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FACTS AND FIGURES ABOUT WATER AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE Also called ‘native’ or ‘tribal’ people, indigenous peoples live in every continent, and have ancient ties to the land, water and wildlife of their ancestral domain. Centuries ago, the San, or Bushmen, were the only inhabitants of the semi-arid Kalahari (South Africa). They were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived in family groups on territorial areas called N!ore1, and moved only when their water source was drying up. They devised ways to access and protect water, without depleting its scarce reserves, and assisted each other by sharing their N!ores with other San tribes when food was scarce. When new settlers appeared with livestock, the fragile balance they had established was destroyed. The new settlers introduced new technologies such as boreholes, which pump masses of water from deep within the ground. Ever-increasing amounts of livestock herds depleted water and food resources. Finally, the San were dispossessed from their land: no land or services were allocated to the Bushmen, designated as nomadic. When the political leadership of the ‡Khomani San Association1 sat with three of the most fluent speakers of the ancient N/u language, they asked the elders for guidance on the land claim and restitution process. The elders identified the three most important resources of their aboriginal culture in the Southern Kalahari (South Africa): water, land and truth. Water, and access to water, has been a key variable in the defence, conquest and colonisation of the Southern Kalahari. In Fiji, the indigenous population has long blended birth and death rituals with sound water management. The Qiang people live in the valleys of the Minjinga River, a main branch of the Yangtze, in China. This region, important for its mountain forests, has suffered from large-scale deforestation over the last four decades, leading to erosion and desertification. A project to rehabilitate this watershed has integrated the Qiang people and their practices of forest management, taking into account their main source of income, cultivation of plants for herbal medicines. Trees have been planted on terraces: horizontal strips of original vegetation, alternated with strips of tree seedlings. Indigenous species are thus preserved, preventing soil erosion, maintaining local traditions, local incomes, as well as involving and motivating Qiang people in the conservation project. According to the Karen people, living in Northern Thailand, ‘if you eat from the forest, you must protect it, and if you drink from the river, you must conserve it.’ Their land use strategy is based upon the maintenance of four categories of land, distinguished by their use, location and pattern of ownership: rice paddy fields, swidden cultivation, community forest and watershed forest. Fields are cultivated for only one or two seasons before being returned to fallow. Cultivation of plots is rotated every 7 to 10 years. Thus the Karen people maintain a high level of biological diversity – even the fallow plots are used for supplying medicine plants, food in the form of mushrooms, tubers and shoots.
1 In most San languages, extra-alphabetic signs are used to represent clicks, which are predominant and distinct. The phonetic inventory of the San language is in fact so rich that all the other symbols of the roman alphabet are already used for something else. N u has 145 different phonemes, which is three times more than in standard English. Many of the signs used come from the International Phonetic Association alphabet.
Information from: Source: UNESCO Water Portal, August 2005
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