In 2025, A small indigenous tribe that calls itself “People of Color” will return to their homeland for the first time in 80 years. Their return will advance indigenous movements across the Amazon rainforest, fighting for and winning legal rights to their ancestral territories. These victories will have global significance.
The Siekopai people lived for centuries along the modern-day Ecuador-Peru border in the western Amazon. In the 1500s, they were a powerful civilization with their own variety of corn and an army capable of defeating the Portuguese conquistadors and halting their advances. But then they were succumbed to disease, enslaved to rubber corkscrews, and forced to relocate to Jesuit missions. About 80 years ago, a war between Ecuador and Peru forced out the remaining Xiecopais. In 1979, when years of conflict subsided, new, if contested, borders carved out their homeland. There are currently approximately 1,950 survivors of the Siekopai tribe, 750 of whom live in Ecuador and 1,200 in Peru.
In Ecuador, indigenous peoples have landowner-lease agreements with the Ministry of the Environment. Currently, nearly 5 million acres of indigenous rainforest are confined to “protected areas” managed by the Ministry of the Environment. This gives the government the power, for example, to grant drilling rights, as it did in Yasunà National Park, or to change tenancy agreements, denying indigenous rights when creating the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve. For purposes of hunting, fishing, and gardening, they are effectively trespassers on their own land.
In Peru, the government leases land indefinitely to indigenous communities for various uses depending on soil type. While only 20 percent of the indigenous area is recognized as Siekopai land, the remaining 80 percent is designated as national forest land, which is “leased” by the state.
Recently, however, the Siekopai people have challenged the legality of these title laws (legal procedures that result in recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights to property on their ancestral lands), and have already launched two major legal proceedings in Ecuador and Peru. He is winning. In 2021, the Siekopai family acquired ownership of more than 500,000 acres of land in Peru. In September 2022, the Siekopay people filed a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government to regain ownership of Pequeya, part of their ancestral territory located along the border. In November 2023, Ecuador’s Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Siekopai people, giving them legal ownership of an additional 100,000 acres of the labyrinthine flooded forest and blackwater lagoon in the heart of their ancestral homeland. This marked the first time that the government had issued land titles to the Siekopai people. Indigenous peoples whose territories are within protected areas.
In 2025, the Siekopai Tribe will work with the Amazon Frontier and the Ceibo Alliance, an allied organization with a mission to protect both the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous autonomy, to further expand its land ownership to approximately 5 million acres. We plan to build a path to permanently protect the area. Tropical rainforest in a national park in Ecuador. Peru is seeking to remove legal and political barriers to taking ownership of an estimated 40 million acres of ancestral indigenous territory in the Amazon. These landmark victories will set a legal precedent for millions of other indigenous peoples across the Amazon, hopefully allowing them to return to their ancestral lands.
Permanent land ownership is not only essential to the survival of indigenous peoples’ lives and cultures; They are also important to our collective ability to protect rainforests. The Amazon rainforest is nearing a tipping point from which it may never recover. From 1985 to 2022, more than 11 percent of the Amazon, an area larger than France and Uruguay combined, was set on fire or logged by people. If deforestation continues at this rate, the entire rainforest will be doomed. By 2050, the entire region could be irreversibly converted into a savannah. The destruction of the Amazon is also the destruction of over 300 different ethnic groups. In other words, it is ecocide and ethnic murder on a large scale.
