Community Survival Strategies
The third project is informed by Dr. Klinger’s observation that, on every inhabited continent, large-scale resource extraction has proceeded at the expense of Indigenous communities, often costing them their lives and ancestral lands. This centerpiece of this initiative on Collaborative Survival (a term coined by Anna Tsing) is an ongoing partnership with the community associations of the Yanomami Indigenous Community in the northern Brazilian Amazon since 2016, but encompasses communities living in the shadow of current and former mining sites as well as those wrestling with critical questions of land use and livelihood security. With her students, Dr. Klinger collaborates with Indigenous counterparts and allied organizations as they articulate their future as protagonists in global capitalism, national development, and climate science and policy, as described in this article from BU Today. Drawing together the worlds of remote sensing, community GIS, artisanal and small-scale mining, and Indigenous survival strategies, this project documents Indigenous land use change practices in a time of tremendous global instability.