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ON THE NATURE OF INDIGENOUS LAND
Ownership, Access, and Farming in Upland Northeast India
Erik de Maaker
Indigeneity and Nature
In January 2014 it became clear that the UK-based Vedanta Mining Corporation would lose its concession to mine for bauxite in the Niyamgiri hills of Odisha (India). A campaign by representatives of the Dongria Khond “tribe,” actively supported by Survival International, had been successful. The campaign stated that the hills are “sacred” to the Dongria Khond. “To be a Dongria Khond is to farm the hills’ fertile slopes, harvest their produce, and worship the mountain god Niyam Raja and the hills he presides over….” In short, “Niyamgiri is our soul,” as stated on the webpages about the Dongria land struggle (Survival International 2014). At the core of the campaign was a compelling short documentary film, Mine, Story of a Sacred Mountain, narrated by UK celebrity Joanna Lumley, which emphasized the cultural and economic dependence of the Dongria Khond on the Niyamgiri hills.1 This film helped to convey the struggle of the Dongria Khond for their land to a broad international audience. The campaign by Survival International contributed significantly to rallying support for this cause both internationally and in India, as was evident from the eventual ruling of the New Delhi Supreme Court in their favor. Supporting and explaining that decision, the editorial of the prominent Indian national daily The Hindu concluded: “It is beyond doubt that there is an organic connection between tribals and the land … That bond must be respected” (The Hindu 2013). Attributing an “indigenous” community, such as the Dongria Khond, a privileged relationship to land and nature is common practice. Claims to such relationships tend to be compelling, and are not easily disputed by either policy makers or the general public on the Indian subcontinent. Alpa Shah has shown, in a study on indigenous politics, environmentalism, and insurgency in the central Indian state of Jharkhand, how indigenous activists’ portrayal of the Munda community as “nature loving” played an important role in advocacy for the creation of that state. The creation of Jharkhand by subdividing the state of Bihar, in the year 2000, was generally regarded as a triumph for its “tribal” majority (Shah 2010; see also Chandra 2013).
The two cases mentioned above reveal the leverage that claims based on the assumed privileged relationships of indigenous people to nature can yield. Internationally, the communities which are referred to within India as “tribes,” tend to be equated with “indigenous people.” Globally, policy makers, journalists, and the general public are open and sympathetic to the idea that the “sacrality” of nature is central to the worldview of indigenous people. This allows perceptions of nature, which such communities supposedly collectively hold, to play a central role in legitimizing claims that extend well beyond vegetation and animals to soil, and thus the “place” at which such groups are or want to be located. These kinds of claims are rooted in oral histories, myths, and religious rituals that state that the people concerned (or better, their predecessors) were the “first” to arrive, and that its members are consequently the oldest settlers on their land (Kuper 2003: 390). Such a claim necessarily denies “firstness” to other inhabitants of the same area, whom it consequently positions as later settlers.
From the 1970s onwards, demands made in the name of indigenous people have increasingly gained international credibility. Indigenous people have come to be perceived as “nations”: communities with a shared ethnicity, language, history, and culture. Often, they tend to be cast as victims of “internal colonialism,” that is, colonized by the states within which they are located. Consequently, international public opinion is increasingly in favor of indigenous communities maintaining, gaining, or regaining control of the resources they depend on. In several cases, indigenous communities’ claims to “firstness” have translated into legal rights, granted (or perhaps better, acknowledged) by the “modern” states in which they are included. Examples include the granting of forest rights by the Brazilian government to the Amazonian Kayapo (Conklin and Graham 1995), the Canadian government’s acknowledgment of Inuit land claims in the creation of Nunavut, as well as Australian Aborigines’ continuing, and in certain respects successful, struggle for control of ancestral territory (Havemann 1999).
For indigenous communities, nature is often the prime resource upon which people depend for their livelihood. This dependence, coupled with omnipresent “noble savage”-like imaginations, which position indigenous people as almost part of nature, lends credence to the common idea that their connectedness to land is characterized by “deep ecological knowledge” (Karlsson 2006: 187–88). In popular perception, such knowledge assumes a harmonious engagement with nature. Or, as the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues states, “Indigenous people … possess invaluable knowledge of practices for the sustainable management of natural resources” (United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues n.d.: 2). Such resource use, which is “traditional” in the sense that it was supposedly also practiced by prior generations, entails techniques of cultivation and extraction that are deemed sustainable, given that they have been supported by the natural environment over many, perhaps innumerable, generations. Because indigenous extractive practices tend to be regarded as far less exploitative than those of their more “modern” competitors (who mine, log, or create large-scale plantations), indigenous demands for land rights are frequently phrased in terms of environmental struggle (Dove 2006). In short, in popular perception, a lot of credibility is granted to what Baviskar (2006: 38) has called the “organic linkage” between indigenous culture and ecology. This also suggests that indigenous land claims are in line with more general conservationists’ concerns. To sum up, this positions people such as the Dongria Khond as archetypical conservationists, driven by the “sacrality” which they locate in nature.
For any community to fit in with what Karlsson (2003) has called the “indigenous slot,” it is compulsory that they meet the kind of expectations outlined above. This particularly holds for people’s perception of nature, and their relatedness to land. More problematically still, it presumes that indigenous communities are internally homogeneous when it comes to perspectives on land and nature, and the kind of engagement this translates into. This is not at all self-evident, as it disregards the often substantial disparities between the interests of urban, educated activists who have the connections and the communicative skills to advocate an indigenous cause at a national and international level, and the (often) rural people on whose behalf they claim to speak (Shah 2010). Romantic and reified interpretations of the cultural practices of the latter then provide the arguments that indigenous activists draw upon.
Referring to these disparate interpretations of culture, Adam Kuper (2003: 395) has argued that “indigenous movements” base themselves on “obsolete anthropological notions and a romantic and false ethnographic vision,” thus “fostering essentialist ideologies of culture and identity.” Accordingly, claims made with reference to “being indigenous” are then primarily politically motivated, which creates doubts about their authenticity and legitimacy. But rather than playing down the social relevance of indigenous claim making, which would not do justice to the complexity of the political realities in which a term like this figures, I want to follow Barnard (2006). Barnard argues that even though, from the perspective of anthropological theory, indigeneity is an essentialist concept, “the legitimate claims of ‘indigenous peoples’ appeal not to objective elements of anthropological theory, but to common identities objectified by participants … [and] … who are we to deny the ethnic identity, or the ‘indigenous’ identity, of others, however unscientific such a claim may seem to us?” (Barnard 2006: 13).
