Ecologists by default? How the indigenous movement in Ecuador became protector of nature

Abstract

Since several decades, indigenous peoples are seen as stewards of nature. This is not only an attribution by Western/Northern academics but rather the result of conscious political choices undertaken by organizations related to those peoples. From a certain moment on, some indigenous organizations integrated nature-related contents into their functioning and demands. In the Ecuadorian case, it is easily traceable when ecology entered the discourse of the indigenous movement and how it developed. Ecology and its connection to well-known concepts such as Buen Vivir/Sumak Kawsay is a main reasons for the success of the movement. This article will analyse the ecologization of the movement and its discourse as a particularly effective way of self-inclusion of the excluded and the subsequent institutionalization both on the level of organizations and the level of discourse. This will make possible to understand the moment of main impact of ecological contents – for instance in the 1990s – and demands and the moments of systematic depoliticization of those demands – especially, since 2008.

Keywords:

• Social movement
• indigenous
• ecology
• framing
• Buen Vivir

ORCID

Philipp Altmann http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5036-2988

Notes

1 The framing approach developed by Benford and Snow is a revision of Erving Goffman’s take on symbolic interactionism. For Goffman, “Frames help to render events or occurrences meaningful and thereby function to organize experience and guide action.” (Benford and Snow 2000, 614) Framing is thus based on a rather classic idea of (social) subjects that interact and produce meaning via (social) objects.

2 In total, almost 100 texts, published between 1934 and 2017.

3 In order to do this, the general political utterings on above-local-level-issues were taken into consideration. The result were central political concepts like indigenous nationality or interculturality, on the one hand, and on the other, more open discursive fields concerning social class, gender, ethnicity, rights and legality, or nature. While the former part was studied with tools of discourse analysis and history of concepts in other publications, the latter one merits a more open approach that allows for a wider understanding of the way certain ideas are rendered meaningful by the movement and its organizations. The framing approach allows just that.

4 All translations by the author.

5 An overview of ecologist NGOs in Ecuador can be found in Brysk (1996) and Lalander and Merimaa (2018). While their impact on the indigenous movement has not been studied, some of them started to cooperate with the movement during the 1990s.

6 Other influential actors would be the Danish and Norwegian development agencies and USAID. During the government of Correa (2007–2017), the structure of international development agencies changed and several ceased their work in Ecuador.

7 https://kawsaksacha.org/

8 Culture refers here to a complex of elements that produce meaning. It is open and changes constantly. In the context of this text, the two main elements of culture are language and the history of oppression. Cultures are therefore not separated but constitute each other in a power relation.

9 This could be observed in the protests of October 2019 where the fight against neoliberal policy was expressed in terms of anti-extractivism and anti-capitalism, but hardly connected to Sumak Kawsay as such. Maybe this is an expression of a general rollback in political semantics in Latin America that makes the repetition of the more generally understandable concepts of the 1980s and 1990s necessary.