps are not border police, they do establish who occupies a piece of land and how it is being used, while proving that it is not empty and up for grabs.

The Honduran project was organized by MASTA, a Miskito Indian group, and MOPAWI...