The ecological native: Indigenous peoples' movements and eco-governmentality in Colombia

This dissertation analyses indigenous peoples' processes of identity construction as ecological natives. It opens a space for reconstructing all the different networks, conditions of emergence, and implications (political, cultural, social and economic) of one specific event: the consolidation of the relationship between indigenous peoples and environmentalism. This dissertation is based on ethnographic information and focused on the historical process of the emergence of indigenous peoples' movements in Latin America, in general, and indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta de Colombia (SNSM), in particular. It demonstrates the processes of the construction of indigenous peoples' environmental identities as an interplay of local, national and transnational dynamics among indigenous peoples and environmental movements and discourses in relation to global environmental policies. It also demonstrates the political effects that these processes have had on indigenous peoples' autonomy, territories, resources, knowledges, identities and representations. These dynamic processes have engaged indigenous peoples and prompted their actions within a specific framework of ideas (eco-governmentality) related to non-indigenous practices, discourses, forms of political participation, conceptions of territory, nature, and property rights.; I followed the method of Interactive Participation for addressing environmental issues. This method allowed for the inclusion of the different social actors involved in particular research projects, especially in terms of defining participation, meetings among actors and the means of dissemination of the information that these agents generated. As a second methodological approach, I focused on the role of different actors at the local and global levels in order to analyze their political actions in the context of the interrelations among them. Finally, I gathered information among different actors through archival research, newspapers, interviews, life histories, and participant-observation.; This dissertation contributes to the understanding of the links that currently exist between environmental identity construction and the political actions of indigenous peoples' movements in Latin America and Colombia. It analyzes the historical conditions of the emergence of the relationship between indigenous peoples and environmentalism by considering the coincidental emergence and consolidation of indigenous peoples' and environmental movements. It also traces historically the conditions responsible for the emergence of the relationship between indigenous peoples and environmental movements in terms of the process of constructing their ecological identities. This historical account of the representation of indigenous peoples as ecological natives allows analysis and explication of the implications and consequences that these emergent situations have generated for specific indigenous peoples, communities, and persons in Colombia.