By Melanie McTurk
Melanie McTurk is a Guyanese tourism and conservation leader whose work spans cultural heritage, biodiversity and community development. She is Managing Director of Karanambu Lodge in the Rupununi, where she works at the intersection of conservation, tourism, local knowledge and community engagement. A descendant of one of Guyana’s early Chinese immigrants, Melanie is English Secretary of the Chinese Association of Guyana and serves on the Committee for the Preservation of Guyana’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. She is also a Trustee of the Binna Hill Institute, reflecting her longstanding interest in the histories, cultural traditions and knowledge systems that have shaped Guyanese society.
Her professional and civic experience includes serving as Chair of the Protected Areas Trust of Guyana, a Board Member of the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund, Executive Member of the Tourism and Hospitality Association of Guyana, and President of Visit Rupununi. Across these roles, she has worked on issues relating to conservation, sustainable tourism, community participation and the future of Guyana’s natural and cultural heritage. Her perspective is shaped by a belief that understanding Guyana’s past and celebrating its distinctiveness are essential to making thoughtful choices about the country’s future, while recognising the diverse histories and contributions that have made Guyana what it is today.
As we approach Indigenous Heritage Month, it is worth looking beyond the celebrations to examine one of the less comfortable legacies of our colonial past: the ways in which it continues to influence how we value people, places, knowledge and natural resources in Guyana.
We often think of colonialism as something that ended with Independence. Politically, of course, it did. But colonialism was more than a system of political control. It was also founded on assumptions about who was educated and who was ignorant; who was civilised and who was “bush”; whose knowledge was legitimate and whose was dismissed; what constituted a productive and valuable landscape and what was considered “wild” or less valuable; and, ultimately, who had the authority to decide what happened to whom and to what.
Sixty years after Independence, we continue to grapple with ideas and hierarchies inherited from that period. To varying degrees, they remain embedded in our institutions, legislation, economic systems and, perhaps most difficult to confront, in the ways we see ourselves and one another.
The “eye pass” mentality
Perhaps we should begin with a uniquely Guyanese concept: eye pass.
It is the ability to look at something — or someone — and decide that the rules do not quite apply. That a person can be overlooked, that a piece of land can be taken, that environmental damage is acceptable, that a community is not really that important, that wildlife is not anyone’s concern, or that because a person is poor or from the hinterland, the way we treat them matters less.
The problem with eye pass is that it is not simply bad behaviour. It reflects a sense of perceived entitlement, and that entitlement is deeply connected to the colonial hierarchy we inherited and, in some ways, continue to perpetuate.
Who is considered “less”?
Colonial society was built around distinctions between people. European knowledge was elevated above Indigenous knowledge. European systems of governance were elevated above traditional systems. European religions and worldviews were often given greater legitimacy than Indigenous belief systems. Settled agriculture and commercial production were valued differently from traditional use of forests and savannahs. Land that could be commercially exploited was considered valuable, while land used through systems that colonial authorities did not recognise was more easily characterised as vacant, undeveloped or empty.
People were similarly categorised. Although Guyana has spent decades building a national identity that rejects these distinctions, traces of them remain. We still sometimes use “bush” as a synonym for backward. We sometimes assume that someone from Georgetown must know more than someone from a remote community. Traditional knowledge can be treated as interesting folklore until it is validated by a scientist. Foreigners in the room can sometimes receive greater attention than local experts. And Indigenous communities can still be viewed primarily as beneficiaries of development rather than as people with rights, knowledge and decision-making authority.
We also continue to view the interior largely through the value of what can be extracted from it: gold, timber, oil, land, carbon, tourism, minerals and infrastructure corridors. By reducing the landscape to a collection of assets, we reduce its people to another part of the equation to be managed. The question then becomes how much inconvenience they can reasonably be expected to tolerate in the name of national development.
Sound familiar?
It should. It is the same old colonial way of thinking.
The geography of value
One of the clearest manifestations of this mindset is the way geography influences what we consider acceptable.
Imagine a proposed activity that would damage a river, destroy habitat, fracture social systems, create noise, disrupt traffic or affect someone’s property in Georgetown or along the Coast. There would likely be public discussion, media attention, objections, lawyers and political pressure.
Now move that same activity several hundred kilometres into the interior. Suddenly, it can become a development project. A road through an intact ecosystem is described as “opening up the interior.” A mining operation is said to be “creating employment.” A wetland is deemed “underutilised.” A forest becomes “natural capital.” A river becomes a transportation route. And the people already living there are expected to adjust — while those who question the activity can quickly be labelled anti-development.
Why?
Because distance changes our perception of consequence. What would be unacceptable in our own backyard can become acceptable when it happens somewhere we rarely visit, among people whose lives we do not routinely encounter.
That is not simply a conservation problem. It is a social and political problem.
It is the geography of who matters.
Indigenous rights and conservation are inseparable
We often speak about Indigenous rights and environmental protection as though they are two separate policy areas. They are not. In much of the hinterland, land, water, wildlife, livelihoods, culture and community identity are interconnected. If a river is degraded, it is not only an environmental issue. If access to a hunting area is lost, it is not only a land-use issue. If a forest is fragmented, the consequences are not limited to biodiversity. If a road opens previously inaccessible areas to uncontrolled exploitation, the impacts are social as well as ecological.
If decisions about these changes are made without meaningful participation by the communities and people living there, then we also have a governance problem.
Guyana’s own legal framework recognises many of these principles. The Amerindian Act provides for communal land rights, village governance and specific provisions concerning natural-resource use and mining on village lands. The Protected Areas Act establishes a national framework for conserving biological diversity, natural landscapes and wetlands, while recognising public participation in conservation. The Environmental Protection Act provides the broader framework for environmental management and environmental assessment.
The issue, therefore, is not simply whether Guyana has laws and policies that recognise these principles.
The more difficult question is whether we have collectively built the capacity to make those rights and environmental protections consistently effective on the ground.
That is a challenge of ambition.
Consultation is not the same as participation
This distinction matters.
A meeting can be held. Information can be presented. Questions can be answered. Minutes can be taken. A document can be signed. And yet a community can still have had very little meaningful influence over the decision.
Consider the imbalance. One side may have lawyers, geologists, engineers, economists, environmental specialists, professional negotiators and public-relations advisers. The other may be a community being asked to understand the potential long-term consequences of a complex project for its land, water, wildlife, culture and economy.
We then tell ourselves that the process was fair because everyone was “consulted.” But consultation is not necessarily participation, and participation is not necessarily informed decision-making. If communities do not have access to understandable information, independent technical advice and sufficient time and capacity to assess that information, then we should be cautious about claiming that a decision represents fully informed consent. A signature establishes that someone signed a document. It does not, by itself, establish that the decision was fully informed.
If we are serious about Indigenous self-determination, we need to be serious about the conditions that make self-determination possible.
This is increasingly consistent with Guyana’s own stated direction. The Global Biodiversity Alliance’s Georgetown Declaration identifies Indigenous Peoples and local communities, with their traditional ecological knowledge and territorial stewardship, as important to effective and equitable biodiversity strategies. In May 2026, the United Nations formally joined the Guyana-led Alliance, with the resulting declaration again emphasising meaningful engagement of Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
That raises the standard for all of us.
If this is the approach we advocate internationally, then it should also inform how we approach development and conservation domestically.
Who carries the risk?
This is perhaps the most practical question we can ask about development: who benefits, and who carries the risk?
A company can leave. An investor can sell. A consultant can complete an assignment and return home.
Governments change.
But communities remain.
If a river is degraded, the community remains beside the river. If wildlife disappears, the community remains in the landscape. If a road fragments an ecosystem, the community remains alongside the road. If a resource project changes the social and economic structure of a village, the community has to live with those changes long after the original decision-makers have moved on.
This does not mean development should stop.
It means that the distribution of benefits, risks and decision-making power needs to be examined honestly.
That is not anti-development. It is responsible development.
The challenge of our environmental ambition
This becomes particularly important when we consider what Guyana is trying to achieve.
The Low Carbon Development Strategy 2030 places forests, biodiversity and natural capital at the heart of Guyana’s development model. Its October 2024 update identifies biodiversity conservation as a critical pillar and outlines work towards expanding protected areas, protecting and restoring critical ecosystems, integrating Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures (OECMs), and advancing Guyana’s contribution to the global 30×30 goal. It also emphasises community involvement and participatory approaches in conservation decision-making.
Guyana has gone further with the Global Biodiversity Alliance and the development of a National Biodiversity Information System. The Alliance’s roadmap includes mainstreaming biodiversity into national and corporate development planning, empowering Indigenous Peoples and local communities, and strengthening monitoring, accountability and data systems.
These are important developments, and they should be recognised as such.
But ambitious policy creates an equally important challenge: implementation. If biodiversity is central to our development model, then biodiversity protection has to be reflected in the decisions made every day — about mining, roads, infrastructure, forestry, tourism, agriculture and settlement.
Protecting biodiversity means more than maintaining impressive statistics on forest cover. A forest can remain technically “forest” while becoming increasingly fragmented. A wetland can remain on a map while its ecological function is degraded by pollution or altered by overfishing. Wildlife populations can decline long before their disappearance becomes visible. A road can open an ecosystem to a series of impacts that individually appear insignificant but collectively transform the landscape.
Environmental laws are only as effective as our collective ability to monitor, manage and enforce them.
This is not a criticism of ambition. It is the natural next step of ambition. The more ambitious our environmental commitments become, the more capable our systems need to be of delivering them.
A biodiversity database cannot protect a wetland by itself. A satellite image cannot enforce a mining condition. A protected-area designation cannot substitute for management. A law cannot protect an ecosystem if there is insufficient capacity to monitor what is happening on the ground.
The test is ultimately very simple:
Do our policies change what happens in the landscape?
We cannot conserve what we continue to treat as disposable
If we see the interior primarily as a place where resources exist for extraction, then conservation will always appear to be competing with development.
If we instead understand the interior as a complex social and ecological system, the question changes.
The issue becomes how development can occur without undermining the systems upon which future development — and future generations — depend.
This is also where Indigenous knowledge matters. Not because everything traditional is automatically sustainable. It isn’t. Nor because Indigenous communities should be romanticised as somehow existing outside the pressures and contradictions of modern society. They don’t.
But generations of living within particular landscapes create knowledge about those landscapes that should not be dismissed simply because it did not originate in a university, government office or corporate boardroom.
The challenge is to bring different knowledge systems together rather than automatically placing one above the other. That, too, is part of decolonising our approach. Decolonisation cannot simply mean changing who gets to be the “taker.”
There is another uncomfortable part of this conversation.
Internalised colonialism reproduces itself
A person who has experienced being treated as lesser can still seek someone else to look down upon. A community can demand respect for its own territory while disregarding the rights of another community. Someone can insist that outsiders respect their boundaries while believing that a protected area or another community’s land is theirs to enter or exploit.
The principle therefore cannot simply be: “Respect our rights.”
It has to be: “Rights apply consistently.”
If communities have rights, those rights must apply to all communities. If wildlife has value, that value cannot depend on whose territory it occupies.
Otherwise, we have not dismantled the hierarchy. We have simply moved ourselves one step higher on it.
What would a genuinely decolonised approach look like?
It would be considerably less romantic than much of the language we use around Indigenous Heritage Month.
It would mean ensuring that communities have timely and accessible information about activities proposed for or around their lands, together with access to independent technical and legal expertise when they are being asked to make complex decisions.
It would mean consultation processes that allow sufficient time for communities to understand, discuss and respond. It would mean environmental assessments that consider cumulative impacts rather than treating every project as though it exists in isolation. It would mean adequate resources for environmental monitoring and enforcement in the interior.
It would mean infrastructure planning that considers ecological connectivity rather than simply the shortest or cheapest route. It would mean using biodiversity information to influence decisions before damage occurs, rather than documenting damage after the fact.
And it would mean integrating Indigenous rights into natural-resource governance rather than treating them as a separate social issue.
These are not radical ideas.
They are the practical requirements of the ambitions Guyana has already set for itself.
And these are not theoretical issues
As we approach Indigenous Heritage Month, it is worth remembering that these are not historical questions or abstract policy debates. They are playing out across Guyana now.
The MV Barima tragedy and the continuing inquiry into the disaster remind us of the consequences when people living far from the political centre depend on systems over which they may have limited control. A Commission of Inquiry was sworn in on July 30, 2026, with a mandate to examine the circumstances surrounding the July 18 tragedy.
At Chinese Landing and Tassawini, continuing disputes surrounding mining activity and equipment raise fundamental questions about Indigenous land rights, consent, regulatory authority and the balance between mineral development and community decision-making. As recently as August 27, the Chinese Landing Village Council declined a further mediation meeting, saying that ongoing efforts to move mining equipment meant that meaningful mediation was not possible under the circumstances.
In the South Rupununi, the situation at Marudi raises many of the same questions from another angle: mining, economic opportunity, Indigenous participation, environmental oversight and who has a meaningful voice in decisions affecting the landscape. There are genuine economic benefits for some communities and miners, while questions have also been raised about the regulatory framework, the status of the mining arrangement and whether Indigenous communities were adequately involved in its development.
And then there are disturbing incidents involving vulnerable Indigenous people that circulate through social media, including the recent video of an Indigenous boy being subjected to horrific abuse. Such incidents remind us that the question of whose dignity, safety and rights we value is not an abstract one.
These are different issues, involving different circumstances and different institutions. But they raise some of the same underlying questions: Who has power? Whose voice carries weight? Whose rights are treated as negotiable? Whose environment are we prepared to sacrifice? And who is expected to live with the consequences?
Perhaps the real challenge of decolonisation is not simply removing the structures of colonialism. It is recognising the mindset that allowed those structures to exist in the first place — the assumption that some people, some places and some forms of knowledge are worth less than others.
Because once we accept that premise, everything follows. It becomes easier to take the land. Easier to dismiss the knowledge. Easier to override the community. Easier to tolerate environmental damage. Easier to call exploitation development. And easier to look away…
Perhaps that is what we need to confront.
Not simply colonialism as history, but colonialism today manifested as Eye Pass.
And perhaps the first step is to stop giving ourselves the eye pass — to stop assuming that because something happens far away and to other people, it matters less.
Because the hinterland is not empty.
Its people are not lesser.
Its biodiversity is not disposable.
And exploitation of Its resources are NOT without consequence.
And if Guyana is serious about the ambitious environmental and development vision it has set for itself, then the real measure of success will not be how well we describe that vision.
It will be how consistently we can make it a reality on the ground.
Discussion