11 Sentinels of Carelmapu: Participatory Community Monitoring to Protect Indigenous Marinescapes in Southern Chile

Francisco Araos, Florencia Diestre, Jaime Cursach, Joaquin Almonacid, Wladimir Riquelme, Francisco Brañas, Gonzalo Zamorano, José Molina-Hueichán, Darlys Vargas, Manuel Lemus, Daniella Ruiz, and Claudio Oyarzún

Introduction

The Carelmapu “Community Sentinels” initiative in coastal Chile is a participatory citizen science experiment that aims to support local action to protect the territory and its inhabitants.

Protecting means establishing and sustaining caring relationships between people and all forms of life on the planet. Observation and awareness of the state of the territories is the first step to begin their care, through the communities’ traditional knowledge, and/or through dialogue with the scientific knowledge provided by scientists.

Community monitoring can be carried out in any type of landscape or ecosystem: in marine-coastal areas, in the mountains, on lakes and rivers, and even in big cities. Observations can have ecological, environmental, social, historical, and cultural dimensions. Likewise, everyone can monitor, regardless of gender, age, ethnicity or other differences. The important thing is to have a motivated group that knows the territory or is interested in recognizing it, and is willing to learn the basic steps of the methodology.

Becoming a Sentinel also places us before a mirror, where the practices and actions of our communities become explicit, telling us about who we are and how we are inhabiting the place where we live. This is an act of consciousness that allows us to value our home and understand its development.

Community Sentinels is a low-cost initiative, open and adaptable to any situation and context, which allows monitoring of the multiple drivers and socio-environmental effects of climate change in the territories; citizens are in the front lines, facing it.

Know to Care, Care to Know

Knowing the ecosystems, cultures, and different ways of inhabiting territories and their socio-biodiversity allows us to identify the dangers that put life-networks at risk and alerts us to look after them.

Climate change, pollution, deforestation, and overfishing are producing transformations that afflict local communities, who perceive and call attention to them. These changes have revealed the importance of knowing the conditions of the territories to understand the pressures local communities are facing (Reyes-García et al., 2021). In this context, it is necessary to have tools to gather information about our environment and to help us to pose questions, generate alliances, and care for life networks (Iwama et al., 2021).

The exercise of “knowing through monitoring” is part of community practices where mutual care is an affective state between human and non-human beings. This is integrated with local cultural practices—for example, protection of threatened species’ habitats, such as the kelp forest for marine otters. Habitat protection takes place through recognition of sacred or ritual practices in these places. Any organized community can carry out participatory monitoring, defining its objectives and adapting the methodology to its own contexts. Community monitoring includes recognizing and remembering our connections with the territories to which we belong, and also considering how we constantly interact and coexist with others on this one planet. In other words, what happens to other beings and territories affects us and has different consequences for all.

Central to community monitoring is that each Sentinel or group is in charge. Just as work in gardens or harvesting involves perceptions and functions involving the whole body, monitoring is also looking, smelling, touching, feeling, and being aware of the space and time of each process. This exercise helps to show changes, transformations, and movements. In addition, it makes it possible to show the transformational roles that other co-inhabitants play, such as insects, birds, mammals, pollinators, among others. In this way, the work of knowledge building in the monitoring process becomes collective and implies sharing care work, generating knowledge, and strengthening interpersonal relationships between human and non-human beings.

Many people of different ages, genders, origins, interests, occupations, and perspectives can participate, monitor, and implement this knowledge in other contexts. For example, school communities, environmental education centres, neighbourhood organizations, Indigenous communities, small producer organizations, among others, can all be involved. It also includes different objectives, such as: raising awareness and valuing nature in a school community, promoting the sustainable use of the territory in organizations, solving local problems such as water pollution, gathering data on species to motivate the conservation and protection of biodiversity, or making visible the various uses of resources such as a forest. Finally, multiple ecosystems and landscapes can be monitored: marine and coastal, archipelago, estuaries, mountains, lakes and rivers, valleys, forests, and wetlands.

Participatory community monitoring is a way to generate alliances and collaborate to protect territories and different life-ways. When the monitoring work becomes collective, the time and the different perspectives of the monitors are shared, contributing to dialogue and cultural exchanges, which promote the socio-ecological networks of the territories.

Citizen Science and Participatory Community Monitoring

The relationship between territories and their residents can be understood through citizen science, placing particular interest in monitoring how the components and processes of ecosystems are part of daily life. Although the monitoring exercises may be related to scientific research, the development of participatory community monitoring by citizens as a prevention strategy includes everything we do to maintain, monitor, and improve our world. It is a process that allows us to check old experiences, remember life-ways through stories and, above all, to recognize the threats to the territories and develop a better future.

Participatory monitoring is connected to science through behaviours and skills such as curiosity, questioning, observation, and feedback. In this way, Sentinels identify and monitor the present and future problems of the territory, motivating their inclusive governance (Araos and Ther, 2017).

Citizen science is a research approach where civil society participants collect, categorize, and/or analyze scientific data (Bonney et al., 2014), creating partnerships and collaborations between scientists and non-scientists (Jordan et al., 2012). Therefore, as an innovative method, citizen science can be helpful to promote individual and collective action on climate change, build social participation in environmental issues, and share experiences with the scientific process. Furthermore, it allows reconnecting with the natural world, motivates collective actions related to biodiversity protection, and strengthens commitments to participate and support place-based management (Groulx et al., 2017).

Community members’ interest in protecting their living places against external dangers is expressed in a vision of the future related to the conservation and sustainable use of nature, integrating traditional practices and knowledge of elders, and promoting various ways of being connected to the environment (Brondízio et al., 2021). Thus, participatory community monitoring can contribute to commitments related to protecting vital processes and regenerating the places where people live.

This chapter presents a methodology for participatory and community monitoring to learn to understand territories and communities. Our case study illustrates its implementation. We have found that the recorded information is key to generating dialogue and solutions to the kinds of problems that can occur in many different regions.

Community Sentinels Methodology

This section presents a synthesis of the Sentinels methodology (LabC-ULAGOS, 2021). A full description is available for free download at: www.centinelascomunitarios.cl.

Source: Developed by the authors.

The process and stages of participatory community monitoring are simple. It begins with an organized group or community that is interested in collecting data about its local territory. The group chooses the elements and areas to be monitored. Then, one group (the Sentinels) carries out the information collection and recording, and a second group (the technical team) reviews, links, and shares the results.

Local People Watching Their Territories

The Sentinels work directly on the collection of participatory monitoring data. They oversee noticing, observing, and communicating about the environmental state of a territory or about some phenomenon of change or alteration.

In community participatory monitoring initiatives, local people are invited to be part of the Sentinel network in charge of observing the territories. Their experiences as inhabitants are expressed in daily experiences, such as telling stories they have heard throughout their lives that support their records. As a result, the Sentinels have knowledge associated with the landscapes and develop cultural and spiritual connections with the place where they live. Indeed, they are the local inhabitants who travel and experience the territory on a daily basis, who first and directly perceive the movements and changes that occur.

The Sentinels’ vision of the state of their territories allows them to design and apply care practices associated with humans, the environment, climate change, and biodiversity. In addition, sharing these records is a way to participate, build relationships of affection and understanding with their environment and community.

Some of the elements that can be recorded are

• Biodiversity: components of the environment such as animals (birds, cetaceans, fish, rodents, amphibians, mollusks, insects, etc.); plants (native, introduced, edible, with or without flowers, etc.); algae; medicinal herbs; fungi; ecosystems (marine, wetlands, estuaries, lakes, rivers, forests, mountains, etc.); among others.
• Environmental risks: water, soil, and air pollution events; but also can be productive activities that are harmful or dangerous for the community and the environment, pollution situations, or risk events for health.
• Climate change: environmental events or phenomena related to climate change, ecosystem changes, population changes of some species, extreme weather events (droughts, floods, fires), impacts caused by these events (landslides, migration, etc.).
• Cultural landscape: Places or sites of importance to the inhabitants, spaces where they carry out their daily activities, sites related to cultural and spiritual practices, heritage and archaeological sites, and tourist places (natural and/or cultural).
• Activities: practices that are part of people’s daily life, their communities, or groups of people, such as productive activities, fishing, diving, horticulture, harvesting, religious celebrations, recreational, tourism, educational activities, among others.
• Stories and memories: stories or narratives about past events, such as the origins or arrival of a group to the territory, past events that happened in the region, relationships between communities and their surroundings, memories, experiences, anecdotes, or stories.

Community Sentinels methodology offers an opportunity to generate and integrate multi-dimensional information, through the collaboration and participation of its inhabitants, based on traditional knowledge and the social and environmental situation of a place.

Case Study: Sentinels of Carelmapu

In Chile, since 2008, a door has been opened for the protection of the ocean for and by Indigenous people through the Lafkenche Law (No. 20.249), which created Indigenous Marine Areas (IMAs, or ECMPOs in Spanish). The IMAs are an institutional tool that protects the traditional uses of Indigenous communities (e.g., traditional fish practices, sacred places, rituals, cultural landscapes) and allows them to protect their way of life. In addition, through their implementation, Indigenous peoples contribute to biodiversity conservation and ecological restoration (Araos et al., 2020).

Carelmapu, or “green land” in the Indigenous language Mapudungun, is located on the western side of the Chacao Channel in south-central Chile (see Map 1, page 29) (Cursach, 2018). It has an area of 178.3 km² and 3,537 inhabitants (INE, 2019). Administratively, it is part of the Municipality of Maullín. Economic and subsistence activities are related to marine resources: boat or shore fishing, shellfish harvesting (mostly practiced by women), and finally, seaweed harvesting for consumption and commercialization (Rodriguez et al., 2014). In addition, Carelmapu has important breeding sites for marine birds and mammals, and the offshore Lenqui marine wetland is internationally considered an important site for the conservation of migratory shorebirds and marine-coastal biodiversity (Cursach, 2018).

The six Indigenous communities that belong to the Carelmapu Indigenous Communities Association (Associación de Comunidades Indígenas de Carelmapu) are: Encuramapu, Kalfu Lafken, Lafkenche Kupal, Lafken Mapu, Wetripantu, and Huerque Mapu Lafken. They formally requested the creation of the Carelmapu Indigenous Marine Area.

For the Indigenous communities, the IMA is an essential tool for the marine-coastal protection of Carelmapu, both from the dangers of environmental pollution connected to salmon farming and from local exploitation of natural resources (Cid and Araos, 2021). The requested area of the IMA covers 28,106 ha, from Astilleros to Amortajado, including the coast of Carelmapu Bay, Punta Chocoy, and including Doña Sebastiana Island and the Farellones de Carelmapu.

Traditional activities for protection were named in the IMA request and are as follows: fishing; boat fishing; shellfish harvesting for domestic consumption and seaweed gathering; religious and/or spiritual practices, recognizing ceremonial sites in the area of Los Corrales and Mar Brava Beach; the gathering of lawen (natural medicine) such as sargasso or huiro, limpia plata, seawater, and wolf oil; and recreational practices on sandy beaches such as Carelmapu Bay, Lenqui, and Mar Brava.

The importance of Doña Sebastiana Island is also recognized, as the island is an ancestral area for use of marine resources, and also known as a magical place with many stories and myths related to sunken ships, sightings of Caleuche (a mythical ghost-ship) and mermaids, which make the island a fundamental landmark in the cultural landscape of the IMA of Carelmapu (Cid and Araos, 2021). Finally, the Indigenous communities recognize the importance of the IMA for the conservation of biodiversity, the support of local livelihoods, and the sustainable development of the area.

In relation to the protection of the IMA, the Mapuche-Huilliche Association has expressed their interest in updated scientific information about the marinescape. Thus, our project entitled “Indigenous Marinescapes and Citizen Science: Enhancing Local Ecological Knowledge of Environmental Change in Southern Chile” was developed, based at the Citizen Science Laboratory of the University of Los Lagos, with the objective of providing Indigenous communities with a methodological strategy for participatory community monitoring that would allow them to collect, systematize, and share relevant data for traditional knowledge to support the protection and restoration of the Carelmapu IMA.

Participatory Monitoring Results

Using the Community Sentinels methodology described above, we carried out monitoring during the first half of 2021. It involved the participation of five Sentinels (two women and three men) who were in charge of observing and recording information about biodiversity, environmental dangers, and cultural landscapes in their territories, using their cellphones. The Indigenous communities selected the Sentinels based on their interest in participating in the project, while also considering gender, age, territorial diversity, etc. Thus, the methodology was adapted to the local context, taking into account the experiences of the Sentinels, their interests, and health conditions related to the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The geographical scale covered by this project was local, associated with the IMA area, with the possibility of covering a larger area with this initiative in the future. This first experience took about six months. Since the territory is protected by the IMA, it is possible to continue the monitoring exercise as long as necessary.

The information recorded by the Sentinels was organized into personal logbooks (see Figure 11.1 and Figure 11.2) and shared online and in a paperback book. In addition, the geospatial location was integrated into a GIS (geographic information system) platform, available on the Sentinels website.

Through community collaboration, the data collection process proceeded without difficulties. We also ensured that all data collected were available on a freely accessible GIS platform. In this case, the instruments used for data collection were cell phones, which supported the Sentinel network. The team of five Carelmapu Sentinels worked together on the project. During a day of training, they received technical support and methodological documents to help them easily record and share project information.

At the end of the project, the Sentinels received a certificate of participation in the initiative developed by the Citizen Science Laboratory of the University of Los Lagos, to attest to their experience, knowledge, and participation in the development of this methodology.

All monitoring information collected by community participants is shared through the Sentinels web platform. This allows the information that has been collected during the monitoring stage to be linked to new data as it emerges. Given its participatory nature and focus on territorial analysis, this project is part of the broader Community Sentinels initiative. This project can be replicated in other Indigenous communities who are applying for IMAs, such as other places in Los Lagos region, and include similar initiatives in both freshwater and marine zones with Indigenous communities and environmental activist organizations. In developing and using the Sentinels methodology, we even see the possibility of scaling up this work across the coastal zone of Chile in collaboration with local organizations who aim to gather information about their own marine areas in order to develop socio-environmental protection actions related to marine-coastal zone management.

Conclusion

The collaborative approach proposed by the Community Sentinels is based on the participation of local community members, and emphasizes the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples. This makes it possible to include the broad dimensions of IMAs and related territories, cultural landscapes, and the wide distribution of species, while also considering ecological, social, and economic areas.

Carelmapu participatory community monitoring contributes to integrating marine citizen science in the implementation of the IMAs, in order to challenge environmental changes and anthropogenic factors that endanger the marine zone. Participatory monitoring can be used as a tool for local people to contribute and share in scientific research and recording of data on biodiversity, cultural landscapes, and environmental risks. This methodology creates dialogues between local people and scientists and opens possibilities for developing individual and collective actions to address environmental changes in marinescapes.

We believe this has great value for marine-coastal conservation and management, by providing skills and information that allow real-time monitoring of the marinescape environment protected by the IMAs, and encouraging people to reconnect with nature, appreciate it, and protect it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the Mapuche-Huilliche Communities Association of Carelmapu for their willingness to co-create citizen science and for their hard work in the implementation of the pilot experience together with the Sentinels: José Molina, Darly Vargas, Manuel Lemus, Daniela Ruiz, and Claudio Oyarzún.

Thanks to the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Scholarships/Climate Justice, Commons Governance, and Ecological Economics project, York University (Canada), and ANID/FONDECYT Project 1220430 “La resurgencia de los comunes en el Antropoceno Azul en Chile” for making this initiative possible.

Thanks to Paulina Mansilla Haeger and Kathryn Wells for the English translation and review.

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