The Nicaraguan Interoceanic Canal and Heritage Protection Mirjana Roksandic (U Winnipeg) Why consultations with Indigenous communities matter The construction of the Nicaragua Interoceanic Grand Canal has garnered only a sporadic interest in the news media, one that does not match the immensity of the project and its potential to affect the natural environment and the lives of those who inhabit the region. As proposed, the canal will remove five times more earth than the Panama Canal; it will connect two oceans with the largest body of fresh water between Lake Titiqaqa in South America and the Great Lakes in the North. There is no doubt that the environmental impact will be immense, and—as far as history teaches us—not entirely predictable. The canal promises to unite the culturally and politically very different Pacific and Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua, provide a needed development boost to the whole country, and create jobs, a portion of which will be reserved for local communities. The devil, as usual, is in the detail. My engagement in Nicaragua as a bioarchaeologist is relatively recent, stemming from my team’s interest in potential source areas for the early peopling of the Caribbean. I began working on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua on the invitation of the CIDCA (Center for the Investigation of the Atlantic Coast), through a joint project centered on community participation in cultural resource management, in which we have worked closely with indigenous Rama and the Afrodescendant communities to build a research design around questions relevant to local stakeholders and academics alike. At the shell-matrix site of Angi, our colleagues uncovered the first human skeleton ever found on the Caribbean (Atlantic) coast of Nicaragua, which I studied in March 2014. Needless to say, I am still learning the archaeology and Indigenous history of the region and grappling with the complexities of the local political and administrative realities. The Nicaraguan Interoceanic Canal and Heritage Protection | Anthropolo... http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2016/05/17/the-nicaraguan... 1 of 3 6/20/2016 1:44 PM