Fernando Galeana Rodriguez, a doctoral student in development sociology, is studying emerging land control practices and potential effects on livelihoods, the environment and indigenous identity among the Miskitu people in Honduras, who have recently obtained legal rights to their ancestral homelands.
Building on prior fieldwork, and in partnership with the Unity of La Moskitia (which defends indigenous rights), he will continue his research in three territories selected for their residents’ primary livelihoods – seafood, forestry and agro-industrial crops – and learn the Miskitu language.
His study is “a window onto the ways in which indigenous peoples in Latin America negotiate their political inclusion as stakeholders in land governance against the reality of an economic system that has systematically excluded them from decisions about land control,” he says. He plans to present alongside indigenous representatives at “Land and Territory in the Americas,” a conference in Bogota, Colombia, in August.
He is one of ten Cornell students whose research projects are supported by Engaged Cornell. Learn more about the projects at: http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2016/04/engaged-cornell-graduate-grants-fund-10-phd-students
