In 2025, a The small indigenous nation that calls itself the “People of Many Colors” will return home for the first time in 80 years. Their return will lead to a movement of indigenous peoples across the Amazon rainforest, fighting for legal title to their ancestral territories and winning. These victories will have global significance.
The Siekopai lived for centuries along what is now the Ecuador-Peru border in the western Amazon. By the 1500s, they were a powerful civilization with their own varieties of corn and an army capable of defeating the Portuguese conquerors and stopping their advance. Later, however, they were decimated by disease, enslaved by rubber miners, and forcibly transferred to Jesuit missions. About 80 years ago, a war between Ecuador and Peru displaced the remaining Siekopai. When the years of conflict subsided in 1979, a new, albeit contested, border crossed their homelands. The Siekopai now number approximately 1,950 survivorswith 750 in Ecuador and 1,200 in Peru.
In Ecuador, indigenous nations have entered into a landlord-tenant agreement with the Ministry of the Environment. There are now nearly 5 million acres of native rainforest land enclosed in “protected areas” under the control of the Department of the Environment. This gives the government, for example, the power to grant drilling rights, as it did in the Yasuní National Park, or to change the nature of the rental contract, which it did when creating of the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, depriving indigenous peoples of this right. to hunt, fish or garden and effectively make them trespassers on their own land.
In Peru, the government leases land to indigenous communities for an indefinite period for various uses depending on the type of soil. Only 20 percent of the indigenous area is recognized as Siekopai property, while the remaining 80 percent is designated as state-owned forest land and is “on loan” from the state.
However, recently the Siekopai have successfully challenged the legality of these land titling laws – the legal process that results in the recognition of indigenous peoples’ right to ownership of their ancestral lands – and have already won two major legal victories in Ecuador and Peru. As of 2021, the Siekopai have received land titles to over 500,000 acres of their land in Peru. In September 2022, the Siekopai filed suit against the Ecuadorian government to regain ownership of Pë’këya, a portion of their ancestral territory located along the border. In November 2023, an Ecuadorian appeals court ruled in favor of the Siekopai, granting them legal title to an additional 100,000 acres of labyrinthine flooded forests and blackwater lagoons in the heart of their ancestral lands, and marking the first time that the government would issue a land title to an indigenous people whose territory was located inside a protected area.
In 2025, working with Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance – allied organizations whose mission is to protect both the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous autonomy – the Siekopai will further expand their land titles and create a pathway for permanently protect nearly 5 million acres. of the tropical forest in the national parks of Ecuador. In Peru, they will dismantle legal and political barriers to titling approximately 40 million acres of ancestral indigenous territory in the Amazon. These historic victories will set a legal precedent for millions of other indigenous peoples in the Amazon and hopefully allow them to return to their ancestral lands.
Permanent land titles are not only essential to the survival of indigenous lives and cultures. They are also essential to our collective ability to protect the rainforest. The Amazon rainforest is approaching a tipping point from which he may never recover. Between 1985 and 2022, people have burned or destroyed more than 11 percent of the Amazon, an area larger than France and Uruguay combined. If this rate of deforestation continues, the entire rainforest will be doomed. By 2050, the entire region could be irreversibly on the path to becoming a savannah. The destruction of the Amazon simultaneously leads to the destruction of more than 300 distinct ethnic groups. In other words: it is mass ecocide and ethnocide.
