“Somos Amazonía,” a New Inter-indigenous Identity in the Ecuadorian Amazonia: Beyond a Tacit jus aplidia of Ecological Origin? “SOMOS AMAZONÍA”, UNA NUEVA IDENTIDAD INTERINDÍGENA EN LA AMAZONÍA ECUATORIANA: ¿MÁS ALLÁ DE UN JUS APLIDIA TÁCITO DE ORIGEN ECOLÓGICO? “SOMOS AMAZONIA”, UMA NOVA IDENTIDADE INTER-INDÍGENA NA AMAZÓNIA EQUATORIANA: PARA ALÉM DE UM JUS APLIDIA TÁCITO DE ORIGEM ECOLÓGICA?

The double colonization of the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon, coming from the Southern Amazon but mainly from the Coast and Sierra, has multiplied perceptions, rights, and management methods in this territory. This article explores these differences and reconstructs the history of this colonization and the rights of access to land, which are private for the colonos (settlers) and mostly communal for the indígenas 1 Researcher, Ph.D. in Rural Development, Université catholique de Louvain. Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Laboratoire Géographie de l’Environnement (GEODE), CNRS, and Université de Toulouse. E-mail: mehdi.saqalli@univ-tlse2.fr. 2 Master’s student in Anthropology, Université Paris 10 Ouest Nanterre, France. E-mail: evabeguet@ hotmail.fr 3 Researcher, Ph.D. in Geography, Université Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès. TerraNIS, France. E-mail: nicolas.maestripieri@terranis.fr. 4 Doctoral professor, Ph.D. in Anthropology, Université Paris 10 Ouest Nanterre, France. E-mail: eric. garine@mae.u-paris10.fr.


Introduction
When the leader of Tiwiram -a Shuar village founded in the late 1970s-goes to town, he never fails to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan Somos Amazonía ("We are the Amazon") displaying the five colors of the five indigenous Amazonian nationalities. Indeed, the Shuar community, named after its founder, does not identify itself as indigenous. The village is in the parroquia 5 of Dayuma, province of Orellana, northern Ecuadorian Oriente, 6 whereas Shuars were originally from the southern provinces. This area is recognized as historically falling within the Huaorani territory by both contemporary Shuars and decentralized local governments (parroquia and province alike).
The Shuars from Orellana use the term "autochthon" for referring to the Huaorani, not to themselves. Indeed, displaced from the province of Morona-Santiago for approximately 40 years, the Shuars prefer to identify themselves as Amazonian natives, homogenizing the culturally heterogeneous Amazon into a collective identity.
The 2009 Ecuadorian constitution refers to Huaorani, Kichwa, Shuar, Siona-Secoya, and Ai'Cofan in the northern Oriente as the "indigenous nationalities of Amazonia."-It is intuitively understood that this identification, "indigenous" and "Amazonian," is much appreciated by the Tiwiram leader. How can we understand the visible desire for a common identity? The purpose of this article is to analyze the construction of this 5 The administrative levels are named Gobiernos Autónomos Decentralizados (usual acronym: GAD), beginning with the highest-level provincias, then the municipios or cantones followed by the parroquias and, finally the comunas and comunidades (see further in the article). 6 The east of Ecuador, meaning its Amazonian part.
"ecological" identification, which overcomes (in a way) the most used ethnolinguistic examples.
In the Oriente, the term "autochthon" is not used in identity claims: people are "indigenous" in Spanish.
In legal terms, Ecuadorian law has taken over the issue of indigenous rights, driven by 25-yearold powerful indigenous movements. The 1998 constitution thus recognizes the nation's pluricultural and multi-ethnic nature (Bosa & Wittersheim, 2009). The current one confirms this transition by conferring rights to communities, peoples, and nationalities, 7 facing the colonization of colonos, the settlers coming from the Sierra and the Costa. Ecuador's government has produced many executive decrees, constitution articles, organic acts, and ministerial agreements on the subject (Table 1). It questions law uniformity throughout the national territory and the equality of citizens before the law.

7
Article 407 of the Constitution states that "the extractive activity of non-renewable resources in protected areas and areas declared intangible, including logging, is prohibited. Exceptionally, these resources may be exploited upon reasonable request from the Presidency of the Republic and upon being declared of national interest by the National Assembly, which may call for a plebiscite if deemed necessary." It was in this context that the exploitation of the Yasuní National Park, where indigenous peoples live, was approved on October 3, 2013.

Social events Legal events nationally and internationally
Governmental and presidential decrees
Density ~< 0.04 inhabit. /km² Prospecting for oil by Texaco Evangelization of natives (Limoncocha) Comunas Act (1937) The 1960s Pop. ~ 330 inhabit. These resources may occasionally be exploited upon reasonable request from the President of Ecuador and upon being declared of national interest by the National Assembly, which may call for a plebiscite if deemed necessary. 9 If case of a conflict of rights between subjects, it is necessary "to guarantee the exercise of the right to those actors who suffer

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Mehdi Saqalli, Eva Béguet, Nicolas Maestripieri, Eric de Garine In practice, however, this tangle of legal rights, practices, and perceptions related to territory and resources are the living reflection of this confusion: there are as many territories and many perceptions of identity as identities in the Amazonian Oriente. This is the convergence of two extremely coherent systems: identity and community self-perception on the one hand and equal rights and political structuration on the other.
As noted above, the latter remains the corpus of the nation-state. The former is the product of these rising self-structured indigenous movements, 10 initially under the Buen Vivir slogan. 11 The reason why the convergence between the buen vivir citizenship and the indigenous self-structuration struggles for rights is non-consensual, to say the least, is that the difference between these two structured ideologies has a practical impact on the exploitation of the territory's oil resources, vital for the state with 70 % of the national budget and 51 % of exports. Consequently, we propose to explore the contradictions that these two paradigms render unclear. The purpose of the article is then to explore the history, perceptions, and practices of indígenas and colonos but also their access to legal rights, leading us to some hypotheses on this conjunction.

Methods, fieldwork, and bias
To clarify our positioning, the research producing these results was supported by several funds and fellowships. The Franco-Ecuadorian MONOIL cooperation project provided a diagnosis and prospective modeling of the Oriente environment, especially for oil pollution. It is funded by the the worst consequences due to failure to exercise the right." 10 In Peru and Bolivia, until they claimed presidential power. 11 In Quechua, sumak kawsay. • Participatory observation 12 (DeWalt & DeWalt, 2011), for subsistence activities, food preparation, and consumption, to cross-check the information gathered during narrations and interviews; • Systematic ethnobotanical and ethnozoological interviews, including a collection of the ethnobiological lexicon by free list (Borgatti, 1999;Weller & Romney, 1998)

Perception-Based Regional Mapping
The Perception-Based Regional Mapping (PBRM) is a participatory method for spatializing environmental, sociopolitical, and health issues in six stages ( Figure   1; Maestripieri & Saqalli, 2016;Saqalli et al., 2009 2. Repositioning the study area in the broader context of its region and country based on published literature, particularly the legal aspect of land tenure and the spatial, economic, and social organization of productions.
3. Reconstructing its agrarian history relying on factors, events, and finally reasons that led to a differentiation between producers and new occupations or types of occupations in this territory; and revealing past and ongoing local dynamics through interviews with people who have lived in the area for a long time and witnessed periods of change.
4. These three stages resulted in a draft typology of agricultural situations that enabled us to build a reasoned sampling to delve into the study of production systems. The interviewed producers were selected according to their technicaleconomic situations and social characteristics. The study of production systems concerns the functioning of farming systems and their interactions (Mazoyer & Roudart, 1997). It means observing and interviewing farmers about their practices and decisions to obtain access to overall day-to-day operative production system rationalities. At least three producers were interviewed for each of the identified production types. Information and data were collected using semi-structured and open interviews with 60 farmers between April and August 2015. The interviews addressed various topics (family paths, technical itineraries, dynamics, constraints, and forces). Attention is paid to the perceptions of agriculture by interviewing 14 more people in contact with but not engaged in farming, such as unionists, politicians, or agricultural technicians, especially those in charge of local projects (GAPO, 17 GADMFO, 18 and MAGAPE 19 ). The sample (N = 74) was designed to capture diversity rather than to be statistically representative.

Legal census
A census is assessed on the existing organic laws, acts, and constitutions, the most recent dated September 28, 2008, and the various inter-ministerial agreements, executive decrees implementing laws, and conventions signed by Ecuador. This type of systematic census helps us position both the colonization and the political processes in its legal chronology.

Combination and bias: Issues and constraints
We All combined support the reconstruction of these differential territory perceptions.
The biases that we present below are common and even elementary in any socio-anthropological research. None is significant enough to discredit this paper. Taken together, however, they may be strong enough to have a significant impact on the results.
• Numerous words can be confusing due to their various meanings in context ("cultivated fields," "fields to be cleared," or "crop-friendly zone"). Therefore, when answering the question, "Can you list all the animals that live here?" some people asked if they should also give the names of birds and fish. Similarly, some mentioned insect names in response to the question "What does this animal eat?" but did not include them in free lists because of the restrictive nature of the term "animal," which was tacitly understood by the researcher as a "terrestrial animal," not the "animal species" in its broad sense. Indeed, among the communities of the Shuar and Ashuar groups, "fauna covers an extensive nominal system made up of multiple generic categories" (Descola, 1986, p. 105), implying that correspondences between these two systems were rapidly discovered. Finally, it should be noted that, although everybody speaks Spanish, mother-tongues may affect the individual's understanding; therefore, most interviews and participatory observations were conducted in Spanish; • Many individual interviews took place in the presence of neighbors, family members, or friends, which is socially impossible to avoid. Their presence produced responses that were obviously intended for that audience: interviewees are aware of their critics, the conflicting part of the local context, and enhancing consensual rules. Thus, the most proficient qualitative data, even if bias creeps in, came from young adults, from marginal families: they tend to describe the political and sociological local situation into a less consensual and "politically correct" tone, and they are usually not surrounded by curious neighbors; • The institutional proximity between administrative documents (particularly the convention allowing us to work in Ecuador) and the Ministry of Environment (MAE) suggests a problem because the MAE is not very appreciated and is suspected of collusion with oil companies. In contrast, the MAGAPE is received with less distrust.
3. Results: Tangles of representation 3.1. A short but meaningful history of practical spatial segregation Until the end of the 19th century, the northern part of the Ecuadorian Amazon was occupied by different groups of rotating slash-and-burn farmers-hunters-gatherers (Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Huaoranis, Taromenane, and Tagaeri). The Huaoranis lived between the Napo River and the Curaray River, currently known as Dayuma,20 and are still present on the edge of this territory, especially in and around the Yasuní Park. The

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Mehdi Saqalli, Eva Béguet, Nicolas Maestripieri, Eric de Garine literature on these groups' lifestyles is primarily the work of anthropologists in the third quarter of the 20th century, including Harner (1977) and Descola (1986), who studied the Shuar territories further south (Figure 2.1).
Agrarian reforms (1964 and 1973)  Naturally, this colonization was supported financially and logistically by successive governments, using trucks, buses, and even airplanes.
After a prospecting campaign south of the Napo River, the Vía Aúca 24 was opened. It was a dirt track from the town of Coca, north of the Napo River, that led south (Figure 2.2). This track was first built until the Tiputini River, allowing colonos to settle before but also beyond this river ( Figure 2.2). 21 According to the agropastoral census of 1954, 73.2 % of farms covered only 7.2 % of farmland with less than five ha per farm, whereas 2.1 % of farms occupied 64.4 % of agricultural land, with more than 100 ha per farm (Chiriboga, 1988). 22 Twenty-three percent (63.500 km²) of the national territory versus 3 % (9.000 km²) of redistributed land as a result of the agrarian reform (Gondard & Mazurek, 2001). 23 This point remains: roads are created by oil companies, following the geological map of oil resources, not the potential of the surface territory, which defines the axes of colonization. In 1970, approximately 30 oil concessions were granted, thus marking the beginning of exploitation (Fontaine, 2010). 24 This is a Kichwa word meaning "wild, beast," which is used to designate the Huaoranis.
Using these opening tracks, settling families, called colonos, accessed property in Oriente.  allowing them to pay for more labor (Eberhart, 1996). Legally, Huaoranis are divided into two sets: Tagaeri and Taromenane, or "non-contacted" or "voluntarily isolated" (Table 1), and "contacted Huaoranis" who are slowly settling along the track.
1. Along the paved road lives a combination of capitalistic extensive cattle breeders (paid labor, pasture, and livestock treatments), mixed (coffee and cocoa) crop-livestock smallholders, retirees, and, only in the province of Sucumbíos, fish farms for urban markets. Road-connected comunas are mainly populated by Kichwas.
2. The second line is inhabited by less capitalintensive livestock farmers and a growing portion of mixed-farming families, with coffee and cocoa less often supported by public projects.
3. Further still, we find farming families with fewer cattle and mostly food crops, being cocoa and coffee often sick, not remunerative, and subsequently abandoned. The indigenous portion of the population increases with more non-Kichwa natives.
4. Finally, the third and fourth lines are primarily populated with indígenas (Kichwa, Shuar, or even Huaorani on the edge of the park), almost all of whom grow food crops.
This progressive differentiation is also found in food consumption, where urban processed products disappear as the tar road separates from the first 32 Indoor volleyball stadiums, schools, churches, and communal houses. 33 Paradoxically, the REPSOL oil company is in charge of controlling visitors going to the Yasuní Park.

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Mehdi Saqalli, Eva Béguet, Nicolas Maestripieri, Eric de Garine social and agricultural practices -apart from the connoted chicha-tend to be the same between indígenas and colonos.
zone, with mostly farm products, which thereafter are progressively replaced with non-timber forest products (Figure 3).    3.3. From the city-country-forest trinity to the city-forest duality Descola (1986)  Indeed, all products, coming from the city, country,  (Kimerling, 1993;San Sebastian & Hurtig, 2005).
The movement and its slogan Somos Amazonía thus unite all of Amazonia's indigenous nationalities, 36 We are the Amazon. See http://somosamazonia.weebly. com/, which describes a political movement fighting the Amazon territory pollution and contamination by Chevron-Texaco. 37 The Texaco-Chevron company has extracted more than two billion barrels of crude oil from the Ecuadorian Amazon. Extraction processes have caused more than 100 billion liters of toxic waste, gas, and oil that have adversely affected the environment, primarily as a result of recurring accidents but also because of negligence during pipe manipulations.
avoiding existing antagonisms such as those between Kichwas, Huaoranis, and Shuars, and opens a dialogue between local and governmentelected representatives through organized political events, also known as Somos Amazonía.
This perspective has started to be extended and adopted by extra-Amazonian groups who want to be included in Somos Amazonía. Therefore, apart from the strong chicha-consumption cultural divergence, there is little difference in everyday life between indígenas and colonos with the same standard of living. Although the conjunction is not yet defined, the connection between these two groups may be considered a future possibility as far as they share the same rural identity, especially because such identity is fading.

The legal and segregating ambiguity between comuna and comunidad statuses
As shown in the previous sections, the Comunas Act of 1937 (Table 1) seems to be the only "legal guarantee" for the defense of collective territorial rights. Comunas refers to "any center of the population below the category of parroquia" (Comunas Act, 1931), allowing the indigenous communities to legally protect their land by registering any community, whatever their organization. By avoiding ethnic references, the comuna then became the par excellence indigenous legal form, making people Amazonia peasants (Santana, 1992). In practice, it provides both a clear status for Ecuadorian citizens and a way to preserve collective rights with specificity.
The 2008 Ecuadorian Constitution acknowledges the status of communities, peoples, and nationalities as related to a specific way of life.
Article 56 (Table 1)  Here we distinguish the Kichwa and Quechua peoples, even if this categorization is less strict in discourses and speeches: Quechua relates to the language, with the related people living in the Andes Mountains and not on their Amazonian foothills and plains. The word is more often used for the Peruvian Quechuas than for the Ecuadorian ones. We highlight here that the main point for the purposes of this article is that Kichwas are recognized as Amazonian, whereas Quechuas are not. 39 However, it remains ideologically strong in places such as in Bolivia, where its equivalent Suma Qamana (Artaraz & Calestani, 2014) is supported by the TIPNIS movement • Choosing the comunidad status allows an individual not to be marked as "native." The interest of this claim is primarily political but also economic, depending on the weight of the state's development aid programs. When MAGAPE supports projects, they are chosen according to their potential as "production

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Mehdi Saqalli, Eva Béguet, Nicolas Maestripieri, Eric de Garine projects" (intensive farming, for example) and favors comunidades because of their private property guarantee. Conversely, social projects tend to favor comunas.
• Owning one's property is useful in cases in which attachment to one's farm or community is not strong. When, because of an oil prospecting campaign, an oil company wants to build infrastructure and buy the finca of a farmer, the property can be sold 43 directly without reporting to other members of the community. 44 • In contrast, to live in comuna enables the mobilization of a united front and negotiation strength vis-à-vis the state, but especially against oil companies seeking to prospect or build infrastructures, to obtain the maximum compensation.
• In practice, the availability of land per capita is generally much higher in comunas (Morin, 2015). However, families in comunas tend to come closer together through collective work (minga in Kichwa), market days, and the very human need for a social life. It is this practice of commensalism that creates a community rather than a formalist ideology.
Of note is that if Kichwas colonizing the Dayuma region in an individual family mode hesitate between comunas and comunidades, the power gain accompanying comuna status will be privileged by collectively organized Kichwa communities.
This situation can be seen not only in parroquias north of Dayuma but also in this one (for instance, 43 What seems to be considered locally as a fair price, based on the finqueiros we met, is approximately US$20,000-50,000. 44 This impossibility of counteracting this sale can be violently contested and is even opposed in some comunidades through local rules, thereby tending to bring the two statutes closer together. the comuna of Rumipamba in Figure 2. in legal terms, the risk of folklorization and dispossession as a self-sufficient political actor, with no need for protectors (NGOs, "enlightened" political parties), is significant. For instance, it is difficult for the Pachakutik party to be heard. Politics are still effective, together with public actions (demonstrations, occupations) but only under the indigenous flag. As a practical matter, beyond even President Correa's proposals for a kind of positive discrimination, political dynamics tend to promote what Young (1990) expressed as differentiated citizenship: all citizen rights and claims are to be organized in communities, different from the "all humans as equals" principle. Accordingly, one may find it difficult not to be labeled as an identity, group, or nationality (Radcliffe, 2012).
• At the level of provinces and parroquias, indigenous people are now recognized but folklorized: related symbols are included on all administrative emblems; they are referred to, but only in socioeconomic terms. Accessibility to public infrastructure and economic means is still difficult for indigenous people. It is the comuna alone that allows a better-negotiating position facing the main de facto public actor, oil companies (Van Cott, 2001), to the extent that a colono claims that being a native provides strength.
• At the community level, the link to the índigena territory, apart from the small Huaorani group (approximately 2,500 people), is at a historic low, at the same level as other settlers. Moreover, this link tends toward a binary scheme between el pueblo, where villagers stock up, and el monte, where one can still hunt and fish, albeit with increasing difficulty. El campo has betrayed its promise of independence: cash crops are no longer remunerative and are regularly ravaged by parasites, maize is difficult to grow, and only cassava is easy. The only rewarding crops are market gardening and livestock, both labor demanding. Apart from the few large colono families along the tar road, it is the indigenous communities, through mingas, that can best mobilize this workforce.
• The existence of a campo world is being threatened by colonos' aging (MAE-PRAS (2016) and team surveys). They mostly arrived between the 1970s and 1990s, and their children have returned either to the city, primarily Coca, or the Sierra or Costa. This exodus dynamic (or at least the cessation of expansion) decreases the possibility of a future smallholder countryside. Nevertheless, although both the Comunas Act and private property confer an intangible right to private property, obtaining a land title requires an uphill battle. Meanwhile, natural reserve entitlements and national parks have proven to be the gateway for land and subsoil state appropriation, as shown by the Yasuní-ITT case (Kimerling, 1990, Larrea & Warnars, 2009, Vallejo et al., 2015. Therefore, once the campo identity is at stake, it appears both symbolically, economically, and politically rational to be indigenous.  Figure 5a). ○ The Shuar have neither geographic autochthony nor the anteriority of coming nor demographic and political weight. They have been the most fragile. However, indigenous identity is built on the basis that it is more than national: it is also internationalist (Castree, 2004). Consequently, territorial anchoring is important, but the internationalist dimension, in terms of the recognition of indigenous rights, gives more weight to the Shuars than to settlers. This situation, a priori discriminatory against settlers, has its roots in a common identity of resistance fueled by struggles over land ownership, cultural property, and intellectual property (Castree, 2004).
Thus, the meaning of the slogan displayed on the T-shirt worn by the leader of the Shuar community from Tiwiram may be better understood: the inclusion of this community and this group in a wider and stronger community is necessary to confirm its right to remain in the form of a protective community (González, 2010). This community claims to be indigenous but unconnected with autochthony, always in the sense in which we hear it: they are no longer "from here," but it does not matter. You live from this land even if you do not historically or biologically come from there.
Again, such conjunction may concern only poor and rural colonos, who feel like they are not on the good side of power.
Nevertheless, as seen in 3.4., colonos do not have a recognized right to organize themselves into a protective comuna, despite similar organizational moves (mingas, comunidad-level rules over property sales). Such rights are acknowledged for the Shuars, Huaoranis, and Kichwa without justification beyond the recognition of their ethnic belonging (Bennett & Sierra, 2014;Truffin, 2006). Even more, colonos having a recognized Quichua ethnicity (nationality) are not included in this right.
The only argument is that some "are from there," from the selva. Here lies a very deterministic identification between ethnicity and nationality on the one hand and ecological environment on the other.
How a differential right that separates groups having the same Ecuadorian nationality, different ethnic nationalities but both recognized as indigenous, with anteriority as the best equivalent, can be justified remains an issue. Here, neither the soil right principle (jus soli) nor the blood right principle (jus sanguinis), the only two existing legitimating rights providing differentiated statuses (Scott, 1930), applies. These principles do Vol. 25 N.º 1 enero -junio de 2020 pp. 12 -34 "Somos Amazonía," a New Inter-indigenous Identity in the Ecuadorian Amazonia: Beyond a Tacit jus aplidia of Ecological Origin? not provide any possible legal distinction among Shuars, Kichwas, and Huaoranis on the one hand and Quechuas and even other colonos from the Costa and the Sierra on the other: • We can envision a blood right solely if we consider the notion of ethnic birth. However, in our case, ethnic groups would have to be regrouped into sub-groups, with Shuars, Kichwa, and Huaoranis having rights on the land and the others having less. Ambiguity reappears here when we question the origin of this classification.
• We cannot envision a soil right solely because descendants of colonos, born in Amazonia, do not have the same rights as the Shuars, for instance, even if they were not born in the provinces or even in the country.
We here assume that a third right, a "biome right" (jus aplidia), is here tacitly considered without being enshrined in the Law. 45 We define this biome right as a rule assigning a nationality/identity to a person because of their birth in a given biome or ecological environment.
This right may be legitimate, but its current lack of affirmation or formalization can only remain ambiguous concerning each differential right and will be accentuated by the local generalization of inter-ethnic marriages. One can only argue for an assumed formalization that it is either linked to a cosmovision or any other democratic ideology or simply based on jurisprudence. There is a narrow border among current ambiguities until intergroup disputes arise (Coombes et al., 2012;Tockman & Cameron, 2014).
45 Because of local jurisprudence at the level of comunas and parroquias, this may already have been done.