Invisible Because Indivisible: “French” Guiana’s Indigenous Peoples Seeking Legal Recognition

Application summary

My doctoral project represents an effort to document the quest for legal recognition of Indigenous Peoples from “French” Guiana, a French overseas territory located in South America. More specifically, I explore how and why Indigenous Peoples articulate their claims through the language of rights in France, where Indigenous rights are not recognised. Through this research, I aim to unpack the opportunities and limitations of Indigenous Peoples’ use of law, which has often been seen as a form of colonisation by law in anthropology. In doing so, I intend to shift the focus from damage-centred research, which has predominantly looked at the problems suffered by Guiana’s Indigenous Peoples, to a more decolonial approach, analysing how they respond to these issues. For this purpose, I explore the Guianese case by adopting a deterritorialised ethnographic perspective to Indigenous Peoples’ use of law, that is, a fieldwork that is not focused on a specific territory but rather on multiple (online/offline) spaces. Since August 2023, I have been collaborating with two Indigenous organisations and one Indigenous village on three different, yet interrelated, legal cases: (i) I am working with an Indigenous village in Guiana trying to fight an electricity power station through legal means; (ii) I am collaborating with a Guiana-based Indigenous organisation, assisting them in developing an international presence at the United Nations; and (iii) I am involved with another organisation, comprised of Indigenous legal experts, which is sharing its expertise with Indigenous Peoples in another French overseas territory. My work on these three projects has taken me not only to Guiana, but also to Western Europe and North America, providing innovative data on Indigenous people’s use of law. I have so far collected data through participant observations, knowledge exchange, interviews, audio recordings, photos, videos, as well as social networks and archives.