Concealing protocols: conservation, Indigenous survivance, and the dilemmas of visibility

ABSTRACT

In an effort to recast themselves as proponents of human rights, transnational conservation organizations increasingly look to Indigenous communities as sources of labour, knowledge, and legitimacy. In many cases, the resulting relationships are fraught with stark power imbalances and premised on flawed understandings of Indigenous practices. As a result, even the most ‘people-centered’ conservation interventions too often serve to accelerate the enclosure, commodification, and dispossession of Indigenous lands. In this article, we reflect on our respective collaborations with Indigenous communities in Sarawak, Malaysia, and Palawan, Philippines, who have contended with biodiversity conservation projects led by transnational NGOs. We have noticed that our collaborators navigate the projects’ expectations by selectively performing, concealing, and obscuring important aspects of their lives. They do so, in part, in an effort to manage the NGOs, government agencies, and other actors vying for their cooperation. But more importantly, we argue, this is a way to defend their lands, livelihoods, and ecosystems from dispossessory pressures, including those exerted by conservation. As such, we theorize, these acts constitute a form of what Vizenor calls ‘survivance’ and raise important questions about the role of scholars and activists in rendering Indigenous lifeworlds (in)visible to conservation organizations and other institutions of neocolonial power.

En voulant assumer le nouveau rôle de défenseurs des droits de l’homme, les organisations transnationales de conservation se tournent de plus en plus vers les communautés indigènes comme sources de main d’œuvre, de connaissance et de légitimité. Dans beaucoup de cas, les rapports qui en résultent souffrent d’inégalités de pouvoir flagrantes et reposent sur une compréhension erronée des pratiques indigènes. En conséquence, même les interventions de conservation les plus attentives à la personne finissent trop souvent par accélérer la délimitation, la marchandisation et la dépossession des terres autochtones. Dans cet article, nous réfléchissons à nos collaborations respectives avec les communautés indigènes de Sarawak en Malaisie et de Palawan aux Philippines qui ont vécu les projets de conservation de biodiversité menés par des ONG transnationales. Nous avons remarqué que nos collaborateurs composent avec les attentes des projets en se comportant de façon sélective, en cachant et en dissimulant des aspects importants de leurs vies. Ils font cela en partie pour tenter de gérer les ONG, les agences gouvernementales et autres acteurs qui se disputent leur coopération. Mais de façon plus importante encore, nous soutenons que c’est une façon de défendre leurs terres, leurs ressources et leurs écosystèmes contre les pressions de dépossession, y compris celles exercées par la conservation. De ce fait, nous théorisons que ces actes constituent une forme de ce que Vizenor appelle la « survivance » et soulevons les questions importantes sur le rôle des chercheurs et des activistes dans leur tentative de rendre les mondes de vie indigène (in)visibles pour les organisations de conservation et autres institutions de pouvoir néocolonial.

En un esfuerzo por reformularse como defensoras de los derechos humanos, las organizaciones transnacionales de conservación consideran cada vez más a las comunidades indígenas como fuentes de trabajo, conocimiento y legitimidad. En muchos casos, las relaciones resultantes están cargadas de grandes desequilibrios de poder y se basan en entendimientos erróneos de las prácticas indígenas. Como resultado, incluso las intervenciones de conservación más ‘centradas en las personas’ a menudo sirven para acelerar el encierro, la mercantilización y el despojo de las tierras indígenas. En este artículo, se reflexiona sobre nuestras respectivas colaboraciones con comunidades indígenas en Sarawak, Malasia y en las Islas de Palawan, Filipinas, que han enfrentado proyectos de conservación de la biodiversidad liderados por ONG transnacionales. Se ha notado que nuestros colaboradores dirigen las expectativas de los proyectos al realizar, ocultar y oscurecer de manera selectiva aspectos importantes de sus vidas. Lo hacen, en parte, en un esfuerzo por gestionar las ONG, las agencias gubernamentales y otros actores que compiten por su cooperación. Pero lo que es más importante, se argumenta, es que es una forma de defender sus tierras, medios de vida y ecosistemas de las presiones de despojo, incluidas las ejercidas por la conservación. Como tal, se teoriza, estos actos constituyen una forma de lo que Vizenor denomina ‘survivance’ y plantean preguntas importantes sobre el papel de los académicos y activistas para hacer que los mundos de vida indígena sean (in)visibles para las organizaciones conservacionistas y otras instituciones del poder neocolonial.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservation
• indigeneity
• survivance
• visibility
• concealment
• Southeast Asia

MOTS CLÉS:

• conservation
• indigénéité
• survivance
• visibilité
• dissimulation
• Asie du sud-est

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• conservación
• indigenismo
• survivance
• visibilidad
• ocultación
• El sudeste de Asia

Acknowledgments

June would like to thank all the Batang Ai communities who graciously invited her to their homes and shared their stories, especially Apai, Indai, and their family, as well as her dearly departed parents who have always supported her work. Noah would like to express his heartfelt gratitude to the Palawan communities who have hosted him during his fieldwork. We would both like to thank Audra Mitchell, Tim Leduc, and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article, as well as both Audra Mitchell and the Independent Social Research Foundation for hosting the workshop where our conversation about this project began.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We acknowledge that Indigenous communities have developed their own approaches to environmental protection and environmental justice and that the issues we highlight may not apply to those efforts. See, for example, Cepek (2008) and Hoover (2017).

2. My reflection is based on the four years that I spent working as a conservation researcher (2003–2007) and on twenty months of ethnographic research for my doctorate beginning in July 2015, of which ten months were spent in three separate Iban communities in the Batang Ai-Lanjak-Entimau complex, located in southwest Sarawak. During my time in Batang Ai, I conducted a total of 45 semi-structured interviews, through an iterative process. Interviews were conducted with both male and female adult participants who were active in land and farming activities. I also observed activities and rituals related to the forests and community life, and took part in the intensive rice-planting process in order to learn the physical skills required for planting rice, including the cognitive, emotional and spiritual aspects. It prepared and sensitized me to the embodied practice of rice-planting and also provided different ways of engaging with Iban worldviews. As noted below, some of the ‘data’ in this section come from journals I kept during my time as a conservation researcher, and others come from my doctoral-research interviews and fieldnotes.

3. I documented this conservation in my journal in September 2004. Batang Ai was flooded in the 1980s to create a hydro-dam.

4. Apai means ‘father’ in Iban, and refers to my adoptive Iban father and interlocutor, during my DPhil field research in 2015–2017.

5. I documented this conversation in my field notes on 16 December 2015.

6. Adat refers to the cultural values, norms, customs, institutions, and customary laws commonly practised by many Indigenous and local communities in Southeast Asia. For more detailed information on the Iban adat for example, please refer to Sandin’s ‘Iban adat and augury’ (1980).

7. My conversations with Apai M. and Inai were documented on 21 December 2015.

8. Name changed to protect the individual.

9. I recorded this interview in my field notes on 2 November 2015.

10. My reflection derives from just under twenty months of fieldwork in the Philippines (November 2010–January 2012; May–August 2012; June–July 2014; July 2015; July 2016), which itself built on ten months of preliminary research between 2006 and 2008. Of most relevance to this article are the nearly eight months I spent living in a hamlet within the boundaries of the Mt. Mantalingahan Protected Landscape, preceded by four months of intensive ethnographic and archival research into the MMPL’s management and punctuated by visits to the provincial capital for meetings and interviews with bureaucrats, activists, and business people whose work connected either to the MMPL or to environmental politics in southern Palawan. In the hamlet context, my most important research method was participant observation, documented in the form of jottings and fieldnotes and supplemented by semi-structured interviews and a systematic survey of thirty-nine households.

11. Isu first told me this story on 3 July 2012, at which point I paraphrased it in my field notes.

12. This is a pseudonym, as are all personal names used in this section.

13. Swidden or uma in Palawan is a practice of shifting agriculture wherein plots of land are cleared, burned, planted, and harvested in an annual cycle that follows the monsoons. Indigenous or ‘integral’ swidden (Conklin, 1957), such as that long practiced by Palawan communities, involves low population densities, extensive (as opposed to intensive) land use, and long fallow periods during which the forest is able to regenerate (Macdonald, 2007). While swidden remains a vital practice in the lives of Palawan and other Indigenous communities in the region, its viability is threatened by migrant settlement, agricultural intensification, discriminatory state policies, and conservation enclosure (Dressler & Pulhin, 2010).

14. This exchange took place on 6 August 2011. The quotes are reconstructed from my jottings and fieldnotes. This was not the only time Lido gave me an amulet to protect me from malevolent forces, nor was it the only time he railed against land clearance by settlers or the prohibition of swidden.

15. This conversation took place on 20 July 2012.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSF Division of Social and Economic Sciences [SES 1023901]; Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison [graduate-student fieldwork grant]; Khazanah Nasional Berhad [Merdeka Scholarship]; Social Science Research Council [International Dissertation Research Fellowship]; University of Oklahoma [Junior Faculty Fellowship].