January 30, 2017 — Along the arid coastline of northwestern Mexico, indigenous Seri communities, who first resisted Spanish rule and then Mexican extermination efforts, eventually gained formal titles over a small part of their ancestral coastal and marine territories. The ocean has always sustained their livelihood, but now they must contend with outside competition over declining fish resources.
This is a familiar story for almost 30 million coastal indigenous peoples around the world from the Arctic to the South Pacific. But until recently no one had ever quantified how intensively they relied on seafood, or its importance for their existence as distinct peoples. To fill this gap, we developed a global database of more than 1,900 indigenous communities, including 600 unique groups.
Our study found that coastal indigenous peoples eat nearly four times more seafood per capita than the global average, and about 15 times more per capita than nonindigenous peoples in their countries. Seafood is crucially important to these communities – but it provides them with more than vital protein and nutrients. It also plays a role in ceremonial traditions, creating important ties between families and individuals and embodying their symbolic ties to the environment. The practice of catching fish affirms their worldviews and puts them into action in nature. These relationships and values cannot be reflected in a number, but quantifying the dietary importance of seafood for these communities can help us understand the importance of indigenous fisheries and relationships to the oceans on a global scale.
Who is an indigenous person?
One major challenge in our study was the fact that there isn’t, and arguably shouldn’t be, a universal definition of what makes a person indigenous. According to the most widely used working definition, which has been adopted by the United Nations, indigenous peoples have a unique ethnic identity and a historical record that predates the colonial societies that exist now on their ancestral territories.