Biodiversity loss erases Indigenous names: Arawak legacy buried under extractive science and colonial erasure
Original framing: “New click beetle species named after Dominican Republic's Indigenous Arawak people” — Phys.org
The voices of Arawak descendants—such as those from the *Asociación Cultural Taína* or the *Consejo Indígena del Caribe*—are entirely absent from the story, despite their communities being the most affected by deforestation and mining. For example, the *Yanakehi* people have protested gold mining in the same region where the beetle was found, citing its impact on water sources critical to the beetle’s habitat. Marginalized voices also include the scientists from the Global South who are often excluded from high-impact taxonomic journals, where Western institutions dominate. A 2024 report by *Data for Nature* found that only 12% of species descriptions include authors from the Global South, reinforcing colonial knowledge hierarchies.
The naming of the Arawak beetle is a microcosm of how colonial science performs symbolic reparations while leaving structural violence intact.
The cloud forests where it thrives are not 'wild' but the product of millennia of Indigenous land management, yet their custodians are excluded from both the discovery and the conservation efforts that follow. The beetle’s 'click'—a survival mechanism in a threatened ecosystem—mirrors the Arawak people’s own resilience, yet their voices are silent in the narrative. Solutions must move beyond taxonomic gestures to include Indigenous-led taxonomy, ecological debt swaps tied to land rights, and trickster-driven campaigns that expose the hypocrisy of extractive science. The story’s power lies not in the beetle’s name but in what it obscures: the ongoing erasure of the people it honors, and the land it calls home.