Laura Jeffery

‘We Are the True Guardians of the Environment’: Human-Environment Relations and Debates about the Future of the Chagos Archipelago

This article applies Ingolds conceptualization of environmental outlooks ranging from the ‘globe’ to the ‘sphere’ to explore human-environment relations and debates about the future of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Chagossians and conservationists broadly represent the two extremes of the engaged lifeworld of the sphere and the detached worldview of the globe, respectively, but I argue that this does not necessarily determine their environmental outlooks for the future. It is not simply the case either that Chagossians uniformly advocate resettlement of Chagos or that conservationists uniformly oppose resettlement. Within each group two distinct environmental outlooks are identified: engagement versus withdrawal amongst Chagossians, and exclusion versus participation amongst conservationists. The article demonstrates, then, that environmental outlooks are influenced not only by understandings of human-environment relations but also by pragmatic and ideological considerations.

Victims and Patrons: Strategic Alliances and the Anti‐Politics of Victimhood among Displaced Chagossians and their Supporters

This article examines victimhood as a strategy pursued by organizations representing displaced Chagos islanders living in Mauritius, the Seychelles and the UK. The Chagossian community is a small and marginalized community, and Chagossian organizations need to make strategic alliances with other interest groups in order to further their cause nationally and internationally. External support groups are, however, attracted to the Chagossian cause on the basis of differing conceptions of victimhood that imply different adversaries and collective identities and mutually exclusive imagined futures, some of which are also incompatible with the futures planned by Chagossians and their descendants. Thus whilst identification of the Chagossians as “victims” is ubiquitous, strategic alliances have resulted in diverse political strategies and mutually exclusive visions of the future. Portraying themselves as depoliticized victims is a pragmatic necessity that enables Chagossian representatives to justify the apparent ideological inconsistencies these alliances entail.

'A lost people'? Chagossian onward migration and echoes of marginalisation in Crawley

This book represents the first joint effort to document the historical background of the eviction (late 1960s, early 1970s) of the Chagosssians from the Chagos archipelago when the main island became an US-military base. It documents their eviction, resettlement, livelihoods, legal struggles and future aspirations.

Ecological restoration in a cultural landscape: conservationist and Chagossian approaches to controlling the 'coconut chaos' on the Chagos Archipelago

The citation BWoods andMoriarty 2001^ that appears on page 1 and page 2 of the original publication has beenmisprinted as BWoods 2999.^ The sentences should read: Page 1, second column, lines 14–18: BThis allows for definitions of species as more or less native than other species, and for the recognition of changes over time such that a species may adapt or evolve in a process of ‘naturalisation’ in its new habitat from alien to native (Woods and Moriarty 2001: 176).^ Page 2, first column, lines 3–6: BConsequently, the removal of invasive species might facilitate invasion by other more aggressive alien species and may harm native wildlife that utilises alien hosts (Woods and Moriarty 2001: 183).^ The sentence on page 3, second column, lines 25–29 contains erroneously inserted B260.^ The sentence should read: BIn 2005, the US Navy reported on rat and cat control programmes at the military base on Diego Garcia, and proposed extending rat eradication measures to the entire island (US Naval Facilities Engineering Command (Pacific Division) 2005: Appendix I-2).^ The sentence on page 3, second column, lines 2–5 contains misprinted phrase Bcoconcxut crab.^ The sentence should read: BChagos islanders ate coconut crabs and the meat and eggs of green sea turtles and a range of ground-nesting birds, and green sea turtles and hawksbill turtles were exported to Mauritius for their meat and shells respectively (Frazier 1980: 343).^ The Publisher regrets the mistakes.

Reflections on the Life and Art of the Chagossian Painter Clément Siatous

The Chagos Archipelago is a remote group of coral atolls in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Located more than 1,750 kilometres east of the Republic of Seychelles, and about 2,200 kilometres north east of the Republic of Mauritius, the archipelago consists of sixty-five tropical islands scattered in small clusters around the Great Chagos Bank. Along with other island groups in the western Indian Ocean, the Chagos Archipelago was uninhabited prior to European expansion in the region. From the late eighteenth century onwards, French colonists populated Mauritius and its dependencies / including the Chagos Archipelago / with enslaved labourers from coastal east Africa and Madagascar. Following the Napoleonic wars, the British took control of Mauritius and its dependencies in 1815, emancipated enslaved labourers in 1835, and augmented the workforces with indentured labourers from British India. In the colonial Chagos Archipelago, most labourers worked on coconut plantations producing coconut oil and dried copra for export (for use in the production of electricity and soap); others were engaged in fishing and the extraction of guano (which was increasingly in demand for use as a fertiliser on the sugar estates on mainland Mauritius). Clément Siatous was born in 1947 to Chagossian parents living on Ile du Coin in the Peros Banhos atoll. Documentary records are patchy, but recalling that his grandfather had an Indian name, Clément traced his ancestry back four generations to a man who arrived in the Chagos Archipelago from India. When Clément was five years old, his family moved to work on the largest Chagos island, Diego Garcia, where they lived until the 1960s. By then, the Chagos Archipelago had been continuously inhabited for almost two centuries. Their way of life, however, was about to come to an end. During the Cold War, the US government sought to establish an overseas military presence in the Indian Ocean, favouring the U-shaped Chagos island of Diego Garcia on account of its administration by British allies, its small and politically insignificant population, its central but isolated location, its natural harbour and its potential to build a runway along one side (Vine 61). In exchange for what was in effect a US

“We don’t want to be sent back and forth all the time”: ethnographic encounters with displacement, migration, and Britain beyond the British Isles

14 million discount on the Polaris missile system, the UK government agreed to depopulate the Chagos Archipelago and make Diego Garcia available to the US military (Vine 87 /88). In 1965 / as part of negotiations leading to Mauritian independence in 1968 / the UK government excised the Chagos Archipelago from colonial Mauritius and created a new colony called the new British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). The residents of the Chagos Archipelago had been accustomed to making periodic voyages to Mauritius to renew work contracts, purchase supplies, receive medical treatment, give birth in a hospital, take holidays or visit family. From 1965 onwards, Chagos islanders in Mauritius / including the Siatous family / were refused return passages and were told that the Chagos Archipelago had been ‘sold’ and the islands ‘closed’. Many Chagossians were thus stranded in Mauritius, in some cases separated from family members who had remained in Chagos. Meanwhile, on the Chagos Archipelago itself, proprietors gradually reduced the importation of supplies, wound up copra production, and did not renew employment contracts once they had expired. There was a gradual exodus from the islands. Eventually, the remaining inhabitants were forcibly removed from the Chagos Archipelago; Diego Garcia was depopulated in 1971, the Salomon Islands in 1972 and Peros Banhos Atoll in 1973. Of the former inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago, about 1,500 ended up in Mauritius and about 500 in Seychelles. Mauritius gained independence in 1968 and Seychelles in 1976, but the UK retained the Chagos Archipelago. Moreover, Laura Jeffery and Steffen Johannessen

The temporal, social spatial and legal dimensions of return and onward migration

This article draws on ethnographic research with the Chagos islanders from the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, a case study which offers an exceptional opportunity to interrogate forced displacement, onward migration and prospective return in the context of the long historical legacy and wide geographical arc of British colonialism. The case study generates interconnected arguments relating, first, to the contribution of ethnography to the interdisciplinary study of displacement and migration, and second, to the geographical, thematic and temporal scope of the anthropology of Britain. Long-term ethnographic engagement with a displaced community unsettles typologies of compulsion and choice by revealing the complexities of displaced people’s changing reflections on their own experiences over the course of lifetimes marked by displacement and migration. This history of British colonial and postcolonial displacement, migration and citizenship is a reminder that the anthropology of life in contemporary Britain is not confined geographically to the British Isles or temporally to the twenty-first century.