Double-Edged Sword

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Above: “Cluster of Brush Clover Start to Blossom” (2007), Dennis Wood

Intercontinental Cry

July 9, 2013

By Jay Taber 

Over the last few years, participatory mapping by indigenous communities has been heralded as a breakthrough in their relations with corporations and modern states. As the theory goes, by mapping sacred cultural sites and natural resources essential to their survival, indigenous nations can help corporate states avoid unnecessary conflict through cooperative conservation. Of course, that is only one theory, the other being that by informing corporate states of their most fundamental vulnerabilities, indigenous nations are plotting their own doom.