With a third of the world’s largest tropical forest under the successful stewardship of Indigenous Peoples, it would be beneficial to consider their strategies to care for the environment, according to a Trinity College faculty member.
However, environmental policy in the Amazon typically ignores Indigenous Peoples’ ways of caring for the land, said Giancarlo Rolando, Patricia C. and Charles H. McGill ’63 Visiting Assistant Professor of International Studies.
“Despite numerous calls for inclusive approaches to environmental conservation and climate change mitigation, Indigenous ways of thinking and doing continue to be largely excluded,” said Rolando. “What lessons can we learn from the ways in which Amazonian Peoples relate to the forest?”
Rolando will address this question at a lecture “Singing, Dancing, Feasting, and Dreaming: Indigenous Amazonian Lessons to (Hopefully) Postpone the End of the World,” on March 31 at 4:30 p.m. in the Washington Room, Mather Hall. The event is the annual Patricia C. and Charles H. McGill ’63 Distinguished Lecture in International Studies.
A sociocultural anthropologist, Rolando’s current work examines the ways in which Indigenous Peoples of Peruvian Amazonia engage with development projects and environmental conservation initiatives that overlap with their ancestral territories.
Rolando is collaborating with knowledge keepers of the Huni Kuin People to document practices and knowledge associated with rituals intended to establish beneficial relationships with the environment.
His research has been funded by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France, the U.K.’s Economic and Social Research Council and the British Museum’s Endangered Material Knowledge Programme.
