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Indonesia is one of the world’s “megadiverse” countries, providing ecosystem services that accrue at the global scale. However, control over access to and use of natural resources has historically been a source of tension between the central government and local communities, with the latter usually being marginalized by the former. Since the fall of the authoritarian Suharto regime in 1998, however, a grassroots movement supports the revitalization of customary communities and their traditional systems of social organization (adat). A major part of this quest for legitimacy is the portrayal of indigenous people as environmentally benign. This chapter describes how indigenous systems have been influenced by political processes over time. We then describe how the changing political–administrative landscape has given rise to a national indigenous rights movement. We also analyze international factors that have contributed to the emergence of the indigenous movement before discussing potential challenges facing the movement in the future. This chapter seeks to get beyond the simplistic conflation of indigenous peoples and environmentalism by understanding the strategic articulation of indigeneity and environmentalism.

This chapter reflects upon the main reasons for the universal, deep, and long-lasting impact of the Mexican neozapatista movement during the 25 years of its public life, recuperating not only the immediate reasons but the reasons linked with process in the middle and in the long term. We argue that the neozapatista movement changed the correlation des forces in Mexico in 1994, opening the transition of all indigenous Latin American movements to pass from a defensive and marginal position, to a new offensive and protagonic position. In the general context after 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Mexican neozapatism restores hope in social protest and social fight of all the anticapitalistic and antisystemic movements all over the world. With the above basis, it is possible to understand that this Mexican neozapatism was able to define the general agenda of the main demands and targets that were vindicated for the antisystemic movements during the last 25 years, including all the movements of 2011, such as the Spanish Indignados, or the so-called Arab Spring, or Occupy Wall Street, or even the current French movement of the Gilets Jeaunes, among many others. It explains partially the real function of a kind of “avant-garde” of the antisystemic movements all over the world, playing by the Mexican neozapatismo in the last five lusters and even today.

This chapter examines the training of indigenous Mayan catechists by the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico, and their subsequent role in the establishment and growth of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in the period prior to the Zapatistas' 1994 uprising. It considers the adequacy of Timothy Wickham-Crowley's model of guerrilla insurgencies in Latin America in explaining the Zapatista case. It finds, contrary to Wickham-Crowley's model of the relations between urban university leadership groups and peasant support bases, that the catechists constituted a stratum of “organic indigenous-campesino intellectuals” that radically undermined their communities’ traditional intellectual dependence on outsiders and enabled them to constitute themselves as a new collective political subject.

The Mexican government has been criticized for its implementation of neo-liberal economic policies that threaten to further impoverish indigenous populations. Given this, it is surprising that in 1997 some members of the Mixe people – one of the poorest indigenous groups in Mexico – condemned the implementation of a new government funding project that was specifically intended to alleviate hardship caused by free trade. The paper argues that objections to both free trade and the new funding program stem from the overarching problem the Mixe face, namely their systematic exclusion from decision-making processes and citizenship at the national level.

Across Latin America, debates and practice around indigenous law provide a window on shifting relations between indigenous movements, states, and international actors. In Guatemala, the practice of indigenous law is a reflection of cultural difference, a response to past and present violence, and a resource for a population denied access to justice. In the postwar period, indigenous law has become a central element of contemporary Mayan identity politics. Together with the policy shift toward state-endorsed multiculturalism, this has meant it has become a highly contested and politicized terrain. This article examines attempts by indigenous activists to “recuperate” and strengthen indigenous law – or what is now termed “Mayan law” (derecho Maya) – in Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala. Analyzing the tensions between local demands, the Mayan movement, international NGOs and intergovernmental bodies, and the Guatemalan state, it reflects on what they reveal about the limits and contradictions of the multicultural model of justice promoted since the end of the armed conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the development of indigenous heritage rights in Taiwan. It examines how this pursuit is intertwined with the global indigenous movement, national political interests and rising local cultural awareness.

This paper focuses on the rise of indigenous rights in Taiwan by looking at political shifts, indigenous museums and changing frameworks through which heritage is understood. The paper uses two case studies: one is the implementation of a heritage protection law in Taiwan; the other is the launch of indigenous museums.

In Taiwan, heritage is often associated with political ideology, power relations and resource distribution. The development of heritage discourse is inseparable from the international heritage trend as well as the local political situation.

The pursuit of indigenous heritage rights in Taiwan is supported on the one hand by the government so as to define a distinctive Taiwanese culture and on the other to meet the demands of Taiwan’s indigenous movement. Two case studies are provided to examine the pros and cons of current indigenous heritage projects in Taiwan.

This chapter critically examines dialogues between indigenous feminists and academic feminists about the role and significance of indigenous epistemologies in constructing social scientific knowledge, particularly feminist epistemologies. We argue that the term indigenous feminisms must be understood as broadly linking gender equality, decolonization, and sovereignty for indigenous peoples. In Latin America, this term typifies an activist and practical movement with cultural, economic, and politically specific dimensions. We posit that analytical and theoretical frameworks developed from indigenous women’s ways of knowledge production should be recognized and legitimated in feminist discourse because much is learned from their worldview about women’s emancipation, the importance of intersectionality in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender in indigenous contexts, in addition to political and cultural critiques. We show that indigenous feminist theoretical formulations are not homogenous but overlap in some areas of theoretical and practical formulations that involve new conceptualizations of the body, space, time, action/movement, and memory.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual overview of linkages between buen vivir and social enterprise as emerging from a review of the literature regarding indigenous development approaches in Latin America. As reported in the literature such approaches aim to reduce poverty and affirm indigenous cultural identities through the sustainable use of natural resources.

The conceptual arguments build on a review of literature regarding social enterprise, mainly in its European conception, on social and solidarity economy according to several Latin American scholars, and on streams of literature related to indigenous development and indigenous entrepreneurship.

Against the failure of externally‐driven developmental policies, social enterprise can be considered as a useful vehicle for indigenous peoples to establish direct control and management of natural resources and territories that constitute an important step towards their self‐determination and self‐managed development.

An empirical validation of the presented argument is lacking in this paper and further empirical work is needed.

The paper is an attempt to provide a general conceptualization of social enterprise as a meaningful tool for the development of indigenous peoples in Latin America, bringing together different concepts borrowed from theories on social enterprise, social and solidarity economy and indigenous development.

This chapter analyzes the semiotic construction of US claims to sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Building on semiotic theories in sociology and theories within critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, it presents an interpretive analysis of state, military, and academic discursive strategies. The US empire-state attempts to construct colonial narratives of race and sovereignty that rehistoricize the history of Hawaiians and other Indigenous peoples. In order to make claims to sovereignty, settler-colonists construct narratives that build upon false claims to superiority, advancement, and discovery. Colonial resignification is a process by which signs and symbols of Indigenous communities are conscripted into the myths of empire that maintain such sovereign claims. Yet, for this reason, colonial resignification can be undone through reclaiming such signs and symbols from their use within colonial metanarratives. In this case, efforts toward decolonial resignification enacted alternative metanarratives of peoples' relationships to place. This “flip side” of the synecdoche is a process that unravels the ties that bind layered myths by providing new answers to questions that underpin settler colonial sovereignty.