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Introduction: Local Reaction to Global Integration The Political Economy of Development in Indigenous Communities
Hokulani K. Aikau and James H. Spencer*

The case studies explored in this volume show how indigenous communities from North America, South America, and Asia have articulated their collective interests within the context of development. This global perspective reveals at least three recurring dilemmas: Who defines the indigenous group and toward what end? How do such groups assert these identities and claims against the nation state, even as they depend on that state for legitimacy? In a fast-globalizing world of placelessness, how and why do they articulate socio-spatial identities? Presenting these cases together offers a constructive platform for better understanding conflicts between globalization and specific localities as well as indigenous reactions to development planning. KEYWORDS: indigenous politics, development, planning, globalization, locality.

For over thirty years, Molokai Island residents have fought to block economic development plans to expand tourism and urbanization. Molokai Island is located midway between Oahu Island to its northeast and Maui Island to its southwest. Many consider Molokai to be one of the few Native Hawaiian places in the state because the majority of the 7,300 inhabitants are Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands. Despite high rates of unemployment and poverty since the closing of the pineapple industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Molokai residents
*Aikau: Department of Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Saunders Hall 611, 2424 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI 96822. E-mail: aikau@hawaii.edu. Spencer: Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Political Science, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Saunders Hall 613, 2424 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI 96822. E-mail: jhs@hawaii.edu.

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continue to actively challenge large-scale economic development programs. In 2003, residents successfully blocked plans by cruise ship companies to include Molokai on their inter-island tours. More recently, in October 2006, approximately 300 activist-residents protested plans to create a large luxury subdivision at Laau Point, a pristine beach on the southwest tip of the island, by physically occupying the land where the development was to take place. Moke Kim, a resident of Molokai, expressed the view held by other protestors: Everyone says that we must assimilate so that we will not be left behind. . . . I dont want to be assimilated. I want to be left behind.1 The development plan, proposed by Molokai Ranch Ltd., a subsidiary of the multinational corporation BIL International Ltd., was in part intended to create jobs, but according to residents, these jobs would be at the expense of a particular kind of lifestyle that residents want to maintain. Rational development theory is unable to account for perspectives like those of Kim, who sees the entry of such large development plans as a choice between maintaining a rural, subsistence lifestyle and working in a low-paying service job. From the perspective of the state and the developers, Kim and other activists are irrational, and their indigenous perspectives appear to be counterproductive to the more rational project of economic expansion. This example illustrates many of the factors involved in the political economy of development for indigenous communities. Molokai residents use their indigenous position, namely their precontact connection to the land and the distinct society that grew out of the relationship between the land, sea, and people, in order to block any further encroachment on those traditional ways of life by the State of Hawaii, multinational corporations, and others seen as outsiders. In a political climate in which the interests and demands of indigenous peoples are becoming widely recognized, Molokai residents have seen some success. One of the theoretical challenges that this case poses, however, is that by establishing their claims on the grounds of maintaining tradition, indigeneity becomes counterposed to modernity, development, and globalization. As Frank Hirtz explains, this is one of the dilemmas of indigeneity: Modernity needs the contrasting concept of indigeneity and tradition, whereas traditional societies in pre-modern or precolonial time did not need to establish their otherness in opposition to modernity or their own history. In other words, through the very process of being recognized as indigenous, these groups enter the realm of modernity.2 What Hirtz suggests is that indigenous peoples necessarily need modernity as much as modernity needs tradition. However, the consequences of this dilemma are

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not evenly weighted. Within the realm of modernity, indigenous peoples, their governance structures, and knowledge systems are contrasted to modernity and in many cases seen as counterproductive to globalization and economic development. This special issue attempts to clear some of the smoke surrounding indigenous communities in the context of state and market structures that are increasingly global in scope and organization. Thus, our focus on the political economy of development in indigenous communities examines the place-making side of globalization, drawing out experiences of how the socio-spatial concept of indigenous communities is created and strategically deployed by formal and informal governance structures, individuals, and nonstate organizations. In the field of political science, indigenous politics has been quite marginal except in the context of human rights and governmental representation. Even more marginal are debates about the relationship between indigeneity and development. Recent work in geography, planning, Latin American studies, and political ecology has focused on indigenous peoples engagement with development projects, programs, and policies. However, the political and theoretical implications of these relationships remain peripheral to debates in political science. In this special issue we are interested in exploring how a community comes to see itself as indigenous as well as how this political identity is mobilized. As with many discussions of communities, particularly those defined by culture, popularly understood definitions of insiders and outsiders are important in how they define political fault lines and communities of interest. A focus on these political fault lines through an indigenous lens, however, specifically highlights how marginalized political communities can, for better or worse, become enshrined in the popular imagination in material spaces. Thus, our focus is on how socio-spatial communities mobilize the concept of the indigenous in their dealings with development and modernity. Political scientist Jeff J. Corntassel (Cherokee), dissatisfied with many academic and IGO/NGO definitional approaches to indigenous peoples, offers a four-part alternative definition of indigenous peoples that allows for self-identification, recognizes historical legacies of colonization, and has direct policy implications: 1. Peoples who believe they are ancestrally related and identify themselves, based on oral and/or written histories, as descendents of the original inhabitants of their ancestral homeland. 2. Peoples who may, but do not necessarily, have their own informal and/or formal political, economic and social institutions, which tend to be community-based and reflect their

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distinct ceremonial cycles, kinship networks, and continuously evolving cultural traditions. 3. Peoples who speak (or once spoke) an indigenous language, often different from the dominant societys languageeven where the indigenous language is not spoken, distinct dialects and/or uniquely indigenous expressions may persist as a form of indigenous identity. 4. Peoples who distinguish themselves from the dominant society and/or other cultural groups while maintaining a close relationship with their ancestral homeland/sacred sites, which may be threatened by ongoing military, economic, or political encroachment or may be places where indigenous peoples have been previously expelled, while seeking to enhance their cultural, political, and economic autonomy. 3 Corntassels working definition moves the discussion of who is indigenous away from a checklist approach to identity toward community claims for self-determination that can include control over governance, economic policies, land use, and natural resources. What this definition maintains, however, is the paradoxical tension between tradition and modernity. As Ronald Niezen notes, references to the term indigenous to describe discrete communities of people is a relatively recent occurrence. However, the interesting thing about the relative newness of this concept, Niezen points out, is that it refers to a primordial identity, to people with primary attachments to land and culture, traditional people with lasting connections to ways of life that have survived from time immemorial.4 Following this line of thinking, the articles in this volume interrogate the socio-spatial contours of indigeneity. The articles in this volume describe and theorize how sociospatial communities strategically deploy an indigenous identity as they navigate the often turbulent waters of global eddies. As in the case of Molokai residents, a claim of indigeneity has the potential to hold off the tide of multinational development projects, even as it allows communities to link their struggles to a much larger international political arena. As Hirtz observes, claims to indigeneity necessarily link tradition to modernity and in turn provide a mechanism whereby indigenous peoples are able to establish claims to places at a time when global flows of capital, labor, and culture are producing a place-less world. Economic geographers have long made a compelling case for the importance of places and territoriality in fast-developing industrial clusters that drive global economic growth.5 This volume supports a

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new literature on globalization from below, 6 but suggests that marginalized global communities are seen not only in the interstices of global industrial production centers with a vanishing middle class,7 but also in socio-spatial communities far from those industrial clusters. By examining indigenous communities in a modernizing and seemingly place-less world, one might better understand the impulse of disempowered communities to claim territoryeven though it those places claimed may be characterized by debilitating poverty and natural resource depletion.8 This collection of essays provides comparative empirical analysis of the political-economic constitution of these eddies and implications for policies related to globalization. We hope that it will help to explain why disenfranchised groups make such strong claims to particular places and why they fight for physical spaces as avenues to economic opportunity in an increasingly place-less world. Why, for example, poverty-stricken Native American tribes fight so hard for recognition of degraded lands. Why low-income urban minorities fight so hard to retain control of dying neighborhoods. Why poor countries fight so hard to control imports when they increase the cost of living. Such issues are at the crux of the dilemma of indigeneity. The essays in this special issue in part support arguments that a community or peoples adoption of an indigenous identity connects them to an international political arena whereby their claims gain legitimacy. Sandra Pinels article, Culture and Cash: How Two New Mexico Indian Pueblos Combined Culture and Development, offers a necessary corrective to Federal Indian policies as well as development models that frame indigenous knowledge and political structures as impediments to progress. Rather, she turns the literature on rational development practices on its head by claiming that indigenous planning and development decisions are rational based on the values, beliefs, and epistemological imperatives of two Pueblo communities. In this essay, tradition is not in opposition or a hindrance to modernity, but a critical part of how indigenous people express self-determination over their economic future, maintain control over their cultural land practices, and ensure the well-being of the community for seven generations into the future. Pinel states, The development choices of Zia Pueblo and Pueblo de Cochiti challenge the long-standing artificial divide assumed between traditional governance and development to show that tradition and development can coexist. Development may be sustained, not when indigenous peoples abandon traditional political institutions; but rather, when traditional leaders, elders, and tribal councils are

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responsible for considering alternatives and make informed decisions that are then implemented through new institutions that are sanctioned by traditional political forms. Gabriela Valdivias article, The Amazonian Trial of the Century: Indigenous Identities, Transnational Networks, and Petroleum in Ecuador examines how three organizations in the Sucumbos region of Ecuador, FIENCE, OISE, and FOISE deploy indigeneity as a strategy to oppose Texacos detrimental environmental impact. The goal of these organizations, Valdivia argues, is to achieve control over local living spaces by establishing connections between local desires for life improvement and the moral, financial, or political interests of actors beyond the local. In this case, indigeneity is a deliberate strategy used to link local environmental concerns to global interests. For local peoples marginalized by capitalist enterprises and environmental irresponsibility, who are seeking to maintain an environmentalist ethic for cultural survival, indigeneity becomes a means for transgressing political, social, and cultural boundaries. In Claiming Indigenous Community: Political Discourse and Natural Resource Rights in Indonesia, Suraya Afiff and Celia Lowe examine two cases where local communities were able to deploy an indigenous identity as a political strategy in their claim over land and natural resources. Through the deliberate actions of scientists who constructed the Togean people as indigenous, this community was able to establish land claims within the emerging Togean Island National Park. In a second example, a community in Sosa, South Tapanuli, was able to adopt a masyarakat adat (customarylaw-communities) discourse as they established rights to land and other natural resources. This approach was a departure from earlier attempts to utilize a class-based strategy used against the state and corporations. Their examples call for a rethinking of the question of who is indigenous. Afiff and Lowe argue that an indigenous identity is not merely a mimetic description of a real kind of people in the world [but] a deployment of political discourse and a framework for political action. James H. Spencers article, A Retrospective Look at the Political Economy of Market Reform: The Formation of Socio-Spatial Identities in the Mekong Delta of Viet Nam, addresses the question of who may be indigenous when there is no clear colonial relationship between the state and a local community. Whereas Corntassels working definition is useful for socio-spatial communities who are intent on establishing claims for self-determination, sovereignty, or independence, it is quiet on the specifics of how an indigenous community is created. Spencers case sheds light on how and where

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indigenous communities are currently being formed in the context of transitional economies like that of Vietnam. In Pathways of Indigenous Knowledge in Yunnan, China, Janet C. Sturgeon extends this focus on transitional economies, offering an example of a somewhat more mature, evolving relationship between a local community and a transitional nation-state. In particular, her discussion of the role NGOs play in how an indigenous identity is deployed through a cultural good such as indigenous knowledge exemplifies application of the concept in a national context where the official state position is a claim that there are no indigenous people within its borders. The case studies described in this volume are examples of how indigenous communities from North America, South America, and Asia have articulated their collective interests. This set of widely disparate cases is linked by at least three recurring dilemmas. Who defines the indigenous group and toward what end? How should such groups assert these identities and claims against the nation state, even as they depend on that state for legitimacy? In a rapidly globalizing world of placelessness, how and why do they articulate socio-spatial communities as identity? By presenting them together in this special issue, we hope to provide a constructive platform for better understanding the reactions to development plans such as those seen on Molokai. As the economy, governance, and culture become increasingly globally integrated, we are sure to see more of these seemingly irrational conflicts between globalization and localities. To be sure, such conflicts are neither avoidable nor fatal, but we should do our best to understand them.

Notes
1. Bree Ullmann, Breaking Point: Molokai Activists Set Up Camp at Laau Point in Protest of Proposed Subdivision, Honolulu Weekly, October 2531, 2006: 7. 2. Frank Hirtz, It Takes Modern Means to be Traditional: On Recognizing Indigenous Cultural Communities in the Philippines, Development and Change 34, no. 5 (2003): 887914. 3. Jeff Corntassell, Who is Indigenous? Peoplehood and Ethnonationalist Approaches to Rearticulating Indigenous Identity, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 9, no. 1 (2003): 75100. 4. Ronald Neizen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and The Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California, 2003), p. 3. 5. For example, Michael Storper, The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy (New York: Guilford Press, 1997); Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables, The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); Alan

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J. Scott, Regions and the World Economy: The Coming Shape of Global Production, Competition, and Political Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 6. Lisa Benton-Short, Marie D. Price, and Samantha Friedman, Globalization from Below: The Ranking of Global Immigrant Cities, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (2005): 945959. 7. See, for example, Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (2d ed.) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001). 8. As defined by William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); William J. Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1996); Christopher Jencks, Is the American Underclass Growing? in Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson, eds., The Urban Underclass (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution Press, 1991); Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995); Paul Jargowsky, Poverty and Place (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997); and Paul Jargowsky, Stunning Progress, Hidden Problems: The Dramatic Decline of Concentrated Poverty in the 1990s. Report to the Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, May 2003.