In 2025 A a miniature indigenous nation that calls itself a “people of many colors” will return home for the first time in 80 years. Their return will propel the movement of indigenous peoples through the Amazon rainforest to fight for legal title to their ancestral territories and victory. These victories will have global significance.
The Siekopai lived for centuries along what is now the border between Ecuador and Peru in the western Amazon. In the 16th century, they were a powerful civilization with their own unique 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 pickers and forcibly transferred to Jesuit missions. About 80 years ago, war between Ecuador and Peru drove out the remaining Siekopai. As the years of conflict ended, in 1979 a modern, if contested, border crossed their homeland. Siekopai currently has a population of approx 1,950 survivorsof which 750 in Ecuador and 1,200 in Peru.
In Ecuador, First Nations have entered into a landlord-tenant agreement with the Ministry of the Environment. There are currently almost 5 million acres of indigenous rainforest territory in “protected areas” under the control of the Ministry of the Environment. This gives the government the power, for example, to grant drilling rights, as it did in Yasuní National Park, or to change the nature of the lease, as it did when creating the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, denying indigenous people the right to hunt, fish or garden and effectively making them intruders on their own land.
In Peru, the government leases land to indigenous communities on an open-ended basis for a variety of uses depending on soil type. Only 20 percent of the indigenous land is considered Siekopai property, the remaining 80 percent is state forest land and is “borrowed” from the state.
Recently, however, the Siekopai have successfully challenged the legality of these title laws – the legal process that results in the recognition of indigenous peoples’ ownership rights to their ancestral lands – and have already won two crucial legal victories in Ecuador and Peru. In 2021, the Siekopai received title deeds to over 500,000 acres of their lands in Peru. In September 2022, the Siekopai filed a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government to regain ownership of Pë’këya, part of their ancestral territory along the border. In November 2023, an Ecuadorian appeals court ruled in favor of the Siekopai, giving them legal title to another 100,000 acres of flooded forests and blackwater lagoons in the heart of their ancestral homelands, and marking the first time the government has granted land title to people indigenous whose territory was in a protected area.
In 2025, working with Amazon Frontlines and Ceibo Alliance – allied organizations whose mission is to protect both the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest and indigenous autonomy – the Siekopai will continue to expand their land titles and create a path to lasting protection of nearly 5 million acres of rainforest within national parks in Ecuador. In Peru, they intend to dismantle legal and political barriers to the appropriation of an estimated 40 million acres of Amazonian indigenous territories. These landmark victories will set a legal precedent for millions of other indigenous peoples in the Amazon and hopefully enable them to return to their ancestral lands.
Lasting land titles are not only vital to the survival of indigenous life and culture. They are also crucial to our collective ability to protect the rainforest. The Amazon rainforest is approaching a tipping point from which it may never recover. Between 1985 and 2022, humans burned or cleared more than 11 percent of the Amazon, an area larger than France and Uruguay combined. If the 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 is also the destruction of over 300 distinct ethnic groups. In other words: it is mass ecocide and ethnocide.