Authored as a result of a remarkable collaboration between indigenous people's own leaders, other social activists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this volume explores what is happening today to indigenous peoples as they are enmeshed, almost inevitably, in the remorseless expansion of the modern economy and development, at the behest of the pressures of the market-place and government. It is particularly timely, given the rise in criticism of free market capitalism generally, as well as of development. The volume seeks to capture the complex, power-laden, often contradictory features of indigenous agency and relationships. It shows how peoples do not just resist or react to the pressures of market and state, but also initiate and sustain "life projects" of their own which embody local history and incorporate plans to improve their social and economic ways of living.

Harvey Feit is Professor of Anthropology and Mario. E. Blaser is a doctoral candidate, both at McMaster University in Canada.

Glenn McRae teaches in the Anthropology Department at the University of Vermont.

Introduction * Indigenous Peoples and Development Processes: New Terrains of Struggle--Mario Blaser, Harvey A. Feit and Glenn McRae * Life Projects: Indigenous Peoples' Agency and Development--Mario Blaser * Part I: Visions: Life Projects, Representations and Conflicts * Life Projects: Development Our Way--Bruno Barras * 'Way of Life' or 'Who Decides': Development, Paraguayan Indigenism and the Yshiro People's Life Projects--Mario Blaser * Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Sustainable Development: Toward Co-Existence--Deborah McGregor * James Bay Crees' Life Projects and Politics: Histories of Place, Animal Partners and Enduring Relationships--Harvey A. Feit * Grassroots Transnationalism and Life Projects of Vermonters in the Great Whale Campaign--Glenn McRae * 'The People Had Discovered Their Own Approach to Life': Politicizing Development Discourse--Wendy Russell * Part II: Strategies: States, Markets and Civil Society * Survival in the Context of Mega-Resource Development: Experiences of the James Bay Cree and the First Nations of Canada--Matthew Coon Come * The Importance of Working Together: Exclusions, Conflicts and Participation in James Bay, Quebec--Brian Craik * Defending a Common Home: Native/Non-Native Alliances against Mining Corporations in Wisconsin-- Al Gedicks and Zoltán Grossman * Chilean Economic Expansion and Mega-Development Projects in Mapuche Territories--Aldisson Anguita Mariqueo * Hydroelectric Development on the Bío-Bío River, Chile: Anthropology and Human Rights Advocacy--Barbara Rose Johnston and Carmen Garcia-Downing * Part III: Invitations: Connections and Co-Existence * Revisiting Gandhi and Zapata: Motion of Global Capital, Geographies of Difference and the Formation of Ecological Ethnicities--Pramod Parajuli * A Dream of Democracy in the Russian Far East--Petra Rethmann * The 'Risk Society': Tradition, Ecological Order and Time-Space Acceleration--Peter Harries-Jones * Conflicting Discourses of Property, Governance and Development in the Indigenous North--Colin Scott * Resistance, Determination and Perseverance of the Lubicon Cree Women--Dawn Martin-Hill * Restoring our Relationship for the Future--Mary Arquette, Maxine Cole and the Akwesasne Task Force on the Environment * In Memoriam: Chief Harvey Longboat (1936-2001)