Learning from mobile

indigenous peoples

DONATE NOW

We visit and research nomadic-tradition communities

and their ecosystems around the world

PASTORALISTS

Pastoralists include all traditional nomadic groups that rely primarily on migratory herds for their livelihood

→ KNOW MORE

FORAGERS

Foragers is a generic term for those surviving by gathering food from naturally sources or by hunting game

→ KNOW MORE

WATER NOMADS

Water nomads is a subgroup of foragers specialized in living on and from aquatic envrironments

→ KNOW MORE

ABOUT NOMADS

PERIPATETICS

Peripatetics or itinerants form groups giving ambulant services to both settled rural and urban people

→ KNOW MORE

The current nomadic and semi-nomadic population could range from 30 to 40 million people, less than a 10% of the 476 million indigenous people (spread across 90 countries and grouped into 5,000 communities), with the highest percentages found in Mongolia (25%), Pakistan (15%), Niger (15%), Afghanistan (10%), Siberian Russia (10%), Sudan (9.1%), India (7%), Mauritania (6%), Chad (3.5%), Kenya (3%), Ethiopia (2%) and Iran (1.25%). The latter is the third largest in terms of absolute nomadic population (between 1 and 1.2 million), with India in first place (more than 50 million) and Pakistan in second (around 35 million), in both cases due to their numerous groups of peripatetic wandering tribes.

Nomadic civilizations have lived for millennia in ecosystems of great ecological value, rich in natural resources, often hostile, yet which they preserved in their essence. Through seasonal hunting, fishing and gathering, just like other animals, or by following the migrations of certain herbivores—which they managed to domesticate—they came to know these ecoregions and their natural mechanisms in depth, appreciating them and becoming an integral part of them.. For this very reason, they did not prioritize political structures in their homelands, placing the rights of nature above human ambition. Later, among settled people, peripatetic groups emerged to provide them with specific itinerant services.

YURTA is a non-profit organisation established in 2012 to work alongside governments and cultural institutions, as well as indigenous communities, drawing on its experience with traditionally nomadic peoples and their ecosystems.

Our mission is, first and foremost, to help people understand nomadic ways of life in relation to their own ecological, social and political context, and second, discover connections with similar groups, countries and ecosystems.

Our duty is to contribute to their conservation, as part of the global effort to maintain the planet’s biocultural diversity, and to this end we develop proposals and draw up projects.

ABOUT US

Working on making compatible nomadic peoples rights, the rights of nature and development

The French jurist J.-J. Rousseau stated that ‘nomadism, in itself, is entirely devoid of legal significance from the perspective of international law’ (J.-J. Rousseau, 1762).

The concept of ‘res nullius’ has invariably been applied to suggest that nomads, by virtue of their itinerant lifestyle, possess no territorial rights, despite having occupied the same areas for millennia, across generations and, often, exclusively.

However, the negative view that international legal scholars held of nomads began to change in the early 1970s, following the advisory opinion on the legal status of Western Sahara issued by the International Court of Justice in 1975. Then, the adoption of an anthropological approach led to the declaration that nomadic societies were legal entities protected by collective rights, adding that the nomadic way of life did not prevent them from accessing self-determination (M. Moreti, 2012).

The final outcome of this conflict—with Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara, backed by the United States—clearly illustrates the ‘official’ corruption surrounding native territorial rights when the economic and strategic interests of states are at stake.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Promoting initiatives for developing nomadic community-based projects in Monsoon Asia

Together with the experience gained in previous years, the EDUNOMAD project, running since 2022 and conceived to discover and learn about a wide variety of nomadic ways of life, enable us to apply our knowledge in a specific region that we consider to be of crucial social and environmental importance: Monsoon Asia

KNOW MORE ABOUT