The Waorani people live in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Five years ago they started to make a territory map, part of a strategy to defend their lands, all the material and non-material resources that live within it, and the futures of their children from the impacts of new oil developments. The Waorani mapping team, working with Alianza Ceibo and Amazon Frontlines, tried a variety of existing mapping applications, but none of these were a good fit for the offline environment and highly collaborative workflow the Waorani villagers demanded. They partnered with Digital Democracy in the early stages of Mapeo development, and have been using Mapeo and contributing to its design since 2015.
The Waorani mapping process
The Waorani mapping team holds a preliminary workshop in each village to agree the conditions and methods of the mapping.
The community draws detailed territory maps with everybody participating; elders often sit to the side and indicate to others how to draw different rivers, their names and where resources and places of importance are located. Sometimes men and women draw maps in separate groups to ensure gendered perceptions of territory are.
The Waorani team holds a training workshop in each village to teach community technicians the basics of GIS and how to use a GPS.
The community mapping teams go out on walks with villages elders and knowledge holders to collect GIS information of all the places and resources the community wants to map, such as palm swamps, fruiting trees, animal mineral licks and fishing spots, and groundtruth the data shown on the hand-drawn maps.
Back in the village, the team enters all the GPS points into Mapeo, adding in stories and explanations about places, including Waorani history, cultural and ethnobotanical information. They use a variety of background maps from satellite analyses that show elevation, river-basins and forest cover to help draw and locate some of the geographical features.
The Waorani maps use symbols drawn by the mapping team, and they have a legend made up of over 150 different items, from jaguar paths to clay deposits, ancient burial sites to flying ants nests. The data is exported from Mapeo to geojson, and then uploaded into Mapbox where the design of the map is stored, and then each community’s area is exported and a legend and titles added in illustrator. Draft maps are returned to each village for verification, and then final maps are printed and given to each village, and each family in each village.
The Waorani maps use symbols drawn by the mapping team, and they have a legend made up of over 150 different items, from jaguar paths to clay deposits, ancient burial sites to flying ants nests. The data is exported from Mapeo to geojson, and then uploaded into Mapbox where the design of the map is stored, and then each community’s area is exported and a legend and titles added in illustrator. Draft maps are returned to each village for verification, and then final maps are printed and given to each village, and each family in each village.
ECA-RCA monitors like Mapeo because it is simple to use and to teach monitors to use, and collects actionable evidence. They have control over the data, and can choose what to share with the State. They hope that it will enable their monitors to go on patrols without the State park guards, and are looking for recognition of their land defense system to ensure its long term sustainability and in order to share their learnings with indigenous peoples in other co-managed areas in Peru.
