The politics of natural resource access: Indigeneity, race and property rights in the Honduran Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve

The Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve has become a place of struggle over natural resource access and property rights. The Miskito Indians are the Reserve's largest indigenous group and are currently demanding the formalization of their customary territorial rights from the Honduran state. Since the mid 1990s, Miskito access to natural resources inside the Reserve has been persistently challenged by outside interests, namely ladino colonists (colonos), and the state itself. Through ethnographic participant observation, semi-structured interviews, historical data collection, and with a focus on discourse, this dissertation explores the dynamics of racial representations of indigenous and afro-indigenous peoples on the one hand, and their land uses on the other. A particular focus concerns the ways that pervasive and contradictory and historical and contemporary discursive constructions of indigenous and afro-indigenous peoples and their habitats are infused in contemporary natural resource struggles. The reproduction of racialized indigenous discourses occurs both in the context of state articulations of biodiversity and sustainable development priorities inside the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, and in addition, is embedded within national agrarian and environmental policies in Honduras. These dynamics are explored with particular emphasis on the ways that Miskito natural resource struggles articulate with the politics of global approaches to environmental conservation, with the resurgence of indigenous peoples' movements in Latin America and with the diffusion of market-driven land tenure policies. Acknowledging the significance of these broader, contextual influences, this work emphasizes the ways in which racialized struggles are highly localized, and particularly, how the Miskito, the colonos and the state lay claim to overlapping yet specific spaces and places inside the Reserve. Building upon the insights of political ecology and critical racial studies, this dissertation calls for increased attention to race in geography and political ecology as important influences on the politics of development and development policy and in the arenas of environmental politics and struggles over natural resources. In this light, Miskito struggles over natural resources are explored as interwoven contestations of racialized identities and land rights, wherein discursive and institutional articulations of state development, race and property rights are mutually constituted.