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States have long used protected areas to consolidate control over Indigenous Peoples' territories, undermining community-based governance and access to resources. Despite this history, Indigenous Peoples around the world are increasingly designating their own protected areas to defend ancestral territories and assert self-determination. This paper examines Indigenous conservation politics in the Salween Peace Park in Kawthoolei, an autonomous territory of the Karen (Sino-Tibetan language-speaking peoples living primarily in Burma and along the Thai-Burma border). Local villagers and the Karen National Union envision the park as a grassroots initiative for peace in an area that has suffered decades of armed conflict between the Burmese military and the Karen movement for self-determination. Using the Salween Peace Park as a case study, we engage Indigenous scholarship on politics of recognition, resurgence, and refusal. We explore intersections and tensions between these political strategies, highlighting ways that Indigenous protected areas mobilize different forms of power to advance self-determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation scientists increasingly recognise the value of Indigenous knowledge in conservation practice. However, studies of Indigenous knowledge and resource management systems have often tended to overlook the role and agency of more-than-human beings and ceremonial protocols in mediating human–environment relationships. This paper presents results from community-based research with Karen communities in the Salween Peace Park, an innovative Indigenous-led conservation initiative in the autonomous Karen territory of Kawthoolei, on the border between Thailand and Burma, or Myanmar. Our findings detail ways in which relations with more-than-human beings, including spirits, constitute environmental governance in Karen communities. These findings compel externally situated conservation biologists to take relational ontologies seriously, allowing local interlocutors' lived experience, knowledge, and theory to challenge culturally bound concepts such as resources, management, and conservation. In order to transform conservation biology through Indigenous perspectives, it is essential to pay attention to the relational world in which many Indigenous Peoples live. Doing so helps support a conservation practice attentive to the interdependence of all life in ways that uphold Indigenous Peoples' rights of self-determination, cultural identity, and social relations with their ancestral lands. We argue that attending to these relations is essential to building community-based conservation collaborations with Indigenous Peoples that are more effective, sustainable, and just. Conservation biologists increasingly recognise the value of Indigenous knowledge and resource management practices for conservation. Drawing on research with Karen communities, we argue that, in order for Indigenous perspectives to truly transform conservation biology, it is essential to pay attention to the relations between humans and more-than-human beings that shape Indigenous stewardship practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory mapping has become an indispensable tool in the struggle of indigenous peoples to claim their rights to land and resources. It has also, however, come under criticism for its potential to increase state regulation, replace indigenous conceptions of territory and property, and to create conflict. This paper starts from the premise that the problem is not mapping per se, but the conception of abstract space we allow to frame and guide our representation of indigenous territories, resource use and management. The development of a more effective participatory mapping practice thus requires a critical engagement with the conception of space that participatory mappers are attempting to map. Using research conducted in two Karen communities in Thailand, this paper develops a conception of 'dwelling space' meant to better capture the complex spatiality of indigenous resource use and serve as a potential alternative to abstract space. I conclude by arguing for a renewed practice of community-based mapping that takes seriously the spatial complexity of indigenous territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: wilderness; conservation; decolonization; Indigenous peoples; Parks Canada; milieu sauvage; décolonisation; Autochtones; Parcs Canada EN wilderness conservation decolonization Indigenous peoples Parks Canada FR milieu sauvage décolonisation Autochtones Parcs Canada 232 249 18 06/04/20 20200601 NES 200601 Introduction: Canada's "wilderness" ethic For better or worse, wilderness has long been emblematic of the Canadian national imaginary (Campbell [13]; Erickson [20]). Canada's assumed legitimacy and authority is based on the racist assumption that Indigenous peoples were too primitive to hold sovereign authority over their lands upon contact with European colonizers (Coulthard [17]). And so when Chief Justice Thomas Berger, the lawyer representing conservation groups and First Nations against the Yukon Government in the Supreme Court hearings, stated that the Peel Watershed "is a wilderness that is sacred to the First Nations" (Berger [4]), the comment is taken in stride, revealing the complex, contentious, and enduring place of the wilderness ethic in the Peel, in Yukon, and in Canadian conservation. Conclusion Although wilderness-thinking continues to structure conservation in Canada in certain problematic ways, the emerging Indigenous-led conservation movement gives us hope for a post-wilderness conservation practice. By critically analyzing the state of wilderness-thinking in present-day conservation in Canada, we are able to better outline the floor for a post-wilderness conservation practice, and hopefully inspire conservationists and critical scholars alike to continue pushing the height of the ceiling. [Extracted from the article]