‘We have been awake for years’: conflicting ecologies in an indigenous land management scheme in Indonesia

Abstract

As access to and control of land is increasingly contested, indigenous land management schemes promise to secure formal land rights. This article is concerned with one such scheme, Dayak, Wake Up (Dayak Misik) in Indonesia. The implementation of the scheme, orchestrated by a Dayak farmers' organization, was rejected by the semi-nomadic Punan Murung as they did not share the same notions and conceptions of land and resources, which are intertwined with struggles over access and control. Framed with the concept of conflicting ecologies, thereby combining material political ecology with phenomenological and relational approaches, this article elaborates on different conceptions, relations, and terms of engagement with nature by the Punan Murung and representatives of the Dayak farmers' organization, which are strongly interlinked with power relations. I show that the ecology of ethnically framed territorialization by the organization is hegemonic and subordinates the Punan Murung's alternative place-based ecology. The control of land is increasingly contested worldwide. In order to counter territorialization processes by states and investors in the course of large-scale agroindustry or resource exploitation, indigenous land management schemes, such as Dayak, Wake Up (Dayak Misik) in Indonesia, promise to secure formal land rights. However, implementations do not proceed without conflicts. In the Dayak Misik case, members of the Punan Murung have been rejecting the implementation of the scheme, although their access to land might be diminished in the course of large-scale coal extraction in the future. Conflicts on land are interlinked with power, governance,

Local wisdom of dayak ethnic groups in central kalimantan, Indonesia

“…Unfortunately, farming practices are currently constrained by the large number of oil palm and mining companies buying land use rights. The Dayak people are still struggling to restore their customary land rights (Crevello, 2004;Großmann, 2019Großmann, , 2020.…”

“…Nathan Bond conducted a study on Dayak Ethnic Identification in North Kalimantan and Sabah (Bond, 2017). Kristina Großmann researching land issues and the impact of environmental exploitation in Kalimantan on the life of the Dayak ethnic group (Großmann, 2019(Großmann, , 2020. Other research related to traditional longhouse (Huma Betang) both in terms of architecture and philosophy (Apandie & Ar, 2019;Karliani et al, 2018;Utami & Laksmi, 2016;Victoria et al, 2017).…”