Tribe wins back rights to ancestral territory

Almost 40 years after being evicted from their homes and traditional forest territory to make way for a national reserve, the Soliga tribe in India have won the right to use their ancestral lands again.

The Soliga's right to collect, use and sell forest produce from within the Rangaswami Temple Sanctuary reserve demonstrates the regional government of Karnataka state's new found ability to reconcile tribal people's rights with wildlife conservation needs, ending more than a generation's concerns about possible evictions and prohibitions against using the forest resources. Earlier this year, more than a thousand Soliga expected to lose their homes when the reserve was re-classified as a tiger sanctuary.

According to Survival International, the Soliga insisted that removing them was not the solution, and told India's Environment Minister to ‘give (them) poison', rather than force them out. One Soliga man explained that the Soliga themselves "have been the ones that look out for tigers. You remove us and you remove the tigers."

Under a Forest Rights Act, the Soliga now have legal rights to use and protect as much as 60 per cent of the reserve, including parts of the core area and the tribal leaders are working on a proposal to manage the tiger reserve jointly with the Karnataka state authorities, making best use of their traditional knowledge.

Survival's Director Stephen Corry said, "the Indian government is beginning to realize that tribal people are the best conservationists, by far. If only the rest of the world could catch on. Evicting tribespeople from their ancestral land in the name of ‘conservation' is not only illegal and destroys them, it also spells disaster for the local environment and wildlife.'

Source: www.survivalinternational.org

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