Workshop - Sumak Kawsay (Good living) good for indigenous movements

Abstract Nr.1: "When a predator culture meets a prey culture"

What is the structure of the process when one culture weakens and eventually kills and consumes another culture? The presentation aims to outline a theoretical framework to analyze such a structure. One way to do structure is by using a goals and means model. The presentation is an illustration how it would look like if one divides the goals into successive sub goals and corresponding means. The presentation would also illustrate how such a process can be structured in phases.

Abstract Nr.2: "Impoverishment, trafficking and human rights violations of the Indidenous peoples of the Himalayas"

For the last 250 years since the invasion of the indigenous Himalayan nations by the Khas migrants, the indigenous peoples of the Himalayas have been subjected to discrimination of all kinds. The cruelest among them were the deliberate impoverishment of indigenous men and trafficking of their women. While some media have taken notice of the human trafficking problems in recent years, they have deliberately kept silent on the indigenous identity of the victims, and have ignored larger historical context in which the trafficking of indigenous women were systematically planned. Since the media and publication industry are fully controlled by the perpetrators, there is little chance that the true story of the indigenous victims will ever be told through those media and publication outlets.

As the settler-Khas regime and the perpetrator-controlled NGO economy are booming on the back of the indigenous people’s poverty, the victims have become increasingly invisible, and some are at the verge of extinction as a cultural group. The most exploited among the 60 plus indigenous Himalayan groups is the Tamang people. This paper presents the findings from a recent study on poverty and human trafficking among the Tamang indigenous peoples in Nepal.

Abstract Nr.3: "Stories of the Mosuo parents in China: From social capital and acculturation perspectives"

The Mosuo people are a small but distinct ethnic group living in Yunnan and Sichuan, China. Known as the “matrilineal society”, many of Mosuo families and clans today are still organized and inheriting through the mothers’ line. A noncontractual, nonobligatory, and non-exclusive form of “marriage”, namely “tisese”, is widely practiced among the Mosuo. Children born in “tisese” usually remain in their natal, extended, and multigenerational households with their mothers and maternal kin. Together family members rear all children born. Because men generally do not live with or co-parent their biological progeny, their sexual behavior has no implications for their own parenting careers or family size.

Faced with Chinese government’s demands towards modernization, the Mosuo began in the late 1980s and early 1990s to conduct local tourism which aimed to foster economic development. Although massive tourism development has led the significant growing of the Mosuo’s social capitals; simultaneously, this ethnic group is losing their status as indigenous people and greatly absorbed into Chinese, especially Han society, where the monetary economy and patriarchal values dominate.

Through the narrative inquiry of twelve Mosuo parents in Ninglang, Yunnan, China, this empirical study uncovered respondents’ parenting stories in a society where the matrilineal family system has progressively changed as the Mosuo culture is reconstructed, reinvented and digested. Guiding this inquiry is the Acculturation and Social Capital models, which together offered the overarching theoretical frameworks to help understand how selected Mosuo parents’ acculturation and social capitals operate collectively in (re)producing, negotiating, and modifying participants’ parenting.

Abstract Nr.4: "Discrimination amongst artic indigenous Sami an non-Sami population in Norway"

Background: Recent research demonstrates that for many indigenous Sami people, experiencing ethnic discrimination is a regular occurrence. The present study was designed to provide estimates of the prevalence of self-reported discrimination in order to identify specific settings where discrimination happened, to identify perpetrators and to examine individuals' responses to the discrimination.

Methods: In 2012, all inhabitants aged between 18 and 69 living in selected municipalities with both Sami and non-Sami settlements in mid- and northern Norway were mailed an invitation to participate in a questionnaire survey. All together, 11, 600 participated.

Results: In total, 21.5% of the sample reported discrimination; of these, 29.8% reported that discrimination happened during the past two years. Ethnic affiliation, age, education level, income and living area were all significantly associated with differences in the frequency of experiencing discrimination. Respondents with a strong Sami affiliation reported the highest levels of discrimination; in total, 50.8% responded that they had been discriminated against, compared with 14.3% of the non-Sami respondents.  Sami with strong Sami affiliation reported have experienced significantly more discrimination over the past two years more than did the non-Sami respondents.

Conclusion: The findings from this study show that the Sami people experience high level of discrimination in Norwegian society. Our findings suggest that interventions specifically designed to prevent discrimination against the Sami people of Norway should be implemented.

Abstract Nr.5: "Decolonizing social work theories as they relate to the indigenous Amazonian constructs of wellbeing, personhood and sociability"

This paper analyses the politics of social progress and social work practice in the Amazon region of Ecuador. It examines the term Sumak Kawsay, Good Living, as a rhetorical devise that conceals conflicting relationships between the government’s understanding of local and national development and indigenous conceptions of land and social justice, particularly environmental justice.
Sumak Kawsay has entered the domain of parliamentary speech, academic dissertation and domestic law regulations as a consequence of a variety of social, political and cultural forces at work. As a peasant Andean notion, it has been transferred to the Spanish-speaking world due to political activism carried out by indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador since the 1980´s and onwards.
As a foreign expression, it has been selected to promote social welfare policies based on a non-Western (i.e., a non-materialistic, non-capitalist and non-developmentalist) conception of human progress. Therefore, it represents a cultural ideal of social justice and social work practice that contrasts sharply with the ideas held by most Western or Westernised academics, developers and politicians.
This paper discusses the extent to which the use of the term Sumak Kawsay by the government is not but a discursive practice. Thus, this paper is an anthropological study of mutually contradictory ideas and social forces at play. On the one hand, there is a conflicting relationship between the government's understanding of local and national development and the indigenous Andean views originally attached to Sumak Kawsay. On the other, there are decolonising social work practices and politically oriented environmental struggles as well as indigenous Amazonian constructs of wellbeing, land use and sociability. This paper examines their mutual
effect.

"Indigenous pathways"

Indigenous people in Canada experience a disproportionately high rate of injuries and fatalities resulting from vehicular accidents compared to that of the general population. Disabling injuries, death, and psychological trauma not only affect those hurt, but also impact their families and their communities. To address the causes and effects of vehicular injury disparities, respectful and creative approaches that are collaborative, sustainable, and rooted in traditional ways of knowing are imperative. Appreciating that the shared experiential understanding of and solutions to the challenges facing Indigenous people differ from that of others in the society, Indigenous people were engaged in collaborative exercises geared towards reshaping their community's message and narrative about safety and injury prevention. Using a Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) approach, Indigenous people partnered in a shared process to better understand current vehicular safety practices, assess the safety needs of their communities, and incorporate traditional modes of knowledge translation to reduce the risk of injury and mortality. The findings incorporated an analysis of the intersection of psychosocial-economic-cultural-spiritual "costs" arising from vehicle-related injuries and fatalities, which in turn led to the development and implementation of cost-saving strategies and community reinvestment. Using this type of analysis moves the discourse on community betterment and capacity-building to a level that provides a defensible argument to those planning, funding and providing services. In doing so, oppressive and subsistence-oriented colonial dogma and practices which have historically been foisted on Indigenous people and their communities are confronted, challenged, and changed.