Visual Anthology: On Fragile Architecture by Mayrah Udvardi

ON FRAGILE ARCHITECTURE EXPLORING CAUSES OF INDIGENOUS HOUSING INSECURITY IN BORNEO, PERU, ETHIOPIA & SIBERIA A VISUAL ANTHOLOGY OF MY THOMAS J. WATSON FELLOWSHIP

MAYRAH W. UDVARDI

INTRODUCTION This past year, I was the recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Traveling Fellowship, which funds college graduates to pursue a year of self-directed research outside of their home country. This was the chance of a lifetime for me — both to travel to some of the most out-of-reach regions on Earth and to prepare myself for a career in social impact architecture and sustainable development. Over the year, I explored how historically marginalized indigenous peoples struggle to sustain their lands, homes, and livelihoods. Through visual journaling, a reflective process that incorporates mapping, gestural sketching, and architectural drawing, I recorded the stories of the Orang Ulu of Malaysian Borneo, the Quechua of the Andean Altiplano, the Matses of the Peruvian Amazon, the tribes of Ethiopia’s highlands and Omo Valley, and the Khanty and Altai communities of Siberia. The great value in visiting each of these places is that although they are all similarly undergoing forced transition and are at risk of becoming culturally extinct, the challenges they face are distinctive. I was concerned with how environmental, political and cultural threats to these peoples affect their housing security and the prognosis for the health and viability of their communities. In traversing these unique and rapidly changing environments, I wove together a written and visual anthology of the communities that call these lands their homes and the forces that threaten them. The moral and ethical implications of this project were not unsubstantial and I spent many a sleepless night considering my purpose, both actual and perceived, in the places I traveled to. There are several ways in which this project diverged from the typical Western journey into the “jungle”. First, this year was not about service. Second, I left my camera and computer behind, as these devices would have been intrusive and distracting for the people I engaged with. Third, I did my best to organize my drawings of these issues in a way that preserves their complexity and broadcasts them to as large an international audience as possible. This book contains my writings, drawings, and paintings from the past year, compiled chronologically in a way that ties together the broader themes that emerged in all the communities I spent time in. I hope that the experiences encapsulated here, which shaped me more than words can describe, will also open your eyes to new realities.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 3

Ethiopia

Personal Statement 6

Introduction to Ethiopia 444

Indigeneity in the 21st Century 8

Addis Ababa 450

Discursive Rise of Indigeneity in the Context of Sarawak, Malaysia

Northern Tigray 454

Criticism for the Transnational Discourse on Indigeneity

Northern Ethiopia Historic Circuit 535

Implications of Discourse on Land RIghts Activism in Sarawak

The Omo Valley 545

Between States and Center Points 22

Addis Ababa Spatial Study 660 Goodbye Ethiopia 688

Borneo Introduction to Sarawak, Malaysia 30

Russia

Baram River 47

Introduction to Russia 690

Miri 85

St. Petersburg 693

Southern Coast 94

Moscow 706

Upper-Rejang River 111

Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug 747

Upper-Bengoh 155

Altai Republik 876

Kelabit Highlands 184 Mulu National Park 202 Ending My First Chapter 218

Concluding Thoughts Not Just a Problem in the Global South

922

Mongolia 928 Peru

The End of America 930 Introduction to Peru 224

Unsung Heroines 932

Lima 228

China 936

Sacred Valley 252

Going (Home?) 940

Lake Titikaka 294 Bolivia 314

Lists 942

Amazon 334 Ending My Second Chapter 442

Further Reading

947

PERSONAL STATEMENT July 11, 2014

native to architecture or the social sciences. Using drawing to analyze community structures, human spatial patterns, and the built landscape is a powerful way of incorporating broader perspectives as well as personal experience. It will also be a more productive way for me to communicate with community members because I will be limited verbally.

If you asked me today what I intend to do with my career, I would say design and build affordable, sustainable housing for underserved communities around the world. Like many emerging millennial architects, I have a vision for a more just and stable world and see design as a powerful tool to affect change in communities that face challenging issues: climate change, unsustainable resource extraction, globalization, political unrest, and forced eviction. Through my studies of architecture and environmental science, I have come to question the paradigms of design and development work; both fields still overwhelmingly assume fluency with marginalized communities they serve, not taking the time to understand the nuances of their problems. It takes a longer process of observation and reflection to recognize that underlying problems are rarely self-evident and that genuine design solutions are complex.

Why not photography? Many of these tribes have also consciously chosen to shun outside technology – can you imagine having a camera pointed at you, without your consent, not knowing where it is going to go or who is going to see it? As much as I love photography, it simply isn’t an appropriate tool for me to use this time around.

A community’s stories should drive design. My Watson year is allowing me the chance learn how to understand and describe the issues and spatial legacies of some of the most fragile communities on the planet. The UN reports that 15 million people (a majority of whom identify as indigenous) are displaced every year by development. Many indigenous groups live with the constant threat of forced eviction from their homes and lands.

Drawing has always been a valuable medium for me to ascertain the world around me and empathize with people and places. I spent the first five years of my education at a Montessori school, where I was taught to keep a sketchbook and would go on fieldtrips to draw sculptures and buildings. My middle school in Oregon emphasized field study through a combination of art and science. My classmates and I would spend Friday afternoons tromping through wetlands, forests, and oak savannahs, sketching species and diagramming ecosystems.

How are the Penan (Borneo), Matses (Peru), Omo Valley (Ethiopia), and Khanty (Siberia) communities changing spatially as eviction, environmental degradation, and assimilation threaten their survival? That’s my research question. To be entirely transparent I should breakdown the agenda behind that question because whether or not I think I have one, the people I meet assume I do. This is where occupational identification becomes particularly important. If I were to introduce myself as an architect or a developer, people would most likely think I stood to make money off of them, which would breed distrust. If I introduced myself as a social scientist, it might also turn people off because of the historic paradigm of Western knowledge hierarchy and information collection. Both identifications set up a really troubling dynamic between the expert and the client, the researcher and the subject, the watcher and the watched. So what other ways could I identify myself and my agenda that would grant me unaffected access to the communities I’m traveling to? I could describe myself as an activist whose intentions are to understand and advocate for the rights of indigenous groups internationally. While this agenda does have some truth to it, it’s also important for me to stay impartial, to honor both my own learning and my obligations to the Watson Foundation.

Why not write a book? Written ethnography could force me to rely on extremely prescribed scholarly frameworks (and preconceived Western ideas about culture and the ideas of home), which would narrow my lens of discovery. Drawing uses an entirely different part of the brain and it will also open me up to learn about traditional drawing methods these tribes use as vehicles for storytelling and map-making.

I reconnected with drawing as an analytical tool in a study abroad course in Copenhagen called ‘Visual Journal’. My professor pushed me to experiment with different ways of visual analysis, to draw more than what I saw. I acquired x-ray vision to break apart and reconfigure sections of space. Drawing quickly, I could capture the essence of actions, patterns, structures, and ambiance in a way that was more compelling and insightful than a photograph. Visual journaling became an opportunity for me to spend time in new spaces and fully appreciate them, rather than taking a photo as a memento and moving on. In living with and visually reflecting on the lives of the Penan, Matses, Omo Valley, and Khanty people and the housing challenges they face, I hope to come to terms with what social impact architecture and my role in it could be.

So what’s left? Am I an artist? A gypsy? An entitled neocolonialist conquistadora? As much as I hate having to label myself and define my research agenda, it has already felt necessary in many of my conversations with NGOs and local activists. So instead of talking about who I am, I talk about what I hope to learn and share. I have approached my time in each village as an exchange — of language, labor, drawing lessons, and of a promise to communicate the injustices I witness with my global networks. Visual journaling (analytical drawing), the toolkit I will be using to document my journey, is not 6

INDIGENEITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A CRITIQUE OF THE TRANSNATIONAL DISCOURSE ON INDIGENEITY & ITS EFFECTS ON THE PENAN PEOPLE IN SARAWAK, MALAYSIA

digeneity as pertaining to marginalized ancient people whose attachment to the land, subsistence-oriented production and indigenous language and culture is under threat by the majority.[7] Indigeneity often alludes to Western ideals of purity, endangerment, and wilderness and is inseparably linked to neocolonialism.

July 11, 2014

Since this early definition, non-scholarly writing on indigeneity has grown substantially, indicating a cultural shift in the West to consider the effects of international development on tribes as well as romanticize their existence. One online search engine returned over 987 major news publications for “indigeneity” and “tribal land rights” from the last ten years, a significant increase from the late twentieth century. Perhaps most interesting is the burst of scholarship on indigeneity, as it has drawn people from a variety of disciplines to think critically about the transnational discourse and its implications on policy and accountability. The following papers will examine the problems imbedded within the transnational discourse on indigeneity, both theoretically and as they apply to the historic, present, and future conditions of the Penan people in Sarawak, Malaysia.

In 2007, the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a landmark piece of international law that had taken 30 years to reach the General Assembly’s table. Many human rights organizations and indigenous communities view the adoption of the Declaration as the consolidation of the Indigenous Rights Movement. The document, which goes beyond previous international statements on indigenous rights in regard to cultural integrity, territories and resources, and rights to treaties, lands and self-determination, reflects a new rhetorical respect for the power of indigenous people in global politics. While the Declaration has no legally binding effect, proponents hoped that it would propel political action at local and national levels, where indigenous people historically have had little or no representation.[1] The Declaration is more than just politically significant; it has emerged on a wave of academic and activist interest in issues of indigeneity. Interest in the utility of indigeneity as a political category emerged in the 1970s when indigenous collectives mobilized support for their claims of economic, political, and cultural exploitation.[2] Tribes like the Penan in Sarawak, Malaysia – who subsist in the mountainous rainforests of Borneo’s interior – used their indigenous identity as an appeal to the government against commercial logging and other industries that were – and are – desecrating their lands.[3] While initially a tool used by indigenous communities themselves, it quickly became the focus of transnational non-governmental organizations. Among them, the International Labor Association, Survival International, International Commission for the Rights of Aboriginal People, Cultural Survival, and Earth Peoples began to channel sizeable funds to protect the civil, political, and cultural rights of indigenous people and educate the international community on tribal cultures.[4] While these international organizations serve a key role as platforms upon which to broadcast local voices, their framing of indigeneity is often problematic and has led to a distorted international understanding of tribes and development. Indigeneity in transnational discourse has come to implicitly embody anti-modern, anti-colonialist, and anti-capitalist sentiments, while explicitly claiming to protect the most “sacred” peoples and environments from commodification.[5] One of the earliest internationally accepted definitions of indigeneity – coined by the UN Working Group for Indigenous Peoples in 1983 – reads as follows: “Indigenous populations are composed of the existing descendents of the peoples who inhabited the present territory of a country wholly or partially at the time when persons of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived there from other parts of the world, overcame them, by conquest, settlement or other means, reduced them to a non-dominant or colonial condition; who today live more in conformity with their particular social, economic and cultural customs and traditions than with the institutions of the country of which they now form part, under a state structure which incorporates mainly national, social and cultural characteristics of other segments of the predominant population.”[6]

My analysis will be organized into three parts: (1) a historical overview of the discursive rise of indigeneity in the context of collective action in Sarawak, Malaysia, (2) a critical look at the transnational discourse on indigeneity through an analysis of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and (3) the implications of this discourse on present-day activism in Sarawak. In this discourse analysis, I am most concerned with the underlying assumptions made by predominantly Western groups, and the implications the discourse has for the health, sovereignty, and vitality of individuals who identify as Penan in Sarawak. [1] Siegfried Wiessner, “United Nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples,” United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law (2009), p. 3. [2] Francesca Merlan, “Indigeneity: Global and Local,” Current Anthropology 50.3 (2009), p. 303. [3] Ibid. [4] Gillette Hall, Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Development. Cambridge University Press (2012), p. 31. [5] Tania Li. “Indigeneity, Capitalism and Countermovements.” American Anthropological Association annual conference, Washington DC, November. 2007. [6] Martinez Cobo. “United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.” Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations. UN Commission on Human Rights. 1986.

As this definition suggests, international organizations and Western governments broadly think of in-

DISCURSIVE RISE OF INDIGENEITY IN THE CONTEXT OF SARAWAK, MALAYSIA July 15, 2014 In many parts of the world, deforestation is having profound effects on tribal communities’ ability to subsist in their ancestral environments. Sarawak, a district in Eastern-Malaysian Borneo, is a useful case study within which to observe this phenomenon. Borneo is the third largest island in the world, characterized by extensive tropical forests and considerable ethnic diversity. The island is politically divided between Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia, which has shaped imperial conquests, religious affiliations, and development patterns. In Sarawak, Malay communities are mostly found near the coast, while Chinese inhabit the larger cities of Kuching and Miri. Then there are Orang Ulu – or the “upriver people” – which the government uses as an umbrella term to categorize 27 small and ethnically diverse tribal groups that live in the mountainous interior of Sarawak.[1] Orang Ulu can be further distilled into two broad classes of interior people: longhouse dwelling, sedentary agriculturalists and nomadic hunter-gatherers, which the Penan people ascribe to.[2] Over the past three decades, government funded hydropower and timber companies have advanced on the last of Sarawak’s virgin forests and rivers and left behind a wasteland of palm oil plantations, to the particular detriment of the Penan people. The rate of deforestation in Sarawak is the highest in the world; in 1983, Malaysia accounted for 58 percent of the total global export of tropical hardwood. [3] Deforestation has increased soil erosion, water pollution and siltation, and driven hundreds, if not thousands, of keystone species into endangerment.[4] The degradation of these fragile ecosystems is inextricably linked to the health and sustainability of Penan communities. Food and water insecurity, forced resettlement and sedentism are only a few of the social impacts of the commodification and exploitation of Sarawak’s environments.[5] Because the Penan bare the impact of environmental degradation and natural resource depletion unequally and because they lack recognition and political agency, the events in Sarawak constitute grave environmental injustices. The government’s prioritization of natural capital and territorial acquisition over the physical and cultural needs of tribes that inhabit Sarawak’s interior is flawed but nothing new. Like many countries where indigenous communities currently struggle for land rights, Malaysia has a legacy of colonialism. Prior to British occupation, Malaysia had no centralized government and was instead a federation of sultanates and remote tribal territories.[6] According to Virginia Hooker, an Australian anthropologist, “The Peninsula and Borneo had, and still have, a relatively low population density with little shortage of land and no shortage of sea. The necessity to control large amounts of territory in order to have power and influence was therefore not a major concern.”[7] However, because of its geographic location – ideal for international trade – and its mineral deposits, Sarawak was attractive to European imperialists.[8] In 1841, it fell under British rule, which changed the modes of governance, resource use, and identity for the Penan people. The British drastically altered the environment and demographic composition of Sarawak. Rubber, palm oil, and tin became important exports, fueling the industrial revolution and, later, both world wars in the West. These industries demanded more labor than the British were able to acquire from local people; the turn of the twentieth century saw an influx of Indian and Chinese immigrants into Sarawak to support the growing economy. As lowland areas of the island were developed, many Penan who stayed were coerced into sedentism and Christianity while others fled deeper into the interi10

or. Colonists saw little utility in the diverse cultures of the Orang Ulu tribes, seeing them as monolithically savage and unproductive. The rendering of Orang Ulu tribes and coastal Malays as a monolith by the British and the development of connective infrastructure propelled a nationalist sentiment, which fueled the revolution and upheaval of the British colonists.[9] After independence in 1957, Peninsular Malaysia and Borneo fell under the jurisdiction of a constitutional monarchy. As was common in postcolonial states of Africa, South- and Southeast Asia, the colonialist legacies of economic expansion, centralized government, and political disenfranchisement of the Penan persisted. Postcolonial Malaysia witnessed a forsaking of tribal identities for nationalist aspirations and economic development. By the 1980s, Malaysia’s economy, which had been state-run for decades, underwent a process of liberalization and privatization.[10] This marked a shift in the pace of environmental exploitation in Sarawak, disrespect for the Penan by the Malaysian government and corporations, and ultimately a survivalist reconstruction of Penan self-identity as indigenous. In 1987, after years of unsuccessful individual appeals to the government to end logging in Sarawak, groups of Penan from all over the interior gathered to voice a collective declaration: “We, the Penan people of the Tutoh, Limbang, and Patah Rivers regions, declare; stop destroying the forest or we will be forced to protect it. The forest is our livelihood. We have lived here before any of you outsiders came. We fished in clean rivers and hunted in the jungle. We made our sago meat and ate the fruit of trees. Our life was not easy but we lived it contentedly. Now the logging companies turn rivers to muddy streams and the jungle into devastation. Fish cannot survive in dirty rivers and wild animals will not live in devastated forest. You took advantage of our trusting nature and cheated us into unfair deals. By your doings you take away our livelihood and threaten our very lives. You make our people discontent. We want our ancestral land, the land we live off, back. We can use it in a wiser way. When you come to us, come as guests with respect.”[11] Like the appeals that had come before, this proclamation was ignored so the Penan decided to take direct action. In March 31, 1987, Penan leaders rallied over 2,500 people from 26 different settlements – including members of other Orang Ulu tribes – for an eight-month non-violent blockade of logging roads.[12] This action was significant in three ways: first, it represented a paradigmatic shift in how the Penan and other Orang Ulu tribes defined themselves, from stifled, powerless, and separate minorities to a network of ‘first peoples’ with innate rights to their ancestral lands. Second, it showed how indigeneity could be a powerful political tool to grow coalitions of tribes that people in power could not ignore. Third, it brought Sarawak under the spotlight of international environmental and human rights organizations and sparked indigenous rights campaigns that continue to this day. The history of Sarawak and the self-determination of the Penan are mirrored in the stories of tribes around the world. Over the last three decades, disenfranchised peoples on every continent have discovered the usefulness of the term “indigenous” and claimed this identity as a badge of pride.[13] According to Francesca Merlan, an Australian anthropologist, “Indigeneity is taken to imply first-order connections (usually at a small scale) between group and locality. It connotes belonging and originariness and deeply felt processes of attachment and identification, and thus it distinguishes ‘natives’ from others.”[14] As tribes began to ascribe themselves to indigeneity, they marshaled support from the international community, who felt a moral imperative to propagate the injustices done unto them. 11

The internationalization of the indigenous rights movement has emerged in two forms: as activism and as discourse. The 1987 logging blockades in Sarawak served as a call-to-action for Western environmentalists and human rights activists. Within four years of the initial blockade, two major international non-profits were founded with the sole intent of supporting Penan land rights: the Borneo Project, based in Oakland, California, and the Bruno Mansar Fund, based out of Switzerland. Other environmental groups like International Rivers began Borneo-specific campaigns, the goals of which aligned with Penan interests.[15] Concurrently, a broader discourse amongst scholars and political agencies was developing and groups were taking steps to write indigenous rights into international law. The UN Working Group for Indigenous Peoples (whose definition of indigeneity appeared on Page 3) was central to shaping indigeneity as a universally applicable concept.[16] In addition to the UN’s initial report, pressure from international indigenous coalitions inspired the creation of working groups within the World Bank (1983) and the International Labor Union (1989).

[13]Jerome Levi and Biorn Maybury-Lewis. “Becoming indigenous: Identity and heterogeneity in a global movement.” Indigenous peoples, poverty, and development (2012), p. 73. [14] Merlan, p. 304 [15] “Home Page,” International Rivers (2014), Web. [16]Tania Li, “Indigeneity, Capitalism and Countermovements,” American Anthropological Association Annual Conference, Washington D.C. (2007).

What has emerged out of the last thirty years of discourse on indigeneity has arguably been useful for illuminating the injustices done unto tribes and demanding political, cultural, and economic recognition of minority people. However, because indigeneity implies claims of a high moral order, it is difficult to take a critical view of it as a constructed and contradictory concept: many would defend it as a self-evident description. [1]John Grim, Indigenous traditions and ecology, Harvard University Press (2001), p. 129. [2] Ibid. [3] Davis Wade, “Death of a People: Logging in the Penan Homeland,” Cultural Survival (1993), Web. [4] Grim, Op. cit. [5] Wade, Op. cit. [6] Zoey Reisdorf, “Colonial Practice: A Malaysian Case Study,” Buena Vista University (2003), p. 4. [7] Virginia Hooker, A Short History of Malaysia, Australia: Allen & Unwin (2003), p. 35. [8] D.K. Bassett, British Trade and Policy in Indonesia and Malaysia in the Late Eighteenth Century, Hull, England: The University of Hull (1971), p. 82. [9] Reisendorf, p. 10. [10] Reisendorf, p. 11. [11] Wade, Op. cit. [12] Christian Wawrinec. “Tribality and Indigeneity in Malaysia and Indonesia.” University of Vienna, Austria (2010), p. 7. 12

CRITICISM FOR THE TRANSNATIONAL DISCOURSE ON INDIGENEITY July 17, 2014 To understand the problems imbedded within the transnational discourse on indigeneity, one need go no further than the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, itself. The language of the Declaration reflects ideas that have been shaped and promulgated by different stakeholders over the last thirty years. While it was written with the best intentions and is comprehensive in its scope, the Declaration is rife with paradox and ambiguity and has been heavily disparaged by scholars.[1] The following criticisms pull from an emerging body of scholarly critique of the transnational construction of indigeneity. Addressing these criticisms will reveal how neither the Declaration nor any other international referendum can serve as a panacea for addressing environmental exploitation and injustice at a local level. The transnational conceptualization of indigeneity wherein indigenous peoples have preeminent rights to community ownership is paradoxical, since property rights are a modern construction. The Declaration includes the claim of preeminent rights in its prelude: “Recognizing the urgent need to respect and promote the inherent rights of indigenous peoples which derive from their political, economic and social structures and from their cultures, spiritual traditions, histories and philosophies, especially their rights to their lands, territories and resources.”[2] According to Manjusha Nair, an Indian sociologist, indigenous land rights are a paradoxical fabrication of western liberalism, since granting the rights of community ownership requires the idea of individual property rights.[3] In Sarawak, the Penan had no defined property rights prior to British imperialism. Instead, they had a concept called molong, meaning “to preserve”, which denoted an individual or community’s proprietary stewardship.[4] Rather than validating individual sovereignty, molong gave groups responsibility to maintain the forests and rivers of Sarawak as common pool resources. While property rights may have existed in some indigenous communities prior to industrialization, the idea of sovereignty over land or resources is a modern construction and must not be interpreted as primordial. Similarly, transnational discourse often includes paternalistic affirmations of indigenous space as pure and sacred. For example, Article 11 of the Declaration states: “Indigenous peoples have the right to practice and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past manifestations of their cultures.”[5] While such a provision is necessary to include in a document of this scope, it reflects the ahistorical Western notion of the simple and undifferentiated society that is assumed to have existed prior to imperial conquest. Western activist websites often describe the Penan as having a “reverential” or “sacred” relationship with the rainforests.[6] This framing is not only ahistorical – as most of the Penan’s spiritual beliefs about the forest emerged from negative encounters with predators – it also shows the strong desire within the transnational discourse to render tribal people as the “others”. Merlan argues that indigeneity has been defined for regulatory purposes in a “criterial” way, mean14

ing that there exists a set of criteria that enable identification of the “indigenous” as a global kind.[7] This is problematic because it tends to homogenize indigenous people, their cultures, and their struggles. The original criteria on which the Declaration is based, in their attempt to include of everyone, creates a global monolith of “the indigenous”: “a) close attachment to ancestral territories and to the natural resources in these areas; b) self-identification and identification by others as members of a distinct cultural group; c) an indigenous language, often different from the national language; d) presence of customary social and political institutions; and e) primarily subsistence-oriented production.”[8] By merging all tribes under one definition, their axes of difference and their unique set of challenges are trivialized. The applicability of the above criteria to the Penan is questionable and brings up the problem of territoriality in the transnational definition of indigeneity. Because the Penan were traditionally nomadic, their attachment to one specific place in Borneo is not as strong as that of other more sedentary Orang Ulu tribes. Furthermore, many of the areas that the Penan would have inhabited were deforested and developed over a century ago. It is debatable whether one can still claim close attachment to a territory that has been lost for generations and if one cannot, one may no longer be able to ascribe to the definition of indigeneity. Anthea Gupta, an Indian sociolinguist, problematizes the language around indigeneity. She argues that “ancestral territories” is ambiguous since the claim on a place can only ever be relative to more recent arrivals. Migration, language shift, and intermarriage render the idea of indigeneity as fluid; it is dangerous to solidify this fluidity into a qualifier as the above excerpt has done. Another common criticism of the transnational discourse on indigeneity, as embodied by the Declaration, is its “relational” construction on a local level. Nair argues that transnational networks popularized indigeneity, which has been useful in legitimizing indigenous peoples’ struggles, but also problematic as it delegitimizes other minorities on a more local level who cannot claim indigeneity.[9] For example, refugees from Myanmar inhabit some of the most degraded environments in Sarawak. They live in informal settlements on the periphery of large cities like Kuching and while they are legally given rights, in practice they are discriminated against, as Malaysia still operates with a strong national sentiment.[10] The popularization of indigeneity has steered international agencies to privilege the rights of tribes like the Penan, taking focus and agency away from the island’s other minority groups. The transnational discourse obtusely misses the fact that indigeneity was first and foremost a strategy by indigenous people for local political recognition, for lack of a better political terrain. “Indigenous” is not always a person’s primary self-descriptor. Jerome Levi and Biorn Maybury-Lewis, two American anthropologists, are critical of how the transnational discourse often assumes a fixed identity. In “Becoming Indigenous: Identity and Heterogeneity in a Global Movement”, they explain how people choose pieces of their identity based on what will serve them most in any given situation.[11] The Declaration fails to mention any other axes of difference when it frames indigenous rights. Further15

more, it predominantly uses plural language such as “they” and “people”. Forgetting that there are multiple axes of difference, even within a Penan village, is a dangerous violation of individual autonomy and disregards other forms of injustice and marginalization that being “indigenous” will only compound. For example, being female, a child, indigenous, and living in close geographic proximity to logging operations would make one much more likely to be raped. The danger of the transnational discourse on indigeneity is that it prioritizes collective rights over individual rights and discounts that axes of difference among indigenous people can make some more susceptible to injustice and violence than others. A final criticism of the internationalization of the indigenous rights movement, as articulated by political scientist Elizabeth Rata, is how the concept of indigeneity has fallen under the jurisdiction of those who hold the most power on the world stage.[12] The Declaration is an example of how international power structures shape our acceptance of indigenous identity on a transnational scale. What was once a term that tribal people had full ownership of has become a transnationally whitewashed political category defined by white, wealthy men.[13] While this is of course hyperbole and many other voices are reflected in the Declaration’s writing,[14] it is a typecast that scholars commonly use to criticize transnational reproduction of knowledge. The danger in this line of critique is that it upholds the socially constructed binary of local knowledge versus global knowledge. Pinning the Declaration as representative only of global knowledge prevents it from becoming an applicable tool on a local level. So while thinking critically about who have defined the accepted definition of indigeneity today and how the power they wield is historically predetermined, it is important to remove one’s analysis from the stagnating binary of the knowledge hierarchy.

[9] Nair, p. 4 [10] EvaHedman, “Refuge, Governmentality and Citizenship: Capturing ‘Illegal Migrants’ in Malaysia and Thailand,” Government and Opposition 43.2 (2008), p. 358. [11] Levi, Op. Cit. [12]Elizabeth Rata. “The transformation of indigeneity.” Review: Fernand Braudel Center (2002), p. 173. [13] Ibid. [14]Kaushik Ghosh, “Between global flows and local dams: indigenousness, locality, and the transnational sphere in Jharkhand, India,” Cultural Anthropology 21.4 (2006), p. 511.

Although scholarly criticisms of the transnational discourse on indigeneity is heavily directed towards the language in the Declaration, it is important to consider those criticisms as ways forward, rather than as imperative to disregard the Declaration entirely. Transnationalization of ideas is inevitable in this day and age; recognizing how the meaning of indigeneity changes through this process is fundamental to taking appropriate and respectful steps that address injustice against indigenous people. [1] Andrea Muehlebach, “‘Making Place’ at the United Nations: Indigenous Cultural Politics at the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations,” Cultural Anthropology (2001), p. 416. [2] UN General Assembly. “United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples.” U.N. Washington: 12 (2007), p. 3. [3] Nair, p. 4 [4] Grim, p. 133. [5] UN General Assembly, p. 6. [6] “The Penan,” Survival International (2014), Web. [7] Merlan, p. 304. [8] Douglas Sanders, “Indigenous Peoples: Issues of Definition.” Intnl. Journal of Cultural Property (1999), p. 5. 16

IMPLICATIONS OF DISCOURSE ON LAND RIGHTS ACTIVISM IN SARAWAK July 21, 2014 The transnational discourse on indigeneity, while in many ways flawed by paradox and underpinned by neocolonialist sentiments, stems from the moral commitment people around the world have for indigenous people like the Penan. Earlier, I described two ways in which the indigenous rights movement has manifested internationally: through discourse and through activism. The transnational discourse has become quite developed over the last thirty years, as the existence of the Declaration indicates. For people committed to supporting the vitality and sustainment of marginalized communities in places like Sarawak, it is important to move beyond the theoretical and global renderings of indigeneity and towards activism. These papers were primarily focused on analyzing the rise of the Penan’s indigenous identity in the context of the global indigenous rights movement and on problematizing the transnational discourse on indigeneity, which has stemmed from this movement. Although outside the scope of this paper, thinking critically about the modes of international activism in response to the indigenous rights movement is also important. I am quizzical of the on-the-ground interventionist approach many Western organizations take to “support” tribes like the Penan. The NGO-ization of indigenous land rights issues is potentially problematic as it results from processes of neoliberal globalization and it takes ownership of the solution away from tribes themselves. However, these criticisms are speculative; my upcoming visit to Sarawak will provide me with the opportunity to understand the complexities of indigenous rights activism and how the international community can most respectfully and effectively involve itself. Researching this topic has forced me to consider my own role in supporting indigenous land rights in Sarawak. I questioned my internal motives for wanting to explore this issue and came to the conclusion that my interest is not based on any superiority complex, neoliberalist sentiment, ahistorical romanticization, or ‘othering’ construction of the Penan. I recognize that ecological destruction in Sarawak and the disempowerment and displacement of the Penan is in part a product of transnational slow violence, or “incremental and accretive” forms of violence by rich nations that harm poor and historically marginalized peoples and ecosystems around the world. [1] As a privileged, white, Western consumer, I contribute to the process of slow violence and feel compelled to respond through activism, not out of guilt, but out of an ethical duty as a global citizen. While I do not yet feel prepared to offer solutions and guidelines for other activists to work and live by, I have developed a set of principles that I hope will guide me through this year of learning, reflection, and action in Sarawak and other parts of the world.

Map of fellowship route 20

BETWEEN STATES AND CENTER POINTS July 30, 2014 I have spent the last two weeks leading up to my Watson Year in Northern India, where I have found myself being pulled back to repeatedly over the last couple years. Why do I keep coming to this overwhelming and all-too-confusing place, in the hottest summer months no less? As a white western woman of privilege, what is my business in this place? These are questions I’ve often had to answer both for myself and for other people. My initial interest in spending time in India is hard to explain without me reeling from my own words. Statements like, “I came here to discover my spirituality,” or, “I wanted to help the poor people,” on a basic level are not bad. Yet they are underpinned by simplified assumptions about an incredibly multi-dimensional country and problematic neocolonialist tendencies to both romanticize “ancient” culture and intervene in social affairs. So how do I justify it? When I’m speaking to strangers in Hindi I usually go for a line like, “being surrounded by India’s many faces and cultures gives me a lot of pleasure.” When I have written grant proposals and scholarship applications to study Hindi and gain fieldwork experience, I talk about the lessons I can learn and apply through India’s development process. I tell my more spiritual friends that I must have been Indian in a past life because everything feels in place when I’m here (although I’m still deciding for myself whether I believe in reincarnation). On a personal level, the dreams that I have and am able remember are enough of a reason to keep coming back (I’ll talk more about this later).

I was taking that was contributing to my visions in prisma color. When I stopped taking the pills and it continued to happen, I wondered if it was the intense heat or my subconscious need to playback so much daytime external stimulation. It could also be the very lack of obligations when I’m here that gives my subconscious and semi-conscious mind space to breathe and reflect. I want to push this theory of the in between a little bit further by extending it to my Watson Year. What is this year, really? It’s a transition point between my past and my future. It’s a one-year space-time phenomenon wherein I have few obligations; thus fully allowing my sub-, semi-, and fully-conscious mind to breathe and reflect. It is a year in which I am essentially trying to overcome my Western Character Complex (defined by rationalism, material consumption, and outwardness) and become more attuned to my inner consciousness. All this of course, while also pursuing a subject of great importance to me. I believe that finding inner-consciousness and overcoming the internal desire for material conquest is the foundation for healthy and sustainable relationships between people, nations, and species. But it is hard to achieve freedom from internal desires when I am constantly barraged by memories of the past and obsessions about the future. So fully embracing the in between, the here and now – with myself and with people I surround myself with – is essential. That is what this year is giving me. And that is what I am embarking on tonight as I traverse the airspace between New Delhi, India and Miri, Malaysia.

Perhaps I should not have to justify why I keep coming here and why, with my ten-year tourist visa, I have no intention of quitting my exploration of this incredible country anytime soon. There is no way I could lie to myself and pretend it is not painfully difficult trying to find my center when I am battling stomach aches, street harassment, and the constant barrage of questions like, “when are you getting married?” I like to push myself and I always have. As an Australian-Austrian-American gypsy, I have grown up having to turn foreign places into homes and India has proven to be the most addictive challenge thus far. Over the last few days, I have become engrossed in Robert Thurman’s translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (more appropriately translated as The Great Book of Natural Liberation through Understanding in the Between). In short, it has given me a much more comprehensive understanding of how Tibetan Buddhism was developed and how it explains life, death, and the in between. I am not reading this book to prepare for my imminent death, although arguably one’s entire life prepares one for death. What interests me most is the Buddhist philosophy on the in between and how to navigate it successfully. From what I have understood from this book, the in between occurs at multiple intervals throughout one’s life and across multiple lives. The theory of the in between pushes against the lifedeath, sleep-awake, conscious-unconscious binaries, which we are taught are absolute in materialist and nihilist Western culture. Understanding that something special happens at the transition point between life and death, death and rebirth, and even repeatedly throughout our lives between sleeping and awakening, is what gives us the power to navigate great seas of consciousness and prepare for death. The most common way people experience this in between state is through the practice of dreaming and remembering one’s dreams. There’s something that transforms within me in India that allows me to practice navigating this in between state, or lucid dreaming. The first couple times I visited I thought it was the malaria medication 22

Layout of Kilo 15 blockade against the Baram Dam

Details in Kilo 15 blockade side

LIFE ON THE BARAM

Don’t get me wrong: these stories are being told. There is a strong coalition of indigenous organizations working here in Sarawak (J.O.A.S., Save Sarawak Rivers, and the Borneo Research Institute to name a couple) on a plethora of interrelated environmental, social, and political issues. The international community has also been engaged in broadcasting and financially supporting indigenous activists in Sarawak for years (The Borneo Project and the Bruno Manser Fund are two that I have encountered). Being here and seeing the work happening on the ground has only reaffirmed my reasons for being here and the potential impact my project could have. I’m trying to approach these stories from a new angle and using a new medium: through the study of indigenous housing insecurity and using visual journaling. I only hope that I can do justice to the topics I report on and the people behind them and work to engage a broader network of people in these internationally-pertinent issues.

August 21, 2014 Greetings from Miri, Sarawak, the home base I’ll be returning to for respite and internet access between my trips to the island’s more remote villages. My first three weeks in Borneo have been immersive and exciting. I’ve visited a blockade site for the Baram Dam, stayed in Kayan and Penan longhouses, driven in and out of Brunei (approximately eight times), visited Sabah for the Orang Asal Annual Gathering (coinciding with Indigenous Peoples Day), and trecked to several larger towns in between. I have met so many people (both upriver and in the cities) who are struggling to survive in a “modern society” that has both been forced on them and foresaken them for profits and political power. Yet the generosity and honesty most of these people have welcomed me with has been overwhelming. They are open about their struggles and the state of their country because they want people to know, to care, and to act. It’s incredible how many people in Malaysia don’t see what is happening under their own noses. 48

For my own safety and expedient departure from Malaysia come November, I will not be able to publish anything political until after I leave. As critical as I wish I could be, my focus in these next few blog posts will much more “objective”, looking mostly at daily life in indigenous villages, how it has changed over the last fifty years, and what we can expect to happen with “business-as-usual-development” in the next few years. 49

Salomon Kallang Gao playing Sapeh at World Indigenous Peoples’ Day Festival in Sabah, Borneo

Introduction to longhouse life in Long Laput

Insights on the Baram River

Long Laput – Life in a Kayan Longhouse

The Baram River is of particular interest to me because it is one of twelve rivers around Sarawak that the government (in partnership with the state-owned company, Sarawak Energy Berhad) has condemned in an industrial initiative to build twelve large-scale hydroelectric dams. The Baram River – and life along it – will change drastically if the Baram Dam is built. The river has been a lifeline for the people on its banks for hundreds of years. It is where people catch fish and drinking water, where they wash and prepare food, bathe, do their laundry, dispose of organic waste, and it is their only line of transportation to the outside world. For both traditionally sedentary tribes like the Iban, Kayan, and Kenyah and the traditionally nomadic groups like the Penan, the river is a vital lifeline.

Phillip Jau, an organizer with Save Sarawak Rivers and J.O.A.S., welcomed me into his family home in Long Laput and taught me a lot about how the village and its surrounding environment has changed in his lifetime. He painted a beautiful picture of what life was like in his childhood: the forest was ripe with fruits and animals, the river was clean enough to drink from, and the people in his longhouse gathered to share food and stories every night. Over time, his village embraced a cashbased economy, changing peoples’ relationships to each other and to their environment. Monetizing the natural capital in the forest and river became primary modes of income and when that wasn’t enough, people began moving into the larger cities in search of gainful employment and the promise of a better life. Of course, this is an overly simplified description of the changes that have taken place, but it describes a development pattern that other villages along the Baram also relate to.

The time I spent in Long Laput, a 200-year-old Kayan longhouse downstream of the proposed Baram Dam, and in Ba-Abang, a 50-year-old Penan longhouse in the proposed dam’s inundation zone, opened my eyes to the centrality of the river in everyday life. Even the last forty years – with the surge of logging, palm oil plantations, and oil drilling in Sarawak’s core – have witnessed drastic changes in the way people of Long Laput and Ba-Abang interact with the river. 50

A Week with the Penan in Ba-Abang I spent this last week living with the Penan in Ba-Abang (literally “on the River Abang”), one of the Penan’s first permanent settlements. The Abang River flows into the Baram River and is about a six hour drive from Miri and a five hour treck from the Long San airport (which I did with my 15 kg bag). Compared with the longhouse I visited in Long Laput – with it’s concrete-frame construction, electricity, and flushing toilets, the longhouse in Ba-Abang was far more minimalist. It has been much more challenging for the Penan to “succeed” in the modern cash-based economy than it has been for other upriver tribes like the Kayan and Kenyah because of their remoteness, governmental and corporate exploitation, discrimination by other tribes, and lack of access to avenues of recourse like education. I was impressed by the resourcefulness of villagers in constructing entire longhouses with minimal funds and tools. Like Long Laput, the last forty years of intensified logging and industry has affected the Penan’s ability to continue their hunter-gathering lifestyle. Many now clear large swaths of primary forest around Ba-Abang to farm rice and tapioca, rotating their fields every year to maintain healthy soil. The 200 people still living in Ba-Abang could be displaced in the next five years if the Baram Dam is built, since the Abang River is in the dam’s inundation zone. Staying in Ba-Abang for seven days was a true test for the effectiveness of visual journaling as a communication tool. Since no one in the village spoke English, I often found myself relying on drawing to explain why I was there and what kind of information I was taking back with me. The following drawings are just a sample of my observations and interactions during the week: Tomorrow I’ll be heading up to Marudi for the Baram Regatta, a festival that brings tribes from the Baram area together for some friendly competition (this year there will also be an important action about the Baram Dam). Afterwards, I’ll visit some villages of the Tering tribe, who live around Mulu National Park and then head down to southern Sarawak to look at the resettlement areas around the Murum Dam, which was constructed in 2013. Thank you to Peter, Maria, and Priscilla Kallang, Nick Kelesau, Willie Kajan, Phillip Jau and his family, Stanley Balan, Panai Erant and his family, Dennis Along and his family, the J.O.A.S. Board of Directors, and everyone else who has welcomed me and supported me over the last few weeks. I am indebted to you for making this experience so meaningful and enjoyable thus far. Until next time!

Nick Kelesau on longhouse porch

Logging road through Ba Abang 64

Abang River

Details of a longboat 66

Ba-Abang family tree

Family on longhouse porch 70

Penan political structure

Penan men preparing to hunt wild boar 72

Nging, a village elder 73

Maria weaving hat on longhouse porch

How to make rings out of Rotan 74

Women weaving baskets 75

Process of making tapioca flour 76

A typical mid-day Penan meal 77

Section of longhouse and river

Nick sitting with back to river at sundown 78

Boys at dinner on the porch 79

Scenes 1 and 2, as labeled on Long San map

Map of Long San 82

Scenes 3 and 4, as labeled on Long San map 83

“DASEIN” IN MIRI August 29, 2014 This last week did not turn out as I had planned. At all. Frustration at the Baram Regatta I went to the Baram Regatta in Marudi to experience a massive protest against the Baram Dam, which didn’t end up happening because of miscommunication between various players in the movement (yes, it happens to organizers everywhere). The event was, however, an incredible opportunity to get to know some fellow travelers, reconnect with friends whom I traveled with to the Orang Asal Gathering in Sabah, and witness some real political bullsh*t close up. The Baram Regatta was first organized by Charles Hose, an official of the British Brooke Dynasty, in 1899. At the time, tribes throughout Sarawak were extremely divided and regattas such as this one were a tool that the British used to keep the peace (and ultimately make the government more powerful). Instead of head-hunting, the Kenyahs of the Baram, Lirongs of Tinjar, and the Madangs and Iban of the central highlands could now prove their strength and superiority through a series of competitions at the Baram Regatta. While longboat racing is the main highlight, culinary, performance art, and beauty competitions are also important facets of the event. It seems that over time (or arguably since its conception) the Baram Regatta has become a vehicle for spreading political propaganda: about the government’s commitment to its people, the unity and contentment of indigenous peoples in Baram, and – in the last few years – about the peoples’ agreement with the Baram Dam scheme. High-level politicians like the Chief Minister and the Minister of Rural Development grace Marudi with their presence every year; plopping their asses in plush armchairs under air-conditioned VIP tents, far away from the locals’ campsites. This year Torstein Dale Sjotveit, a tall Norwegian man and the CEO of Sarawak Energy, which is the company responsible for all the corruption-filled hydroelectric dam projects in Sarawak, also showed up. My good friend and activist Willie Kajan couldn’t resist approaching him about his company’s plans for the Baram River. I couldn’t photograph the encounter for him, but I did record their conversation. Willie waited for the Norwegian outside of the men’s restroom and pounced (in full Steve Irwin uniform + aviators) when he emerged:

Flying over thousands of hectares of palm oil plantations along the Sarawak coastline 84

W: My name’s Willie (shake hands) N: Hello, Willie. W: Are you enjoying the regatta? N: Sure I am. W; Do you like the people you’ve met here? N: Sure do. W: Then I want you to stop the Baram Dam project. N: (Chuckles) I’ll have to think on that one. W: The people don’t want it. N: I’ll be going now. W: Stop the Baram Dam. N: I’ll think about it. 85

Propaganda in Fort Hose Museum in Marudi, Sarawak The other incident that particularly appalled me – involving a politically powerful, wealthy, non-native man – took place on the first night of the cultural performances. The rain was pouring down and a few thousand people were huddled under the sparse arrangement of tents to the right and left of the stage, or else in the back holding umbrellas. The only people who could fully see and appreciate the performances (mostly traditional folk dances with sapeh music) were again the VIP businessmen and politicians in their plush armchairs. Halfway through the show, one of them – Sylvester Entri, the Assistant Minister for Agriculture – demanded a microphone. He hijacked the performance for over half-an-hour to complain – in front of thousands of bystanders – about all the ways in which the event had insulted him. No one could believe it! He was reading from a list he’d written of his problems with the event’s organization, including the fact that the acts were too long for his taste and that the organizers should have purchased more microphones. Perhaps what shocked me most was that people were just putting up with it. A handful of people left, but everyone else just sat there in silence until this man was done. We left infuriated!

Clearcuts terraced for palm oil plantations near Marudi 86

On the third day of the regatta, I started to experience pain in my ankle where a mosquito had bitten me earlier and by evening my left foot was twice the size of my right and I could barely walk. Luckily I was in good hands, traveling with an Australian couple with extensive medical training and experience with tropical infections (thanks, Deb and Bay!). I went to the hospital the next morning and immediately started a course of antibiotics. Given how much pain I was in, it became pretty clear over the next few hours that Nyke (a German woman on her gap year whom I had met in Miri last week) and I would not be able to continue up the river to Long Terawan. We would have to drive back to Miri and wait to see what happened next. 87

“Dasein” in Miri I’ve been battling this dang infection for nearly a week. The worst part isn’t the pain or even the side effects of the antibiotics; it’s the realization that only a month into my Watson Year, I’ve already been slowed down. I know what you’re probably thinking (“Geez, Mayrah it’s only one week and you have a whole year!“). But I’m the type of person who hobbles into high school the morning after being hit by a car and carted to the emergency room via ambulance (how many teenagers do you know who wouldn’t jump at an excuse to stay home and play video games?) and jumps on an international flight just hours after a near-fatal car crash in India (adorned with blood, bruises, and a broken collar bone). And here I am in Borneo, completely incapacitated by an infected mosquito bite! But I’ve been working hard to overcome this feeling of “stuckness”. My friend Nyke (who bitter-sweetly left to continue her journey to Brunei yesterday) helped me a lot with this. She shared with me an inspirational passage that has guided her along her journey (she’s been on the road, sola, for over eight months now) and helped me see more clearly what “dasein” really means: “Mann kann natuerlich auch reisen, um irgendwo hinzukommen. Um zu gucken, wo der Papst wohnt. Um den Aequator zu ueberqueren, die Anden zu besteigen, die Fuesse in den eiskalten Pazifik zu halten. Man kann reisen, um wegzukommen. Sich auf irgendeinen Berg zu setzen, wo man Wasser aus dem Brunnen holen muss und tagelang keinen Menschen treffen kann. Bei dem Anblick eines Slums in Brasilien merken, wie gut man es doch hat. Bei den besten Reisen ist es aber voellig egal, wohin man gefahren ist und was man dort wollte. Einmal war ich vier Wochen in Suedamerika unterwegs, alleine. Ich hatte mir eine Liste von Staedten, Berglandschaften und Wasserfaellen gemacht, die ich erreichen muesste – schliesslich hat man nicht oft Geld und Gelegenheit zu solchen Reisen. Ich bewanderte also Sierras, raftet durch wilde Wasser und fuhr viele tausende Kilometer mit argentinischen Reisebussen durch diverse Klimazonen – und dann sass ich eines Nachmittags in einem Cafe in der schaebigen Fussganengerzone der Provinzstadt Salta, wo es kaum etwas zu tun gab, ausser sich im Park mit Alkoholikern und Strassenkindern zu unterhalten, und dachte: Ich bleibe laenger. Ich ging absichtlich jeden Abend in das selbe Lokal, ich lag zwei Tage lang nur auf meinem Stockbett im Hostel und las einen englischen Schundroman, ich verpasste den Buss in die sagenumwogene Wueste von Atacama, die ich nun noch immer nicht kenne. Noch immer ist es die Woche der Reise, an die ich am liebsten denke.

aufsteht, obwohl man es zu Hause hasst, dass jeden Morgen der Wecker klingelt. Wenn man merkt, dass man abends sehr gerne den Muell aus dem Ferienhaus bringt, weil die Girllen so schoen zirpen und die Luft so weich und sanft ist. Dann muss man nirgends hin und von nichts weg. Dann ist man wirklich da.” – Meredith Haaf “Dasein” is a concept that was developed by German philosopher Martin Heidegger in the early twentieth century. It alludes to the idea of existence but embodies something much more important. In his book, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), Heidegger poses the question: what is the being that will give access to the question of the meaning of Being? I am not going to feign any fluency in Heidegger’s ideas as I have not yet read his book (or even SparkNote’d it!). I do however think that it’s important to consider who we let define our own existence and judge whether that existence has been valuable or not. Time is also an essential element here as being is directly related to time spent. The most important point I took from Meredith Haaf’s passage above is that one needn’t try to fill time in a place doing too much. Because existence doesn’t depend on how much you do in a certain amount of time. Rather, you are ‘truly in a place’ when you have no obligations to time. Drawing Miri’s Extremes So I took the rest of the week to just be in Miri and try to understand this city better. The last few decades of development in Miri – and Sarawak at large – have generated contrasting landscapes within the city. I set out with some friends (a huge thank you to Tommy, Jerry, Calum, and Nyke for being so open to this exercise!) to draw some of Miri’s poorest and wealthiest neighborhoods. With pencil and paper in hand, we drove down one street in four different areas of the city, stopping eight times randomly and capping our drawing time at two minutes per stop. This forced us to draw quickly and instinctually, sometimes picking only a single object that first drew our attention. I really enjoyed drawing with other people and hope to incorporate these types of activities into my fieldtrips next week. Tomorrow I’ll be heading down to central and southern Sarawak for three weeks to see resettlement areas around the Murum and Bakun dams. Thank you to everyone who took care of me this week, particularly the staff at Pandora Co-Cottage (Willie, Brellyn, and Lily), Tom and Jerry, and Nyke. Until next time!

Reisen um sich zu bilden, ist ehrenwert. Reisen, um sich zu erholen, ist verstaendlich. Aber der beste und wichtigste Grund um zu reisen ist frei zu sein. Frei von zu Hause und den Menschen, die man dort liebt und fuer die man gerne da ist, aber eben nicht jetzt. Frei von irgendwelchen Selbstoptimierungsplaenen im Buero oder im Hobbykeller. Und frei von der Sehnsucht nach Freiheit. Wenn man Gespraeche fuehren kann wie: “Sollen wir Heute zum Markt fahren, oder direkt zum Strand?”, und genau weiss, dass es egal ist, fuer was man sich entscheidet. Wenn man das tolle Fruehstuecksbuffet im Hotel einfach verschlaeft. Wenn man zur Abwechslung mal Frueh 88

Details from Lorong neighborhood

View from bridge over polluted Baong River

Details from Lutong neighborhood

Mansion in resort neighborhood south of Miri 93

we fall asleep. This is evidenced by our very language around dreaming: it was only a dream, wake up to reality, and even subconscious all infer that dreams are useless in advancing us through the very rational and production-driven society most of us operate in. Even the fact that so many of us claim to “never dream” or “never remember” our dreams shows how we have been socialized not to nurture our dream space. I think the trivialization of dreams is holding us back from an entirely new level of creative enterprise, communication, and personal fulfillment. After all, dreams are where our minds synthesize new ideas and where we can be the most creative. Many indigenous cultures see dreams as instrumental in guiding people through their lives. Some even believe the waking state is merely inspiration for “true consciousness” in the dreaming state. This brings me to one of the book’s exercises I’ve been doing the last couple days: writing in reverse. The exercise requires that I write all of my dreams down when I wake up as if the events therein actually occurred during my waking state. Then I am to go through the day imagining that I am actually dreaming and record my experiences as if they are the stuff of strange and supernatural dreams. I thought I would share some of my my “dreams” from the last couple days:

AWAKENING THE DREAMER September 10, 2014 Warning: the events that I’m about to relay may make you uncomfortable and cause you to question my judgement and capacity to survive this year of travel. I’d like you to take a deep breath, realize that I’m still alive to tell the tale, and think of this as the one-time-kick-in-the-pants I needed to never ever put thrift or pride ahead of my personal safety. Last week I started reading Sarvananda Bluestone’s The World Dream Book, which offers pieces of wisdom from ancient cultures around the world to help induce, recall, and understand our dreams. The book is filled with exercises, some of which I find inane (“put a glass of water half-full beside your bed while you sleep and it will help you remember your dreams…”), but many of which have helped me reconsider the place of the dream space in navigating our everyday lives. Bluestone prefaces his argument by explaining how Western, industrialized society has come to devalue our sleeping (and dreaming) consciousness. Put simply, we prioritize being awake and trivialize what happens when 94

In Jerry’s grandmother’s kitchen in Rumah Nyuka 95

Map of Rumah Nyuka 96

Analysis of Rumah Nyuka 97

At Rumah Nyuka, Jerry’s Iban Longhouse Sunday, September 7th I am sleeping peacefully in the old longhouse loft. Everyone has warned me of the strange creatures that haunt the old longhouse, which, since the construction of the new longhouse directly behind it, serves as a museum for the family’s heirlooms: urns, baskets, skulls, and beaded costumes. The elders tell me that strange creatures hide in the shadows of the tall, barn-like roof. I am awakened suddenly to find a dog-spirit sprinting across the floor to the door. “Jerry!” I yell, “There’s a dog in here!” He groans and sits up. Suddenly, the dog shape shifts into Tommy, who’s hunched over the ledge of the longhouse throwing up. We’re hiking through jungle in search of the legendary seven-tiered waterfall. As we walk on, the jungle consumes us, growing taller, denser, and darker. “If you see anything supernatural, just act like everything is normal. Don’t call attention to it or it will alert the evil spirits to our presence,” Jerry breathes. I begin to see all kinds of things that could be “supernatural” but I’m not really sure what’s considered normal in a place like this: trees wrapped around each other in strange lattice patterns, flowers falling from an unknown source, and the sweet call of a bird unlike any I have ever heard. I concentrate hard on the path in front of me, trying hard not to channel the Iban’s evil spirits. I’m swimming in a pool of unknown depth under the 7-layer waterfall. The water is cool and refreshing and the sun filters down through the forest canopy to dabble me in light. Our guide warns me of the snake who is known to dwell in the hole between two worlds, far below my peddling feet. Suddenly I feel something nibble my feet. I rush towards the bank.

At Sarikei Central Park During Chinese Mooncake Festival Monday, September 8th Five of us stand around a glowing orb of light. The lantern is heavy with our wish for a better future for Sarawakians and is taking it’s time to inflate. Tommy points at the groups of guys around us, who are letting their lanterns go by the dozens. “They only wished for girlfriends,” he says. “That’s a simple wish to fulfill, which is why they’re lighting theirs so easily. Our wish is a little hefty.”

En Route to Lubok Antu near Batang Ai Dam Tuesday, September 9th I am riding in a car singing “Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog,” with three old men from Sri Aman. We pass by swaths of jungle converted into paddy fields, banana orchards, and palm oil plantations. Artificial lemon air freshener blasts from the front vents, triggering an intense wave of nausea. Michael, the driver, tells me his L.A. is not the city de los angeles but rather “Lubok Antu”, the town of ghosts. 98

Chinese lanterns in Sarikei 99

I am planning my next move at Lubok Antu’s unused bus station, which offers much needed shade for my sunburned skin. I have just been to the only hotel in town, which charges three times the usual rate, and much more than I am willing to pay. I want to find a homestay for cheaper. Suddenly, a man of around 60, sporting a cargo print safari cap and Germany FIFA shirt appears. He introduces himself as Raymond and asks if I’m looking for a homestay. He boasts that he runs one just down the street. “Why haven’t I heard about it before?” I ask skeptically. “I don’t have the money to advertise and I’ve been gone for a while so it’s not in the best condition,” he replies. He invites me to come check it out and I follow him on foot to a run-down house on stilts next to the petrol station. There are family homes surrounding it and plenty of people at the station to see me go inside. The interior looks somewhat like what I imagine the contents of a twelve-year-old boy’s tree house would be. Junk hangs from the ceiling and banners from political campaigns serve as the space’s walls. “You live here alone?” At the moment. “What do you do for a living?” Anything that brings in income… from guiding politicians on their trips to the Batang Ai Dam nearby to facilitating the passage of trade goods across the Indonesian border. I grill him for over an hour and he speaks openly, showing me photos to validate his stories. I can tell he’s a little socially “different” but I don’t get a bad feeling from him. I also really need a place to stay. I call my friend and pseudo-father Phillip to have him speak with Raymond (so someone else knows exactly where I am). Raymond asks if I want to go see the Batang Ai Dam before it gets dark. We take his motorbike there but it is already dark by the time we reach. Suddenly, a brilliant orange orb appears from behind the clouds. It is so massive that it takes me a second to recognize it as the moon. It reflects so much light that the entire lake is illuminated and I can see the fishermen’s houseboats scattered across the water. Fireflies flicker from surrounding bushes and I am overcome by the majesty of it all. We return to the house and spend the next couple hours watching tapes of Malaysian karaoke music. I feel comfortable because I will be sleeping on the couch close to the front door and Raymond will be in his own room. It begins to rain. And that’s when this “dream” becomes nightmarish. While I settle down to go to sleep, Raymond drags his mattress from his bedroom and moves it in front of the television. Strange. When I look up, I see him flicking through pornographic images on his phone, about a meter from me. I sit up and as calmly and forcefully as possible tell him that this is inappropriate and making me feel unsafe. I tell him that I’m going to leave as soon as it stops raining and ask him to go sleep in his own room until then. He does this in an oddly passive way. I gather up the few belongings I had taken out of my backpack and sit in silence holding my knife. I should just leave now, I think to myself. But there is nowhere else to go in the town this late at night and there are other sketchy men on the street who I had the pleasure of being harassed by earlier. And what if he came after me? I sit on his couch for six hours, adrenaline surging through my body, listening to him jack off repeatedly in his bedroom. I am alert to every creak that emanates from the shack and the rain falling outside. I pray I’ll hear him snoring soon. I ask myself again and again how I could be stupid enough to put myself in this situation. You’re wiser than this. Apparently not. Apparently my desperation for a cheap place to stay, my heatstroke, the timeliness of Raymond’s arrival, and my desire to think the best of him outweighed the wisdom my mother had bestowed me with: do not to stay alone with strange men. 100

Harvest moon over Batang Ai 101

I keep repeating author Sheryl Strayed’s mantra: I am safe. I am strong. I am brave. I am reminded of my dad telling me years ago that there are certain places in the world I should never travel to alone because I am a woman. At the time I responded that I would not let fear for what might happen stop me from experiencing the world as much as any man could. If women are to just hide under the safety of their families’ wings and not push boundaries, problems will persist. Like rape culture more broadly, It puts the blame on me as a victim for allowing myself to be a traveler open to new experiences. Raymond is disturbed and should not have done what he did. I should be able to go to any established homestay and feel confident that I will be safe. Yet the world is filled with Raymonds and always will be. So how do I balance being an open and adventurous traveler (a characteristic society venerates) with being cautious as a woman (which society has instilled in me). At the end of the day, I just want to live to see the next sunrise. Which I do today. At 5:45 am, I make a break for it and head to Lubok Antu’s first open cafe. I then hitch a ride to the highway junction and pick up a bus headed to Kuching, Sarawak’s largest city. I apologize if this pained you to read. I want my family and friends to know that I am safe and typically make very sound decisions while I’m on the road alone. Last night was a lapse of judgement. But terrible things could also happen to me even if I built walls up around myself. Will I ever stay the night at a strange man’s home alone? Absolutely not. But will I close myself off completely to the rich experiences that come with trusting (some) strangers? I can’t promise that. I do promise that I’ll continue this year, undeterred, dreaming both asleep and awake of a better and more secure world for us all to live in. 102

Details in and around Kuching 103

PLANTING SEEDS TO (NOT?) WATCH THEM GROW October 14, 2014 According to the flashy reminders on my WordPress dashboard, it’s been almost five weeks since my last post. In that time, I have visited twelve new communities and engaged with various ethnic groups, each with their own unique cultural legacy and struggle. Among them are the Bidayuh, Chinese-Malaysian, Kelabit, Penan, Berawan, Tering, Kenyah, and Kayan. I have nearly completed the four sketchbooks and three diaries that I brought with me and am feeling overwhelmed with the number of stories that now need to be told. I suppose that is why it has taken me so long to build up the courage to begin writing this post. In a recent email to me, my mother observantly noted that the way I spent my time in Sarawak over the last ten weeks follows the same pattern I normally operate within: do as much as feasible in as little time as possible. She questioned whether I was staying true to my original vision for this year, which was to live with one community for three months in order to understand them, their customs, and the threats to their livelihoods on a deep level. I have considered my (potential lack of) faithfulness to the spirit of this project and am retreating with two key realizations: (1) I like to understand the broader scope of issues and look for patterns within the larger picture. When you study my drawings, you will notice how I try to deconstruct, categorize, and illustrate literally everything. While this almost inevitably over-simplifies incredibly complex systems, it is the best way for me – as a visual learner and teacher – to solidify what is otherwise opaque and convoluted. Nevertheless, this truth about my learning style should not inhibit me from practicing being still and exploring new ways of analysis that (perhaps) go deeper (I’ll come back to this later). (2) The way I have spent my time in Sarawak has been completely appropriate, given the nature of the problems here. You may have read an earlier post I wrote, “Criticism for the Transnational Discourse on Indigineity”. In it, I explain the common danger of romanticizing indigenous peoples and their ways of life and seeing the “indigenous” as a monolith (not understanding the nuances in culture and environment that distinguish even local ethnic groups). In many ways, my expectation to live with one or two Penan communities for three months borders on doing both these things. It also reflects the international bias that has developed over the last thirty years for Penan issues over other Orang Ulu (“up river” or indigenous) tribes. In coming, I thought that the Penan struggle for land and livelihoods was by far the most severe in Sarawak because that is what the West has focused on in its scholarship and activism. Perhaps the Penan are the most negatively affected by development, but there are many other peoples in Sarawak who face similar issues and whose stories are not being told, as prolifically or at all. Why such an international focus on the Penan? I think one of the reasons is unarguably that we romanticize the semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle and have preservation bias for it. Transitioning from such a lifestyle into the cash economy (which is inevitably what current development forces) appears much more extreme than does transitioning from the sedentary, subsistence-based lifestyle of other Orang Ulu peoples. However, I saw it to be essential to understand issues of development from all (or as “many as feasible in as little time as possible”) Orang Ulu perspectives. 104

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On a personal level, I do not think it would have been healthy for me to stay in one Penan village for three months. Although I was always able to communicate my basic needs and had some beautiful moments where I connected with community members through my drawings, my inability to speak Penan (or any of the distinct Orang Ulu languages, including Kayan, Kenyah, Bidayuh, etc.) made it difficult to connect on a deeper level. I picked up some basic phrases in the various languages I came across and am sure that had I stayed in one village the whole time, I would have learned more. But I question whether I would have felt too isolated and whether people would have even wanted me to stay for that long (it can be quite a burden to host an outsider for a long period of time). So I kept my itinerary open, remained flexible, and let the good people I met direct me to new experiences. If I had not, I never would have journeyed up-dam with the Bidayuh in southern Sarawak or experienced (first-hand) the industriousness of young Chinese entrepreneurs in Sarikei. I would not have tasted the pinneapple of the Kelabit highlands or planted padi (rice) with the Berawan in Mulu. I am so grateful for the experiences that have been afforded to me these last few weeks. Over the next few days, I will be publishing individual posts that will delve deeper into the issues of many of the places I visited. I hope that as my readers, you will be able to share these within your networks. It is important to broadcast these issues to as large an audience as possible.

5-10 acres of land, of which 1-2 are planted each year (the rest are left to fallow for 2-5 years until they are cleared and planted again). One acre generally produces enough rice to feed a family of six for a year and have extra to replant the next year. Every time I planted seeds with a family, they lamented the fact that I wouldn’t be there in the spring to reap the harvest. In a way, I am sad that I won’t be here next March (I’ll be in Ethiopia, though, so I can’t complain!). I am equally sad that I won’t be able to continue developing my relationships with the good people that I have met. I have planted seeds, both physically and metaphorically, and while I may not be here this season, I know that those (metaphorical) seeds will remain, as will my loyalty to this place. And I will come back to see them, perhaps two harvests from now, and rekindle my connections to the people and to this land. I have a long list of people to thank but I don’t want to get sentimental just yet (I do still have another two weeks here). I’ll save my thanksgiving for my last post about Sarawak, where I share my compiled journals. Don’t forget: stay tuned over the next few days to learn more about the specific places I’ve journeyed to. Terima kasih!

Within each post, I will be addressing the types of development that are taking place in that area and the ways in which it affects household livelihood security. Housing insecurity, while my chief interest, is unavoidably intertwined with other issues in a maze of feedback loops. For example, not having a secure place to live leads to food insecurity issues, which leads to health insecurity, etc. I have distilled the ways in which many Orang Ulu have adapted (or are adapting) to survive largescale, disruptive development schemes (commercial logging, industrialized-agriculture, extraction and manufacturing, mega-dams, etc.). Whether or not you find it unfortunate, the reality is that most communities are being forced to adapt into a cash economy. There’s no way to revert back to a more “traditional” lifestyle; the best way forward is to recognize the changes, the problems therein, and work to bring about conditions that are just and sustainable so that the Orang Ulu can continue living “upriver”. One of the joys of being in Sarawak for an extended period of time has been witnessing stages of the padi-growing cycle. Padi is a dietary staple for most communities living upriver and I found the slash-and-burn process to be practiced almost identically throughout the state. When I first came at the end of July, people were just starting to clear second-growth forest. Since then, I have participated in the drying and burning of fields and most recently the planting of padi (with maize, cucumber, and squash intermixed). In many areas in Sarawak, subsistence agriculture (and specifically the planting of padi) is being replaced with the planting of cash crops like palm oil and pepper. This has profound effects on peoples’ food security and on their surrounding environments, which I’ll talk more about in subsequent posts. I have illustrated the differences between traditional small-scale agriculture and industrialized (or at least cash-crop-based) agriculture below: Despite the looming threat of large-scale agriculture, most of the communities I stayed with are still doing fine planting their own rice and vegetables. In most villages, each family will have between 106

Notes illustrating recent changes in Orang Ulu community structures 107

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BAKUN AND MURUM DAM October 18, 2014 When I first came to Sarawak, I knew very little about the twelve large-scale hydroelectric dams that were slated for construction, as part of an industrial development initiative called SCORE. Being situated in Miri, at the mouth of the Baram River, I was naturally swept up in the movement against the proposed Baram Dam. The dam, as I explained in an earlier post, would flood an area of 41,200 hectares and more than 26 indigenous villages, forcefully displacing some 20,000 Orang Ulu (upriver, or indigenous people). The lack of transparency, illegal seizures of NCR (native customary rights) land, and the bribery and coercion that are moored in this project are not unprecedented. In fact, just two-hundred kilometers south of the proposed Baram Dam are two relatively recent sites of injustice: the Bakun and the Murum dams. As part of the campaign against the Baram Dam, groups representing those who were displaced by Bakun and Murum have traveled to the Upper-Baram to share their experiences with communities who are otherwise cut off from information regarding the project. I heard many of their stories during my first trip upriver and wanted to see for myself what the impact and ongoing struggle has been for those who were resettled. Park in Belaga

History of Bakun Dam One of the main political controversies since Sabah and Sarawak joined Peninsular Malaya in 1963 (to become Malaysia) has been over the distribution of resources, wealth, and power amongst the 13 states. Despite having the largest share of natural resources, Sabah and Sarawak have the highest and second-highest levels of poverty in the Federation, respectively. Some argue that this is a natural consequence of unconstitutional under-representation in Malaysian Parliament. Others blame the governing elite in both Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia for embezzlement and misdirection of state funds to serve private interests. These issues have been written about extensively so I wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t waste time delving into the politics around development in Sarawak. Understanding the power dynamics within greater Malaysia is important to contextualize the construction of the Bakun Dam. In the 1960s, the Malaysian Economic Planning Unit began brainstorming schemes to industrialize Malaysia and generate wealth. The Bakun Dam was a nationally managed project, designed to meet the projected demand for electricity in the later-half of the twentieth century. This demand, however, was mostly in Peninsular Malaysia rather than in Sarawak itself. So the government envisioned transmitting more than 70% of the energy generated from Bakun via long overland and undersea cables to Peninsula (which is insane, given the cost, vulnerability, and incalculable environmental impact associated with such a development). Further evidence suggests that Malaysia did not even need the amount of energy that Bakun promised to generate. Perhaps one could argue that Malaysia was just following the global trend of (opportunistic and senseless) mega dam construction that began after World War Two (Garrison Dam and Fort Peck Dam in the US, Samara Dam in Russia, and Talbingo Dam in Australiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Snowy Mountains, to name a few)?

Belaga: a city in the heart of the jungle 110

It took over 30 years after the initial feasibility studies for the go-ahead to begin construction of Bakun Dam (dually because of decreased demand after an economic recession in 1985 and because natural gas emerged for a short time as a more viable energy source for developing the petrochemical 111

industry). In 1994, on the heels of aggressive logging companies, the Federal Government (in a privatized joint-venture consortium called Bakun Hydroelectric Corporation) penetrated the Upper-Rejang to begin construction of a 2400 MW hydroelectric dam, the transmission of its electricity, and the building of related infrastructure including access roads, resettlement areas, and an airport. The planning process of the dam was entirely nontransparent: there was no public accessibility to the Environmental Impact Assessments, few consultations with the indigenous communities who would be displaced, and no public accessibility to the feasibility studies (it is actually a criminal offense to obtain feasibility studies on development projects in Malaysia). More than 800 families (10,000 mostly Kayan and Kenyah people) were forced to accept resettlement packages and move downstream to Sungai Asap in 1998. People were originally promised ten acres of farmland, monthly stipends for the first two years, and fair compensation for the NCR land that would be flooded (none of these promises have been kept). A few villages chose not to move to Asap and built their own longhouses along the Belaga River, or other tributaries of the Rejang. Only a couple villages moved further upstream (out of the flood-zone), their headmen knowing full-well that life without access to forest resources and a clean river would only bring insecurity and suffering. I had the opportunity to visit communities in all three categories and will discus my experience with them momentarily. Despite its immediate (and latent) social impacts, the government steadfastly defended the dam. The project would be completed by 2003, they said, and would cost a mere 5.2 billion USD, which would be paid back within a couple years through energy revenue. PM Mahathir Mohamad said numerous times that it was the â&#x20AC;&#x153;governments way of helping the poorâ&#x20AC;? and that it would create jobs and livelihoods for Orang Ulu (who in his eyes were living depressed and backwards lives). None of these claims have turned out to be true. In 2010, after five decades of delays and seven years after its projected completion date, the Bakun Dam was impounded, flooding 700 square kilometers of mostly NCR land (an area the size of Singapore). The project was substantially over-budget and has yet to generate the energy it promised to (both times I went to the dam site, the turbines were not even running at half-capacity and local experts tell me that they cannot generate more because Sarawak already has a surplus of energy). By the time the dam was operational, families had been in the new resettlement areas for twelve years and were disillusioned by the reality of their situations. The Bakun Dam today is filthy, continuously releasing sulfer and methane, which renders the water undrinkable (as well as contributing to climate change). The riparian zone is functionally dead and as the water is still, its temperature has increased. This in turn has affected fish populations, increased parasite counts, and created 700 sq km of breeding grounds for mosquitoes. In 2008, the construction of another hydroelectric gravity dam began on the Murum River, just 70 km northeast of the Bakun Dam. The need for electricity generated from Murum, which was impounded last year, is unclear and does not justify the social and environmental impacts that resulted. A total of 353 (mostly Penan and some Kenyah) families were relocated to Long Wat at Tegulang resettlement site (20 km from Murum Dam) and Metulan resettlement site (130 km from the dam). As Murum Dam and the resettlement areas are substantially more isolated than Sungai Asap is, living conditions are deplorable and far less acknowledged. Map of Upper-Rejang 112

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From Uma Nyaving to Uma Daro: Life for the Kayan in Sungai Asap On my first trip to Upper-Rejang I stayed with a Kayan family: Alex, his wife Candy, and their children Jason, Wenga, and Gloria. Before resettling in Uma Daro, Alex lived in Uma Nyaving, a self-sufficient village along the Belui River. Uma Nyaving had schools, government offices, plenty of land for generations to farm on, a clinic, and a river all within walking distance of the longhouse. Lack of strong leadership enabled logging companies to encroach on their NCR lands in the late 1980s, which had affected the availability of wild game for hunting and the water quality of the river. In 1998, Alex’s tribe negotiated a resettlement package and moved to Asap. Each family got three acres of land and a 40,000-60,000 RM (12,000-18,000 USD) resettlement package, which was far less than the government had originally promised. After sixteen years, many families are still battling in court for the compensation they deserved. However, they often run into difficulties proving their claims because the government conducted faulty land surveys initially to make tribes’ land boundaries appear smaller on record. However, despite their frustration with compensation money, you could say that Alex and Candy represent the few who were able to “make it” in Asap. They have successfully integrated themselves into the cash economy: Alex works as a consultant and their family uses their allotted land for growing cash crops like palm oil and pepper. They buy most of their food from the local supermarket, which is about a ten minute drive from Uma Daro. Uma Daro, itself, has changed quite a lot over the last sixteen years to meet the needs of the community. The longhouses the government initially built were inadequate: poorly constructed with low-quality wood that began to rot after a couple years, no access road up to the longhouses, and living spaces that were too small for the average family of six people. As community members began to generate more income, they pooled their money to build the services they needed, including a church, a road, and covered walkways between buildings. Most people have also added onto the original floorplan, as depicted in the image below. Alex explained to me how different it is living in a valley with so many different tribes sharing the same services: two primary schools, one secondary school, a clinic, and a handful of general stores. He and Candy are fortunate enough to have a car because the sprawling layout of Asap and the lack of a river makes it difficult for many families to drive their kids to school, let alone access the outside world. Alex is able to drive up to Bakun Dam on the weekends to hunt and fish for what is left in the forest and rivers. He has recorded several songs about the Kayan’s struggle in Upper-Rejang, which air frequently on local radio.

Bakun Lake 114

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Map of old Uma Daro before forced relocation from Bakun Dam impoundment

Map of Sungai Asap by Alex Lehan 116

Sections of old Uma Daro before and after Bakun Dam impounded 117

Map of new Uma Daro in Sungai Asap 118

Architectural details of government-built longhouse in Uma Daro 119

Exploded axonymetric of Uma Daro government longhouse

Lun, a Kenyah elder from Long Gang Long Gang: a Kenyah Village in Sungai Asap In my second visit to Sungai Asap, I accompanied Nigel Dickinson, a photo-journalist and videographer who had been documenting the people of Long Gang since the late 1980s. We stayed with an old woman named Lun (pictured right), who he had documented at the first logging blockages thirty years ago. Imagine: spending half your life fighting battle after battle to defend your land, your livelihood, and your culture. First logging, then displacement by the dam, and now the even more opaque threat of globalization and loss of cultural identity!

Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s celebration of Malaysian Independence Day in Sungai Asap 120

Lunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s village consists of thirteen longhouses, which have all been modified as the ones in Uma Daro were. But, as is inevitable when many families share a wood-frame building, a couple of the longhouses have burned down. The government, with much delay, has finally rebuilt those homes out of concrete, which the residents lament. One woman I spoke to complained that the concrete units are even smaller than the original units in the wooden longhouses were and have no ventilation. And just as three acres of land will not be enough to divide amongst the next generation, the issue of housing for future children and their families in a settlement plan that allotted no room for expansion is critical. It means that young people will inevitably move to urban centers in search of housing and gainful employment. It is a death sentence for Kenyah culture. 121

Map of new Long Gang in Sungai Asap 122

Kenyah patterns and crafts 123

On the veranda of Lunâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s longhouse 124

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Government-built concrete longhouse (2nd generation housing in Sungai Asap) 126

Lungâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wooden longhouse (1st generation housing in Sungai Asap) 127

The Ongoing Struggle of the Penan: Sungai Asap The Kayan and Kenyah communities in Sungai Asap have fared well in comparison to the Penan. Because the Penan were unfamiliar with farming and other trades that would generate income comparable to those of sedentary tribes, they have faced the greatest challenges adapting in Sungai Asap. They have not been able to afford to expand on the original government-built longhouse (see below). They are also much less mobile, since they cannot afford cars and do not know how to drive. Many Penan families are anxious to separate with their children and send them to school, which transportation insecurity compounds. So literacy rates among the younger generation are far below those of their Kayan and Kenyah peers, which sets the Penan back in this new world governed by the cash economy.

Map of Rumah Penan, a government-built longhouse in Sungai Asap 128

Design flaws of Rumah Penan longhouse 129

The Ongoing Struggle of the Penan: Tegulan In Long Wat, the Penan resettlement village for Murum, people are facing similar issues. Inconsistent delivery of cash allowances, electricity supply and farmland, poorly constructed housing and waste management systems, and no operational community facilities render Long Wat unlivable. People I spoke with said that they were promised 250 RM (76 USD) in cash and 600 RM (183 USD) in dry food every month but that delivery has been inconsistent. Almost everyone still has a boat docked in the Murum reservoir but they are unable to access them to go hunting, gathering, and fishing because there are fewer than five vehicles in the entire community. The community was also promised 37 acres of land per family and farming assistance (to teach them how to farm), which they have not yet received. For the Penan, maintaining their rights post-resettlement is challenging because they have historically been so isolated and are unfamiliar with different avenues for recourse. NCR rights are also more opaque because it is difficult to file claims on larger territories in which they were semi-nomadic. Lack of identity cards and low literacy rates make communication and legal recognition difficult as well. Because Long Wat is so isolated from both sites of employment and from the forest, I found that most men sit around on their verandas all day. There are a few men in the community who are blacksmiths or craftsmen and are able to generate a little income from selling knives, baskets, and other instruments to Orang Ulu in Sungai Asap (a three-hour drive away on perilous roads). The womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s role seemed to be less affected, as cleaning, child rearing, and cooking must still be done regardless of location (however, I have talked to women in other resettlement areas since and they say that the stress men feel and their increasing absence in the home puts more of a burden on women).

Murum Dam 130

Map of Tegulan, a government-built resettlement area for Penan displaced by Murum Dam 131

Analysis of Long Wat longhouse in Tegulan 132

Penan blacksmiths making knives for trade downriver 133

Independent Living: An Example Downstream

Design flaws of Rumah Penan longhouse 134

There are a handful of communities who chose not to accept the governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s resettlement package and moved to separate locations along tributaries downstream, where they could be more self-sufficient. Long Lahanan, a small Kayan community of about 30 families, is an example of this. They moved to the mouth of of the Lahanan River (where it joins the Belaga River) and built a simple longhouse, church, and boathouse. The greatest benefit I see in this course of action is that the community still has access to a river, which allows them to fish, bathe, drink, and travel to nearby towns and farmland. Interestingly, the headman of Long Lahanan is married to Alexâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sister (with whom I visited the village) and lives full-time in Sungai Asap, only occasionally returning to Long Lahanan to gather fruits and hunt on his land. We spent the day in the jungle across the river from the village, gathering kilos upon kilos of dabai (local olives). 135

Independent Living: Above the Dam After visiting Lun with Nigel last week, we went to stay with Nelson, a strong Kenyah headman from Long Lawan in Upper-Bakun. Nelson has been the headman of Long Lawan since 2003 and has continued to fight for his peoples’ land, which is to this day threatened by logging companies. Nigel met Nelson back in 1991, when the Long Gang and Long Lawan communities were organizing their first blockades against the logging companies. After Ului Lian, the headman of Long Gang who fought the logging fiercely, passed away in 1997, the leadership was passed down to his son, who passively succumbed to the relocation of their community in Sungai Asap. Nelson’s village, however, moved upriver to hold onto the forests that would not be inundated by the dam. Life still isn’t easy for the people of Long Lawan. Logging companies inevitably built roads throughout their lands and came back to log and re-log their forests until no marketable timber was left. Now, the roads that Nelson’s community has become dependent on are unusable so transport to lowerBakun has become difficult. To get to his village, we drove an hour from Sungai Asap to the dam, parked the car and got into a speedboat, which carried us three kilometers to the edge of the Tegulan tributary. There we got into a longboat to forge the shallow waters upriver for a kilometer. Then we had to walk up and down a mountain to get to the small valley where Long Lawan is nestled (a five hour journey in total to travel 50 km). Yet, autonomy creates resilience, which you can feel in the atmosphere of this community. Long Lawan is powered by a micro-hydro dam (a small-scale dam that doesn’t disrupt local ecosystems). Nelson got the last logging company that trespassed on their land to commit to funding the construction of a new longhouse, which will be finished by Christmas. And on the evening I left, he was gathering the people to organize a new road blockade to demand the the company fix the roads that they built. Despite the conditions, these people are fiercely resilient. But what else would they do? Life just keeps on moving forward. Moving Forward I’d encourage you to go on the websites of SCORE, Sarawak Energy, and Shin Yang to see how they write about Bakun and Murum dams, and the other industry happening in Upper-Rejang. Repeatedly, the idea of green, clean, and renewable energy are used to describe Murum and Bakun. Are hydroelectric mega dam projects like this really clean, green and renewable? I spent most of this blog post discussing the social impacts of the dam and spoke little about the environmental impacts. But the negative environmental impacts are implied. What’s bad for our environments is bad for us. Whether on a local scale with erosion and water pollution, or globally with climate change, the health of our environments deeply impacts our livelihood security. For most of us operating in a cash economy, it may take longer to feel the impact of environmental degradation. But it is still shaping the way we live: the prices we pay for food and petrol, the way we build our houses, and the way we engage politically with other countries.

Map of Lahanan, an independent resettlement village south of Sungai Asap on the Belaga River 136

Dams can be green, clean, and renewable. There are examples of dams around the world that generate electricity without destroying ecosystems and displacing people. But a dam built under these conditions – where the principle objective is to generate money for the governing elite and their corporate partners, the process is both nontransparent and the impacts not properly researched – is neither just nor green. 137

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BIDAYUH RESILIENCY IN UPPER BENGOH October 21, 2014 In a remote corner of the world, an island lay quietly among the seas and oceans. It was lush and green, great rivers snaking all over its land, high mountains running down its middle, like a very dry and old backbone. Deers, pigs and beast of many kinds roamed the thick forests. Birds flew the air, cruising in the wind that came down from the mountains. No one lived there but the animals, except for one man, the first Land Dayak. His name is Tenabi. He lived at the foot of Bukit Suit and Baru. He had a wife named Kitupong, but she died during childbirth. Yet, Tenabi conceived a child in the calf of his leg. When it matured, his calf burst, and a baby girl was born. When she became a woman, Tenabi married her and had three children. They had a daughter named Timuyau, a son named Padat and another named Tiruah. When they grew up, they moved out of the family home and ventured to find a place to call their own. They finally settled at Sinyang and Bukit Saki. They both got married and had children. All seemed well. One day Padat’s son walked by Tiruah’s sugarcane field. He felt hungry and stole some. Tiruah’s son was furious when he found out that someone stole the sugarcanes his father had planted. So he set a trap. Padat’s son came again the next day to steal some more, not knowing of the trap that lay in wait. Just as he was about to get to the sugarcane, he got caught in the trap and beheaded. Padat was both sad and angry, desiring revenge. He moved his family to Sikangan and launched an attack on Tiruah and his family. Tiruah, managing to escape in time, didn’t want to fight his brother. So he moved away and settled at Inikabut, on the right branch of the Sarawak River. There, Tiruah’s son, Sikaya, fell in love with a spirit named Sekama. They both got married and had two children, a boy and a girl. Soon their children grew up and got married. They were blessed with many children, Bena, Bungu, Bibawang, Biatah, Singai, Bikirup, Baang, Bratak, Peninjau and Puruh. (“The First Land Dayak” by Dr. John Hewit, curator of Sarawak Museum 1905–08) People of the Land Legends of origin can reveal a lot about a people: their identity, their values, their customs. So too can a name. In the northern part of Sarawak, a once-powerful but now fragmented tribe called themselves the “Tering” or “smoke”. My Tering friends tell me that their name symbolized both their power and mystique, as well as their habitation of the land (where there is settlement there is bound to be smoke). Similarly, “Kayan” means “this is our land”, which was a way of attaching themselves through language to a place. In the western corner of Borneo, spread between Kalimantan, Indonesia and the hinterlands of Kuching live the “Bidayuh” or “people of the land”. 154

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Map of Mujat, a Bidayuh village near Kuching 156

Analysis of Mujat Longhouse 157

Rice storage end of veranda in Mujat longhouse 158

Bidayuh irrigation system for rice terraces 159

Map of Monkos, a Bidayuh village near Kuching 160

Analysis of Monkos Longhouse 161

The Bidayuh are believed to have migrated across the border of Kalimantan during the Brooke Era (late 1800s) and settled in the hills above Kuching. Their main enemies were the Iban, who lived along the rivers and flatlands in Sarawak. In order to protect themselves from Iban encroachment, the Bidayuh built smaller longhouses on difficult terrain and engineered bamboo building components that could be easily lifted or altered to slow attackers. These adaptations allowed the Bidayuh to develop autonomous ownership over pockets of southern Sarawak and sustain a unique culture and self-sufficiency. When Sarawak joined the Malaysian Federation in 1963, the government was quick to acknowledge the Bidayuh’s claims to their NCR land. As the second largest Dayak (indigenous, or non-Malay/ non-Chinese) group in the State, the Bidayuh had a lot of voting power and securing their loyalty to the Barisan National (BN) Party was of paramount importance (BN has held the power in Sarawak since independence in part because of its pandering to the major ethnic groups like the Bidayuh). Over the last sixty years, many Bidayuh have moved from the hills to settle in the valleys closer Kuching and Serian. Here, they have easier access to modern services and markets. However, there are many who continue to sustain their traditional lifestyles in Kuching’s hinterland. For example, the communities of Upper-Bengoh grow their own food, raise chickens and fish, produce their own electricity through micro-hydroelectric dams, and collect all their building supplies from the forest. Anything that they buy in town (toilet bowls, gas canisters, plywood, pots and pans, etc.), they strap to their backs and carry uphill (sometimes 10-15 km) to their villages. Their self-sufficiency is what allows them to thrive in this part of Sarawak. The government has largely ignored their needs in its development schemes and there is thus no access road, electricity, water supply, or other facilities in Upper-Bengoh (despite appeals for government funding). Instead of supporting its constituency as is typically a government’s obligation, the government of Sarawak has launched several projects (see concept map above) to exploit the natural resources of the Bidayuh’s land in Upper-Bengoh. Dams, Logging, and Tourism in Kuching’s Highlands In 2008, the government launched the Bengoh Dam Project, which would provide water supply to Kuching City (the need for such a large water supply is heavily questioned, considering Kuching has not repaired it’s water supply system in years and could easily decrease use through water conservation programs and infrastructural upgrades). Before the four impacted communities were even made aware of the project, its environmental impacts, and how they would be effected, bulldozers were clearing the 10.21 sq km area in Upper-Bengoh that the dam would fill. In 2009, the families in Taba Sait, Bejong, Rejoi, and Sembant were offered resettlement packages and were asked to move down to a government resettlement site between Bengoh and Kuching. Many agreed initially with the condition that they would be given houses, land, compensation for lost NCR land, and basic infrastructure. But the lack of transparency around the resettlement schedule and compensation amount, as well as illegal logging on their lands during the construction process, made most reconsider. The Bidayuh of Bengoh took the government to court over their compensation packages in 2009, after 60% of Bengoh had already been cleared. What I find most inspiring about this issue is that while the dam will inevitably be impounded (it was 162

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scheduled to be filled in 2010 but is still on hold until the lawsuits are settled), communities chose to stay and fight for their land upriver. Families of Taba Sait, Bejong, and Rejoi all relocated to higher ground. In doing so, they are securing the forest and its resources for their grandchildren to be able to use. Sembant was the only village to accept the government’s resettlement package and they are already facing similar issues as those who were resettled in Tegulan and Sungai Asap: poor housing design, unfulfilled promises of monetary compensation, isolation from both agricultural land and urban services/facilities, immobility, and dilution of Bidayuh culture. This will inevitably lead to the end of the Sembant community, as increasing numbers of young people choose to move to Kuching for more opportunity. However, the battle is not yet over for the three communities who stayed. They are still fighting in court over the compensation packages they should be entitled to, for the cost of relocation and the land that will be submerged (the government is very unhappy that the communities chose to stay on their land and are claiming that their presence upriver will threaten the quality of the drinking water supply). They are still fighting the logging companies who have illegally encroached their land (why is the government more concerned about contamination potential of three villages when logging activities impact water quality to a far greater extent?). And as of September, 2013, they are battling the national park and resort that are now proposed along the shores of Bengoh Reservoir. Imagine: coming to a place to exploit and extract without due cause and transparent process, forcing people to dismantle and leave their ancestral homes, and then coming back to this already decimated environment to try to squeeze more money out of it through tourism! And of course the process by which the government is establishing this national park is purposefully nontransparent and coercive. The Bengoh National Park Notification, which was sent out on September 19, 2013 stated: “Any person who has any interest or any rights or privileges over the land described is required to submit his/her claims in writing or in person to the Chief Park Warden within 60 days from this date, together with evidence of such claims. Upon expiry of this period of 60 days from 19/9/2013, no claim to any rights or privileges in or over the area intended to be constituted as a national park shall be entertained and such rights and privileges, if any, shall be deemed to have been abandoned.” My main two concerns are: (1) how this document was disseminated. What if it took over a month for the officials to bother sending it up to the communities impacted by the proposed national park? What if they didn’t see it before the 60 days had expired? (2) How people will be able to provide necessary evidence in such a short time. Many peoples’ claims to NCR land have no official documents attached to them, or else they have not been able to get their identity cards/ birth certificates (a very difficult and convoluted process here in Malaysia as it is in any country to retrieve as an adult). So submitting evidence within such a restricted time-period is challenging. The issue of the national park is also on the agenda of items to settle in court. As much as I love visiting national parks, I do not support ones that require the taking of land from indigenous people and excluding them from the management and (even moderated) use of park resources. I’ll discuss this issue more in my post on Gunung Mulu National Park.

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Visiting Upper-Bengoh I had the opportunity to visit the resettled villages in upper-Bengoh with Simo, the headman of Rejoi (now Nyegol) and his family (his son Jerome is one of the few young people I have met here who is also active in protecting his peoplesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; land rights). We drove an hour from Kuching to the Bengoh Dam, parked our car, and then strapped all of our goods (sacks of rice, cakes, shoes, and other purchases from town) onto wooden planks and fixed them to our backs. Then we set out on the 10 km trek from the parking lot to Nyegol. The journey was hot, as we started in late afternoon. We passed camps of Indonesian workers clearing biomass along the Sarawak River (which must be done before the dam is compounded to prevent the emission of methane gas later on). The cleared and burning landscapes looked apocalyptic at times. We reached Nyegol just after dark. Because the resettlement sites are farther upriver, land is hillier and cannot support longhouses. Simo tells me that everyone had to build their single-family homes in a very short time-frame because they thought the dam was going to be impounded in 2010. He plans to rebuild his home out of concrete (more stable) when they receive their full compensation package. I spent two days with Simoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family. We planted padi, hosted a Christian fellowship meeting (in addition to being the headman, Simo also serves as the interim pastor of their community since no outside pastor would be able to come this far to give sermons), visited the old Rejoi village, and visited Muk Ayung (where people from Taba Sait resettled). Walking through the now-abandoned Rejoi was haunting and sad. Beautiful homes still stood, homes that had obviously been lovingly crafted to serve the needs of the past seven generations. Nyegol, the new village, is in a much more beautiful (albeit less-accessible) location. The families built a micro-hydro dam, which supplies enough energy to run a generator in the evening. Every family also keep chickens, in addition to having 4-5 plots of land for farming padi (rice). The new lifestyle in Muk Ayung was similar to that in Nyegol. I visited a woman named Kibik, who explained to me the challenges of being self-sufficient in an environment like this. Micro-hydro in Muk Ayung is not possible, since there are no large streams close to the village. So families will need to find another sustainable source of power (petrol is too expensive to rely on indefinitely). Kibik also explained how families, themselves, will need to pool their money to build things like roads, schools, and other facilities (this is something that tax money should go towards, not the life savings of these people). While there were plenty of challenges, Kibik, Simo, and others I talked to seemed optimistic and proud of their decision to stay in Upper-Bengoh.

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A Mini-Rant So often, media outlets organizations are able to broadcast the news of mega dam sites around the world. We have all heard of Three Gorges Dam in China; the Belo Monte Dam in Brazil, and the Mekong Dam(s) in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. These dams are known about both because of their size and the number of people (and species) being displaced. Similarly, the Bakun and Murum dams are of such importance to us because close to 15,000 people were impacted. This manner of determining moral importance is based on an instrumentalist ethical framework, wherein the more people/ places/things impacted negatively, the more we should care. The Bengoh Dam project is not well-known, perhaps because “only” 199 Bidayuh families will be effected. Yet placing less importance on an issue like this simply because of its less consequential scale denies the intrinsic value of these communities and their land. We need to realize that for every big issue we hear about on the BBC, there are hundreds of small injustices like the Bengoh Dam. Similarly, we may hear plenty about the work of humanitarians building wells in Niger or the resilience of the Japanese communities that were nearly destroyed in the 2011 Tsunami. But where are the stories about people like Simo who have shown great resiliency for years to sustain places for themselves and their great-grandchildren to live? So the moral of my mini-rant is that we shouldn’t allow media bias for the “big things” to dictate which stories are told and which ones are not. Let’s give a voice to everyone facing injustices and fighting for opportunities, and plant seeds of hope the whole world over. I would like to thank Niloh Ason for her support and guidance, Simo and his family for their generosity and hospitality, See Chee How for his perspective and undying commitment to represent the Bidayuh in court, Kibik for a fantastic visit in Muk Ayung, and the others along the way who made my journey to Upper-Bengoh possible.

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TRAVERSING THE KELABIT HIGHLANDS October 24, 2014 In my last post, I discussed the development issues that the Bidayuh people of Upper-Bengoh are facing and the ways in which their society continues to be self-sufficient. They are an example of resilience and autonomy despite top-down development surrounding them. In the northern most part of Sarawak is another example of self-sufficiency in the face of remoteness. This post will tell the story of the Kelabit people in Sarawak’s highlands and how their livelihoods and identities are rapidly changing as the outside world penetrates with “eco”-tourism, logging, and conservation. I spent four days in Bario and Pa’Lungan (oh, how I wish it had been longer!) and am therefore only able to provide a limited composition of visual observations and written thoughts. While I was there, I came across the dissertation of a woman named Sarah Hitchner from the University of Georgia, which I found particularly useful (and you might too, if you want to learn more). She spent more than two years with the Kelabit people and wrote about, “Remaking the Landscape: Kelabit Engagements with Conservation and Development in Sarawak, Malaysia”. Her criticism for classic models of wilderness conservation and the human-nature binary reminded me a lot of The Promise of Wilderness by Jay Turner, my college adviser, and my own musings in my college honors thesis. So in case you don’t get your fill of conservation/ eco-tourism talk here, you’ll have more sources to check out. Many of the ideas that I present here will also be continued in a subsequent post on Gunung Mulu National Park. A (Very Brief) History of Bario Bario lies in an expansive, flat valley between the Tama Abu Range and the Dabpur River in northern Sarawak. The first Kelabit community is believed to have settled here over three-hundred years ago. Because of it’s favorable topography and close proximity to the Indonesian border, Bario became a military base for the British to fight the Japanese during World War Two. The airstrip built during the war remained as the first and only link between Bario and the rapidly modernizing outside world. In 1963, following Sarawak’s independence from Britain and succession to the Malaysian Federation, border tensions arose between Sarawak and Kalimantan, Indonesia in the Kelabit Highlands. Indonesia believed it had claims on the Kelabit Highlands (of course, Kelabit people lived on both sides of the border) but when it brought its case to the UN, it was ignored. So in 1964, it sent troops to the Sarawak border, ready to attack. The British felt responsible for ensuring Malaysia launched into independence peacefully and so came to the Kelabit Highlands to protect the border. As the border was so long, British troops found it prudent to regroup the longhouses into one valley for protection. For the same reasons Bario was chosen as an airbase during World War Two, it was chosen as the site to consolidate seven villages in a program called “Hearts and Minds”. The original people of Bario, who lived in a longhouse now known as Bario Asal Lambah, peacefully accepted the other Kelabit (and one Penan) communities into their valley. They assumed their presence would only be temporary and were therefore willing to give up half of their NCR (native customary rights) land to the newcomers. The headman of Bario Asal Lambah at the time established 184

a local district committee to govern land usage. As Bario was well irrigated by a natural network of streams, the Kelabit practiced wet-padi (rice) farming and only planted fruit trees in the hills surrounding their village. The committee worked to allocate plots of land to the newcomers and taught them wet-padi agriculture. The newcomers ended up settling in the valley permanently and have coalesced peacefully since then. Bario remained relatively untouched by Sarawak’s development schemes until the late-1990s. While companies logged extensively in the Upper-Baram throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they did not come as far as the Kelabit Highlands because it was less accessible. In 1999, the first timber road was pushed through close to Bario. It was not supposed to reach Bario itself because there was no profitable timber in the valley but the communities pressured the logging company to extend the road to reach them. This enabled Kelabit people to access the outside world independently from the inconsistent airplane service. Now bringing in new technology, construction materials, and foodstuffs from the city was possible by car. Villages were able to instal solar panels and micro-hydro plants to take care of their electricity needs. They built a telephone tower, water-treatment facility, and brought piped water to all the longhouses in the highlands. I was very impressed to see, both in Pa’Lungan and in Bario, the same type of bottom-up self-sufficiency that I had observed in Upper-Bengoh. Over the last fifteen years, the outside world has started to pay more attention to Bario and the Kelabit highlands, as well. Beginning in the early 2000s, regular flights started coming to Bario and tourism agencies began marketing the area for trekking and cultural immersion. The commodification of Kelabit’s culture and physical landscape has visibly impacted livelihood security and has changed Kelabit’s connection to and perception of the landscape. Many of the observations I made are expanded upon more in Hitchner’s dissertation: 1. Much of the revenue generated from tourism in the Kelabit Highlands is not going to the local people (many have mentioned the importance of greater communication between locals, agencies, and lodges to ensure business is being equally distributed). 2. Some Kelabits say that they as a people are not “capitalizing” on these tourism opportunities as much as they could be because of their generous and relaxed nature. 3. There is the danger of the Kelabit beginning to falsify or exaggerate their material and performance culture to cater to international tourists (which can be avoided by taking power out of the hands of tourism agencies that market culture and into the hands of communities, themselves). 4. The greater access to the outside world and the limited number of jobs available to locals in the tourism industry has forced a mass outmigration of young people to coastal cities (the Kelabit population once numbered 5000 but only 1200 now live in the Highlands). 5. Opportunities for livelihoods are no longer based on land: people are forced to operate in the cash economy. Even farmers now, to get by, often plant more rice than they will consume to make a profit. 6. The massive outmigration of young people has negatively impacted the older generation, as they must now do difficult manual labor themselves or else hire Indonesians (who work for a lower wage) to do the work around the farm and village, which young people in the community would have traditionally done. 7. In part because of the commodification of the Kelabit Highlands as a desirable tourist destination, Kelabits who have moved to the cities are beginning to romanticize their old villages. This relates back to what I wrote about in “Indigeneity in the 21st Century” and how romanticization can 185

change the way people talk about their pasts. 8. The people still living in the Kelabit Highlands do not have access to the information about government plans to develop their area as people in the cities do, which affects the power imbalance between rural and urban Kelabits.

children grew up and her husband past away. Several years ago, she invested in an additional wing in front of the longhouse to serve as a homestay space for tourists. But she complained to me repeatedly how difficult it is to find anyone to stay with her, since there are at least fifteen other homestays in the small town of 800 (and many of these homestays are sponsored by external tourism agencies).

All of these concerns will worsen over the next few years as logging companies advance onto their land (many people in smaller villages have already accepted compensation packages from interested companies), and as government-sponsored agencies attempt to increase their claims on the tourism industry (problematically branding it “eco-tourism”, which I will talk more about in my next post).

Most of Supang’s siblings and both of her children have moved to Miri and other coastal cities for employment. The regular and affordable flights allow her to visit them every couple months, although she complained that Miri was “incredibly boring” and she much preferred her life up in Bario, tending to her vegetable garden and being an active member of the church community. She seemed well-versed in catering to foreign tourists. She fed me very healthy, not-fried vegetarian food (assuming I was vegetarian because so many foreigners who travel in these parts are!) and pineapple (my favorite!) at every meal.

Homestays and Trekking in the Kelabit Highlands I really got to be a tourist for the short time that I was here (it’s hard not to be perceived as anything but as a foreigner in this place) and experience how the tourism industry is shaping the lives of people I stayed with. The first couple nights I stayed in Bario Asal Lengah (the original longhouse in Bario) with a woman named Supang, who was the sister of an acquaintance. Supang has lived alone in her unit since her 186

I talked to Supang a lot about how Kelabit culture is changing. She lamented the fact that her children are embarrassed by her distended earlobes and that so many of the units in her longhouse are vacant. Looking around the longhouse veranda at night, it was very obvious that the age demographic was quite skewed. Everywhere I looked, I saw mostly older people adorned with thick sweaters, hats and mittens (the temperature in Bario gets down to a mere fifteen degrees at night!) 187

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On my third day in the Kelabit Highlands, I trekked the 15 km from Supang’s house to Pa’Lungan, a small village of 28 families known as the gateway to Pulong Tao National Park and the cross-border treks (this language has obviously been shaped by the tourism industry). Pa’Lungan itself boasts several interesting attractions, including ancient megaliths (which heirless aristocrats had built hundreds of years ago to bury their belongings when they died). I stayed with Stephen, a friend of Uncle Willie’s, who was also a trekking guide in the highlands. They lived in a single-family house like everyone else in the community, situated across in front of the sports field and behind the church. Surrounding Stephen’s house were wet-rice fields and paddocks dotted with water buffalo. According to Stephen, the community only adopted wet-rice agriculture a hundred years ago, when Western influence incentivized a more sedentary lifestyle. Before permanent wet-rice agriculture, the Kelabit practiced swidden agriculture (which most Orang Ulu and the Bidayuh in Upper-Bengoh) still practice. They changed longhouse locations every two-to-three years to be near newly cleared land. When they first moved to this location, they built a longhouse in which all the families lived. But outside influence has slowly changed peoples ideas about community living and everyone now lives in a single-family home. Stephen talked to me a lot about the current threats to Pa’Lungan. Logging companies were encroaching, decimating their NCR land and damaging the megaliths. Archeologists from around the world as well as a team from the Sarawak Museum have been to Pa’Lungan several times to assess the damage and the museum plans on funding the construction of fences to protect the sites for cultural preservation (and tourism). This past year, the government also announced plans to designate land below Pulong Tao National Park for a new conservation zone: Long Lapun National Park. Like the notice sent out in Upper-Bengoh, the government’s notice to the people of Pa’Lungan gave them 60 days to provide evidence of their claims to the land (literally their backyards) or the government would move ahead with the already-decided boundary for the national park. Stephen expressed his frustration and anxiety about the future of Pa’Lungan and other villages in the Kelabit Highlands. I got to spend some time on my last day in Bario with Lucy, an estate planner and former principal of Bario’s secondary school. Lucy was able to confirm many of my observations about Bario’s changing landscape and culture. She also told me about the Penan communities spread throughout the Kelabit Highlands who continue to live a much more insular lifestyle than the Kelabit in the area. Lucy explained how frustrated she had been as a principal to see so many Penan children out of school. She designed a program to incentivize attendance whereby parents who physically dropped off their children (rather than having the children walk eight hours through the jungle alone to get to Bario) would receive monetary compensation and food for the journey home. This helped a little, but the tendency Penan children have to avoid school is still rampant (in the Kelabit Highlands and throughout Sarawak). It will ultimately affect their future ability to sustain themselves in a country that is forcing them to compete in the cash economy. As I walked to the airport on my last day, I was overcome by the beauty of Bario’s beautiful landscape and couldn’t help wonder what it would look like the next time I visited. Would there be Chinese-run hotels and museums to tell the story of the Kelabit’s dying culture? Or would the local command over tourism strengthen and provide sustained livelihoods for the people living here? I guess only time (and our decisions as law-makers, consumers, and activists) will tell. 194

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IN THE SHADOW OF GUNUNG MULU October 29, 2014 About 100 km east of Miri (as the crow flies) lies the stunning Gunung Mulu, a 2,377 m (7,798 ft) limestone pinnacle whose surrounding cave system and biodiversity have landed it on the UNESCO World Heritage List. I had heard much about Mulu National Park, both from tourists passing through Miri and from my Berawan, Tering, and Penan friends who have played a part in the rapidly growing tourism industry around it. My Uncle Willie (whose guesthouse I stayed at for three months) comes from Gunung Mulu and has been leading a ten-year-old legal battle for his community’s Native Customary Rights (NCR) in the park. I had decided early on that if I was going to go, it should be with him, as I knew otherwise I would be pulled into the bubble of oblivious nature-loving bliss that befalls the other 30,000 tourists who visit the park every year. An Unjust Model of Conservation On the last Monday in September, we took a 30-minute, 99% empty flight to Mulu (I asked the flight attendant if I could take some of the extra juice boxes but he refused… SO stingy). Upon landing, Willie explained that the land on which the tarmac was developed had been his and was stolen with no notice or compensation in the early 2000s. In fact, almost all of the land that is now allocated for Mulu National Park was occupied or at least used by Orang Ulu for hundreds of years. There is substantial evidence proving that the Berawan, Tering, and Penan tribes have native customary rights over land in Mulu: artifacts and human remains have been found in caves, indicating the use of the area as a burial ground for over 500 years, 150-year-old grooves from longboats are still visible in the Melinau and Ubong riverbanks, and fruit trees planted in the valley’s secondary forests imply a legacy of small-scale agriculture. Yet despite the evidence of hundreds of years of settlement, which leaked documents show that the politicians responsible for the assumption of NCR land and its designation as national park land were fully aware of, the native people have still not been fully compensated. The way in which Mulu National Park came into existence and continues to be managed today reeks of environmental injustice. It is also a prime example of how traditional conceptions of human-environment relationships create unjust models of conservation. Most of you reading this have probably been to a national park. They are lovely places to get away from the hustle and bustle of urban life, explore geological/ecological wonders, and find solitude. For people raised to value biodiversity and natural beauty (and for people who can afford to visit them) they seem to be entirely good and necessary allocations of land: developing local economies through tourism while also conserving wilderness for future generations (see diagram below on moral multiplicity). Wilderness. What is it really? Our society sees places most worth protecting as those untouched by humans. The underlying assumption here is that humans are an invasive species and their activities inevitably lead to erosion of biodiversity. Wilderness wouldn’t be sacred if people were to suddenly move in next door… What would Yosemite be if people were allowed to hunt and fish from its forests and rivers? 202

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participation in the development of the environment and the fair access to that environment across peoples based on difference). I think it would be useful to introduce it here. I grounded my thesis research in three core arguments: (1) the natural environment and built environment exist in a hybrid form in both cities and rural areas; (2) by ascribing agency to both the natural and the built components of hybrid environments, it is possible to qualify their nexus as it impacts the human experience; (3) problems that are commonly understood as social injustices are shaped by this natural-built environment (NBE) nexus, and must therefore be reconstructed as environmental injustices. I explain: “The NBE nexus is a framework for understanding both the physical and experiential spaces wherein the natural environment and built environment connect. The physical nexus of the natural and built environments is often more visible than the experiential one: it happens where rain meets the gutter, where cultivated gardens attract insects, and where pit latrines produce biogas. Almost everywhere we look, the physical landscape has been shaped both

Panorama of entrance to Mulu National Park This common conceptualization and prioritization of wilderness has three significant consequences: (1) it leads to models conservation that mandate the exclusion of humans from biologically diverse landscapes, which results in the restriction of local’s livelihoods in the area that is being conserved. (2) Anthropogenic landscape processes (no matter how old) are viewed as threats to biodiversity, which ignores the legacy of land use by locals. (3) Ultimately, biodiversity becomes more worthy of protecting than people are (see Hitchner, 2009). The loss of livelihood due to conservation in itself is not unjust. The establishment of national parks becomes an environmental justice issue by way of the political process of exclusion and disenfranchisement that so often occurs. In Malaysia, Orang Ulu have comparatively little money and are therefore valueless to the elite circle of politicians and corporations that run the country (unless their cultures can be commodified). The environments in which Orang Ulu live, however, are valuable and easily commodified. The exploitation and degradation of Malaysia’s environments (and consequently its people) is a result of logging, extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, refineries, mega dams, and conservation. Conservation!? You’re probably wondering how conservation could possibly exploit an environment? Isn’t that a bit diametric? But in Malaysia, conservation seems to be just another form of environmental commodification at the expense of indigenous people. It is a way for the government and its vested interests to “save some for later” while also making money off of tourism and research efforts (I’ll back up this assertion later). Back to wilderness: it’s a flawed concept. More importantly, society’s desire to “consume” wilderness is leading to the commodification of environments for national parks and environmental injustice for local people. In reality, much of what we think is pristine has actually been shaped by people. This was the foundation for my college thesis research, in which I developed the Natural Built Environment Nexus framework to analyze environmental injustice (which I define as the lack of meaningful

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through human design and natural processes. The experiential space within the NBE nexus happens where farmers no longer have access to irrigation water and must make difficult decisions that will affect their economic and social wellbeing, where choosing to earn a wage in the city means living in unsafe, unsanitary, and inadequate housing; or where people endure the local environmental consequences of the social and economic decisions made globally. The experiential space can be assessed using multiple metrics: cultural, social, ecological, and economic, to name a few. Using these metrics, it is possible to qualify the experience of the NBE nexus for stakeholders with different priorities. The experiential space of the nexus cannot be reduced to a simple binary of “positive” or “negative” because the metrics within which the experience is based are complex.” A useful way to visually map the NBE nexus is to use a time-scale graph (I realize time should really be on the X axis in the figure below…out of college for less than five months and my brain is already turning to mush). It is much easier for us to recognize environmental injustice when there is an immediate, local effect. When injustice manifests over a longer period of time or when there are global causations, it becomes difficult – but no less important – to recognize conditions as environmental injustice. How the NBE Nexus Can Be Used to Understand Injustice in Conservation at Mulu Reframing the social and environmental issues in Mulu as environmental justice issues will allow us to see the inseparable connection between environmental and human well-being in this park. Calling out environmental injustice is also a more powerful way to initiate action and bridge social and environmental movements, which have traditionally operated in separate spheres. It is my hope that the NBE framework will encourage people to reconsider spaces that they may have originally deemed neutral or positive, and work to fight injustice done unto indigenous peoples (both in Mulu and worldwide). In the years leading up to Sarawak’s independence from Britain, the British Administration recommended that Mulu be turned into a national park, to preserve sites for research and recreation. The governor of Sarawak sent out a notice of intention to create a national park in 1965 and five years of investigations into resident’s NCR claims ensued (I explain how this was carried out in the image above). I had the chance to read pages of correspondence between the governing officials during this time and was amazed at how conniving and strategic they were in destroying evidence of indigenous peoples’ claims to their land. Gunung Mulu National Park was officially constituted in 1974 and the Penan who had occupied the area for hundreds of years were forcefully moved to Long Iman and Batu Bungan, two resettlement areas nearby (see map below). In the first ten years after the park’s establishment, several large-scale international explorations revealed the extent of biodiversity and the magnitude of the Melinau cave system (one of the largest in the world). Beyond just the scientific discoveries, Mulu showed huge promise in generating revenue from tourism. In 1985, the park opened to the public. The Berawan and Tering people, many of whom had moved farther downriver to be closer to growing markets in the early twentieth century, returned to their native land around the park to get their hands in the emerging tourism industry.

introduced, meaning that all facilities and development went under the auspices of a private company (owned by the former chief minister’s sister). This spurred rapid development of the area: an airstrip, resorts, and spas sprung up within five years of the park’s subscription as a World Heritage Site. I had the opportunity to interview a park employee who had been working at Mulu since the early 1980s. He was able to tell me how things had changed, particularly for the Penan and Berawan people who had occupied Mulu and been forced to adapt outside the park: I also befriended a local Penan woman named Sue who had grown up in Batu Bungan, one of the Penan settlements across from the park. She and the other Penan I talked to confirmed the information the park employee had shared with me. Sue took me around Batu Bungan and I got to see how the Penan had adapted the original settlement to suit their needs. When they were first relocated in 1982, the Penan were given a longhouse to live in and a couple acres of land per family (not nearly enough to pass down and sustain future generations). Longhouses were not the appropriate housing type for Penan; they were used to living in clusters of temporary huts in the forest. So they ended up building their own homes around the government-built longhouse: Over the last thirty years, the longhouse in Batu Bungan has burned down twice and the government is in the process of building a third one (this time out of concrete). I find it amazing that despite the overwhelming visual evidence of longhouses not being the preferred housing type, the government continues to insist that the Penan move into these tiny longhouse units. Perhaps it is to fabricate a bit of Orang Ulu culture for the tourists (who are shuffled through the Batu Bungan handicraft market on their way to the caves) to experience. This could very well be another example of cultural falsification for the monetary benefit of tourist agencies (which I discussed in my last post). Despite the counts of injustice the obliviousness of most of the tourists I observed, my week at Mulu was incredible. I am so grateful to Willie’s family for hosting me, and to Sue, Helen, Larry, Peter, Rick, Nicholas, Kenneth, Robert, and all the other park employees for their friendship and assistance. Cultural Survival My analysis in this post and the past ones has focused heavily on the physical, visible implications of development schemes on housing and livelihood security. I have talked very little about the invisible impacts relocation, isolation, and environmental degradation. I have noticed that the indigenous people, themselves, rarely acknowledge these unseen impacts: how living in Batu Bungan will change the way Sue’s future children identify themselves, how detachment from the land that gave them their culture and spiritual identity will impact them psychologically. There is so much to a society that is unseen and thus difficult to talk about. Most utilitarian thinkers find “housing insecurity” or “environmental injustice” much more compelling issues to address than “loss of identity”. In my next post, I will return to the Baram River, where I hope to paint a more comprehensive picture (literally) of what the Orang Ulu stand to lose if the Baram Dam is built.

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A self-built home in Batu Bungan

Government-built longhouse in Batu Bungan, the Penan resettlement area outside the park 214

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rounding environment becomes much more complex, but no less important. Many of you reading this right now are sitting in an enclosed dwelling, perhaps an office space or a house. Around you lie functional and sentimental nicknacks: a half-full cup of coffee, some pens, a couple photos. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a nice view outside (if your space was designed by a proper architect, you should be able to glimpse some sky and maybe a tree or at least a patch of grass). If you’re at home, you’ve likely spent a lot of time making your space your own. After all, your home is where you spend at least half of your days; it serves as your refuge from the stress and chaos of the outside world. For most sedentary adults, our home is our most valuable asset. What surrounds our home is equally as important. If you have studied any type of urban theory, you know that the larger environment in which we live determines our health, wealth, and happiness. A child born in South-Side Chicago or Ejipura, Bangalore, or on a reservation in Alberta, Canada will have much less opportunity to thrive than a child born in Wellesley, Massachusetts or Copenhagen, Denmark. In the “developed” world, we are dependent on facilities and services like grocery stores, clinics, and transportation networks. Even in “lesser-developed” parts of the world like the interior of Borneo, access to a healthy environment is intrinsic to a person’s wellbeing and potential to succeed in life. Look up from your computer/tablet/phone again and take a moment to appreciate your surroundings. If you are in fact in a stable home with access to services and resources that sustain and propel you, say a quick thank you to the universe. You have worked hard to get where you are today. You have also been incredibly lucky to be born into whatever body, family, society, and environment that enabled you to get here. The Pinnacles, a popular destination in Mulu for more adventurous hikers

ENDING MY FIRST CHAPTER November 5, 2014 Home. A warm, nostalgic feeling sweeps through me whenever I hear that word. For me, home is ellusive and indifinitive; it is rooted both in the places I have lived and the people I have attached myself to. Canberra, Cooma, Potsdam, Steyr, Corvallis, Gleneden Beach, Windsor, Wynyard, Boston, Copenhagen, Ardmore, Jaipur, Gurgaon, Bangalore, Santa Fe… these are just some of the places – home to people – that have captured my heart, where I know I could return to and be welcomed with open arms. Time is irrelevent in my definition of home, in part because my life up until now has mandated my continuous transition from place to place, and partly because any ancestral roots have been all but lost in this mixed up salad bowl we call Earth. Many people today share my definition of home. Some people spend their whole lives migrating from place to place, dependent on seasons, resource availability, cultural traditions, or environmental and/or social unrest. Some people, like the 200 still-semi-nomadic Penan in Borneo, spend their lives shifting locations within a 100-km-radius region. Other people, like Captain Kirk, cover far greater territory over their lives. For people who shift homes regularly within a larger territory (whether that be a mountain range or an entire galaxy), the relationship between created dwellings and the sur218

Now I want you to imagine that someone is knocking on your door. They’re faceless, wearing the shirt of a company you’ve only heard about. They tell you that your land will be flooded soon and there is nothing you can do about it. You can either cooperate and accept a compensation package for the property you’ll lose, or you can leave empty handed. I don’t want you to picture yourself in Sarawak, Malaysia, I want you to imagine this is happening right here, right now, in your home. The property you have spent years, perhaps even generations shaping and maintaining, the neighborhood where you took nightly strolls and caught up with neighbors, and the larger region, which is home to your favorite sports team, will all be inundated in this unexplainable development project. This faceless man tells you that you will benefit from this project but you are unsure how. You will no longer have your home, your neighborhood, or the hills that surround you. You will be forced to move to an area that is far away from your office, local grocery store, and the other services you have become comfortable using. This project is not benefiting you in any perceivable way. In fact, you’ve heard from your neighbors that the company is flooding this area to generate energy for people far, far away. Others have mentioned that the very core of this scheme is rotten: the money being pipelined for it is going to politicians who have vested interests in this company. Furthermore, you’ve heard that there is already a surplus of energy being generated from other such schemes around the state and that the development of this one will not contribute anymore to the “progress” people talk about. You’re confused but you have no way of getting more information. The environmental impact assessment and social-economical impact assessments that you should have seen were never published, and perhaps never written. Without your free and prior consent, the land that you own, rent, or law219

fully live on is being bulldozed and there is nothing you can do about it. You try to find ways to cope with your impending transition but nothing can console you. If you’re young, you know this eviction will prevent you from accessing gainful employment, opportunities, and resources. It will affect your ability to care for yourself and your family. If you are older, the thought of dismantling everything so close to the end of your life feels like a stab to your heart. What legacy will you be able to leave for your grandchildren now? The faceless man who came to your door is full of false promises. He is trying to put a price on your home, which you know is invaluable. Your home provides more than just livelihood security. It provides you with an identity and represents your physical and spiritual attachment to your environment (however large or ephemeral).

but my research will have been for nothing if you, sitting in your chair with your by-now-empty cup of coffee, don’t do your part in helping me to share these learnings and fight the gross injustices happening to indigenous and non-indigenous communities, alike. Madeline Albright told me, amongst a small audience of former Wellesley students, that she has always been an optimist… just one that worries a lot. I resonate with that self-reflection and think about it often as I try to mediate my relationship with the space-time I was born into. I see our current path of development as literally leading us out of our homes and into our graves. A good friend once painted a brilliant metaphor for our current situation: our grandparents bought “the car” and our parents continued to drive it, realizing only once we were born that it was about to crash into a wall.

So what do you do? You feel powerless in the face of this corporation and the political administration backing it up. You are unclear on your rights and have no way of knowing who, outside of your immediate community, is your ally. But you know your home is worth defending. You know that your relocation will mean the death of your livelihood and culture. You decide to fight. You will not succumb to coercion, bribery, silencing, or physical violence. You will not be a victim of environmental injustice.

Perhaps that moment of impact has already passed. Many people are already in this metaphorical ICU, battling the inevitable social, political, and environmental consequences of our greed, violence, and hatred. We need a new model of development that – I hate to sound cliche because these words are so overused – are just and sustainable. We have the technologies and minds we need to make it happen. The hardest part will be recognizing within ourselves and overcoming the greed, hatred, and violence that are normal (but not necessary) parts of the human psyche and dictate the current trajectory of our planet.

Two weeks ago, I went on my last trip up the Baram River and it felt like coming home. I was accompanied by Phillip Jau, who has worked tirelessly over the last six years since the Baram Dam was proposed to activate the communities along the Baram in peaceful but forceful opposition. An Australian-Malaysian professor of water law and governance was sponsoring our trip to study the ways local communities were engaged with the project and to understand how they attached their identity to the Baram landscape.

The Orang Ulu of Sarawak deserve a piece of this world as much as you and I do. Their definition of home and relationship to their environments is what makes their cultures unique, just as your relationship to your home makes you unique. As we move on in this world, working towards a more just and sustainable future, let’s not forget that we’re doing it so that ALL of us can live in the home of our dreams, in a place where we’re surrounded by opportunity and people we care about and where we can be free to march to the beat of our own drum.

I broke down for the first time during that trip. Part of it was the realization that the villages we were visiting may very well be underwater the next time I come to Malaysia. Part of it was also that I was finally starting to piece together all these stories and consider how to present it in the most impactful way to my audiences back home(s).

I have many people to thank for these past three months, whom I will list in the order that I met them. Everyone included in this list is welcome to use any piece of my digitized visual journal (available here) as long as its use is inline with the mission of my work. All others must seek written permission from me, as these images are copyrighted (please email mayrah.udvardi@gmail.com for more information):

We were in the home of an 80-year-old woman named Ubung Lian in Long Selaton. She had been born when the longhouse had been on the other side of the river and remembers when the first Roman Catholic missionaries ventured onto their land in the early 1950s. Her longhouse was remarkably empty when we visited her; she explained that most children were studying in Long San and anyone of working age was across the river tending to their farms. When Poh-Ling asked Ubung Lian how she would feel if the Baram were to be flooded, she replied that she would feel very angry. After a few seconds, she started tearing up. She added that in all honesty, she would feel lost. “I don’t know how to live in other places,” she said in Kenyah. Suddenly I saw my own grandmother sitting there in front of me and her tears sparked a flood of my own. I exited the room to regain control and felt a wave of guilt for feeling so sad. “I’m not the one who has to live this reality,” I told myself. “As a temporary visitor, I don’t have the right to get so upset.” My breakdown caused me to develop even more respect for the community leaders like Phillip who manage to be strong and optimistic in the face of decades of adversity. This is my last post about Borneo but certainly not the last time I address these types of issues. The next nine months will reveal similarly heart-rending stories of strength and resilience and also sadness and loss. I am privileged enough to be able to learn from these frontline communities firsthand 220

Judy, Jess, and Bria with the Borneo Project for connecting me with the right people; Peter Kallang and his family for welcoming me to Sarawak and helping me get situated in my new home; Phillip Jau and his family for welcoming me into their home and supporting me steadfastly throughout my time; Willie Kajang, Lynn, Lily, Alice, and Harry for making me feel so at home at Pandora Guesthouse; Dennis Along, Ewa, Danilo, Amy, Imelda, Esther, and all the other members of your family for sharing your culture and struggle with me; Nick Kelesau for being my guide and inspiration for peaceful existence; 221

Panai and Maria in Ba’ Abang and their families who showed me the true extent of Penan hospitality;

Jack and the staff at Jungle Jack’s in Sabah for the most incredible “holiday”;

The family who hosted me at Sakai Jarmock longhouse in Long San;

And Annie Lesimbang for connecting me with Doris and others at PACOS Trust in Kota Kinabalu;

Nyke, Lizzy, Sandra, Bay, Deb, and the rest in the wave of travelers I was fortunate enough to meet in late August;

And all the strangers who treated me with kindness and no judgement as I fumbled my way through Borneo;

Alex, Candy, Gloria, Jason, and Wanger for hosting me at Sungai Asap and their family for including me in their dabai tree mobs;

Thank you!

Tommy, Jerry, Patrick, Elton, Ah Jie, Jin Zhu, and their families for hosting me in Sarikei and teaching me more about Chinese-Malaysian culture.

A list of resources I have used over the three months:

Khai for his incredible friendship and sense of humor; Dennis and Adderly for the most amazing tour of Kuching I could imagine; Niloh and See Chee How for teaching me more about NCR issues in west Sarawak; Desmond for letting me shadow his anthropological research in Serian; Simo and his family for hosting me in Upper-Bengoh and Kibik for a lovely lunch in Muk Ayung;

Beyond Conservation: http://www.heartofborneo.org Borneo Post: http://www.theborneopost.com BRIMAS: http://brimas.www1.50megs.com Borneo Project: http://borneoproject.org Bruno Manser Fund: http://www.bmf.ch Center for Orang Asli Concerns: http://www.coac.org.my

Supang, Stephen and his family, and Lucy for their hospitality in the Kelabit Highlands, and the children of Pa’ Lungan who serendipitously served as my guides through the Kelabit jungle;

Damn the Dam Coalition: http://damnationfilm.com/blog

Buffy for her companionship in Mulu National Park;

Jaringan Orang Asal SeMalaysia (JOAS): http://orangasal.blogspot.fr

Uring, Helen, Gecky, Bungan, Tony, and Uson for hosting me at Mulu;

Hornbill Unleashed: https://hornbillunleashed.wordpress.com

Sue, Robert, Peter, Rick, Kenneth, Nikolas, Larry, and others who showed me the real Mulu;

International Rivers: http://www.internationalrivers.org

Nigel Dickinson for his mentorship and for introducing me to Lun and Nelson and their respective families in Long Lawan and Long Gang;

PACOS Trust: http://pacostrust.com

Lun and Nelson and their families for their generosity; Poh-Ling for my last trip up the Baram and for teaching me more about everything; Johannes, Bujang, Juman and Jerami, Alex, and their respective families for hosting me in the Upper-Baram;

Free Malaysia Today: http://www.freemalaysiatoday.com

Sarawak Report: http://www.sarawakreport.org Save Sarawak Rivers: http://saveriversnet.blogspot.ch Suaram: http://www.suaram.net Survival International: http://www.survivalinternational.org

Salomon, Caroline, Rafael, Daryl, Ernie, Geoffrey, Sheryl, Rapelson, and the Pandora family for helping me celebrate the end of my time in Sarawak; 222

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Huaca Pucllana in Lima

Huaca Pucllana contrasted to concrete urban landscape

Elements of Wari culture in Huaca Pucllana

Moments in Central Lima

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Indigenous foods to Peru: potatoes and squash

Indigenous foods to Peru: tomatoes, oca, cotton, and maiz

LE SOLEIL AND PERU’S CHANGING FOOD CULTURE December 1, 2014 While most of my American readers will have spent last Thursday curled up in their homes, watching football and baking pies, I spent mine in an (obviously) foreign and untraditional way. Last week, I had the privilege of shadowing the operations of Le Soleil, Cusco’s only outlet for French cuisine and one of the top-ranked restaurants in all of South America. Jorge Riveros-Cayo, a prominent journalist and my friend and host in Lima, connected me with Arthur Marcinkiewicz, the owner of Le Soleil. Arthur generously let me “work” with his staff for a week, to understand how a high-end establishment like this interfaces with local Peruvian food culture and farmers.

Indigenous foods to Peru: quinoa, maishua, and yucca 236

It was marvellous to have a routine again, albeit just for seven days. Every morning I would get up, sketch, go to “work” at 10 am, follow the chefs to the markets, roll out bread rolls and chop vegetables for the staff meal, and then observe and assist quietly as the five men in the kitchen worked syn237

chronously and passionately to create the most exquisite and intricate dishes. At 3 pm, I would stroll back to my hostel, sketch, and then return at 6:30 pm to “work” the dinner shift in the dining room. Arthur, Maria Fernanda (Le Soleil’s manager), and Jimmy (Le Soleil’s only waiter because he is so good at his job, Arthur doesn’t need to hire a second one) conducted the dining experience as if it were an orchestra. “There is a step for everything,” Maria Fernanda explained to me on the first day. “The clients enter, we greet them and hang their coats. They are seated and the moment Arthur asks them if they would prefer still or sparkling water, Jimmy is already opening the bottles and gliding over.” And so it went for the full two-hour culinary experience that welcomed every person who walked through Le Soleil’s imposing Moorish-style doorway. By 10 pm, I was exhausted from standing at attention and acutely remembered why four years of waitressing in high school had destroyed my back. Seven days at Le Soleil taught me so much about a side of Peruvian culture that I may otherwise never had experienced. I got to laugh with the boys in the kitchen about their lives and Quechua-ñol (the hybrid between Quechua – the local indigenous language – and Spanish that they routinely joked in). 238

I got to learn the entire farm-to-table system for some of Le Soleil’s signature dishes and discuss the appropriation of local Andean foods into different international culinary traditions with the chefs. And I got to eat really, really well (…I bet I gained more weight at my Thanksgiving than you did at yours). I do not want my readers to think that I was shirking my Watson project by spending my time in a gourmet kitchen in Cusco, rather than out in villages experiencing the lives of Andean peasants. It is essential to understand the growing demand for and delivery of gourmet food to paint a more complete picture of livelihood changes amongst indigenous Peruvians. And who better to learn from than a team of local Peruvian chefs and an international food connoisseur? The following are the answers to some of the questions I posed to Le Soleil’s staff last week: Where do you get your ingredients? Arthur explained to me that 85% of the ingredients used in Le Soleil’s menu are sourced from farmers 239

(hand-picked and quality controlled) within the Sacred Valley. In the 21st century, almost anything that was endemic to France and French food – including water fowl, dairy, wheat, and grapes – is grown or raised in Peru. With an exception of the wine list and certain speciality ingredients, everything the kitchen needs to recreate an “authentic” French experience is from within 100 km away. This not only supports livelihoods of local farmers and distributors, it also takes power away from energy-intensive global industrial food corporations. Which foods have you appropriated into your dishes that are native to Peru? I was amazed to find out just how many native Peruvian foods Le Soleil’s menu uses. Potatoes, avocado, tomatoes, cacao, pumpkin, corn, chillies… when you think about truly “authentic” French, Italian, German, Indian, and Indonesian cuisines (to name a few), they are all based on Peruvian stables, distributed globally some 500 years ago. This begs the question: what is authentic food if global agricultural expansion and appropriation has coincided with the development of said food in its formative years? We talk about cultural and gastronomic appropriation as being inherently negative and diluting, when cultures and their cuisines have intersected for as long as human civilizations 240

have been mobile. Perhaps it is important, then, to distinguish between appropriation and exchange. I see the culinary changes taking place in Peru as a fair, welcome, and inevitable exchange. Arthur is sharing an important piece of his world with Peru and involving local gastronomic culture at the same time. Local and foreign demand for this type of cuisine, albeit out of context, is growing rapidly. And while I doubt Peru’s signature dishes (ceviche, cuy, causa, and anticuchos, to name a few) will ever go out of style, Peruvians want to diversify their diets just as much as quinoa-eating hippies in the United States do. Many people have criticized the homogenization of global food cultures for its potential to decrease crop-diversity. While it would take up way too much of your time now for me to explain my stance on this issue, here is an academic paper (with links to further reading) that will whet your appetite (I will cover the complexity of this topic more in my visual journal on Peru, which will be available online in early February). How do you think farmers have been impacted by changing food cultures and increased demand for non-Peruvi241

an foods here in the Sacred Valley? The staff at Le Soleil all seemed to agree that the growing presence of gourmet restaurants and international tourists had raised the quality of crops grown in the Sacred Valley. Stricter government regulations as well as competition to supply to well-paying restaurants is forcing farmers to comply with more standards (pesticide-free, organic, and aesthetically-pleasing being some of them). There has been surprisingly little change in the Sacred Valley in terms of agriculture typology (largescale vs. small-scale). Most farms in the Andes are still small-scale, family-run farms in part because of the mountainous topography and in part because there is not a large enough market (yet) for the staple foods cultivated (with the exception of quinoa). In contrast, the north of Peru has seen a drastic turnover in farm typologies. Large-scale farms focusing on monocultures in maize, cotton, and rice are quickly outpacing family-owned farms. This is not due so much to increased demand within Peru, but to rising international demand for these cashcrops… How do you think farmers and locals have been affected by the growing international demand for Peruvian staple crops? Farmers and locals have definitely been impacted by growing international demand for Peruvian “superfoods” like quinoa and chia. In Cusco, quinoa cost 3 S/kg (about 1 USD/kg) three years ago and now costs more than 6 S/kg. In more remote regions of the Andes, the price has risen up to 15 S/ kg. This is great news for local farmers, as they are now making huge returns on this once plebeian crop. But it does have negative implications for food insecurity of low-income communities here. As quinoa´s price rises, people have turned to imported rice and processed carbohydrates, which are nowhere near as nutrient rich or culturally appropriate. This last topic – the ethics of international quinoa consumption – has made waves in Western social media over the last few months. I have read opinions as varied as, “WE´VE GOT TO BAN QUINOA IMPORTS NOW,” to “The growth of quinoa consumption internationally could resolve food insecurity in many developing countries of the world.” This is an obviously complex topic that I am happy to see more privileged people in the United States and Europe engaging with. My travels through Peru and Bolivia are helping me develop my own nuanced opinion on the topic, which will appear in my visual journal at the end of this quarter. Until then, I´d like to leave you with a list of readings (as diverse as the quotes above) to help you form your own opinion: Blythman, Joanna. “Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?” The Guardian (Jan. 16, 2013). Cagle, Suzey. “Are you a terrible person for eating quinoa?” Grist (Jan. 28, 2013). Philpott, Tom. “Quinoa: Good, evil, or just really complicated?” Mother Jones (Jan. 25, 2013). “Quinoa: An ancient crop to contribute to world food security.” FAO (2014). Richmond, Ben. “The motherboard guide to quinoa.” Motherboard (Jan. 28, 2013). Wachter, Paul. “The dark side of quinoa.” Esquire (Jan. 22, 2013). 242

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MODERN CONQUEST OF THE SACRED VALLEY December 3, 2014 I was wandering the halls of the Museo Historico Regional in Cusco the other day when I came across a piece of Spanish propaganda from 1572. The poster illustrates the brutal execution of Túpac Amaru, the last Inca monarch in Cusco’s Plaza del Armas. It was used, as most patroned art was during Spanish Conquest, to send a concise political and ideological message to the indigenous people of Peru: our way of life is superior to yours and we will impose it upon you, whether by peaceful assimilation or force. The popular and religious art I have explored (in far too many museums in Lima and Cusco) over the past month all share this message. And it got me thinking, not only about the role of art in social and political change, but also about the nature of conquest more broadly. The Nature of Conquest I was thirteen when I first read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. The book’s thesis was hugely influential in developing my understanding of how world societies, both past and present, succeed or fail based on their environments. Spotting a replica of Millais’s painting of Pizzaro seizing the Inca of Peru reminded me of Diamond’s theories and I thought it would be a good way to start the conversation of conquest and environment in the Peruvian Highlands. Diamond uses the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire as a case study to explain how civilizations do not rise to power because of their superior intelligence, but because of favorable environmental preconditions. Geographic, climatic and environmental characteristics (which allowed for the development of advanced weapons, stable agricultural systems, and immunity to certain diseases) allowed European societies to develop strong, organized states capable of dominating even the most powerful Pre-Colonial American Empire: the Incas. My issue with Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it almost seems to “okay” conquest, arguing that it is inevitable, given the right preconditions and people’s thirst for power and security. I agree that societal turnover is inevitable and was prolific long before and after the oft-told Spanish Conquests of America. The Incas were one of many Pre-Columbian empires to have swept through Peru and their rise to power was not void of violence. However, one important difference between the Inca and Colonial Empires remain: their ethical principles. The table below shows that during the Imperial Epoch, the Incas coexisted with other societies. While they were politically and militarily dominant, they allowed the continuity of other cultures and ways of life in the territories they conquered. The Spaniards were much more ruthless. In less than fifty years, they killed 98% of the original 12 million people inhabiting the Andes at the time of conquest (mostly by the spread of disease). Following this mass genocide, the Spaniards proceeded to impose their way of life, religion, and politics on the 200,000+ people left and created severe livelihood insecurity, which continues today.* While conquest may be inevitable, it does not have to come entirely void of ethical principles or respect for others’ lives, as it did in Peru in 1952. *While I do not wish to downplay the immense effect the Spaniards had on the collapse of the Inca 252

“Tupaq amarup umanta kuchunku”. Wikimedia 253

Empire, many scholars, including Diamond, believe the civilization was already in decline. Pizarro and his men were greatly aided in their conquest by the fact that they arrived when the Inca Empire was in the midst of a civil war. Modern Conquests While Peruvian society has been shaped by the hierarchies imposed during Spanish Conquest, a new empire – global capitalism – is reinforcing those hierarchies and creating new livelihood insecurities for many indigenous Peruvians who make up Peru’s underclass. In the Peruvian Highlands, this manifests in two main industries: (1) tourism and (2) food exports (which I will discuss more in my next blog post). The rest of this post will be dedicated to my initial impressions of tourism here in the Peruvian Highlands. Tourism in the 21st century is complex. It has the potential to create economic livelihoods for a lot of people, spur the development of transportation and energy infrastructure and public facilities like hospitals, raise standards of industrial and agricultural production, and preserve culture and environments. But tourism in the developing world, where corporate interests outweigh government regulations and local livelihoods, often has a negative impact. I discussed some of these impacts in my posts on Mulu National Park and the Kelabit Highlands in Borneo. These negative impacts include: (1) The tourism industry is not spread equally and is often based around sites, which are the product of cultural/biological falsification or embellishment. Machu Picchu is the perfect example of this. Of the hundreds of ruin sites in Peru (perhaps not as “untouched” or fantastic), Machu Picchu became the mecca for international tourists. This spurred a revolution in local culture to appeal to the “image” so sought by consumers and drew attention away from other communities in the region who could have also benefited from tourism. (2) The influx of tourists in countries where environmental regulations are already lax can have profoundly negative environmental impacts. In the Peruvian Highlands, this manifests in proximate environmental pollution (ex. tourists throwing waste in a river) and also in increased resource and energy demands (mostly from gas and hydro). (3) With the majority of tours to Peru being pre-arranged on-line (mostly through larger tourism corporations), the industry has become cut-throat, with local companies literally fighting on the street for tourists’ dollars. With so many companies providing similar services, it is difficult to know where your dollars are going and if they really are providing living wages to local community members. (4) Price hikes are an inevitable consequence of increased wealth in tourist centers. In an ideal economy, the increased price of goods would happen in conjunction with increased income. While median family income may be increasing in Peru, the 7.3 million people still living in poverty here are undoubtedly struggling with the price inflations.

ArmzRace Comic describing Jared Diamond’s theory of geographic luck 254

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The road to Paracas

Islas Bastillas

To learn more about the growth of the tourism industry in the Peruvian Highlands and its positive and negative impacts on indigenous communities, I encourage you to start here.

Prepared for anything, Amber (a good friend from Boston) and I set off at 3 am from Lima, headed south along the coastal highway. As morning light started to flood the sparse landscape, we could make out shanty highway towns, many still devastated from the earthquake that hit in 2007. We were dropped off in Paracas at 8 am and herded with a couple hundred other tourists (mostly bird fanatics and gross couples) onto boats headed towards Islas Bastillas. The islands, referred to in the Lonely Planet as the “Poor Man’s Galapagos”, far exceeded our expectations. They were teeming with birds (including pelicans and penguins) and lounging sea lions. Algae and crustaceans covered the substrate and waves of white sea foam slapped the rock-faces dramatically. I didn’t dare take out my sketchbook.

My 21st-Century Pilgrimage to the Inca Heartland I wanted to begin my exploration of indigenous housing (and livelihood) insecurity in Peru by looking at the architecture and lifestyles of indigenous people pre-Conquest. Because the Sacred Valley was the heart of Inca Civilization and is now the top tourist destination in Peru, it seemed appropriate to begin here. Not only have I been able to experience the ruins and remnants of the most powerful (and still very influential) indigenous empire in history, I have also navigated the mechanics of the tourism industry here and perceived its well-hidden injustices. Lima > Paracas > Ayacucho > Andehuaylas > Cusco 264

We spent the afternoon trying to walk to the nature reserve, which is Paracas’s other main attraction. The town had obviously been designed to be as inaccessible to pedestrians as possible, in order to encourage us to pay for taxis. Amber and I were stubborn and sweltered under the hot sun for nearly an hour until we found a lovely set off hammocks on the edge of the reserve and decided we had come far enough. 265

On the Andean highways

From the coast to Ayacucho

Ready for some fresh mountain air, we took an evening bus from the junction of Hwy 24A, bound inland. The ride felt like a roller coaster in the dark with no seatbelts and my PTS from my car accident in India made me almost lose it. Thankfully, Amber was there to hold my hand and I kept my eyes closed, listened to Bon Iver, and breathed deeply. We reached Ayacucho, a small mountain town famous for housing the Shining Path terrorist group in the 1980s, at midnight. The next morning we explored the city center, witnessed a school parade and a church service, and filled up on goodies at the local market. At noon, we hopped on a combi (a large van, which the locals prefer to the larger and more expensive buses). Amber and I sat in the front, hip-to-hip with the driver, and watched the Andes go by. It was one of the most beautiful rides I have ever been on: I felt like I was in a hybrid Rusted Root and Sigur Ros music video. By evening, we were in the town of Andehuaylas and decided to spend the night to recuperate some hours of lost sleep. Another 3 am wake-up call and Amber and I were back on the highway, waiting for the promised 3:30 am bus to show up. An hour of uncomfortable interactions with taxi drivers and drunks later, our bus came. We were so grateful for its appearance and to be on our last leg to the Sacred Valley, 266

From Andehuaylas to Cusco 267

Cuscoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Plaza de Armas

Map of central Cusco 268

From the steps of la Catedral de Cusco 269

that we didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even mind sitting in the very back (and most turbulent) row. Another perilous 12-hour bus-ride brought us into the gleaming city of Cusco. We couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have been happier! After only two nights to explore Cusco, we headed out at 3 am to begin the five-day Salkantay Trek. The trek, which runs an impressive 90 km and 7000 meter cumulative elevation change, traverses some of the most incredible mountains and valleys around the Sacred Valley. It culminated at Machu Picchu, which after all the grand vistas we had experienced throughout the week, left us less impressed than we thought we would be. After Amber left last week, I had the chance to explore four other Inca ruins in the Sacred Valley: Ollantaytambo, Saksayhuaman, Chinchero, and Moray. It was incredible to see the sites during low-tourist season. The grandness of the ruins, void of humans, made them seem eerie and I felt a wave of nostalgia for this civilization that I would never have the privilege to know. It was also fascinating to see how effected the communities around the ruins have been. Almost everyone is involved in the tourism industry now: women line the streets selling textiles and trinkets, men beckon you into storefronts selling pottery, and every shop is either a travel agency or bourgeois restaurant. I wonder how quickly these communities fell into the cash economy and how it has impacted their culture, diets, and general stability.

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Soraypampa mountains

Road down to Challway and drinking mate in the tent

Yoga at Soraypampa and the Salkantay Pass

Santa Teresa Hotsprings and the neighboring hydroelectric dam

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Hiking on the railroad to Machu Picchu and map of the ruins

Machu Picchu in the morning 274

Amber napping in the ruins 275

Salt mines in the Sacred Valley 276

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Details of water temple at Ollantaytambo 280

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Gate at Saksayhuaman 282

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Natural-built environment nexus in Saksayhuaman 284

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Catholic church built upon Incan stone ruins

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Moray terraces 288

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ON AN ISLAND IN THE SUN December 18, 2014 I land on an island coast Where the only souls I see are ghosts I run through wooded isle And chase the sunlight mile after mile. And I feel like I know this place As a tree line breaks in a wide open space I stare at a bright red sun And search all day, never find anyone. -Excerpt from Lord Huron´s “Lonesome Dreams” Romanticizing Island Life The notion of an island (isolated paradise) has captured the hearts and minds of societies for thousands of years. People the world over have obsessed over them, creating romanticized dramas of an island lifestyle many could have only ever imagined (The Tempest, Gulliver´s Travels, Lord of the Flies, Treasure Island, Atlantis, Robinson Crusoe, the list goes on…) Today, island living (the kind we have fantasized about for generations) is easily within reach (at least for those with money and time on their hands). In 2014, 21.5 million people set off on cruise ships and 91 million on flights, bound for remote destinations like Fiji, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Bali, Mallorca, the Maldives, etc. Here, honeymooners, spring breakers, retirees, and families come for respite from their chaotic lives on the mainland. They lounge under palm fronds by the ocean or in the comfort of poolside cabanas. They sip expensive cocktails and rage on sandy beaches until the wee hours of the morning. And they take advantage of low exchange rates by stocking up on collectibles at the local markets. Sounds like paradise, doesn’t it? (Note: if your idea of the ultimate getaway is getting drunk on the beach every night and perfecting your tan, we probably won’t be good friends). Beyond the hype of the tourism industry, islands exist universally as homes and lifelines for one in ten people. Many are geographically isolated, which forced inhabitants at one point to develop self-sufficient economies and unique cultural traditions. Today, these island societies are amongst the most threatened by climate change and globalization. Take for example the atoll nations of Kirabati, Tokelau and Tuvalu, where expected sea level rise will render the islands uninhabitable in less than 50 years. Inhabitants are already facing difficulties with the salination of their freshwater supplies, coral bleaching, and stronger cyclones. Moving to Japan or New Zealand (two countries that have agreed to accept refugees) will not only set them back in very competitive economic environments, it will also all but destroy their cultural identity, which was so attached to their land. (A friend of mine published a really interesting article on the subject of climate refugees, which you should definitely check out for a more nuanced understanding of this issue). 294

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Livelihood Insecurity on Amantani As important a topic as it is, this post is not dedicated to the most “threatened” island societies on the planet. It is intended to provide you a better picture of life on an island in the world´s largest navigable lake. Lake Titicaca fills a valley high in the Andes between Peru and Bolivia. It´s shores have been inhabited for 10,000 years, first by smaller tribes and later by the Incas. In the 1400s, population pressures along the shores of the lake forced some groups to seek territories on the lake body, itself. Some agrarian communities formed on the islands of Amantani, Taquile, Isla del Sol, Isla de la Luna, and Suriqui. Others innovated artificial islands from reeds, known as Uros, from which they could fish. Many of the islands were abandoned leading up to Spanish Conquest, which allowed the Spaniards to assume land rights and bring in “Quechua-speaking natives” from the mainland to work the agricultural terraces. Amantani Island was thus “officially” settled in the late-1500s. After several decades, families of the original servants on the island purchased plots and were able to sustain themselves on staples such as: quinoa, wheat, potatoes, vegetables, livestock, and fish. While trips to the mainland weren´t uncommon, the people of Amantani were self-sufficient in their food production and infrastructure. Today, Amantani has a population of just over 4000 people, distributed amongst ten communities around the perimeter of the 9.28 sq km landmass. It is no longer the self-sufficient, isolated island of tranquility that it was once heralded as. These days it serves as a major attraction for tourists passing through the Peru-Bolivian frontera. Almost all families on the island have partnered with one of the dozen Puno-based tour companies and each gets a stipend to host a group of tourists every three weeks or so. This system is what enabled me to come to the island and live with a family (however, while most tour companies shuffle groups through in two days, I chose to spend a few extra days with my host family, to see what life was like after the hype of the tour group´s presence in the community had subsided). I stayed with a family of five: the mother, Emerenciana; the father, Emilio; the oldest daughter, Marialena (age 17), and the youngest daughter, Yeni (age 7) (the oldest son works in Lima and comes home once a year for Christmas). They live in a beautiful adobe house surrounded by just almost an acre of fields, overlooking the lake. Their house is about fifteen years old, but they built an addition above the main living area several years ago, in order to accommodate tourists with the homestay program. When I was there, there was still no running water (a service that the island planning committee had been developing) so Emerenciana used water from the rain barrels for washing and drinking. The girls were at school most days and Emilio was next-door, helping with the construction of his uncle´s house (traditional adobe construction!). So I shadowed Emerenciana around the property as she milked the cow, shepherded the sheep, spooled yarn, and prepared our meals. She taught me a lot, not only about traditional Amantani culture, but also about how their lives had changed in the last thirty years. Below is the summary of my conversations with her: For the most part, I think the opening of Amantani´s ports to tourists has been a positive, welcome (and inevitable) development. If you asked most people on the island if they think tourism has been a good thing, they would say “YES!” It´s their only income stream and will probably be the only source 296

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View from my room on Amantani Island

of income for generations to come (when I asked Emereciana what she wished for her daughter´s future, she said she hoped she would stay on the island and make handicrafts to sell to tourists). It keeps people continuing (hopefully not falsefully embellishing) their local way of life. But there are negative impacts: higher resource demands have depleted fisheries, freshwater supply, and polluted both land and water. Prices of processed goods and transport have gone up. And as the outside world percolates through, the islanders are beginning to see what life could be like away from the island. Young people are starting to dream of leaving, of going to university and getting a job in a far-off city. Whether or not their parents will be able to support them in doing this is entirely up to their earnings through tourism. It is truly a double-edged sword: “Come experience our lives on Amananti so that we might one day be able to – for all intents and purposes – abandon our culture and move to the city.” Is this okay? Regardless, it´s happening.

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Details around the house

Emerenciania cooking 304

Yeni infront of the house 305

Process of building a mud-brick house

Architectural details around the house 306

The top of Amantani at sunset 307

Process of making mud-bricks 308

Prayer stones for Pachamama 309

Pachamama arch 310

Portrait of Cholita on Amantani 311

Islas de Oros housing typology

Descending Pachamama on Amantani 312

Details on Islas de Oros 313

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this free ticket to roam the globe at their leisure, while others must sneak across rivers and chainlinked fences at night just to put food on their family´s table. Furthermore, I only see this duality intensifying as more international marriages lead to children with multiple passports and heightened border disputes lead to taller, thicker walls. As much as I wish they did not, borders shape people’s lives, livelihoods, and happiness. The border between Peru and Bolivia cuts right across Lake Titicaca, a territory that was inhabited by the same indigenous groups for several thousand years. But for those born on opposite sides of the border today, life could not be more different. The average life expectancy for a newborn on the Peruvian side of the border is five years longer than for a newborn on the Bolivian side. And while there is a 3-in-10 chance that the Peruvian child has been born into poverty, the chances are nearly 5-in-10 for the Bolivian child. The World Bank statistics for both countries may not be the most uplifting (or accurately calculated), but they do shed light on the economic and social disparities between the two countries. Housing and Livelihood Insecurity in Bolivia

Details around La Paz

BOLIVIA’S INFORMAL ECONOMY December 23, 2014 I had not originally planned to go to Bolivia. It seemed too overwhelming to try to absorb in the two weeks I had left in the Andes (before heading to Iquitos to celebrate the holidays with my family). But the closer I came to its border, the more drawn I was to cross over and explore. National borders have always affected me in this weird, psychologically taunting way. They are, after all, usually arbitrary and invisible membranes between political spheres. They cut. They block. They incite wars and instill national pride. They fabricate different identities for people who may have had the same ancestry, customs, and language for thousands of years. I will never be able to understand what it feels like to be geographically cut off from a part of my heritage. I have three passports (Australia, EU, and USA), which cumulatively allow me visa-free entry into half the countries in the world. It seems incredibly unfair to me that some people are born with 316

Bolivia ranks near the bottom of Latin American countries on the 2014 Human Development Report. Like most developing countries, it is experiencing rapid rural-to-urban transition (at a rate of 2.18% per year), as a consequence of climate change and youth outmigration. Of the 66% of Bolivians living in urban areas, 61% live in slums without access to basic services. Housing, as I have stressed in earlier posts, is the keystone for securing gainful employment, access to social services like clinics and legal representation, and good education. The fact that more than half of urban Bolivians lack this human right explains many of the other social challenges plaguing Bolivia, including employment insecurity and water-related disease. I spent my first week in Bolivia in El Alto, the twin city to La Paz, with my friend Franz to learn more about urban housing insecurity. Franz is an incredibly driven nuclear engineering student (my age) who has been making it on his own in El Alto since he was seventeen. His parents live hours away in Bolivia´s lowlands and while he has extended family scattered across the city, I could tell that he was receiving little support from them. In fact, he was taking time out of his busy schedule every day that I was there to take care of them (cooking, mediating legal battles, providing emotional support, etc.). Franz is one of the 414,300 people in El Alto living in insecure housing. That doesn´t mean that his roof is caving in or that he may be forcefully evicted tomorrow. Franz is living in a half-constructed house his uncle (who lives across the street) built and never completed a couple years ago. It has no insulation and a continuous draft from the open stairwell causes Franz and the other boys who fade in and out of the spare bedrooms to develop frequent colds. The property has limited running water and electricity, which is a sign that Franz´s uncle did obtain permits during its construction. However, many of the homes around Franz´s are much more informal and almost all seem to be “under construction”. What makes Franz´s situation the most “insecure” is his distance from the city center. Most growth in El Alto (since it isn´t limited for space) is happening horizontally. This means that as people immigrate into the city from rural areas, particularly young people for work or studying, they are forced into the outer boroughs. It takes Franz over an hour to get to university, thirty minutes to get to the market, and twenty minutes to get to an internet center (on various buses and for a total of about 10 Bolivianos per day, which is the amount of money you would need to buy a nice chicken fillet with 317

Views from Franzâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s balcony

rice, pasta, and potatoes). The amount of time and money that he (and most residents of El Alto) expends is a huge inhibitor of his upward social mobility. I know Franz is going to succeed because he has the drive and intelligence to complete his studies. But many of the young men his age whom I met do not. Many are picking up their fathersÂ´ bad habits and careers in the informal economy (selling coca and other illegal narcotics). Franz painted a beautiful picture for me of what El Alto could look like someday. But there is a lot of work to be done. During my week in El Alto, I got to interview the communications manager at Red Habitat, an organization working to promote and realize peoplesÂ´ rights to the city, housing and environment. It was useful to hear her perspective on housing and development in El Alto at the same time that I was living it (translated from Spanish so some nuance may be lost): Housing insecurity is an issue all over the world. What distinguishes the problems here in Bolivia from other places? 318

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Franz’s uncle in his rooftop factory in La Paz

Bolivia´s rate of urbanization is quite high so one of the biggest challenges is keeping up with this transition. Political instability is also a major issue, as it slows positive work from being completed on an institutional level. One unique part of the issue here in Bolivia is peoples ‘attitudes towards their home. People (at every income level and from every ethnic group) value having a nice home over buying a car, paying hospital bills, etc. So even families with little money will spend all they have to construct their houses with good materials. You don´t see this in countries like Peru, where people will build their homes haphazardly, out of anything they can get their hands on. How do you assure that housing projects being constructed will have access to basic urban services like potable water, vehicular access, and electricity? It´s hard, since our government is so poor and most social and humanitarian donations go towards rural development projects. People here have to wait for years sometimes to hook their homes (which they constructed themselves) up to basic services. This is especially true in the far reaches of El Alto and La Paz. It is also challenging because many homes being constructed are not licensed. Families 320

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created space for the establishment of non-profit humanitarian organizations like Red Habitat. At that time, only fifty percent of the population lived in cities but it was the turning point for rapid and chaotic urban economic and physical growth. In what way do you think climate change is complicating life for low-income people in cities? In rural areas? All of the freshwater in La Paz state comes from glaciers. These are already nearly gone at the end of every summer and in 20 years will have melted completely. It is also raining in months that it shouldn´t and dry when we need the rain most. There is no culture here around saving water and that is the greatest challenge we have. We need to teach people about water conservation, greywater recycling, and rainwater harvesting in cities and rural areas. What are the major causes of rural-to-urban transition here and what are the social consequences? Climate change is the biggest factor of rural-to-urban transition. Farmers are struggling with drought and irregular rainy seasons so they move to the cities to find informal work. Youth are also leaving their villages for better opportunities. So not only do you have a huge influx of people coming to cities like El Alto, they´re also all poor, which puts more strain on services. It also changes urban culture; there´s a depressed aura to the city because of the concentrated poverty, crowding, and competition. Traditional customs that were kept alive in villages are also lost when people move to the cities. What do you think about “La Paz Maravillosa” and the seven marvelous cities of the world? Do you think it is accurate? How do you think it will influence the work Red Habitat is doing? Franz’s uncle’s home in the hills above La Paz

do not understand their rights and duties when it comes to housing and therefore cannot speed up the process of accessing basic services. Which demographic(s) do you think have the greatest difficulty obtaining quality housing? Single mothers are definitely the most housing insecure. Sixteen percent of mothers in Bolivia are single and 70% of them struggle to secure safe, affordable housing. This figure has grown in recent years as more women are realizing they can leave abusive or failing relationships and be self-sufficient. What was the sociopolitical climate when Red Habitat was founded? Why 1991? 1991 marked the tenth year of democracy in Bolivia. But weak leadership and economic mismanagement in the early 1980s led to a disastrous economic crisis, massive unemployment, and high poverty levels. Reforms in the early 1990s spurred private investment, stimulated economic growth, and 322

How can La Paz be marvelous when there are still so many problems? But it is a sign that the urban landscape here is changing rapidly and that´s something the rest of the world is picking up on. I think this award will force politicians to improve services like trash pickup and road infrastructure, as well as enforce stronger bans on air pollution and crime. Tourism will also continue increasing, which will improve the economy. I truly think La Paz (and Bolivia) has the capacity to be marvelous. We just need more time. But it will take more than just the tourism industry and public investment in social services to uplift the 4.9 million Peruvians living below the poverty line. Bolivian society is highly racialized, and one´s indigenous identity drastically impacts one´s ability to succeed in Bolivia. Indigenous Identity and Chronic Poverty Indigeneity is a highly complex and very sensitive subject in Bolivia and it obviously plays into urban and rural housing and livelihood insecurity. According to the UNDP, 62% of Bolivia´s population is indigenous which is the highest in Latin America. Another 30% of the population is mestizo, or mixed, and 15% is white. If you look at poverty rates by race, 60% of the indigenous community falls under the poverty line, as opposed to only 20% of the white community. Franz told me quite bluntly that because their surnames reveal both parents´ racial lineages, people with even one “indigenous” surname are heavily discriminated against in school and job applications. But nobody talks about it. 323

poverty and find long-term employment. The streets of El Alto were a powerful example of the cut-throat climate of the informal economy. Here, street vending is the primary mode of revenue for people and they are in your face, as their lives literally depend on it. I wanted to see what the informal economy looked like for indigenous communities still living outside Bolivia´s urban centers. So I went down to Potosi, a small mining town about ten hours by bus southeast of La Paz. The Spaniards first discovered silver in Cerro Rico Mountain, whose dilapidated shape now barely casts a shadow over Potosi, in 1545. Using indigenous slave labor, they mined thousands of tons of silver for export back to Europe. Potosi´s silver mines were nearly exhausted by the time Bolivia achieved its independence in 1825. But mining was all people in Potosi had ever known. So many continued, under state-run mining operations, to dig for zinc, tin, and any other metal they could get their hands on. When Bolivia liberalized it´s economy in the early 1990s, it abandoned its state-run mines and the Cerro Rico Mountain became a free-for-all for anyone desperate enough. This is the side of the informal economy you rarely get to see; men and boys toiling 80 meters below the earth in oxygen-weak, dusty, 40°C crevices. They work over 12 hours a day, making barely 100 Bolivianos (14.50 USD), to produce 10 tons of metal that they´ll sell to rich northern companies, who will then profit enormously on the global market. Cultural Survival describes the working conditions well. It was a really humbling and incredibly heart-wrenching experience to enter the mines and meet the 14-year-old boys and 30-year-old men (who I knew statistically wouldn´t live another ten years) extracting the metal that likely goes into the electronics I´m able to afford at home. They, like almost everyone I met whose livelihood depends on the informal economy, seemed so resigned with the cards they had been dealt. Outside silver mine in Potosi

Racial oppression and Bolivia´s informal economy are directly related. Nico Tassi, an activist from La Paz explains this well: “In Bolivia, the constitution of the republican state was based on the alliance between the bureaucratic apparatus and the enlightened ruling classes of Spanish descent to the point that the state became a tool to further the economic interests of a small sector of the population and maintain a regime of exploitation of the indigenous majority (Zavaleta, 1986; Macgaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga, 2000). In other words, the state became the instrument that granted the participation in the formal economy to a small group of enlightened citizens (Soto, 1987) while forcing the rest of the population to operate their economic activities in the absence of a regulatory frame.” (Excerpt from “Informal Economy Bolivian Style”) For over twenty years – since the economic “liberalization” and privatization in the 1990s that favored the while elite – most indigenous and mestizo Bolivians depend entirely on the informal economy for their livelihoods. The problem with informal employment is that it is small-scale, impermanent, and hand-to-mouth in nature. It does not provide families with security or the means to escape 324

Unlike in Borneo, indigenous people here seem less enthused to fight for the implementation of indigenous rights. I think an important step to addressing housing and livelihood insecurity (which, needless to say, is endemic in Bolivia´s indigenous populations) is to initiate comprehensive intercultural dialogue and agreements on plural coexistence. Indigenous people also need to understand their rights: to education, public services, and to a life that does not include selling coca on the street or tin to northern markets. The dialogue is beginning with organizations like Red Habitat, Central de Pueblos Indígenas de La Paz, and CARE Bolivia. But there´s still a lot of change to be made at all levels of Bolivian society. Further Reading: Chua, Amy. World on fire: How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability. Random House LLC, 2004. Kolh, B. (2003). Democratizing Decentralization in Bolivia: The Law of Popular Participation. Journal of Planning Education and Research 23:153-164. Lazar, S. (2009). El Alto, Rebel City: Self and Citizenship in Andean Bolivia. Cornell University ILR School under the Industrial & Labor Relations Review, Vol. 62, No. 3: Ithaca, NY. 325

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Woman sitting in the Plaza de Armas in Potosi 327

Walking towards the church in Potosi 328

Square in Potosi 329

Crowd by the bank in Uyuni

Driving out to the salt flats of Uyuni

Abandoned traincars in Uyuni

A cave in the flats

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Map of Angamos, the military outpost accessible weekly from Iquitos by float plane 336

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Self-built home with locally sourced materials (L) next to a governmnet-built home (R)

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Silvia (24) and mother Maria Jimenez

William and Wagner

Zaqueo (25) and father Antonio Jimenez

Erik and Beatrice

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Maria cutting sugar cane; Antonio fitting Erik with a headband

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Twush, the lost parrot chick

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TREKKING ACROSS THE MATSES RESERVE January 27, 2015 On Thursday evening, I returned from an incredibly fulfilling experience in Nuevo San Juan, a Matses village of about 40 people. My arrival in San Juan had been delayed nearly a week, first because contacting my host in San Juan took several visits to the local radio station. Second, because the rural flight service, operated by the military, kept being cancelled because of inclement weather. My glee upon landing in Angamos, the military colony on the Peruvian-Brazilian frontier, was boundless. Only a seven hour longboat-ride up the Rio Galvez separated me from my new home for the next three weeks. I couldn’t have imagined a more frustrating, challenging, and ultimately rewarding journey. But of course, the universe always finds a way to push us to the very limits of our potential. When I was celebrating my victory on the banks of San Juan that January 2nd, I had no way of knowing that the hardest part of my trip would be the journey back. 432

Last Monday morning, my host family and I packed the longboat full of plantains, yucca, backpacks, and eight people (somehow it still managed to float), and set off on the trip downriver to Angamos. Four of Antonion’s children planned on joining me the next day on the flight back to Iquitos. I was surprised to see Zaqueo and his brother Aquiles waiting for us when we arrived at Antonio’s river house in Angamos. They had left San Juan last week, expecting to fly back to Iquitos on Thursday. Apparently inconsistent flights for the past month had generated a waiting list of about 60 people, all anxiously sitting around in Angamos trying to get to Iquitos. It was very unlikely we would be able to leave that week, Zaqueo explained, unless we bribed the coordinator. That evening we received more bad news. All rural flights were being cancelled that week because of the President of Peru’s visit to Iquitos. Apparently the military pilots needed to be present for the events. This left us with two options: wait for two plus weeks in Angamos (a cestpool of stink and sandflies) or walk back to Iquitos. Now there were seven of us who needed to return to Iquitos and none of us fancied siting around in Angamos. So as quickly as we’d come, the next morning we loaded up with more fuel and returned back upriver. 433

We dropped Maria (Antonio’s youngest wife), Erick and Paulo (the children) off in San Juan and continued upstream into the Cebrada Romoyacu. It rained heavily the whole day and everyone save for Zaqueo, who was driving the boat, was huddled under blue tarps. By 9 pm, I was hungry, soaking wet, and stiff from sitting in the same position for 15 hours. Sometime later we finally pulled up at a bank and stumbled our way up to a campsite with raised open-air shelters. I didn’t sleep well; the moisture was bone-chilling. Antonio woke us up at 3:30 am and we jumped back on the boat and covered ourselves with blue tarps again as the rain was relentless. At 11, we reached the trailhead of the carretera (note: “carretera” means highway in Spanish and I’m pretty sure this was someone’s idea of a joke because you would hardly call it a hiking trail let alone a navigable road). I said a tearful goodbye to Antonio and set off with Silvia, Zaqueo, Romer, Aquiles, William, and Wagner into the rainy abyss of the jungle. We walked for five hours through muddy swamps, across rotting logs, and up and down slick hills. Three things kept me sane: 434

1. The rain was a blessing because it kept me cool. 2. 2. I was pleased to be sporting my “Adidas Kampong”, the $3 Malaysian rubber shoes that my Orang Ulu friends use in Borneo’s jungles. They have grips on the soles that provide great support for navigating muddy slopes. 3. 3. I was also thankful for the support and guidance of my matses siblings, who knew what was under every log and stone. They helped me across at least thirty slick log bridges that first day and offered to carry my pack (which I refused out of pride). At 4 pm, we reached the camp where we would spend the night. I felt like I was one of the characters in The Boxcar Children, coming across an abandoned house and farm in the middle of the forest. Within ten minutes, Silvia had dug up enough yucca to feed an army and the boys had a raging fire going. I bathed in the river and dressed my infected finger, which had become progressively more inflamed throughout the day. By sunset, we were all under our mosquito nets and sleeping soundly. At 2 am we were up and moving, with the goal of reaching the town of Requena by 12 to catch the boat back to Iquitos. My headlamp’s batteries had died so I walked closely behind William for the 435

first three hours of darkness, trying my best not to trip, slip, or fall. At one point we were crossing a river when the rotting log we were on collapsed. We fell almost three meters down into the water below and somehow managed to emerge without any major injuries. I soon became incredibly dehydrated (my Achilles heel; if you know me well, you know how cranky I get without enough water). But I felt like I couldn’t stop; my companions were like machines, each carrying 20 kg packs and practically running the carretera without pause. At one point I was crossing a stream, slipped, and realized in that moment how nice it was to just be still. I took my filter straw out of the top pocket of my backpack and sat for a good five minutes on a submerged log in the middle of the stream, sipping straight out of the water. Over the period of 10 hours we trekked nearly 35 km, crossing at least fifty streams, walking through swamps with water up to our chests, and practically running up 60 degree slopes. Every part of me ached: my knees, feet, head, and back. But I kept going. If the Matses could do it carrying 20 kg packs, I could at least try my best with my 5 kg. 436

We finally reached the main road and blissfully bathed in a roadside stream and changed out of our drenched and muddy clothes. We walked the last kilometer to Requena and took motocarros to the port. A three hour boat ride and two-hour taxi-ride later, I was back at my hostel, about ready to collapse. Thinking back to how challenging this journey was for me, I can’t imagine what it would be like to travel back and forth between the reserve and Iquitos solely via the carretera. The rural flight service, while inconsistent and expensive (200 S/ or $68 each way), is definitely a lifesaver for Matses who have to split their time between the city and their village (for work, medical, or familial reasons). But I am also left disillusioned by the flight service as it so blatantly makes it’s rural, indigenous patrons its last priority. Pilots often choose to just not show up for the twice-weekly flights, generating long delays and backups. When this happens, or when flights are cancelled due to inclement weather, foreigners and businessmen are easily able to spend an extra 40 S/ on bribes to guarantee seats on the 18-person passenger planes. This option is not available to most Matses clients, who generally generate less income. 437

had been recommended to me by someone at SPROG (Sierra Club’s summer training program for youth organizers). I remember reading and thinking, wow this book was written in 1971 and the picture it painted of American society looksalmost identical today. I have since read it five times. Every time I have been at a different place in my organizing and it teaches me something new. Rules for Radicals and Alinsky’s approach to grassroots organizing has shaped America in various ways over the last forty years. It has empowered marginalized low-income communities of color in cities like Chicago and Rochester. It has guided young organizers in all sorts of social and environmental movements. It was a major influence for Barack Obama, who was trained as a community organizer in Chicago. And I found out last spring as I was perusing the thesis archives at Wellesley College, that Hilary Clinton wrote her honors thesis on the Alinsky model of activism! It’s a fun and engrossing book that comments more on human nature and ethics than anything else and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in understanding the changes (or lack thereof) in modern democratic societies. One idea really struck me in my re-reading this time: generational amnesia. I had had several conversations before leaving for the jungle with travelers who believed that the twenty-first century marked an unprecedented shift in collective human consciousness. “We are waking up”, they said, “finally”. I had heard this from young people (people my age) before and while it’s nice to believe that a paradigm shift is upon us, I think that for the most part it is a load of BS. If Alinsky were alive today, I think he would agree with me. In his prologue, he explains: “What the current generation wants is what all generations have always wanted: a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are, a chance to strive for some sort of order.” The issues that community organizers are focused on today are not dissimilar to the issues our parents´ generation were concerned with (environmental protection, civil rights, war, corruption, corporate hegemony, etc.).

RACISM, RESOLUTIONS, AND RULES FOR RADICALS February 2, 2015 Re-Reading the Rules One of the most amazing parts of my Watson Fellowship is the time it has allowed me to read and reflect. Like most college students, I had had so many readings assigned to me that by the end of the day I was too tired to do any reading “just for fun”. The most I could manage were a couple stanzas of Maya Angelou or on worse nights, the news. I (very impractically) packed an entire backpack of books for this journey. Sketchbooks, notebooks, language books (as if I were actually going to attempt to learn Ethiopian Amharic out of a book!!), and five of my all-time favorite reads. Among them was Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, which I finally pulled out one night in the jungle and read cover to cover, curled up in my hammock. I first read Rules for Radicals when I was sixteen. It was the start of my “activism career” and the book 438

The critical difference today is the technology at our fingertips that both magnifies the problems and can (if used properly) facilitate the revolutions needed to address them. Alinsky points out that communication is the most fundamental component of activism. Yet today, more than ever we lack the critical ability to talk face-to-face with friends and enemies, alike. We have become reliant on virtual realm to express opinions. We have no problem calling people out on injustice, political incompetence, etc. online, but it has in many ways become harder for us to do it in person. I’m not talking about rallying in the streets, as Alinsky himself points out how unimaginative and potentially polarizing this tactic is. I’m talking about real, face-to-face, eye-to-eye, compassionate confrontation. This communication problem amongst millennial activists is something I have only recently become conscientious of, in part because a huge change swept over me in college that caused me to shy away from being vocal about issues I was passionate about. I had always been a loud-mouth, both in the classroom and on the playground. I spoke up when I didn’t understand why something was being done in a particular way or if I thought something was unfair. But the combination of studying in a very competitive college environment and spending substantial time in countries where I felt obliged to adopt the docile, unopinionated female persona had stolen my confidence. For the first time ever, I dreaded being in front of an audience and I avoided rallies and similar types of confrontation like 439

the plague. I was self-conscious: of saying the wrong thing, of not articulating myself properly, of not being liked. The rude awakening of graduating from college and being hurled into a fellowship that demands my voice and confidence has helped me get over my self-doubts. No longer am I in the theoretical and safe world of academia. Furthermore, I realized that my education, travel and diverse cultural experiences privileged me to go out and get real sh*t done. In some ways, though, I am still hiding behind the safety of my computer screen. This blog is case-inpoint. The other day I witnessed some really explicit racism and rather than confronting it right there, I told myself, you’ll just make enemies of the offender (whose opinions and actions will not change by being yelled at) and embarrass the victims. Better to gather your composure and your words and share your experience in a realm where more people can learn from it. While I still plan to do that here, I also want my readers to know that I am really trying to push myself to confront racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice face-on. It’s one of my intentions for this year and I think it’s a big step all millennials need to take if they’re serious about inciting sweeping social change. Whites Only It may have just as well been pasted on the front door of my hostel. I hadn’t really considered it before it was laid out to me so explicitly last Saturday. But that’s racial hegemony for you: those who benefit from it never have to question it because it feels normal. I had returned from the Matses Reserve on Thursday, having forked out the extra $15 for the fast boat. My six Matses siblings waited for the cheaper slow boat that would depart from Requena the next day, dropping them off in Iquitos on Saturday morning. Naturally, they would be needing somewhere to stay for the two weeks they were in town and I suggested my hostel. For $8 a night, you got a bed in a shared room, breakfast, wi-fi, hot showers, and an unobstructed view of the Amazon River. The staff, whom I had gotten to know more personally during a charity event in mid-December, were also lovely and super helpful… That is until my Matses siblings came to the door on Saturday looking for a room. “No hay espacio”, Marcel said with a smile on his face to my six weary friends. What do you mean there’s no space? A bunch of people left this morning and it’s low-season, I thought to myself. I told my friends to wait a minute and I would talk to Marcel personally. “Si no hoy, posible mañana?” I asked him. “Mayrah,” he leaned in close. “La cosa es que no podemos aceptar esta tipa de persona. Podrían robar los otros clientes.” Translation: the thing is, we can’t accept this type of person. They could rob the other clients.

I spent the rest of the day considering my course of action. I had to confront the issue somehow. I recounted what had happened to several guests in the hostel and messaged a couple people from home. Some suggested I make a scene and leave dramatically out of principle. Others told me to pause and consider why the hostel had this policy: maybe locals (darker-skinned) had stolen things repeatedly in the past. I knew, regardless if this was the case, that criminalizing an entire ethnicity was unjust and inhumane. I thought back to all the times stuff has been stolen from me: food at that hostel, my iPod at Wellesley, my wetsuit at a yacht club… Every time the perpetrator was a white, rich kid. And this is not because I only surround myself by this demographic of people. I’ve spent time in slums in the US, India, Europe, Malaysia, and Bolivia. I usually take the cheapest mode of transportation when I travel (which tends to be alongside POC, since race and economic status sadly correlate). And I have never been robbed by a POC. This isn’t to say that POC don’t steal. That’s as stupid as saying white people don’t steal. Fact: people steal when they want something and they think they can get away with it. This applies just as much to that WASPY wolf on Wallstreet as it does to that unemployed black man in the downtown-Detroit convenient store. This is where I was coming from. But I realized that I could yell and stomp as much as I wanted in front of Marcel for the last three days that I was there and he probably wouldn’t change his mind. He was coming from the same place that a third of Peru was coming from. He, like so many people I had met on my travels here, had been socialized to accept an ethnic hierarchy that criminalizes, oppresses, and prejudices POC (or indigenous people, since most POC are the native people of the region). I brought the subject up with him later and asked him if he had any personal experience with local people stealing from the hostel. He said he had not but that the hostel franchize had implemented the rule to create a more international vibe. This was definitely a battle for someone else, some other time. My experience as a third-party observer of prejudice against the Matses was limited to this one incident. But there are undoubtedly other forms of oppression my siblings experience on a day-to-day basis in the city. Being refused service in business, being perceived as illiterate, being politically sidelined because of their unimportance to local politicans, etc. Even as a young person and a woman, I have never had to deal with such a continuous stream of attitudes and actions against me. Today I am thankful for the body, family, and country that I was born into. But I hope one day that I do not have to be. And I will strive my best as an ally, artist, storyteller, designer, and organizer to see the day when all people have equal opportunity to live a happy and secure life.

Insinuation: we are racist and believe that people of color (POC) will rob foreigners. I was speechless. Fuming, I spun around and walked back towards the door, where my friends were still standing. I took a deep breath and considered my options. Telling them the truth would be so painful, not just for me, but for them as well. I decided to continue the “white” lie and suggest we walk down the block to another hostel and have them check in there. 440

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ENDING MY SECOND CHAPTER February 4, 2015 I have many people to thank for these past three months, whom I will list in the order that I met them. Everyone included in this list is welcome to use any piece of my digitalized visual journal as long as its use is inline with the mission of my work. All others must seek written permission from me, as these images are copywrited (please email mayrah.udvardi@gmail.com for more information). The Watson Fellowship for funding this project; Jorge for first introducing me to PeruÂ´s many facets; Amber for being such a supportive friend and travel companion in the Altiplano; Nestor for teaching me about local livelihood issues in the Sacred Valley; Artur Marcinkiewicz and the staff at Le Soleil for the opportunity to work and learn about French (and Peruvian) food culture and ingredient sourcing; Carlos and Siwar for introducing me to local CusceĂąan culture and helping me celebrate my last week in Peru; Emerenciania and her beautiful family on Amantani Island for hosting me; Franz, Sally, Phyllis, and other friends in El Alto for their teachings and company; Red Habitat for providing me with information on housing security issues in Bolivia; the miners I met in Potosi for their smiles in spite of struggle and hardship; Frankito for hosting me in Arequipa; Marcel, John, and other staff at Flying Dog in Iquitos for always having my back; my family for coming to Peru and resupplying me with materials, love, and commitment to my project; Zuzane, Jerek, Merav, and Brian for helping me celebrate the New Year in Iquitos; Bill and Christina at EcoOla for making my trip to visit the Matses possible; and last, but most importantly, my Matses family for their love, knowledge, and unbouding generocity! This evening I fly to Addis Ababa to begin the next leg of this incredible adventure. Check back in next week to learn about GM and sustainable agriculture in the context of Ethiopia! 442

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Women selling potatoes in Mercato, Africaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest open-air market

Addis Ababa skyline

Streetlife around Addis Ababa

Typical pastoral temporary shelter on display in the Ethnographic Museum of Ethiopia

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LIVELIHOOD SECURITY, SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE, AND BIOTECHNOLOGY IN TIGRAY, ETHIOPIA (PART 1) February 14, 2015 Greetings from Tigray, the northern-most province of Ethiopia where I will be exploring indigenous housing and livelihood security for the next three weeks! It has been an eight-year long dream of mine to come to these arid highlands. It began in a high school global studies class when I was fourteen. The class was assigned a term project to research a “global issue” and design a fundraiser to address it at a micro-scale. My team chose water insecurity and decided to focus our fundraiser on building clean-water infrastructure in Tigray, Ethiopia after a thorough analysis of the world’s most rapidly desertifying regions. We partnered with Water.org (known in 2007 as WaterPartners International) and, over the period of three months, independently raised $3300 to build a well in Geblen, Tigray. I know a lot more about NGO work and the beurocratic process of development and aid today than I did as a fourteen-year-old. I realize that the money we thought we were raising to build a well in Geblen may just have likely gone towards administrative expenses in the aid organization’s Kansas City office. I am not trekking to Geblen to find out, either. I want to study Geblen today for the same reasons I was interested in studying it eight years ago: to understand the impact of desertification and unjust development on a small farming community. Agriculture as Livelihood in Ethiopia’s Highlands Despite intensifying drought (caused by global climate change) and soil degradation (caused by overgrazing and deforestation), Ethiopia’s future rests on the growth of its agricultural economy. Today, its agricultural sector accounts for nearly 50% of the country’s GDP, 84% of exports, and 80% of national employment. According to the World Bank, 86% of the country’s 94.1 million people lives in rural areas. In the south and west are over 15 million nomadic tribal pastoralists, who are facing the consequences of rising temperatures, dwindling water supplies, and population pressures. In the northern highlands, 27 million agriculturalists have come to rely on shrinking plots of cultivatable land to grow coffee, teff, and other cereals for consumption and income. Someone asked me the other day how this could be construed as an indigenous livelihood security issue. To answer this properly, we need to re-examine our working definition of what it means to be indigenous. In one of my first posts, “Discursive Rise of Indigeneity in the Context of Sarawak, Malaysia”, I explained how indigeneity implies a deeply felt and historically evidenced connection between a group of people and a place. To identify as indigenous, one must satisfy several requirements, the most important being: (1) persistence of a group or tribal identity and (2) the identification of a territory in which that group has historically subsisted prior to the birth of the modern nation-state. However, in Ethiopia many tribal communities still struggle to be formally recognized as indigenous. For example, the tribal pastoralists in the southern and western provinces of Ethiopia are seen as wanderers and have no “historical claim to any particular territory”. This conceptualization is of course a product of western liberalism, since modern land ownership is based on the idea of individual property rights (see my “Criticism for the Transnational Discourse on Indigeneity”). 454

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For agriculturalists in the northern highlands, the first requirement – the persistence of a group or tribal identity – is often less clear, which makes it challenging for them to gain indigenous status. While the nomadic tribes of the south have elaborate costumes and customs (preserved because of their rejection of modern, sedentary society), the agriculturalists of the north have largely adopted modern clothing, technology, and language, ridding them of a tribal aesthetic but not necessarily of a shared identity. I believe that many agrarian communities in Tigray (including Geblen) satisfy both definitory requirements and that their identification as indigenous can provide greater impetus for governing bodies to grant them rights and support that will make them more secure and resilient to environmental threats. This is why I am framing my study as an indigenous livelihood security analysis. But why should the Ethiopian government, or any government for that matter, care about indigenous rights in Ethiopia? Besides the fact that more than two-thirds of the country’s population can be classified as indigenous – a huge chunk of the political constituency – recognizing indigenous rights will facilitate the sustainable development of Ethiopia’s agricultural economy (as they are the largest contributors, recipients, and stakeholders). Yet there is no national legislation “mentioning or protecting the rights of indigenous peoples. Ethiopia has not ratified ILO Convention 169 and was absent during the voting on the UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).” Perhaps the Ethiopian government could not send delegates to the UNDRIP Convention because it was too preoccupied leasing millions of hectares agricultural land to foreign investors to develop (contracts that will supposedly ensure the country’s food security). I don’t want to get into a philosophical debate around solutions to ending food security today. I’ll save that for my next post, “Livelihood Security, Sustainable Agriculture, and Biotechnology in Tigray, Ethiopia (Part 2)”. For now I’ll leave you with a couple interesting articles related to Ethiopia’s current land development strategy, in case you’re thirsty for more: Azadi, Hossein, et al. “GM crops in Ethiopia: a realistic way to increase agricultural performance?.” Trends in biotechnology 29.1 (2011): 6-8. Guillozet, Kathleen. “Forest investments and channels of contestation in highland Ethiopia.” African Identities 12.1 (2014): 45-61. Mulleta, Fantu F., Pierre Merlet, and Johan Bastiaensen. “Questioning the “Regulatory Approach” to Large-Scale Agricultural Land Transfers in Ethiopia: A Legal Pluralistic Perspective.” Law and Development Review 7.2 (2014): 361-391. Pretty, Jules N., James IL Morison, and Rachel E. Hine. “Reducing food poverty by increasing agricultural sustainability in developing countries.” Agriculture, ecosystems & environment 95.1 (2003): 217-234. Stebek, Elias N. “Between ‘land grabs’ and agricultural investment: Land rent contracts with foreign investors and Ethiopia’s normative setting in focus.” Mizan law review 5.2 (2011): 175214.

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LIVELIHOOD SECURITY, SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE, AND BIOTECHNOLOGY IN TIGRAY, ETHIOPIA (PART 2) February 15, 2015 In the face of climate change, degraded ecosystems, globalizing markets, and a seemingly endless list of sociopolitical problems, how do we ensure Ethiopians benefit nutritionally and economically in a predominantly agricultural economy? Don’t get your hopes up – this post is not going to answer that question. In my last post, I wrote about the importance of identifying and prioritizing indigenous communities in a country whose future economy depends on the sustainable development of its agricultural sector. Focusing on agriculture and food security may seem at first far removed from my original objective of studying housing insecurity in Ethiopia’s highlands. If you have been keeping up with my posts, however, you will remember that housing insecurity can never be studied in isolation. To fully understand what makes a community spatially fragile one must examine housing in the context of food, health, environmental, economic, educational, transportation, and political security. In a society whose very foundation is built off of agriculture (and whose future depends on its sustainable development), the state of all of these livelihood indicators depends largely on the state of agriculture. The question I posed above is one that has been asked and answered thousands of times before in thousands of other contexts. In any question this loaded with potential agendas and ideologies, it is important to ask: Who is asking? Who is acting? Who is receiving? Who has agency? Who has stake? Who has an obligation to care? Who should just mind their own business? World hunger and agriculture have become enormous topics of interest for the West in the last seventy years. After World War II, with so many governments restructuring and the threat of Communism spreading through the Global South, Western governments became concerned with shaping political, economic, and social systems that would fall in line with the new-world capitalist order. The withdrawal of colonial forces from Africa and South Asia left many countries struggling to secure agricultural systems that would feed their growing populations. In India, for example, widespread famine was only avoided when the United States began shipments of grains and eventually introduced Green Revolution technology that would build India’s self-reliance. It was the beginning of a new era of global imperialism. We know today that the Green Revolution, while increasing food production exponentially and securing food access for countries during a crucial time in their development, was also entirely unsustainable. Relying heavily on fertilizers, pesticides, energy- and water-intensive machinery, and monoculture production destroyed soil fertility, polluted lakes and rivers, and depleted freshwater aquifers. It also had high social costs: benefiting large (often Western-based) agribusiness over local small farmers. The big question the Western world is concerned with today is how to feed over 7 billion people in a way that is socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable. This sense of moral obligation to 458

feed the world’s poor is fascinating and worth mentioning. Do we feel obligated out of guilt for past political interventions that produced dependency? Is it because we can’t sit passively when we know we are privileged in a world that is still so unequal? Or is our interest based less on moral obligation and more on political agendas? There are many potential explanations for why the West continues to provide relief and suggest long-term agricultural and food distribution strategies for developing countries. I don’t want to delve into the ethics of international aid. What I do want to address is how the West continues to set parameters around what should be a part of sustainable agricultural development in the developing world. Unsure about what I’m getting at? Let me spell it out: we need to stop demonizing biotechnology and acknowledge it as a potentially powerful toolset for countries that are struggling to support growing populations in the face of climate change. What so many Western anti-GM activists don’t seem to understand is that their opposition to scientific advancements – advancements that can support both sustainability and food security agendas – is both imperialistic and unethical. Biotechnology: A Viable Toolset to Address Food Insecurity and Develop Sustainable Agriculture To be honest, writing about this topic scares me sh*tless. Genetic modification is a topic that has become more polarized than climate change; the dialogue is so overrun with scare tactics, it continually ignores scientific consensus, and it has built up an inseparable connection between GM technology and exploitative, profit-seeking multi-national corporations. It’s the self-proclaimed social-justice-minded environmentalists versus the evil capitalists. If you’re not in with one, you’re in with the other. As someone who identifies as a liberal environmental activist, it has been very hard to vocalize my position on this issue to my peers. I am not a proponent of exploitative, profit-seeking multi-national corporations. I believe in peer-reviewed and field-proven science. I believe that feeding the world with small-scale organic farms is pragmatically unrealistic. And I believe that with so many people’s lives at stake, we cannot afford to crucify a technology that has the power to improve nutrient levels of staple crops, decrease consumption of agrichemicals and water, and resist drought. The last time I tried to explain my position was in a high school debate when I was thirteen. I felt so unheard and written-off in a classroom of white, liberal, privileged hippies that I broke down and had to leave the room. Today, I have a lot more confidence to defend my stance. I have spoken with farmers in the US, India, and Malaysia cultivating both GM and non-GM seeds, Monsanto researchers, colleagues of Vandana Shiva, humanitarian agricultural specialists, and independent plant geneticists actually developing the technology. The issue is definitely not black and white. But I have found no valid reason to write-off GM crops in the challenge to address climate-change-induced food insecurity. “Complexifying” the GM Debate It’s unnatural! The GM debate is another example of how the generic environmentalist falsely conceives the perfect environment as existing in a pure and natural form, separate from humans. No environment in the 459

world (and no agricultural crop for that matter) has been left unaltered by humans. In his article, “Seeds of Doubt,” writer Michael Specter explains: “For thousands of years, people have crossed sexually compatible plants and then chosen among their offspring for what seemed like desirable characteristics (sturdy roots, for example, or resistance to disease). Farmers learned how to make better plants and varieties, but it was a process of trial and error until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Gregor Mendel demonstrated that many of the characteristics of a pea plant were passed from one generation to the next according to predictable rules. That created a new science, genetics, which helped make breeding far more precise. Nearly all the plants we cultivate—corn, wheat, rice, roses, Christmas trees—have been genetically modified through breeding to last longer, look better, taste sweeter, or grow more vigorously in arid soil. Genetic engineering takes the process one step further. By inserting genes from one species into another, plant breeders today can select traits with even greater specificity. Bt cotton, for instance, contains genes from a bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, that is found naturally in the soil. The bacterium produces a toxin that targets cotton bollworm, a pest that infests millions of acres each year. Twenty-five per cent of the world’s insecticides have typically been used on cotton, and many of them are carcinogenic. By engineering part of the bacterium’s DNA into a cotton seed, scientists made it possible for the cotton boll to produce its own insecticide. Soon after the pest bites the plant, it dies.” It is in human nature to shape and improve surrounding environments to serve us. Trying to back out of science and technology with the false, romanticized vision of returning to some pastoral past is both ignorant and uncompassionate. Rather than question the naturalness of biotechnology, we should question whether it is being developed and implemented in a way that is environmentally just. The problem with doing this, however, is there is so much misinformation being disseminated by influential people in the West like Michael Pollan, Dr. Oz, and most notably Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmentalist and pseudo-scholar who has been spreading lies about GM crops for years to fuel her anti-globalization agenda. To learn more about the ways in which people are taught to fear GM science, check out this Freakonomics article, Pamela Ronald’s piece in the MIT Technology Review, and a video by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. When Biotechnology Becomes an Environmental Justice Issue There are many people out there who, like me, acknowledge the social and environmental benefits GM crops have but who are uncomfortable with the way the technology is being applied. Today, the majority of GM seeds are not being harvested in transparent ways by non-profits dedicated to ending global food insecurity. The majority of seeds are being grown and patented for profit by the same corporations who have dictated the food production paradigm for the last half-century.

tures are not mutually exclusive) and socially damaging (subtracting from local economies, grabbing land, creating cycles of dependency), I consider it an environmental injustice issue. The question of environmental justice as it relates to biotechnology is particularly important to discuss in Ethiopia today, as the government’s House of Representatives is slated to pass an amendment that would open the country up to GM agriculture. After Ethiopia’s bio-safety proclamation in 2009, which made entry of GM seeds nearly impossible, this shift would change agriculture… for better or for worse. But with a political administration that still seems more concerned with forging partnerships with foreign investors than prioritizing the needs of its rural constituencies, allowing GM crops could just open the gates to global seed corporations, whose minds are not on environmental justice. If GM seeds are to be introduced in Ethiopia’s agricultural development strategy, it needs to be done in a way that prioritizes the meaningful participation of Ethiopian farmers. It needs to be done in conjunction with mandating sustainable agricultural practices (such as crop diversification, rotational agriculture, drip irrigation, etc.). If applied correctly, biotechnology can and should be a key component of sustainable agriculture in developing economies. And concerned citizens of the developed world need to learn to be scientifically literate and think critically before imposing (again) their agendas on historically marginalized rural communities in the global south. Further Reading: “Achieving food security in the face of climate change: Summary for policy makers from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change”. CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). November 2011. Anderson, Kym, and Lee Ann Jackson. “Some implications of GM food technology policies for Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of African Economies 14.3 (2005): 385-410. McKenzie, Megan. “As I See It: Rethink GMOs as sustainable agriculture.” Gazette Times. November 2007. McKibben, D. The Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century Sustainability Crisis. Watershed Media. 2010. Ronald, Pamela C., and Raoul W. Adamchak. Tomorrow’s table: organic farming, genetics, and the future of food. Oxford University Press, 2008. Zhu, April, “Are Genetically Modified Crops Good for Sub-Saharan Africa?” Huffington Post, April 2014.

Environmental justice is the meaningful participation in the development of the environment and the fair access to that environment across peoples regardless of difference. When a technology, which could generate economic livelihoods for rural communities and contribute to their food security, is being used to advance corporate interests in a way that’s environmentally (GM seeds and monocul460

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From Enaf community guesthouse outside of Adigrat

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REFLECTIONS ON GEBLEN AND THE FUTURE OF ETHIOPIA’S RURAL HIGHLAND COMMUNITIES March 19, 2015 I had a dream last night that I was back in northeastern Tigray. I was hungry and thirsty after days of wandering the crumbling highland desert. Out of the vegetationless environment, a lone juniper tree protruded from a cliff. I tried to tap it for its sap but it was dry. When I woke up this morning, I was reminded of a Kenyan short-film called Pumzi (meaning “breath” in Swahili), a futuristic story about a young woman living in a post-apocalyptic world. In the film, water scarcity has rendered nature extinct and Kenyans have been forced into oppressive closed-loop, self-sustaining compounds. Asha, a museum curator, is sent a fertile soil sample from an anonymous source and in it she plants a seed, which immediately germinates. She manages to escape from the compound and plants the sapling in the desert outside. Unlike my dream, the film ends with a sense of hope; that from a destroyed environment, new life can still emerge. I spent the last four weeks seriously contemplating the possibility of regeneration and long-term viability of the degraded environments I was traveling through in Ethiopia’s highlands. Thinking about resource scarcity and sustainable subsistence in Geblen and other agricultural communities I visited brought me back to conversations from my environmental studies courses at Wellesley and the great Malthusian-Cornucopian debates. Will population growth eventually outstrip resource availability or will human ingenuity and technology save us? This question – which has surfaced in the last fifty years with widespread famine, environmental degradation, and rapid technological advancements – is most clearly expounded in the Simon-Ehrlich wager. The Simon-Ehrlich wager is a keystone in all environmental scientists’ elementary education. In 1990, Paul Ehrlich (a self-described “neo-Malthusian” biologist) placed a bet with Julian Simon (an economist critical of the conventional wisdom on population growth and raw-material scarcity) about the price of five mineral resources. Ehrlich believed that resource pressures would inevitably drive up their prices over ten years, while Simon thought that abundance resulting from economic forces would, in fact, drive prices down. Simon won, although the wager was not a good proxy for betting on scarcity versus abundance; it is difficult to determine scarcity in such a short amount of time, particularly with so many markets collapsing in the latter half of the twenty-first century. Regardless of its efficacy, the wager has helped set the tone for modern environmental debates and shifted environmental rhetoric to focus less on resources and more on systems and ecological thresholds. Conservatives celebrate Simon’s victory, using it to denounce environmentalist’s alarmism, particularly around contemporary resource-management and global pollution crises. The wager also greenlighted a new way to manage resources and environments: environmental economics. While this has arguably gotten more people to care about conserving environments, I still believe that our actions relating to environmental policy and resource management should reflect more than just the economic model of supply and demand. We should also consider the moral and cultural implications of environmental exploitation, conservation, and restoration.

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I have prefaced with all of this because it relates directly to my impressions, analysis, and lingering questions around housing and livelihood security in Geblen, Ethiopia. 467

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Geblen as a (Failing) System Spending ten days in Geblen has been both the highlight and nadir of my time in Ethiopia. It was such a joy to connect with the people whose lives I had studied and written about so abstractly in the past. It was also incredibly distressing to see how severe and hopeless their lives have become in such a degraded environment. While I learned a lot through observation and interviews (I was lucky enough to make friends with some English-speaking school teachers) about the impact categories of livelihood insecurity in Geblen, I was ultimately left with more questions : 1. Who is to blame for the extreme deterioration of Geblen’s environment? 2. While aid from NGOs and governmental programs has temporarily resolved specific resource-related defficiencies over the past twenty years, will such interventions ever be enough to resolve the complex system of socio-political problems innate to living in a degraded ecosystem? 3. How can we rationalize investing in the conservation and restoration of an environment like Geblen’s that is bound to deteriorate further in the face of climate change? 4. Are resettlement schemes ever an appropriate solution? 468

The rest of this post is dedicated to my musings on these questions. As my research methodology is observation-based and since I have little access to scholastic sources, my analysis here is based on local knowledge and perspectives recorded in the field. 1. Who is to blame for the extreme deterioration of Geblen’s environment? There are several compounding causes and positive feedback loops in Geblen’s environmental history. Geographic luck (or lack thereof) predisposes Tigray to severe drought and climate change is contributing to irregular rainfall. These climatic factors compounded by livelihood pressures over the last half-century have encouraged rural communities to over-graze and over-farm their lands. While the mining industry may have compromised environments in other parts of Tigray, Geblen’s environmental problems cannot be attributed to corporate exploitation. There are few large-scale agribusinesses and manufacturers in Ethiopia’s highlands, in part because so much of the land is occupied by subsistence farmers and also because the rough terrain and climate outweigh potential profits. When I travel to Gambella and the Omo Valley in the lowlands this month, I expect to see much more corporate activity and consequential social and environmental impacts. 469

2. While aid from NGOs and governmental programs has temporarily resolved specific resource-related deficiencies over the past twenty years, will such interventions ever be enough to resolve the complex system of sociopolitical problems innate to living in a degraded ecosystem? Aid and relief work can be critical: following a natural disaster, in a war-struck region, in an epidemic-affected area. Problems arise that are obviously short-term and require immediate attention and these are usually the priority of international donors and volunteers who like to see their investments manifest into results in a relatively short timescale. Yet at some point along the continuum, outside agencies need to go beyond aid and invest in structural developments that will increase the autonomy, sustainability, and resiliency of the effected community. Northeastern Tigray, and Geblen specifically, is no exception. In the second half of the twentieth century, Geblen was effected by a series of famines that warranted government food aid. Structural attempts to address food insecurity in Tigray began in the mid-1970s, first with the Imperial regime and then with the Derg regime. After the democratization of Ethiopia in 1991, the government implemented the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP), which imports and distributes food to nearly eight million people. Today, Ethiopia is one of the largest recipients of food aid in the world. According to Lorenzo Suarez, the Swiss Counsellor for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs in Ethiopia, this long-term provision of food aid to people has created severe dependency. He, and many other development leaders, see recipients of PSNP reducing their efforts to improve their livelihoods as well as reducing their work efforts to qualify for the program. While the people I spoke with in Geblen were not able to give me an exact figure, it seems that more than half of the community is enrolled in PSNP. This decreases outside and community incentive to invest in solutions that would contribute to long-term, self-sustaining food security. Another example of interventions that are not contributing to Geblen’s long-term resiliency and self-sufficiency are the international aid projects that have swept through the village in the last ten years. IrishAid, USAid, World Vision, Catholic missionaries, Water Partners International…the list goes on. These agencies have invested in school buildings, a clinic, and countless water pumps, all of which are important pieces of improving livelihood security for the people of Geblen. But the strategy of most these agencies was to enter, complete the project without an adequate site study and leave without implementing a participatory management plan. Consequently, all but two of the wells that were built have either dried up or are unusable, the school buildings are in disrepair, and the clinic lacks funding to operate. Obviously, interventions that do not involve community participation do not contribute to sustainable development. I think that one of the biggest reasons why these types of aid strategies fail is because they do not consider how the problems interact in a complex system. Water insecurity impacts and is impacted by education, political participation, food production, health, etc. and will not be resolved simply by building a well. Until we understand livelihood insecurity as a system of 8 interrelated categories, we will not be able to contribute to Geblen’s (or any community’s) longterm resilience. 3. How can we rationalize investing in the conservation and restoration of an environment like Geblen’s that is bound to deteriorate further in the face of climate change? The more I thought about ways in which interventions could be more effective in Geblen, the more pessimistic I became about investing in such a degraded environment at all. Places like Dubai are proof that with enough monetary, time, and energy inputs, even the most inhospitable deserts can 470

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become lush oases. But for a community of people who face chronic livelihood insecurity and overwhelmingly seem to want to live anywhere but Geblen, does it make sense for governmental and non-governmental organizations to even invest in development there in the first place ? Obviously it is a government’s obligation to make sure the needs of its people are being met. Furthermore, I believe that wealthy governments have the obligation to pay for and contribute to solutions to the climate injustices in developing countries like Ethiopia. Since today’s developed countries have historically contributed the most to climate change, and are still consuming and emitting at unsustainable levels, their governments, corporations, and citizens have a moral obligation to change the way they themselves live and develop and address global injustices impacting communities like Geblen. But how should national and international agencies address the issue of inevitable environmental collapse? 4. Are resettlement schemes ever an appropriate solution? I have written a lot about the injustice of forced resettlement programs in past posts. Ethiopia has many such schemes, which have been bashed by international human rights organizations and labeled as unjust and unethical. But resettlement is nothing new for Tigrayans. I learned from one of Geblen’s elders that the Derg regime forcefully resettled most of the Geblen community during the 1984 famine. His account of the event sounded horrendous. The authorities requested that everyone in Geblen report to Edegahamus, a nearby town, to pick up their food aid packages. He was one of the few who did not go, out of suspicion. Once in Edegahamus, people were forcefully rounded up and placed in trucks. Anyone who resisted was shot on the spot. They were then driven down to Southwestern Ethiopia where they did not speak the language and had no connections or means income generation. Most victims of this scheme moved back to Geblen if they were able to in the mid-1990s, after Ethiopia’s democratization. But they had lost everything over the course of ten years and land reforms left them without any financial assets. Sometimes, resettlement is necessary if both the community and the government agree that the environment can no longer sustain them. It has not yet come to that in Geblen. Community members are working hard, under the advisement of the government, to implement soil and water conservation and restoration measures. Every day that I was there, the community was going out onto public land, building terraces, dams, bunds, planting trees, and digging trenches in the hot sun. Some people are paid for their efforts in food aid but most do it voluntarily, knowing full-well that their livelihoods depend on the productivity of their land. But I am pessimistic that these grassroots efforts will not be enough. Tigray is and will continue to be hard-hit by global climate change. With limited financial resources, human effort and ingenuity may not be enough to sustain Geblen’s environment and its peoples’ livelihoods. But even with an environment in inevitable decline, a resettlement scheme probably won’t be necessary. As with many rural communities, the out-migration of young people to cities is increasing rapidly. Of course this is a tragic trend in terms of loss of culture, history, indigenous identity and connection to the land. But if young people in Geblen want to exit the exhausting cycle of subsistence agriculture and poverty and have the opportunity to earn a living in a nearby city, nothing should stop them. Outside agencies could support youth in doing this through improved funding of schools and employment opportunities. 472

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Main street in Geblen

Prayer wall behind Geblen’s church

Rapid rural-to-urban transition is alarming urban planners, scholars, and policy-makers worldwide. Not only does it place a huge burden on urban infrastructure, it threatens small-farmer food production (which many see as the most sustainable and just system over large, corporate monocultures). Often (as is the case in rural Bangalore, which I wrote about in my college honors thesis), rural-to-urban transition is spurred by large agribusiness taking over local peoples’ land and natural resources. In these cases, fighting rural injustices and re-stabilizing rural livelihoods should be a top priority. But in a place like Geblen, where the macro-forces complicating people’s lives seem pragmatically unsolvable (long-term), people may be better off leaving for cities or other more hospitable rural areas.

associated with climate change, resource depletion, and sociopolitical unrest, it is important that we empower local communities to forge their own paths to achieve resiliency, using “higher-up” specialists as advisers and enablers and nothing more.

It is always hard for me to write about these kind of issues because it makes me feel overtly utilitarian, like a twenty-first century Le Corbusier or Ebenezer Howard trying to play God. These kinds of discussions can easily sound inappropriately authoritarian and oppressive. Ultimately, planners, designers, development workers, government officials, etc. should have the best interests of the people they serve at the top of their minds. Development and management should not be treated like a chess game, where certain privileged “specialists” get to manipulate pieces (communities) as they see fit. If we are to progress into the twenty-first century as a global community, preparing for the uncertainties 474

In the end, there are over 7 billion livelihoods on this planet to protect. Whether you align yourself more with Ehrlich or with Simon regarding the future of our environments is irrelevant. What matters is that you recognize your impact (ecologically and socially) and your place amongst all other lifeforms. Some of us are born into lives that privilege us never to have to think about our livelihood security or our cultural survival. We definitely will never all be equal in this respect. But an unequal world should not equate to an unjust world. Injustice we must fight, whether that be by addressing the global slow violence affecting Ethiopia’s highlands or the profit-over-human-lives-development happening in Borneo. Those who were born into lives of privilege, as well as those who face adversity daily, must understand the importance of fighting pervasive global injustice. And with this understanding, we must then move forward, using our skills and our passions to improve and sustain livelihoods, foster har475

mony and connectivity, and enrich the human experience, on whatever scale we are able. Resources: Aligica, Paul Dragos. “Julian Simon and the “Limits to Growth” Neo-Malthusianism.” The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1.3 (2009): 49. Chambers, Andrew. “The Fight Against Eco-Imperialism.” The Guardian (2010). Girvan, Norman. Power imbalances and development knowledge. North-South Institute, 2007. Greaker, Mads, et al. “A Kantian approach to sustainable development indicators for climate change.” Ecological Economics 91 (2013): 10-18. McCauley, Douglas J. “Selling out on nature.” Nature 443.7107 (2006): 27-28. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. O’Hara, Sabine U. “Economics, ethics and sustainability: redefining connections.” International Journal of Social Economics 25.1 (1998): 43-62. Pearce, Fred. “Land Grabbers: Africa’s Hidden Revolution.” The Guardian (2012). Perrot, Michelle. “Malthusianism and socialism.” (1983): 257-74. Ross, Eric B. “Malthusianism, capitalist agriculture, and the fate of peasants in the making of the modern world food system.” Review of radical political economics 35.4 (2003): 437-461. Sabin, Paul. The bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and our gamble over Earth’s future. Yale University Press, 2013. Simon, Julian L. “Resources, population, environment: an oversupply of false bad news.” Science 208.4451 (1980): 1431-1437.

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AGE DOES MATTER (WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR BUS DRIVER) March 21, 2015 For me, the beauty and terror of traveling is found in the bends and bumps of highways. This year alone, I have travelled over 10,000 km by bus (and minibus). Most of the time bus is the only mode of transport, given the remoteness of my destinations and/or the cost-prohibitiveness of flying. But even when the option of flying is affordable, time saving, and far safer, I still opt for buses. Why, you might ask, would I prefer to spend 14 hours on a hot, crowded, smelly, and butt-breaking bus when I could take a flight (for only four times the price) and get there in one hour? I have three answers to that question: (1) You get to travel *through* a place rather than over it. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance described poetically the beauty of being on a motorbike on the open road, of having no barrier between you and the environment that surrounds you, of being visible and accountable to everyone and everything you pass. Buses don't offer quite the same level of intimacy with the environment as a motorbike (i.e. you don't get splattered by bugs and getting into an accident isn't an eminent death sentence). But when it comes to observing the landscapes of a place and the people who inhabit them, buses are by far the best option. Local people carrying sacks of grain, water, firewood, and babies on their back wave excitedly; children dance on the road's shoulders in an effort to get passengers to toss them empty bottles, which they later exchange for candy; crowds prossess carrying funeral caskets, or religious relics, or political banners. Through the window of a bus, you witness real life in real time. No aerial view can offer you that. (2) In countries where I am so used to being pointed at, objectified, and often ostracized for being foreign, taking the bus gives me the chance to "feel a part" of society. Unlike a street corner, where simply walking places you on the turf of others to be cat-called and asked for money, a bus is neutral space. No one on the bus actually owns their seat (of course men, who are socialized the world over to feel physically entitled, will take up more space on the bench). But no one is in their comfort zone and this creates rawness and equality. Other passengers on the bus no longer perceive me as a wealthy, promiscuous White woman. I am, for a short period of time, a peer (or as close to a peer as I will come). I am equally trapped in the discomforts of a confined space. I feel immersed in the reality of the proletariat. (3) I am not the type of person who takes time out of her day to sit and meditate. I remember first learning about meditation at age 6, when I saw a painting of the Buddha on an ancient Nepalese scroll in the Berlin Museum of Asian Kunst. I went home and sat on my bed in lotus position, attempting to clear my thoughts in order to attain inner peace and mindfulness. But I couldn't do it. It felt unnatural to practice it the way Siddharta is depicted under the banyan tree in ancient India. As I grew up, meditation came to have a place in my spiritual life during times when I felt the most overloaded by outside noise. Times such as those when I was stuck on a bus for 14 hours, with obnoxious music blaring, passengers yelling over each other, and people vomiting next to me. Having so much time with literally no obligation to do anything (since I had given the role of transporting myself from point A to point B to the driver), suddenly gave me the unique opportunity to do nothing. 534

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Drivers must navigate potholes as deep as craters, stretches of unpaved and unplaned road, poorly engineered hairpin turns, cliffs and side-slopes that seem to defy the laws of gravity, tumbling boulders, fallen trees, freak storms, floods, *breath*. And those are only the inanimate obstacles. Then there are the herds of brainless cattle, flocks of sheep and goats, and ornery asses (both human and animal) that refuse to get out of the way, aggressive dogs, and distracted children who don't seem to understand the danger large vehicles traveling at high speeds pose. Luckily, most countries' bus systems include a driver's assistant. The assistant is responsible for ticketing, helping the driver navigate tight turns, distributing plastic bags to the victims of nausea, and resolving passenger conflicts on the bus ("He stole my seat!" and "her child just peed on me!" are two that I have heard at least once). Bus driver's habits reduced to age bracket: 18-24: still getting drunk the night before (or at pit stops) and consequentially have impaired motor functions and slower response time. Growing up in the height of mobile phone usage also makes them dependent on their cellphones. Drivers in this age bracket often make calls and texts while driving, with obvious consequences. Since they are also new to the job they have less experience dealing with the aforementioned road obstacles. Drinking and texting certainly do not help. On a local bus en route to Axum

And with nothing to do, I focused on filtering out all the white noise and attaining true mindfulness. Of course, the last thing you want to happen when you are in the midst of attaining true mindfulness is to be launched from your seat in a tragic accident and die. While I love bus rides for the reasons mentioned above, I have had scary experiences on them and I don't take the decision of choosing which bus to ride lightly. There is a science to choosing the best bus (my definition of best means a bus-ride that is smooth, safe, quiet, and still manages to be on time) and it's based on the age of the bus driver. Of course, capability and reliability cannot be simplified down to his (I have yet to be driven by a fellow woman) age alone. But my experiences, as well as those of other travelers I have talked to, have revealed that age is the best predeterminer of whether the bus trip will be smooth, safe, quiet, and on time. Before going into detail about how to select your bus driver based on his age, I want to take a minute to recognize the difficult job drivers have in underdeveloped countries. Driving from point A to point B in countries like Malaysia, Bolivia, and Ethiopia is never a straight shot down a paved highway. 536

25-35: while usually a little bit more responsible when it comes to texting and substance abuse, drivers in this age range are the cockiest, having had enough experience to feel both like experts and entitled to full ownership of the bus space. These guys are the most likely to blast loud music, which detracts from passengers' experience. They also think they are invincible on the road and tend to be aggressive around curves and pedestrians. 35-45: the best time to be alive (or so I've heard) and also the best time to be a bus driver. Most of these drivers have been in, caused, or at least seen a major road accident and it's brought them back down to earth. They know the limits of the machines they maneuver and can safely transport their passengers to point B on time, without endangering their lives or those on the road. 45+: generally not advised to use people in this age bracket as drivers because their age has begun to compromise their motor skills. Realizing this, they also tend to be too conservative on the road, moving at a crawl and causing long delays. When I put my life in someone else's hands, I don't do it lightly and I prefer to do it with confidence. When there are multiple busses leaving for the same destination in the morning, I pick my bus based on the driver' age. I also have no inhibitions calling drivers out on their reckless behavior (which I have done several times in Ethiopia), reporting them to their company (which I had to do once in Malaysia), and even getting off of the bus when I really don't feel safe (which I had to do once in Peru when it was raining). My PTSD from my near-fatal accident in India probably makes me over-cautious. But if I am to continue enjoying the landscapes, people, and meditation time that buses offer, I need to consider the safety of the driver. And the truth is: Age DOES matter!

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Ruins of Axum

Hills of Simien National Park 538

Church in Axum 539

Fort in Gondar

Stones in Queen of Shebaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s palace 540

St. George Cathedral in Lalibela 541

View from the roof of my pension in Gondar 542

Ceremonial drums hidden in walls of monolythic temples in Lalibela 543

WHAT’S IN AN IMAGE? CONTEMPLATING NEW WAYS TO INFORM THE WEST March 22, 2015 This morning I read Surrender or Starve, a book written by Michael D. Kaplan about the epic famines that devastated the Horn of Africa from 1984–87. Kaplan, a prominent journalist for the Atlantic Monthly, paints a picture of U.S. involvement in relief efforts in Ethiopia and argues that the media misdirected America’s political agenda and covered up the gross human rights violations that were the ultimate cause of the famines. While I found the book’s organization to be quite scattered and its scale of narration overly ambitious, it made me reconsider two ideas that have emerged in other contexts of my research over the course of this fellowship: (1) the environmental politics of ascribing blame in the wake of disaster, and (2) the role of poverty porn in simplifying problems and their solutions to Western audiences. Through the Eyes of the Media: Natural vs. Man-Made Disasters One of Kaplan’s main objectives in writing Surrender or Starve was to complexify the argument perpetuated by the West that Ethiopia’s famines of 1984/85 were caused by drought. Drought is a natural disaster, and in labeling that as the ultimate cause, it naturalizes the tragedy, taking culpability from political leaders. Interestingly, we see the rhetoric around natural versus manmade disasters used all the time by politicians in the United States, with troubling sociopolitical consequences. In the United States, a double standard exists for disaster culpability. Property owners and local governments of upper-income areas have never accepted the inevitability of natural disasters and instead are insistent that the blame should be placed on ill-preparedness. Yet in marginalized, low-income communities there is a tendency for local officials, the media, and property owners to naturalize the strictly human artifact of disasters, when social institutions are entirely responsible. These social responses to natural disasters perpetuate racial and socioeconomic inequality and reinforce unsustainable and unjustly distributed public expenditures on disaster relief. Hurricane Katrina in 2007, for example, was repeatedly described as an “unavoidable natural disaster,” never-mind the links the superstorm had to anthropogenic climate change, the unequal distribution of impact on low-income communities of color, and the racist response of the local and national government. Yet in the words of the authorities and the media, it was “natural” and the poor people most affected had little voice to say otherwise.

Women gathered outside a church in Bahar Dar 544

Like the 1984/85 famine in Ethiopia (though on a much smaller scale), Katrina was a calamity of capitalist priorities and violent political agendas. Failed U.S. Army Corps engineering, the ravaging of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands by petroleum corporations and luxury estate developments, and the disrepair of New Orlean’s urban infrastructure (particularly in low-income Black neighborhoods) turned what would have been a passing storm into the most expensive disaster in America’s history. 545

More troubling than the ill-preparedness for the storm was the racist response of the municipal and national governments. Despite countless human rights violations on the part of the government, the media downplayed the Bush administration’s failures and instead reaffirmed the tragic inevitability of the situation. How Photographic Media (Mis)directs Aid, the Case of Ethiopia in the 1980s Americans en masse are not seen by the global community as being particularly literate when it comes to news, be it national or global. I think this is a two-part problem: (1) the news that is readily available is sensationalist and oversimplified, and (2) most people have little motivation to seek out good news and understand complexity around important issues. When Americans heard about the famine in Ethiopia in 1985, media outlets and both government and private aid agencies sought ways to tell the story to the American people in a simple way that would incentivize donations. Kaplan explains that, “Beginning in 1985, the American public was bombarded with images of people starving in an exotic land, images that gripped viewers by the throat.” (9) They were told that the cause was drought and that the solution was as simple as shipping food. The preference for keeping the story simple covered up the real sociopolitical cause of the famine. In a recent retrospective on the famine in The Guardian, journalist Suzanne Franks explains, “In 1984 the authoritarian Ethiopian government (the Soviet-backed “Derg” regime) was fighting a civil war against Tigrayan and Eritrean insurgents. It is no accident that these were the areas starving because, to a large extent, the government was deliberately causing the famine. It was bombing markets and trade convoys to disrupt food supply chains. Defence spending accounted for half of Ethiopia’s GDP and the Soviet-backed army was the largest in sub-Saharan Africa… The Ethiopian government also had deliberate strategies to manipulate foreign donations in pursuit of its brutal resettlement policies. Victims of famine were lured into feeding camps only to be (forcefully) transported far away from their homes.” However, all of this went untold because in the minds of the American government and news outlets, the crimes of the Derg were so abstract, they were outside the realm of human accountability. Over the course of two years, the U.S. spent $1 billion in relief for the famine, which did more to support the Derg’s political agenda (as grain deliveries were going into the hands of corrupt Derg officials), than it did to support the starving Tigrayan and Eritrean peasants. Kaplan criticizes the U.S. government for limiting its involvement in Ethiopia to humanitarian assistance and argues that if the media had emphasized the bloodshed and human rights violations of the Soviet-backed Derg, America may have backed the Tigrayan and Eritrean insurgents and their food aid would have had a far greater impact. I was surprised, too, that after so many anti-Communist interventions in the years leading up to the Ethiopian famine (in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nicaragua, etc.), that the Reagan Administration did not involve itself more in Ethiopian politics. Kaplan explains, “The US policy seemed to rest on the hope that despite the $4 billion Soviet arms investment and influx of several thousand Eastern bloc advisers, the Derg could be bribed away with grain.” (78) 546

The fact is, the American media had already shifted its focus to more sensationalist world news: South African apartheid, the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq War, etc. Ethiopia had become a lost cause and an exhausted story. The Problem with Using Photography to Narrate and Dictate Development Today The 1980s were just the beginning of the trend in image-heavy news. Today, we absorb so much of the world and development issues through pictures: on social media and online news-sites. Stories told in images can be hugely influential for policy but, as the West’s response to Ethiopia’s famine in 1985 suggests, it can also have problematic outcomes. Part of the problem is that, like everything else, photographs have been commodified and therefore stand to earn artists, reporters, and agencies lots of money. Today, photographers documenting issues in developing countries use the same techniques as those shooting for the porn industry: Shock: the content of the photograph must be novel enough to stand out from the overload of images we are saturated with every day Arouse: elicit a high emotional response from your audience Leave the viewer wanting to spend more: either through the consumption of more photos/ videos or through a donation for a cause related to the photo The issue is not merely that photographs are misleading Western audiences, but that they often objectify the human subjects of the photo. There are two main ways in which human beings are being objectified through photographs today: (1) Through the exploitation of the poor’s condition (which I will refer to as poverty porn) (2) Through cultural romanticization and exotification (which I will refer to as culture porn) The indigenous communities I am studying this year are victims of both forms of photographic objectification. They are depicted as fantastic specimens of “caveman” culture, with elaborate costumes, facial embellishments, and visual traditions. Concurrently, they are shown as victims of poverty, climate change, and political oppression. Why is this a problem? For a multitude of reasons: It Simplifies the Issue Problems like poverty and famine are caused by personal and systemic problems that are complex and difficult to explain. If these problems were any easier to understand, they would also be easier to solve. But they are neither. Furthermore, misrepresenting and oversimplifying the issue will not bring us any closer to finding solutions. In the case of poverty porn, viewers are told that material resources are both the problem and solution (like grains during Ethiopia’s famines), when in reality, they are symptoms of larger issues. Cultural porn can also simplify the human experience, and an entire society, down to very aesthetic 547

characteristics. While photographers may argue that the photos they take of indigenous people in costume are beautiful and honor their cultural legacies, it also simplifies very complex legacies down into one image. This will likely be the only image that Western audiences see, therefore narrowing their understanding of a very complex people and their culture. It Perpetuates False Stereotypes With poverty porn, images almost always portray distended bellies, rags, dirt, and helplessness. Poverty, it is important to understand, is multi-faceted and often has more psychological impacts than physical. But when audiences are only exposed to the type of poverty depicted in mainstream photographs, they lose sight of the pervasiveness of the problem across many races, cultures, and environments. Cultural porn often over-dramatizes or even falsifies the subject’s culture and traditions. In a world where most indigenous people now wear modern clothes and use cellphones, photographing them only when they are wearing their traditional dance costume (which they may only put on once a year) is dishonest and misrepresentative. It perpetuates the notion of primacy, nonconformity, when the reality may likely be different. It Is Done for Money Is it right to depict the aesthetic qualities of a human being or exploit their condition of suffering for monetary gain? Especially when the subjects of those photographs will likely never see the photo of themselves or personally reap the benefits of the photo’s royalties or its campaigns funds, it doesn’t feel ethical. Many of the indigenous cultures being photographed today have also consciously chosen to shun outside technology and the capitalist system its imbued in. Some even believe that a photo taken of them captures a piece of their soul. Regardless, photographing people for money, with or without their consent, feels incredibly wrong to me. Its Responses Do Not Generate the Structural Changes that Need to Take Place As I explained earlier, poverty porn is aimed at alleviating material-based deficiencies, rather than addressing their systemic roots. This is one of my biggest objectives in my fellowship project: to research and depict the ways in which different material facets of livelihood insecurity, like food, housing, and transportation, interplay with larger social, political, and environmental forces. Cultural porn can also undermine structural progress relating to the rights of indigenous people. In this project, I neither advocate for the integration of indigenous cultures into mainstream society nor for their unaltered preservation. That’s not up to me and that shouldn’t be the decision of anyone but the people, themselves. If an indigenous community resides within a larger political state, it is that government’s obligation to offer the community basic services and infrastructure, provide protection from other nations, and include them in the larger political process. Cultural porn can undermine efforts by local and international agencies to promote both the autonomy of indigenous groups and their status as citizens of a larger society. 548

It Reinforces Problematic Paternalistic Binaries Photos can establish problematic relationships, both between the photographer and the subject, and between the audience and the subject. Poverty porn, for example, tells the poor that they are helpless beneficiaries and wealthy Western donors that they are saviors. This type of photograph empowers the audience to make changes, rather than the subjects to be their own change agents. It fails to awaken Western audiences to the mutual need for transformation (see Robert Nixon’s introduction to “slow violence”). As much as I love photography, I have generally been disappointed by the way in which photographers work in the developing world, the way in which photographs are used in the West, and the outcome photos have on development policy. We need new ways to explain the complex problems of our world that are still visually appealing and compelling to unmotivated Western audiences. Traveling to the Omo Valley…Without a Camera These thoughts have emerged, partly from reading Kaplan’s book and partly from my preparations for the next segment of my Ethiopian adventure. This week, I will travel down to the Omo Valley, an area in Southwestern Ethiopia that is home to eight different tribes whose populations total about 200,000 people. These tribes are renowned the world over because of the photographs that have been made of them. Photo stories in magazines like National Geographic and The Wild, have generated a surge in tourism to the Omo Valley in recent years. Tourists now spend exorbitant amounts of money to be driven into tribal villages by corrupt tour operators with the express purpose of taking exotic photographs of the people. The tourism industry in the Omo Valley is booming in a very troubling way, which ecotourism expert William Jones elaborates on here, and cultural porn has a lot to do with it. The tourism industry, several government development schemes, and a general legacy of abuse by mainstream society has produced a lot mistrust of outsiders in Omo tribal communities. Planning a trip down there outside of the mainstream tourist route has taken weeks of planning. The most challenging part is yet to come, when I actually reach the Omo Valley and must gain the trust of the village leaders, with whom I hope to stay and learn from. Not having a camera will certainly help with this. I hope that my low-technology, readily observable methods of discovery will enhance my ability to connect with the Omo Valley tribes more intimately and thus to better understand their struggles. And I hope that my drawings will serve as a better tool to educate the West about the Omo Valley than the thousands of stock photos available online. Further Reading: Franks, Suzanne. “Ethiopian famine: how landmark BBC report influenced modern coverage.” The Guardian (2014). Gillis and Barringer, “As Coasts Rebuild and U.S. Pays, Repeatedly, the Critics Ask Why.” New York Times (2012). 549

Heldman, Caroline. “The Truths of Katrina.” Coffee at Midnight (2010). Blog. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011. Reilly, Benjamin. Disaster and human history: Case studies in nature, society and catastrophe. McFarland, 2009. Roenigk, Emily. “5 Reasons ‘Poverty Porn’ Empowers The Wrong Person.” Huffington Post (2014). Steinberg, Theodore, “Do-It-Yourself Deathscape: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in South Florida” (1997).

On streets of Jinka

BEING A FEMALE FERENJI ON THE STREETS OF ETHIOPIA March 30, 2015 They range from taunts of "You you you! Give me money!" and "Mister where you go?" to physical grabbing by young boys and vulgar gestures by adult men. This is my reality on the streets of Ethiopia's dusty towns and cities. It's not like harassment is nonexistent in other places I've lived in and traveled to. Furthermore, this type of perpetual non-discriminatory (in the sense that any other female ferenji backpacker who puts herself on the streets faces the same) harassment is likely more *non-threatening* (superficial, not amounting to anything) than the street harassment I've faced in cities like Berlin, Boston, and Bangalore. But even if the street harassment in Ethiopia doesn't develop into someone reaching for my bag, or groping my breast (which has happened in India more than once), or a worse form of physical assault, it is still incredibly exhausting and *demoralizing*.

Lakes by Arba Minch 550

The problem is, I walk everywhere. "Why?" you might ask, "when your purchasing power in Ethiopia could surely secure you a bajaj (rickshaw) to get to your destination." Yes, it would be lovely to skip the sun, dust, and endless taunts. But in addition to assuming you were placed on their streets to give them free sex and money, many Ethiopian men think it's perfectly justified to inflate a taxi ride 300% or more for their ferenji passengers. That means that instead of paying 20 birr ($1) to go 1 km, I'd likely be asked to pay 60 birr. Yeah, that's the difference of two dollars, which paying once or twice isn't a big deal. But seeing as I am nearly ALWAYS in transit for three months, two dollars times three rides per day times 90 days equals 540 dollars! That's 540 dollars of undeniable racist stereotypes about 551

Whites' wealth and ignorance. These stereotypes obviously did not emerge out of thin air. Ethiopians have been bombarded by White money for years, through military intervention (against communist Somalia in the 1960s), humanitarian aid (since the late-1980s for drought relief and development projects), and most recently through tourism (which projects the bank notes to the masses in much more intimate and visible ways). Real talk: a child on the street would not call me "money" if it hadn't worked for him or one of his friends before. White tourists are total idiots in this regard, first because their dollars could be better spent on someone in serious poverty rather than a loudmouth skipping school on a Monday, and second because it reinforces a really unhealthy paternalist, savior-victim binary between visitors and locals. But what is more frustrating than a child growing up to have faith in this binary are the adult male bajaj drivers who assume all White people are rich and slated to be taken advantage of. I'm sorry, but in what universe is it ethical for an economic exchange of service-for-payment to be sidetracked by racial prejudices?

THE WORLD UNTIL YESTERDAY: REVISITING THE DISCOURSE ON INDIGENEITY AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IN THE OMO VALLEY April 21, 2015 I used to read prolifically. When we moved from Germany, I swear half of the weight of our shipping crate was in books. Beautiful books of all genres, especially biology, religion, and nineteenth century British literature (my mother likes to boast that she’s read Pride and Prejudice at least twenty times). We lived for three years in an old farmstead, nestled against the foothills of the Pacific Mountains. It was picturesque and romantic, but also quite boring given the 150 days of rain we saw annually. I spent many afternoons curled up inside reading. For a while I was into pre-teen fantasy series, which were evidently so un-compelling I can’t even remember what they were about. Then I developed a brief obsession with Eastern religions, but soon decided I didn’t want to become a Western Buddhist as there were already far too many of them in Oregon, so I dropped that topic.

Out of principle, I refuse to give money both to young children and to bajaj drivers who want to cheat me. Out of pride and financial prudence, I choose to walk. And while this places me in the line of fire of unscrupulous, entitled, chauvinistic men, I would rather embrace the battlefield. At least on the battlefield I have ammunition of my own: silence and noise.

Slowly, I started reaching for titles higher up on our library’s shelves and it was there that I discovered my first earth-shattering book : Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. I think I was thirteen when I read that book and it shaped my worldview at the time: it helped me piece together ideas that are too often separated into different disciplines, like history and ecology. The book’s main argument is that Eurasian civilizations did not come to dominate our world militarily and socially because of superior intelligence, but because of a series of favorable environmental preconditions. In my first post about Peru, I write about how this argument applies to the conquest of the Inca Empire.

In many cases I go with the "I pretend I didn't hear you," and continue walking tactic because it helps the novelty of a ferenji walking by wear off. But sometimes I have no inhibitions. Like the other day, I was walking through a crowded market and got stuck behind a truck for several seconds. A man came up and waved his hand two inches from my face to get my attention. I was so pissed off at such a violent violation of personal space that I did it right back to him. He was stunned and just stood there for a couple seconds while I walked off. Then he started to yell after me. "I know your mad," I thought to myself. "But maybe you'll think twice about how your next victim might feel before you pull that stunt again."

Of course I was far too young to think critically about Diamond’s underlying assumptions. But rereading it several years later made me question his reliance on the orthodox anthropological trope of linear human development. Western anthropologists, ethnographers, and historians have traditionally studied world cultures with this framework, assuming that all societies exist on a linear spectrum from savage to barbaric to civilized. Diamond, while I admire him for his interdisciplinary approach to history-telling and egalitarian views on human potential, is no different than the rest of them. In seeking environmental explanations for why some cultures have developed further than others, he is positioning himself in the rhetoric of “savage and civilized”.

Petty? Well, yes, maybe. But I'm sure every woman who has ever left her house can relate to this. Street harassment everywhere has got to stop. And identifying the intersection between gender and race is an important step to analyzing and combatting it.

Darwinian ideas of “survival of the fittest” can only carry us so far. While it is undeniable that certain societies (namely Western societies) have far more power on a global scale, they are not the ultimate form of culture to be replicated by all others. There are thousands of other minority societies that have more than survived (in an evolutionary sense); they have also been successful in creating and preserving a unique model of reality. If we, as members of the modern Western world can move beyond the narrow view that advanced technology and literacy are what determine a society’s success, we would see that all cultures share essentially the same raw brilliance.

Note: I really try to be conscious of the potential racist undertones of my writing. This topic is, of course, imbued in race issues. I wrote it, not to condemn an entire nation of Black men and boys, but rather to vent my frustration with an undeniable reality I'm facing. If any part of my writing is problematic to you and needs to be addressed, let's talk! I want to be called out when it's needed.

Whether that raw brilliance developed into the physical manipulation of one’s surrounding environment through the development of technology, or the cerebral exploration of dreamstates and energy flows was simply a matter of adaptive insights, orientation, and cultural priorities. Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist, beautifully encapsulates my thoughts on the relativity of culture in his review of Diamond’s most recent book: “Cultures do not exist in some absolute sense; each is but a model of reality, the consequence of

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one particular set of intellectual and spiritual choices made, however successfully, many generations before. The goal of the anthropologist is not just to decipher the exotic other, but also to embrace the wonder of distinct and novel cultural possibilities, that we might enrich our understanding of human nature and just possibly liberate ourselves from cultural myopia, the parochial tyranny that has haunted humanity since the birth of memory. The other peoples of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us. They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7000 different voices, and these answers collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species as we continue this never-ending journey.” Davis wrote this as part of a critique of The World Until Yesterday, in which Diamond writes about what we in the modern world can learn from “traditional” peoples. While Diamond doesn’t romanticize indigenous societies—acknowledging some of the horrific practices like infanticide, domestic violence, and slavery that have permeated some of them—he argues that studying indigenous people today can provide solutions to universal human problems like child rearing, conflict resolution, and physical fitness. But to Davis, Diamond’s anecdotes are more problematic than revelationary. Davis isn’t the only one who takes issue with the book. Several anthropologists, activists, and tribal leaders have spoken out against it, claiming it is curiously impersonal, full of innacuracies, and damaging to the indigenous rights movement. Of all the books Diamond has written, this one deals the most with current issues so I am not at all surprised that the response has been heated. Indigenous issues are innately political and fall within the ideological debates about globalization, environmental extraction, industrial development, and modern imperialism. I finally read The World Until Yesterday last night, after hearing so much criticism about it. Going in, I was sensitive to the ways in which Diamond might ahere to the problematic rhetoric around indigeneity. I emerged from the book, not radically incensed as so many had been before me, but definitely surprised that Diamond was contributing to a narrow international discourse around indigenous issues that I find damaging. Having just returned from three weeks worth of encounters with tribes in Southwestern Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, I would like to consider the issues imbued in Diamond’s arguments and how they intersect with my own recent experiences: 1. It includes paternalistic affirmations of indigenous lands as pure and sacred. Diamond insinuates that the spiritual relationship some indigenous societies had or still have with the land applies to all of them. This is not only ahistorical, but it renders several hundred indigenous groups as one monolith. Of the 15 indigenous communities I have stayed in, I have yet to find one where their contempoary society emphasizes the purity and sacredness of their environment. I have met one or two individuals (a Penan man and Quechua woman) who do feel a spiritual connection to their land, which goes beyond utilitarian values. But I have met far more indigenous people this year who throw plastic into their rivers and see their trees and animals as merely firewood and meat. For example, the Hamar and Kara people in the Omo Valley have strong attachments to their land but do not construe it as pure and sacred. Rather, their ties to the land stem from a need to protect it from neighboring tribes who could encroach at any time. 554

2. It implies that indigenous people live the same now as they did in the past. On the book’s back cover is written: “Tribal societies offer an extraordinary window into how our ancestors lived for millions of years.” This is incredibly inaccurate! Just because an indigenous society hasn’t industrialized does not mean it has remained stagnant since the Stone Age. Like everyone else, their genes, cultures, and behaviors have continued to evolve to the present; they had to or they would not have survived. The tribes in the Omo Valley have gone through profound changes over the last few hundred years, not all of them linear (the assumed order being hunter-gatherer to pastoral to agricultural to urbanized). Some tribes, like the Hamar, were practicing agriculture long before they became the famous pastoralists they now are. The introduction of maize from the New World in the 15th century inspired pastoralists like the Kara to begin planting on the banks of the Omo River. Countless other cultural changes and adaptations have occured, making the tribes here look much different than they did during the Stone Age, let alone 1000 years ago. 3. It pushes the view that tribal people are particularly violent. While I personally think some indigenous societies are more prone to violence than others, it is dangerous to assume that all tribal people are innately more violent than people in industrialized societies. Diamond argues that indigenous peoples have engaged in frequent inter-tribal warfare because their societies’ ethical codes around violence and killing is either non-existant or not enforced. Perhaps, in some cases. But many of the tribes Diamond writes about who appear naturally aggressive have actually developed these characteristics as a response to colonial and modern invaders. In the Omo Valley, several tribes have legacies of territorial disputes and related violence. The Mursi and the Ari, for example, who are now “separated” by Mago National Park, were often at war over land and natural resources. But many of the inter-tribal wars still going on are exacerbated, if not caused, by land encroachment and other hostilities by the Ethiopian government and foreign companies. Sugar cane and cotton plantations along the Omo River, for example, have significantly reduced the grazing land of the Nyangatom and Kara people, which has increased incidents of violence between herders from the two groups. Acts of aggression have also increased against government and corporate officials; recently a policeman in the Hamar District was killed because he arrested a Hamar man for hunting an elephant in the wildlife reserve nearby. While I think murder is never justified, it does show the desperation of people who see their natural resources and livelihoods disappearing before their eyes. 4. It argues that tribes need and welcome the intervention of the state. Diamond believes that many of the issues indigenous communities face: warfare, illiteracy, disease, etc. stem from their removed position from larger society, where the government is not able to enforce laws or provide services. Furthermore, he claims that tribes welcome assimilation (“villagization”), “willingly abandon[ing] their jungle lifestyle.” With this statement, he is in effect attacking decades of work by indigenous peoples and their allies, who have fought the theft of their land and resources, and uphold their right to live as they choose – often succesfully. 555

The Ethiopian government and its international corporate allies are pushing for the villagization and centralization of the remaining pastoral tribes in the lower-Omo Valley. I believe that they see these tribes, who often respond to encroachment with violence, as unpredictable free radicals, threatening the Omo Valley’s development and Ethiopia’s overall progress. The Ari, Hamar, and Kara people whom I met are proud of their cultures and want to sustain their traditional livelihoods. They aren’t at all interested in moving into government apartments in larger towns. 5. This book and the arguments it supports were developed by a White American male academic (WAMA). I am not criticizing Diamond for any facets of his identity. He is an intelligent scholar who has pushed the world to think about the rise of civilizations differently. The problem is that the concept of indigeneity has fallen under the jurisdiction of those who hold the most power on the world stage. Diamond embodies the person at the top of this hierarchy and he has taken it upon himself to educate the world about indigenous cultures from his relatively removed and privileged position as a WAMA educated within a WAMA framework. Because of his prestigue and involvement with the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation International (both of which have questionable records when it comes to indigenous issues), people in the West take his writing seriously. Despite being obviously well-intentioned, this book is cementing problematic rhetoric around indigenous people and their place within modern society. Most worryingly, it all but encourages outside intervention in indigenous communities, which as I have observed in Borneo, Peru, Bolivia, and the lower-Omo Valley of Ethiopia, rarely has positive consequences. The Omo Valley is a politically charged and often terrifying landscape to experience. More than fifteen different tribes live side-by-side each other and a growing number of foreign communities, including Ethiopians from the North and developers from Asia and the Middle East. Environmental exploitation, national parks and reserves, and a growing tourism industry are not only threatening tribes’ livelihoods, but also aggravating tension between the various groups.

Resources: “Angry Papuan leaders demand Jared Diamond apologizes”. Survival International. February 4, 2013. Archer, John. Ethnology and human development. Rowman & Littlefield, 1992. Brooks, David. “Tribal Lessons ‘The World Until Yesterday,’ by Jared Diamond”. The New York Times. Retrieved Jan. 10, 2013. Corry, Stephen. “Savaging Primitives: Why Jared Diamond’s ‘The World Until Yesterday’ Is Completely Wrong.” The Daily Beast, Jan. 30, 2013. Davis, Wade. “The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamon – review.” The Guardian, Jan. 9, 2013. Diamond, Jared M., and Doug Ordunio. Guns, Germs, and Steel. National Geographic, 2005. Diamond, Jared. The World Until Yesterday: What can we learn from traditional societies? Penguin, 2012. Helmore, Edward. “Jared Diamond in row over claim tribal peoples live in ‘state of constant war'”. The Observer. Feb. 3, 2013. O’Reilly, Abby. “Review: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?”. The Independent. Jan. 20, 2013.

Here, it was often hard to tell who was savage and who was civilized. Ultimately, the binary is irrelevant. The linear social evolution so much of development rests on is socially constructed and incredibly problematic. As we have seen time and time again, the fabrication of such binaries can excuse innappropriate and unethical interventions by rich states in poor states, rich governments in marginalized communities, etc. – all in the name of “progress”. In my next post, I will write about the many models of reality that exist today in the Omo Valley and my experience with some of them. While I lived with the Ari, Hamar, and Kara tribes, painted their daily realities, and analyzed their livelihood security, I made every effort to step back from the constraints of my own prejudices and preconceptions. It’s hard to do, particularly amongst people who have been so photographed and objectified on an international level, and so marginalized and looked down upon by the Ethiopian majority. But sharing their story is important, and I have no alterior motive besides this.

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COWBOYS AND INDIANS: STORIES FROM MY TIME IN THE LOWER-OMO VALLEY

lage services. Most of the money that enters villages through tourism is going to the local guides and chiefs, who spend most of it on alcohol. This leaves villagers hungry for a small share of the cake and they often become aggressive when bartering with tourists for photographs.

April 22, 2015

Tourism has drastically altered how tribes like the Hamar, Kara, and Mursi treat outsiders and each other. The encounters they have with tourists is based purely on financial exchange and leads them to feel increasingly peripheralised in their own home. Competition and violence between different communities is also common, as most tourist companies have prefered villages they take their customers to, allowing them half an hour in the village to buy souvenirs, be acosted by villagers asking for photos, and then return to the safety of their vehicles. Cash dependency, feelings of marginalization and objectification by tour operators and tourists alike, alcoholism, and increased levels violence between villages are troubling consequences of the emerging tourism industry.

I never liked old Western films. You know, the ones where John Wayne and his fellow cowboys fight the red-skin Indians on the plains of the Wild West. These films consistently contained far too much violence and played upon the archetypes of the good and bad, where the white hero’s quest for retribution against the uncivilized Indians and colonial expansion always played out in the end. It is through these films that the image of Native Americans first became a commodity to be consumed on a massive scale in the United States. Thanks in part to these and other forms of propaganda, as well as government policy, Native Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries were and continue to be romanticized as either blood-thirsty or noble savages and discriminated against. The actual conditions during westward expansion in the 19th century were far more brutal and complex than Western films depict. After the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, the government devised a scheme to encourage families to move out West and claim new territory. Manifest destiny, the idea that Americans were destined to stretch from coast to coast, inspired hundreds of thousands of people to move in the second half of the 19th century. But the land that they intended to settle was already inhabited by Native Americans (whose populations had already declined 90% because of disease spread a century before). Naturally, a war for land and resources ensued with both sides committing brutal acts. Howard Zinn, my favorite American historian, writes a compelling chapter about this period in American history in his book, A People’s History of the United States. While I wouldn’t dare equate the Omo Valley today with the American West 150 years ago, many of the dynamics between tribes and outsiders are similar. Just as settlers in the American West came seeking to capitalize on tribal land, the Ethiopian government and foreign companies are grabbing land in the Omo Valley to develop hydroelectricity, and sugar cane and cotton plantations. The 15 tribes living in the valley who rely on the river and its floodplains to maintain their forests, pastures, and fields, are being forcefully resettled or coerced into giving up huge tracts of land (more than 450,000 hectares) to foreign investors. The Ethiopian government supports these projects because it sees them as the best way to create revenue and develop much-needed infrastructure (such as roads, which companies often promise). In reality, these projects are a huge environmental justice issue, locally, and do not support the development of Ethiopia as a whole. Communities are not being consulted, environmental and social impact assessments are either performed haphazardly and not distributed or not performed at all, local peoples’ food, water, and economic security is being compromised through the reduction of their lands, and in the end most of the profits from these deals are exported. That is to say that neither the local tribespeople nor Ethiopia as a whole ends up better off. The other “settler” in this analogy is the tourism industry. While far fewer tourists come to the Omo Valley compared to Ethiopia’s highlands, the number is growing. Most of the 5000 tourists per anum venture down with Addis-based tour operators. This is the first problem: poorly trained and culturally insensitive guides from the north are reeping profit off of the objectification of local tribespeople. Very little money actually makes it to the communities being visited by tourists. Even the village fees, which usually average $10 per person, are not being invested into schools, clinics, and other key vil558

Talking about the impacts of industrial development and tourism on the Omo Valley tribes (and the relationship between the “cowboys” and the “indians”) in abstract cannot possibly paint a vivid-enough picture of just how extreme things are. In my three weeks in the Omo Valley, I witnessed a murder, life in a Chinese construction camp, the ploughing and planting of sorghum and maize in parched and degraded soil, the whipping of women and jumping of bulls, and the transformation of a village at the sound of a tourist car. My time in the villages I stayed in was brief (only five days in each). But I believe the stories I have come away with epitomize the changing environmental, social, and cultural landscape of the Omo Valley and the ways in which these changes are impacting the livelihood security of its indigenous people. Over the next four days I will publish a story a day, recounting my experiences with the four tribes I visited (the Mursi, Ari, Hamar, and Kara) along with the drawings, maps, and diagrams I have made. I encourage you to check out the sources below to learn more about the statistics and politics of development and the human rights violations occuring in the Omo Valley. Cheers! Sources: Angelei, Ikal. “Ethiopia’s Gibe III Dam Endangers Kenya’s Lake Turkana.” International Rivers, March 1, 2009. Jones, William. “Tourism without controls – a case study in Ethiopia’s lower Omo Valley.” The Anglo-Ethiopian Lecture, 2005. “Omo: Local Tribes Under Threat.” The Oakland Institute. October 2013. “Tourism.” Mursi Online. Oxford Department of International Development, 2015. “Understanding Land Investment Deals in Africa.” The Oakland Institute. 2011. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. Pan Macmillan, 2014.

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ellery. Exchanges with each vehicle of tourists last no more than thirty minutes but with up to twenty cars coming each day during peak season, villages can be busy for several hours. By the afternoon, the tourists have fled the valley’s scorching temperatures and the villagers retreat to their huts to begin an afternoon of drinking. That’s when I show up. My guide and I had planned to take the morning bus, but delays meant that we didn’t end up leaving Jinka (the district’s largest town) until mid-day. The bus ride through Mago National Park, which encompasses Mursi territory, was beautiful but intense. Sitting amongst people from various different tribes, I finally understood the reality of the term “ethnic tension”. Two Ahmaric women were vocally competing with a Mursi mother for space on the bench, a Hamar girl was so incensed by the stench of a drunk Ari man that at one point she began hitting him; the bus was reverberating with negative energy at a level I had never experienced. It was a relief to get off, armed with a small pack of clean underwear, soap, and sunscreen, a box of bottled water and food supplies, and a tent. We had come to this particular village because I wanted to meet Oli Serali, a man who had come to be a voice for his people and who I hoped would welcome me as a researcher and friend. Oli Serali, we found out soon enough, was not around. He had left for several days to build his second wife a home in a nearby village.

Mursi village where the shooting took place

The men he left in charge were vicious and drunk. They wanted an exorbitant amount of money from me to camp next to their village. All the attempts my guide made to explain our situation – that I was a student, that I wasn’t there as a tourist, and that my purpose for being there was to expose the reality of their lives in the face of development – failed. They were far too drunk to listen. I decided to fork out the money the first night and then leave for a nearby village where my guide had better connections the next day. Not wanting to waste more time, I set out to map the village. Hoards of children followed me, asking where my camera was. They couldn’t believe that I had come without one. I had just sat down in the middle of the village gathering place to draw a picture. Suddenly, two gunshots went off and a man about ten meters in front of me dropped to the ground, dead. The next thing I knew, more shots went off and people were running in every direction. Women were screaming, babies were crying; everything was total and complete chaos.

MURDER IN A MURSI VILLAGE April 23, 2015

I ran towards the scrub brush and found a relatively large tree to hide behind. Seconds later, two men came and grabbed me forcefully by the wrists and started pulling me back towards the village. I screamed at them to let me go because they were hurting me. They didn’t hear me.

I began my time in the south with every intention of spending two weeks with the Mursi, the Omo Valley’s most popular tribe. The Mursi are Nilotic pastoralists who are believed to have crossed over into the Omo Valley from Sudan 200 years ago. They have become an icon of tribal culture in Ethiopia, with people traveling for hours to take photographs of their lip-plates. For tourists, the lip-plate symbolizes the “untouched” and “exotic” and the Mursi are more than willing to play the demeaning role of the archetypal primitive for the money they get from photographs.

My guide emerged with the chief from a neighboring village. He was hunched in pain because someone had just hit him with a stick.

When the road to Hana was built several years ago, many Mursi communities decided to move their villages closer to the main road in order to further capitalize on tourism. Tourism has become an integral part of daily life, as has drinking. A Mursi will begin his day at sunrise, tending to his herds of cattle and goats. By 9 am, the first tourist vehicles arrive and villagers (men, women, and children) rush to position themselves for photographs, adorned with lip-plates, horns, and other elaborate jew-

We drove for thirty kilometers on a rough, un-planed road. I was in the front with the two construction workers who had saved us. We rode in silence into the setting sun, towards the Chinese construction camp.

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A lorry pulled into the village and within thirty seconds we heaved our tent into the back and jumped in with four or five others from the village (mostly elders and Oli Serali’s younger brother, Melisha).

People at the camp surrounded us with questions when we arrived. About 150 men and five wom561

killed was an Ari who had become friends with the villagers by providing them with alcohol. The shooter had been shot by several others in the leg as he escaped. There was now family tension between the family of the killer and the family who shot the killer. It would likely take several weeks for the incident to blow over. Just as we were driving away, a tourist car pulled into the village. I was incredulous. Another day in Mursi land had begun. I was glad not to be a part of it! I have spent a substantial amount time since I witnessed that event trying to understand how the Mursi can take human life so lightly. This murder was not an isolated incident and cannot be attributed to the killer’s mental instability. Mursi have a reputation for committing violent acts, both against each other and against outsiders. Some people I talk to say that it is a defense mechanism they have developed as a society over the last few hundred years. Surely, living in a conflict-heavy zone, with frequent tribal raids must make one desensitized to death. That explains death as a consequence of territorial and resource disputes. But killings like the one I witnessed, that are so unfounded and unnecessary, make no sense. Yes, alcohol surely provokes violent behavior and an access to a gun makes it that much easier. Are these underlying causes, or is the true cause really that people are naturally inclined to kill? Many people believe that we will do bad things – rape, pillage, murder – unless we belong to a society that ingrains in us an ethical code of conduct. Morality, they say, is derived entirely externally. So does that mean that Mursi society simply does not have rules in place that condemn such violence? As much as this makes sense, I hate to assume that every person has it in them to kill. If I were born into a Mursi family, would I also be inclined to kill someone when I didn’t get along with them? Lakes by Arba Minch

This is definitely one of those unanswerable questions. But I refuse to believe that all people, even the Mursi, are innately capable of murder. I’ll leave you with a Frank Ocean quote: I still believe in man a wise one asked me why I just don’t believe we’re wicked I know that we sin but I still believe we try

en, mostly from the north, had been there just over a month, contracted by a Chinese construction company to build a new road from Hana to Jinka. They were visibly shaken when we told them what had happened. They had heard stories of Mursi aggression and attacks against construction workers in the past. And now they were living in the middle of Mursi land, with fighting breaking out on all sides. Three Chinese managers approached me asking how I got clearance to be there. They spoke only a few words of English. They spoke no Ahmaric. I explained to them what had happened and they immediately arranged a private caravan for me to sleep in and invited me to dinner (Chinese dumplings!). They offered nothing to my guide. The shock from the trauma we had experienced earlier quickly wore off in the company of the workers. We stayed up for several hours, listening to their stories and laughing. The next morning they drove us back to Jinka. We saw a herd of zebras and many baboons on our way. We stopped by the village and Melisha filled us in on what had happened. The man who was 562

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MAINTAINING TRADITION IN THE FACE OF URBANIZATION April 24, 2015 I didn’t let the Mursi encounter deter me from continuing my research for a second. As soon as we returned to Jinka, I had my guide walk me to Girshe, an Ari village in the hills above the city. There, I spent a beautiful five days with a widow named Agalo and her children. The Ari people have a population of nearly 240,000 and are located in the hills around Jinka and the eastern portion of Mago National Park. They are primarily agriculturalists and farm a variety of staple grains, fruits, beans, and root vegetables. When the Menelik Empire made a move to “incorporate” previously autonomous regions of Ethiopia in 1895, the Ari lost huge tracts of their land to violent military generals who served as landlords. During the Derg Regime, these lands that had been stolen formally came under public ownership. Today, Ari land – like all tribal lands in Ethiopia – is still publicly owned. This means that to develop housing or cultivate new areas, the Ari must seek permission from the government. While in many ways this government strategy prevents short-sighted environmental degradation and extraction, to many Ari it feels like the government has taken their power to be the environmental managers on their own land. For example, Ari are not permitted to log, extract from, or cultivate hillsides above existing settlements. This law has been implemented to prevent soil erosion and conserve tree cover, which in the long-run contributes to sustaining the Ari’s livelihoods. However, population pressures, urban encroachment, and soil degradation of over-farmed land are incentive enough for some to break these laws and farm illegally in the upper hills. In the hierarchy of needs and considerations, ensuring that your family has grain to survive the year trumps the potential ramifications of deforestation. Agalo wasn’t in Girshe when I first arrived. She had walked more than 15 km that day into Mago National Park to collect grass for her new kitchen. Men in the village gathered at Agalo’s in the late afternoon, after spending all day plowing their fields. I watched them work for a couple of hours, attaching rafters to the hut’s frame. When the job was done, we sat around drinking t’ala (fermented maize beer) out of a communal gourd bowl. What I was witnessing was the age-old practice of idir, where a voluntary work party consisting of neighbors and family members comes together to assist in the construction of a house or the clearing of a field. Idir is an integral component of traditional Ari communities; it promotes collaboration, inter-dependency, self-help, and support for members of the community, like Agalo, who do not have men in their families to do such labor themselves. As the days passed, I watched as Agalo’s new kitchen materialized. I also got to participate in the ploughing and planting of the new season’s crop. Frequent rains caught us in the field and despite being cold and wet, we were glad to see them bringing life to the seeds we’d planted. One day, I climbed with Agalo up the village’s tallest peak to cut grass. From the summit I could see all of Jinka: the airstrip under construction, the main street, the road leading up to Arba Minch, and Mago National Park to the west. My view was shrouded seconds later by a blanket of fog and we quickly headed back down to avoid the impending thunderstorm. Seeing how close Girshe is to the city made me really appreciate the Ari’s continuance of their traditional ways of life. How easy it would be to abandon one’s agricultural lifestyle, move 3 km down 566

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Hills around Girshe the road to the city’s edge, and eek out a living in a small shop. Many Ari have done this; the majority of Jinka’s population consists of Ari who were born and raised in the hills. But most Ari still cling to their traditional lifestyles. Perhaps it is out of pride to uphold tradition, or out of fear of something new, or perhaps because for so long, agriculture has been the most secure form of livelihood in this environment. Being in the foothills, the Ari rarely experienced droughts of the same severity as tribes living in the valleys. And their distance from the Omo River and un-developable terrain do not make them targets for foreign investors. Despite impending threats of deforestation, soil degradation, and water scarcity, the Ari are relatively lucky to be living where they do. As long as they are not pushed out by urban sprawl and can manage their natural resources in the face of population growth and climate change, I think the Ari will be here for many generations to come. Of course, managing interactions with their urban neighbor will be tricky. Presently, Ari children walk to Jinka daily for school. Most adults go at least three times a week to access the market, flour mill, clinic, and other urban services, visit relatives, and relax. At the same time, Jinka relies on these rural villages for food, handicrafts, firewood, and charcoal. At present, their relationship is mutually beneficial. As long as rural communities like Girshe continue to be valued, both instrumentally and culturally, total rural-to-urban transition and cultural annihilation of the Ari can be avoided. I hope I can return to Girshe five or ten years from now and find Agalo still sitting, by this time surrounded by grandchildren, shucking corn and roasting coffee. Sources: Jemma, Hussein. “The Politics of Land Tenure in Ethiopian History: Experience From the South.” XI World Congress of Rural Sociology, Trondheim, Norway. July 25, 2004 Woldetsadik, Terrefe. “The Unification of Ethiopia (1880-1935) Wälläga.” Journal of Ethiopian Studies (1968): 73-86. 568

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Agaloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new house in Girshe Building a round kitchen

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Agaloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s old roundhouse 581

Details around the house

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A HAMAR UTOPIA? April 25, 2015 Getting out to Hamar land was almost too easy. A guide in Arba Minch had given me the name of a family to stay with in a village called Umbli, 20 km from Dimeka. I took a 2.5 hour minibus ride south from Jinka. The landscape changed dramatically over the course of the journey. Forested hills, made lush by the recent rains, turned into dry expanses of terrain, marked intermittently by ragged trees and gigantic boulders. I was worried that I wouldn’t find a motorbike in Dimeka to take me out to Umbli. But within the span of 5 minutes, a local guide approached me, I told him my mission, he called over his friend with a bike, I negotiated a price that was one third of what he originally asked for (still twice what a local would pay), and I was off down the dirt road with my white scarf fluttering behind me. My driver dropped me off at a fork in the road. I had been expecting an actual village with round huts like the ones in Mursi land. But all I saw were fields of scrub-brush and paths of cracked clay winding between them. Children emerged and walked me in the direction of Sago’s house, the head of the family I hoped to stay with. After about half a kilometer I sighted the first two thatched roofs of “Umbli”. I approached the clearing, where two women were sifting through sorghum grain and a half-dozen children were playing under a tamarind tree. A wave of anxiety hit me: this was the first time in all my nine months of visiting villages that I was all alone at the start to introduce myself and ask to stay. The women brought out several animal skins and arranged them artistically underneath the tree for me to sit on. I mentioned the man who had given me their contact and they smiled in recognition. Not knowing what else to do or say, I opened my sketchbooks and started showing them past drawings. Everyone gathered around me and I felt like a kindergarten teacher reading from a picture book. Like the Ari’s, the Hamar’s language is Omotic-based. So occasionally I would throw out the Ari word for something in my drawing like “ono” (house) or “waki” (cow). The children found my attempts at communication quite comical. I realized, ultimately that the women were waiting for Sago to formally welcome me to stay with them. He came some time later and we lounged around for the afternoon, exchanging basic phrases in Ahmaric and Hamar. I learned through interpretation that the two women who were busying themselves with food prep and water collection were Sago’s wives, Duka and Bur. He had a total of 11 children, with one more on the way, and two grandchildren. When I asked him how old he was, he proudly signed, “30!” I had to hold back laughter. I knew he must be at least 45; most Hamar have no records of their date of birth. In the evening, Sago walked me one kilometer east to another hut that was enclosed by a scrub-brush fence. Duka was there corralling the goats for the night. I realized that this was her house. In Hamar society, it is common for a man to have two wives. He builds each wife a home with some distance between them, and in this way expands his territory for grazing and cultivation. Because the Hamar are a majority tribe in the Omo Valley, their territory is substantial and at less risk of attack. Families are not clustered in compact settlements, rather they are sprawled across the valley in isolated homesteads. When the community gathers, they chose a centrally located site that all families can walk to. 596

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I was lucky enough to witness the largest community gathering of the year. The next day, Sago and I walked along the dry riverbed, which passes by Bur’s house, to a neighbor’s. There, men and women sat in separate circles, sharing parsi (fermented maize beer) and coating each other’s hair with red clay and oil. I could sense that this was preparation for a much bigger event to come, but having had no opportunity to do background research on the Hamar, I was naive as to what it could be. At one point it started storming and more than twenty of us squeezed inside this tiny hut, of no more than 10 feet (3.3 m) in diameter. I was wedged in, chest-to-chest with a nursing mother who jokingly pushed her babe to my breast. She reached for my sports bra (I was wearing a bra and sarong to cover my lower half) and motioned for me to take it off. Several others around us nodded in approval so I removed my bra. Tragically, the baby didn’t take well to my nipple when he realized it was dry. Life went on as usual the next day: Sago and the boys plowed and seeded the fields, Bur had disappeared, I assumed out to tend the cattle, and Duka stayed at Bur’s house to process cereals. Evening time approached and with it the distant sounds of horns. Sago arose from his afternoon nap and walked with me to a field just beyond Duka’s house. There, a couple hundred people were gathering, clad in leather skirts and adorned with beaded jewellery from head to toe. Women were dancing in the center of the open space, men were sitting on the fringes drinking parsi, and children glided between them excitedly. The evening progressed. People did not seem surprised to see me, although they were curious about why I wasn’t taking pictures. When people began to cluster themselves in a central area, I took a seat next to the only young woman my age who was not dancing. She seemed a bit uneasy and I soon discovered why. Young men were passing around supple sticks and the young women were gathering, preparing to dance before them. Total chaos ensued: women danced in front of men, some very exuberantly, and received whiplashes in return. The young woman I had sat next to soon emerged from the mosh-pit with bloody gashes on her previously smooth back. Although she seemed to not enjoy it, other women were: some even went as far as demanding to be whipped again, to ensure that their wounds would scar. The scars, I assumed, represented a woman’s strength and courage. Later, I learned that they also symbolized her worthiness to be loved by her husband. All their families sat and watched the show merrily, passing around gourds overflowing with parsi. The celebrations, called Ukuli Bula, lasted the three remaining days I was there. Adults did not sleep. In the evening, Duka would cook me and the children sorghum porridge with moringa leaves and then leave me as the informal babysitter to go drink parsi with the other women from around Umbli. She would reappear at sunrise to wake us up and the daily routine – cooking, herding, and fetching water – would continue. On the second day of the festival, I witnessed the bull-jumping, where the strongest young men greased their bodies with butter and wrestled eight bulls into a line. A teenage boy then sprinted and leaped across the bulls’ backs several times: this was his right of passage into manhood. I realized on my last day in Umbli that I had not seen the very pregnant Bur since she had disappeared three days earlier. My questions about her disappearance went unanswered and I deduced that she must have left to deliver her baby in isolation (most Hamar women still uphold the practice of giving birth on their own, despite outside doctors’ encouragements to travel to clinics in nearby towns). I was sad that I would not see her or meet her newborn baby. 598

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View of Hamar Valley

On my fifth day, a hung-over and exhausted Sago emerged from his merrymaking to walk me back to Dimeka. It felt weird to be back in “modern” society with this man. We sat and had a beer and he picked at the injera I ordered, obviously partial to the bland porridge he eats three times a day at home. Despite his patriarchal nature and habit of taking long naps while his wives worked beside him, I had come to really love this man and I wiped away tears as I said my goodbyes. Looking back, there were many moments during my stay where I felt like I was witnessing what life must have looked like 1000 years ago. While it is true that the Hamar have not changed their traditions much since their conception as a people, I had to shake myself awake from this fantasy. In my writing, I have repeatedly tried to express the folly of romanticizing indigenous cultures as “untouched” and “traditional”. In my post “The World Until Yesterday: Revisiting the Discourse on Indigeneity and Its Implications in the Omo Valley”, I wrote that, “Just because an indigenous society hasn’t industrialized does not mean it has remained stagnant since the Stone Age… Their genes, cultures, and behaviors have continued to evolve to the present.” At first glance, the Hamar seem totally removed from the mainstream society that encapsulates them. Aside from the beads, salt, cotton fabrics, metal pots, cutlery, and occasional cellphone that they get source from Dimeka, everything they own they make themselves. But they are and will continue adapting, as natural resources become scarcer, more tourists visit, and companies claim portions of their land to develop. While the cultural disintegration of the Hamar would be tragic in many ways (most of which are aesthetic), it would likely be seen as a success to many human rights workers who criticize their inhumane and oppressive practices of polygamy, female whipping, isolation during childbirth, infanticide, etc. But does the ceasure of these practices also have to coincide with the complete destruction of the Hamar’s way of life? I don’t think it does.

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There are many who believe that the Hamar’s traditional forms of livelihood are slated to disappear – and with it their unique (and questionable) cultural practices. All I’ll say is this: like everyone else, their cultures and behaviors will continue to evolve; they will have to or they will not survive. I just hope it happens in a way that gives all Hamar people (men and women) a voice in the process.

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Burâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house

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Sagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sons under the tamarind tree

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Shera dressed for the Jumping Bull Festival 612

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Whipping and dancing

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PREFERENCING A MINORITY April 27, 2015 I had spent the last hour at the dusty junction of Turmi trying to get a ride to the town of Omorate, 100 km south on the border of Kenya. My plan over these last couple weeks had been fluid, designed mostly around the objective of experiencing life in three tribes that encompassed the different bases of livelihood in the Omo Valley: agriculture, agro-pastoralism, and pastoralism. Several people had recommended I visit the pastoral Dassenech, whose territory encompassed Omorate. But public transportation was all but nonexistent and finding a ride from Turmi, as I was gathering, was nearly impossible. I was walking away from yet another rude encounter with a passing vehicle, when a guy on a stoop of a nearby coffee shop called my name. Startled, I approached and discovered that he was a local guide recommended to me weeks earlier by another guide in Arba Minch. We talked for a couple of hours and I explained to him my interest in spending a few days with a traditionally-pastoral tribe. By evening, I had still not managed to find a ride to Omorate and he kindly invited me to join him and his three Israeli clients on their journey to Kara land the next day. The 70 km drive the next day took us over two hours on bumpy, unplaned road. Rains the night before had brought much-needed water to the streams and soil, which consequently proved challenging to drive over. We reached Korcho, the first of three Kara villages along the Omo River, mid-morning. The village sits at the edge of a narrow plateau with a spectacular view onto the snaking river below. To the south you can see Kenya, to the west Sudan, and to the north a cotton plantation that a Turkish company is developing. As soon as I arrived, I met Dunga, a college-educated government-employee who had returned to Korcho – his hometown – to collect the annual tax. Dunga invited me to stay at his family’s house. I walked with him around the village and met his aunt, a widow named Chowli who had two boys (both of whom were gone for a few days with the livestock). I immediately felt at home with Chowli. But before I could settle in, I needed to get permission from the Korcho guide’s association to stay. Like most of the tribal villages that tourists frequent, Korcho requires a village fee from each visitor. In Korcho, the fee is 200 birr (10 USD), which is equivalent to the average Ethiopian city-dweller’s weekly income. Sadly, this money is not benefiting the community at large; the handful of local “guides” and the chief pocket most of it. I was nervous approaching the guides here for this reason; I knew they must have become used to taking advantage of tourists and their perspective and tolerance for non-standard visitors (i.e. visitors like me who had come not to take photos but to sit and stay awhile) would have been compromised. Indeed, when I first explained myself to the head guide and asked to stay, he was insistent that I pay 3000 birr (150 USD) for four nights. This was an obscene amount of money to hand over to a bunch of young men with large egos who were doing me absolutely no service. Had I had such a large sum of money with me, I would have rather given it all directly to the woman who would be hosting me. She would use the money to feed her family and rebuild her house, whereas these boys would likely use it to purchase alcohol at the village tavern. I explained to him that I could not pay such a high price and he arrogantly told me that I could leave if I didn’t have the money. 624

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I returned broken-hearted to the car I had come in. Just before we were ready to go, I approached the head guide one last time and pleaded with him to let me stay. Tears welled in my eyes, which must have softened him up because he finally agreed to let me “as a researcher”. Elated, I said goodbye to my new Israeli friends and practically skipped back to Chowli’s hut. The five days I spent with Chowli and her family in Korcho were fascinating. This was the first village where tourism played a major role in people’s daily lives and I was excited to witness the process from the other side of the fence. Within the first two hours of settling in with Chowli, we were summoned to the parking lot to entertain a special group of visitors. The women adorned me with jewelry and white paint and we walked together to the clearing where six National Geographic vehicles had just pulled in. The head guide explained to the villagers gathered that this VIP group had paid in advance and that they would all make 100 birr at the end of their visit if they posed for photographs and showcased traditional Kara dances. Two dozen mostly elderly White Americans emerged from the vehicles with Nikon cameras draped around their necks and beige safari hats on their heads. And just like that they began snapping pictures right and left. Standing between Chowli and her friend Nameli, I really felt for the first time the blatant objectification that this type of photo-tourism brings. A couple of women approached me and asked what on earth I was doing here, how did I manage to live with these people, and was my mother okay with it? I am sure these women were well-intentioned and just naively curious. But to me their questions reflected a deeply supremacist Western mindset, which holds that tribes like the Kara should be engaged with only for their aesthetic value. For these women, and I’m sure for most tourists who pass through, the thought of actually having a conversation with a villager, let alone spending the night with one, was unthinkable and possibly dangerous. As if the people of Korcho don’t eat, play, sleep, poop, and laugh like the rest of humankind… Aside from the three hours worth of tourist exchanges in the morning, daily life in Korcho was not so different from life in Girshe or Umbli. I would rise with the sun, drink tea made of coffee shells with the neighbors, eat paldo (sorghum porridge with peas, which I enjoyed so much it became my Kara nickname), go to the farm with Chowli to weed, return to the hut in time to see some European and Chinese tourists wander through, eat paldo again, sit and paint in the gappa (outdoor shelter) while Chowli ground flour, made jewellery, and preformed other household tasks, fetch water from the river in the late afternoon, watch the sun set over Sudan, bathe, eat paldo, and then lie and sing songs with the children under a blanket of stars. After two days, the children finally stopped asking me to take pictures of them. But I felt the impact of tourism and NGO interventions in many other ways. Women would occasionally come up to me and ask if I had an extra t-shirt to give them. This puzzled me, since it has never been their custom to wear Western clothes. Tourists come all the time with plastic toys, second-hand clothes, and monetary donations. It’s a strange duality, since they are visiting to appreciate and document a beautiful and (until recently) self-sufficient society. What they may or may not realize is that they then undermine this self-sufficiency and cultural beauty by bringing unnecessary clothing, plastic junk for the children to fight over, and money. How can you come claiming to have respect for a society like the Kara when deep-down you think they require your charity? Over the past ten years, at least half-a-dozen NGOs and several international government agencies have entered Korcho, promising to equip the villagers with various infrastructure and services. Why have the Kara – a minority tribe of no more than 1500 people – received so much more aid than oth626

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er tribes in the Omo Valley? It’s not that they are any more disadvantaged or negatively impacted by development schemes along the Omo River than the Dassanech, Nyangatom, or Mursi are. They also are no less represented by the government (that is to say, the government doesn’t seem to represent any of the pastoralist tribes). I would argue that exposure from tourism has a huge impact on the number of foreign aid investments. The Kara are colorful: they paint white designs all over their bodies, wear bright jewellery, and perform beautiful songs and dances. I believe they receive so much outside aid because of their aesthetic infamy and because they lack basic services that the government would normally be obligated to provide a community. It is true that the Kara have been historically marginalized by the government and, despite paying taxes, have seen few government initiatives to equip their villages with basic infrastructure and services. Yes, the government built a road to Korcho in 2000, which has meant that more money via tourism enters their community (albeit unequally distributed). It also funded a health post for several years, which provided medicine and emergency care; but that eventually closed due to lack of funding. Pressure from outside organizations finally forced the government to build a primary school in Korcho, which has increased the rate of attendance from 1% to maybe 25% (on a good day). But from the perspective of the government, investing in Korcho makes no longterm sense. It sees minority societies like the Kara as putting unnecessary strain on public resources and would rather have them relocate to a more centralized town like Turmi, where public services are already in place. So NGOs have begun to assume the role of the government in bringing infrastructure like wells, generators, and materials to Kara villages. The problem is that these NGOs are either not following through with their projects or they are developing them in a way that the community can’t sustain, themselves. This – along with tourist donations – is creating patterns of dependency in a society that was for so long autonomous and self-sufficient. When you never have to leave your village to earn a livelihood, it makes sense that you would start to feel entitled to ask for things like t-shirts, pencils, and cellphones instead of working to purchase them yourself. I am not trying to say that the Kara have become lazy. Quite the opposite: they have to work much harder now than they ever had to produce enough food, keep their livestock healthy, and provide shelter for their growing families in the face of large-scale development. The Turkish-owned cotton plantation being developed upriver stole 10,000 hectares of land from the Kara. This project has substantially decreased Kara’s access to grazing land and forests (a source of game, medicine, firewood, and lumber) and is polluting the Omo River, their only source of drinking water. The construction of the Gibe Dam has decreased annual flooding, which the Kara traditionally relied on to nourish their crops along the river. In recent years, they have had to begin a second growing season on the plateau to ensure their continued food security. As pastureland becomes increasingly degraded by development and climate change, the Kara will become evermore dependent on agriculture and alternative sources of livelihood. Housing typologies will also change, as a result of decreased access to natural resources. Grass, the traditional roofing material, is difficult to gather nowadays in large-enough quantities. Wood, as well, is proving hard to find in the sizes and quantities that are necessary. Towards the end of my stay, Chowli told me that she would soon need to rebuilt her house: it had been several years since she constructed her current one and the roof was beginning to leak. As soon as she had enough money, she would rebuilt, reusing the wood posts and walls, but purchasing corrugated iron sheeting to use for the roof. Not only would she have to buy the material, she would also have to pay someone to transport it to Korcho and install it (a total cost of 4000 birr, or 200 USD). What I paid her at the end of 628

Kara boys playing football as sun sets into Sudan behind them

my stay would cover the material costs of this project. The Kara will be forced to adapt to many physical and social changes over the next couple decades. Among these changes will be an ever-increasing level of tourism and NGO involvement. If the Kara are to stay on their land and not succumb to government pressure to integrate into mainstream society, they will need to take a much more active role in directing outside involvement. Money entering the community will need to be distributed more equitably and infrastructure projects need to be designed in a way that encourages self-sufficiency and resilience. Outside involvement can have a positive impact on minority groups like the Kara, but only if it comes from a place of respect and not paternalism. Further Reading: Petros, Gezahegn. The Karo of the lower Omo Valley. No. 6. Dept. of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Administration, Addis Ababa University, 2000. 629

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The Turkish plantation that has taken over the Karaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land

Dunga Nakuwa, the regional representative for the Kara, in front of the Omo River 634

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Chowliâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family cluster 640

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Collecting water from the Omo River, with plantation construction in background

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Grain storage sheds

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Bunno making jewellry 656

Chowli making jewellry 657

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Dungtum with traditional face paint 659

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GOODBYE ETHIOPIA! May 2, 2015 As I embark on the last leg of my Watson Fellowship tonight (beginning in St. Petersburg and ending in Beijing), I can’t help but reminisce about my time here in Ethiopia. I came to this country feeling lost and unprepared. My NGO and faculty contacts in the Omo Valley had dead-ended and I felt unready to begin my research down there. Instead, I headed north to spend a month in the Ethiopian highlands. I had actually dreamt of traveling to Geblen, Tigray for eight years and don’t know why I hadn’t considered integrating a trip into my Watson project before. Geblen ended up being both the highlight and nadir of my time in Ethiopia. It was such a joy to connect with the people whose lives I had studied and written about so abstractly in the past. It was also incredibly distressing to see how severe and hopeless their lives have become in such a degraded environment. The second portion of my research in Ethiopia focused on the Omo Valley. I divided my three weeks there between three different communities that encompassed the spectrum of livelihood generation: agriculture, agro-pastoralism, and pastoralism. The Omo Valley was as disheartening as Geblen with respect to its communities’ livelihood insecurity. I just wrote several blog posts about it and can’t bear to write about it any more! The last portion of my research here focused on urban housing insecurity in Addis Ababa. Rural-to-urban migration is rapid in this city of 4 million, mostly as a consequence of indigenous livelihood insecurity and forced resettlement schemes. Addis is not prepared to deal with the influx of people and an estimated 80% of its population lives in informal settlements. I spent the last two weeks doing a visual analysis of Addis’s periods of growth and met with professors, urban planners, and local politicians to understand what is (and isn’t!!) being done to address the housing crisis. I have many people to thank for supporting me here over the past three months: my friends and family who were always a Skype call away when I needed them, the guides and villagers who showed me so much hospitality in the highlands and the Omo Valley (you know who you are!), the travelers I met along the way with whom I shared many miseries and joys, the faculty and staff at EiABC for helping me synthesize the last portion of my research, and most of all Lorenzo Suarez, the Swiss Counsellor for Development and Humanitarian Affairs who provided me a home base in Addis and many important insights and contacts. Thank you!

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On canal in St. Petersburg

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In Catherine Garden

Kazan Cathedral

Churches on Nevskiy Prospect

Cathedral of the Savior of the Spilled Blood

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View from the State Hermitage Museum on Victory Day

Details around central St. Petersburg

Panorama from St. Isaacâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cathedral

Sculptures in the Russian Museum

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BEING INVISIBLE IN MOSCOW

lives and I'm happy that way. I can't imagine walking down the street in Addis, it's way too dusty."

May 14, 2015

Here was a woman who was acknowledging her privilege, essentially acknowledging her racist assumptions of all of *them* (as if every Ethiopian was filthy and lived on the streets and wasn't worthy of associating with aside from having them do her laundry and serve her at the salon). And I find her attitude appalling. But what I find even more disgusting is that apparently this racist "associative" perspective exists within me, too, in a much more subconscious and therefore problematic way.

Since I last wrote, I've spent a week in St. Petersburg and a week in Moscow. I am currently staying with the friends of my good friend Joe in a KGB apartment complex on the edge of the city. There are probably lots of hidden cameras everywhere, even in the shower. Being back in a highly organized, clean, "developed", consumption-driven, and White European environment has elicited a plethora of emotional responses in me. I am overcome here by a new set of realities and collective ethos, the likes of which I have never seen. Most of the places I've have traveled to alone over the last six years contain a broad spectrum of realities. In India or Bali, for example, where spirituality, conservatism, post-industrial globalism, populism, etc. all converge, butting heads. Within a 100 meter radius you can find people who hold stock in the truth of palm lines, who attribute strange happenings to mischievous spirits, and others who can't spend more than five minutes away from their phones, who think the presence of an H&M in their city is the ultimate mark of progress. It's incredible to see realities of these extremes coexisting. That's partly what draws me to places like this: because there is no such thing as conformity. There is only confusion, chaos, and somehow through it all still a national identity. And somehow I have never felt out of place in any of these environments, engaging in any of these varying realities. I am just as comfortable doing shots with conservative businessmen as I am painting murals with anarchist artists, enjoying an opera with fancy urbanites, sitting around a ceremonial fire for 6 hours of Sanskrit chanting, or pulling weeds with tribal women. This is not so much a reflection of my flexibility as a person, but of the ultimate similarities that I found bound us in this vast and complex human experience. I think it is biologically ingrained in us to recognize commonalities and socially taught to identify differences.

I convinced myself in all of these places that the cultural and racial differences that may seem to predefine relationships normally wouldn't inhibit me from having deeper connections with the people whom I was visiting. I realized quickly that this wasn't just up to my openness: more often than not I found myself isolated because of the other's inability to see past race, class, and culture. But now I must ask if it wasn't just them? If I really was being open enough with myself and with those around me? Intimacy with one's own pathos is the foundation for intimacy of any kind with others. It seems wrong that I only start to feel insecure when I become anonymous amongst Whiteness again. Maybe I subconsciously liked being stared at and yelled at and touched in countries where I stood out physically. Because this attention validated my existence. Physical anonymity forces you to look for other ways to validate yourself. Whether it's the way you dress or how skilled you are at something or what have you. It's not as simple as walking down the street. In a way I feel lost right now searching for self-validification. And in another way it's incredibly freeing. Maybe I'll just take a couple weeks in Moscow and feel totally invisible for the first time in my life.

Most notable these past couple of weeks is this wave of self-doubt, the likes of which I have never before experienced. I have irrationally begun to question the methodology of my research, my creative abilities, my relationship to family back home, my physical appearance, my lack of motivation to plan (and therefore worthiness to go on) my trip to Khanty Mansiysk and Altai... This is where I really need to recognize the internalized racism I have (that most White people have). Traveling for so long in developing countries with people of color, I always felt like I connected to people I met but never felt the need to compare myself to them (in the sense of am I smart enough, good enough at this or that, social enough, attractive enough?). But now that I am back in a region where people once again look like me, and have relatively similar familial and educational backgrounds, aspirations, style, etc. I find myself needing to understand myself more in relation to others. How is this racist? Right before I left Ethiopia, I had a rather uncomfortable conversation with a White Swiss woman who was the neighbor of my host in Addis. I was explaining how exhausted I was after spending so much time being on the streets and interacting with people who just never seemed to want to accept me as a peer. She said she couldn't relate at all. To paraphrase, she said, "We just knew coming here that there's such a huge gap between us and the locals and that we would never have to interact with them. I mean, look at us. We're privileged: we have a nice car, a decent house, we socialize within our own (diplomatic) circle, we go to nice restaurants. We live totally separate 706

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Gorky Park urban furniture

Self portrait on the metro

Architectural details around central Moscow

Melnikov House details

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Behind Melnikovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house 715

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Details of Lena and Arturâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house 722

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View from Jenya and Pollyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s apartment

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View from my room in Artem’s apartment 728

View from my room in Artem’s apartment 729

CREATING A PERMA-CULTURE IN RUSSIA’S CITIES (PART 1) May 15, 2015 I have spent the past two weeks soaking up the first rays of Russia’s summer sun, first in St. Petersburg and now in Moscow. More so than the past four countries I stayed in, Russia is unchartered territory for me. Despite its fantastic railroad network, plethora of wi-fi hotspots, and relatively well organized social and political system, I feel substantially more nervous and unprepared to embark on my journey east than I have in the arguably “wilder” and more remote areas I visited earlier. Perhaps it is the shear size of my impending journey (5000 aerial kilometers to Beijing), or my inability to say more than “please” and “thank you” in Russian that feeds this anxiety. But beyond these logistical challenges, I worry that I don’t understand the Russian ethos or how the country’s history informs the present and future lives of people here. Most people I have met seem resigned to live the lives they inherited in this post-Soviet landscape. They hover in this strange limbo, half-embracing Western capitalism and half-resisting outside control. This is the urban experience, where people spend their days working in modern European city centers and return at night to their brutalist Soviet-era apartment buildings on the city’s fringes. I have been lucky to stay with friends in both cities who have shed varying perspectives on the Russian ethos and who have managed to adopt lifestyles that veer from the mainstream. The architecture of St. Petersburg and Moscow does a better job explaining this country’s history and current ethos than the people themselves. Both cities were developed during Russia’s Muscovite and Imperial epochs (1230-1712; 1721-1917), when tsars commissioned lavish churches, palaces, and centers of art and theater to commemorate their power and culture. Many of these buildings were partially destroyed during World War II or else demolished by the Soviets who mandated atheism and condemned hedonism. Seventy years of Soviet totalitarianism drastically impacted the cities’ plans and buildings. Soviets propagated formalism and proposed plans for large, organized, and technically advanced cities. After WWII, Stalinist policies forced rapid urbanization and emphasized constructing brutalist and monumentalist buildings from the rubble of the war. Stalin built huge, multi-lane highways through cities and promoted the industrialization and productivity of urban spaces over their habitability by people. He also constructed massive fields of apartment buildings on the cities’ peripheries, where each family was given a room in a communal apartment and shared a kitchen and bathroom with several other families on the floor. Today, most people still live in these apartment buildings, although spaces have been redivided to consider modern expectations for privacy and space. In 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed and many building projects were put on hold. Over the last thirty years, as Russia’s economy strengthened and its building codes were loosened, its cities have grown in three interesting ways. (1) Many of the Classical and Baroque buildings that were destroyed in the twentieth century are being restored or even reconstructed in a nostalgic effort to recreate a sense of European opulence and grandeur. (2) An ever-growing demand for affordable housing has spurred the construction of both public and private apartment buildings, which often adhere to the same monotonous architectural forms that were characteristic of Soviet times. (3) Simultaneously, developers are looking to modernize business districts, erecting glass and concrete skyscrapers and shopping centers everywhere you look. 730

Within all of these formalized changes to Russia’s urban fabric, more subtle but equally important grassroots projects are in the works. It is these projects that have gripped my attention over the last couple weeks. While they don’t exactly align with my interest in studying indigenous housing insecurity, I find it fascinating and useful to study housing and livelihood insecurity in an urban context and how people are taking the power into their hands to create the culture and lives they want for themselves in Russia’s twenty-first century. I would categorize many of these initiatives under the umbrella of permaculture, the systems approach to creating ecologically harmonious permanent human settlements. Looking back at my past posts, it seems strange that I haven’t yet discussed permaculture in the context of my project. Permaculture is not a new concept. The word was coined in 1978 by two Australian designers but its principles were being explored decades earlier in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. What began as an effort to develop regenerative and self-sustaining agricultural systems has broadened to include all ways in which we design for human societies in the broader environment (buildings, biotechnology, forestry, etc.). Permaculture has not been adopted into mainstream design and engineering fields (yet) because its definitions and theoretical underpinnings are still rather vague. There are many definitions out there that I like, all of which are a bit different: “Permaculture uses a set of principles and practices to design sustainable human settlements.” — Toby Hemenway “Permaculture is a way of life which shows us how to make the most of our resources by minimizing waste and maximizing potential. Conscious design of a lifestyle which is highly productive and does not cause environmental damage. Meeting our basic needs and still leaving the earth richer than we found it.” — Graham Bell “Permaculture provides an ethical & holistic foundation for sustainable culture. The principles are derived from three basic ethics: Care for the Earth; Care for People; Limit needs & Reinvest in Future. Permaculture uses the energies of wind, sun, water, soil & the myriad biological processes of the world’s organisms.” — Ben Haggard “Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted & thoughtless labour; of looking at plants & animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system.” — Bill Mollison “Permaculture offers an understanding of how biological processes are integrated, and it deals primarily with tangibles: plants, soils, water, animal systems, wildlife, bush regeneration, biotechnology, agriculture, forestry, architecture, and society in the areas of economics, land access, bioregions and incomes tied to right livelihood.” — Rosemary Morrow Of course, permaculture is a system of solutions and my Watson research aims to understand the nuances of the problems, only, and not propose solutions. But I still find it a worthwhile pause to see what ideas locals have come up with in Russian cities to deal with rising cost of housing, introduce systems of urban food generation in the wake of sanctions and widespread food insecurity, and decrease dependence on virgin resources and fossil fuels (Russia’s main industry). The following are three “permaculture” projects in or near Moscow that I will write more about over 731

the next few days: Fruits and Veges – opened a few months ago, this place was an instant success. It’s nestled within a large factory complex that has been adapted to house progressive and creative businesses ranging from design firms to art schools. Anton, the owner, built a space-ship-like greenhouse above a former bomb shelter. A vegan cafe occupies the lower bomb shelter and profits fund Anton’s urban agricultural experiments in the greenhouse above. More information and sketches to come! Cherny Cooperative – you might ask yourself how a cooperative of five people who are selling hand-brewed coffee could be considered permaculture. Sure, they’re not designing urban agricultural systems, but they are designing a new type of business, one that is more ecologically sustainable and socially just both for those living in Moscow and for those who are exporting the coffee. Plus their coffee is really good! Nicola Lenivets – a 650 hectare territory north of Moscow that serves as a natural, self-regulated environment for life, recreation, art and work in harmony with nature. It offers residencies for artists, who create large installations that experiment with biomimicry and ecological wellness, workshops, and a communal living space for people who want to live off the grid. I’ll be visiting this weekend! Fruits and Veges, Anton’s greenhouse and hydroponics system

CREATING A PERMA-CULTURE IN RUSSIA’S CITIES (PART 2) May 28, 2015 If you follow my blog, you must know by now that I am cynical of the standard model of development most of the world aspires to. “Development” as defined by our world’s most powerful governments and corporations falls within the paradigm of unending economic growth. I believe it is impossible to grow our economies indefinitely on the timescale humans operate within, as that would require an infinite amount of natural resources, most of which have regeneration rates on much larger timescales.

The inside of Fruits and Veges, which goes down into the former bunker of the surrounding factory 732

The proponents of this type of development promise that it will advance societies and create wealth and livelihoods for the world’s poor. Everything in my studies, travels, and conversations with the world’s “poorest people” has revealed otherwise. Hegemonies (wealthy governments and corporations with a history of exploiting people and their environments to make profit and retain power) want you to believe this story of never-ending growth and inevitable prosperity. It secures their posi733

tion on the world stage. It reinforces a top-down approach whereby those who hold the most power (white, heterosexual, upper-middle-class men) make the decisions and are farthest from the social and environmental consequences. Nowhere is this system more transparent than in the city and its immediate rural context. Cities are centers of wealth and power. They run on the natural resources sourced from their hinterlands. Traditionally, these hinterlands were more localized in scale, spanning only a few kilometers from the city, where food, fodder, fuel, water, and construction materials could be sourced. In feudalist societies, peasants occupied slums of cities’ fringes and the villages in its hinterlands. Hinterlands and the people who lived there existed to buttress the urban elite. The environmental degradation and suffering by rural people, which such a hierarchical system of development caused, went largely unnoticed by those who benefited from it (largely because of their spatial and “moral supremacist” distance from the externalities). Today, hinterlands assume an entirely different definition. With the introduction of global supply chains and access to essentially every square meter of the planet, cities now run off of the exploitation of rural people and their environments in distant lands. This is the concept of slow violence, which I have described in previous posts, whereby the world’s most privileged people are uplifting themselves at the expense of traditionally marginalized, disenfranchised people and their environments. This is not just injustice, it is a slow and often invisible type of violence. A lot needs to change in our current model of development. And it doesn’t just involve tacking the term “sustainable” in front of it and pushing forward. To truly develop in a just, equitable, and sustainable way, we must ask ourselves what we seek through development? What would a developed world look like? Would it be having New York Cities scattered around the globe? Is it a world of endless opportunities? I would like to see a world where 95% of wealth and political power is not in the hands of 5% of the population. Where peoples’ basic needs can be satisfied and their rights respected. Where people can really choose whether they want to live their lives in a city or on the land their ancestors passed down to them, rather than being coerced or otherwise forced into urbanizing. I do not envision an equal world (that is far too naïve an ideal), but I do envision a just world where environmental limits are recognized and respected. In this world, the proletariat would play a real part in their countries’ decision-making processes. Success in business would be reimagined as a system of sustainable livelihood generation, rather than limitless growth of profits. Turning people on to this idea may seem like an impossible challenge. In cities, where 66% of the world will live by 2050, most people become passive within a system that tells them they must work hard, have a family, respect the rules, buy stuff, and maybe get lucky. Yet, waking up to the realities of this system of exploitation and conformity is possible. It can begin with a handful of visionary change-makers. In Moscow, after decades of tsarist, communist, and now totalitarian/corporate oppression, most people have trouble imagining what their lives could be like if they were to be given freedom from conformity. But there are people challenging the status quo and I was lucky enough to meet some of them and learn about their projects: Fifteen years ago, Anton was a rebel who was repeatedly being kicked out of school, getting into 734

How to make hanging plant holders out of felt

fights, doing drugs, and riding around the city at night on his motorcycle. He finally left school and moved to Goa, India, where he spent several months doing more drugs on the Russian-dominated beaches, in an attempt to escape from a life that he didn’t see himself living. One day he ventured north to Nepal, discovered another way of living that was free of worldly pretensions and material obsessions, and decided to move back to Russia. Back in Moscow, Anton surrounded himself with architects and high-achieving visionaries. But he was still finding it difficult to commit to a life of aimless productivity and began searching for something meaningful he could grab onto. A couple of years ago, he found a space for rent in ArtPlay, an old factory that now houses various design firms, education facilities, and slightly bourgeoisie restaurants. It was the factory’s vacant bomb shelter. With the help of his friends, Anton raised enough money and gathered enough reclaimed materials to turn the bomb shelter into a functioning vegetarian restaurant. His friend Misha, an architect, donated a light-framed shelter he had designed for a low-budget building competition. Anton installed it above the bomb-shelter and now uses it as his home and experimental greenhouse. 735

Fruits and Veges has since become one of the most popular venues for Moscow’s hipsters. It sits glaringly in the courtyard of ArtPlay with no clear signage or purpose. Once you discover the building’s entrance, however, you are sucked in. A long staircase with built-in tables on both sides leads you down into the pit of the shelter, where friendly staff work in a fully visible kitchen. They offer a simple menu of falafel wraps, soup, salad, daily curry, cheesecake, tea, coffee, and freshly made juice and smoothies. All of it is insanely cheap, locally sourced, and served unpretentiously. When I asked Anton to describe his business model, he admitted honestly that he doesn’t have one. “I like serving cheap food. It makes me happy to see people well-fed and unstressed about money,” he explained. This plan hasn’t always worked out for him. He had to borrow a lot of money from friends at the start of the project, which he has only now started to pay back. He also had to close for a couple of months this spring because he could not afford the rent. But things are looking up now and Anton is well on his way to achieving an “accidental” sustainable business model. It works like this: source from local farmers and food-distributors to keep money in the community, hire local staff and pay them a fair wage so that they can sustain themselves without having to work two full-time jobs, price the menu to cover the basic costs of food, wages, and rent. When customers understand that they are not being up-priced, they become loyal, preferring to spend their rubles there than in a profit-mongering food chain. Then you have a business model that is sustainable – not profit-making – but perfectly sustainable. Anton and Pasha’s Coffee Shop (Cherny Cooperative):

Artem at work and some post-Fordist art in his friend’s gallery

Two years ago, Artem was struggling as a journalist in a notoriously closed and controlled media environment. At that time, the coffee scene in Moscow was dominated by a handful of chain cafes that over-priced, over-roasted, over-sweetened, and over-creamed their coffee. He and his friends had traveled to other parts of Europe and were inspired by the independent coffee shops they visited, where coffee was prepared by hand and drunk to enjoy the subtleties in its taste. Artem quit his job and joined four others to create what became known as Cherny’s Cooperative. The objective of the “cooperative” was to create a sustainable system where work and profit would be shared equally amongst the five members. Sounds nice, but it ended up being full of problems. Unable to afford rent, the cooperative spent their first six months in the corner of a local bookstore. They then moved in with Anton at ArtPlay and sold coffee in Fruits and Veges for a year. Throughout this time, several members of the cooperative had no choice but to move back in with their parents. They were all supposed to be committed to this project and therefore not supplement their income with other part-time jobs. But they were barely making enough to cover their operational costs, let alone their own basic living expenses. Their approach was proving to be economically unviable and in October, they lost one of their members and decided to close for a month. This past November, the four remaining cooperative members decided to switch from a coffee shop to a coffee subscription model. They would begin roasting their own coffee and deliver it monthly to subscribers around Moscow. They gained followers quickly but it was not enough to cover the upfront capital investments. Their mistake in this stage of the project was their failure to secure enough financial back-up for the first six months of the project. They began taking out loans just for the operational costs of roasting and delivering. The inside of Cherny Cooperative’s coffee shop 736

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Section of coffee shop in street context

When the ruble fell in December, the subscription project faced even more challenges. They were buying coffee at international prices and selling it to locals whose comparative purchasing power had fallen drastically. Coffee, which is a luxury for most people, was forgotten amidst the rising costs of food staples and Cherny’s lost many of their subscribers. In March, two more members decided to quit, leaving only Artem and his brother Pasha. Having already invested so much time and energy into making Cherny’s a reality, Artem and Pasha decided to push forward. Listening to their friends and loyal customers from past months, they realized that having a coffee shop, where people could come spend time and experience the art of making coffee, was what people wanted. So they set out to find a storefront in a nearly impossible real estate market. They were lucky enough to find a space for only $3,000/ month in the city center, a five-minute walk from their apartment. They share the space with a man who sells craft beer, which halves their rent and keeps the storefront activated from 10 am to midnight. Paying $1,500/ month is unheard of in that neighborhood, where all of the surrounding storefronts cost at least $8,000/ month. How is this 738

Map of Cherny Cooperative’s coffee shop location 739

possible? The property is government-owned, which rents for ten percent of the price of private real estate. The renter whom they sub-let it from likely had a pharmacy, bank, or other public service before, which are typically the only businesses eligible to receive government property. All this to say that the real estate business in Moscow is underhanded, subject to corruption, and dominated by opaque laws. Two months into the new chapter of Cherny’s, Artem and Pasha are well on their way to having a sustainable business model. In this central location, they are growing their loyal customer base rapidly. In addition to paying for the rent for the building and roaster, the upfront cost of the coffee machines, the recurring material costs, and the loans they took out at the start, both are finally earning a $700/ month income. This is enough for them to pay their own living expenses. Artem explained that he doesn’t ever hope to get rich from this project: “I started this project because I wanted to contribute something to Moscow culture, not make money. A sustainable business model is just that: you don’t upsell your clients and are still smart enough and sacrifice enough in the project’s early stages to make it through to a system that pays for itself.” The main barrier to achieving a sustainable business model in Moscow is rent. The ever-growing influx of people and businesses to the city is causing property values to soar. Moscow, one of the world’s most expensive cities, is an extreme example of a worldwide urban phenomenon, which makes creating small-businesses a huge challenge. Both Anton and Artem were exceptionally lucky to find the spaces they did. Had they not, they definitely would not have survived. Young entrepreneurs like them will have to become increasingly more resourceful in this city and those like it: sharing spaces, using a pop-up business model, moving into the virtual-realm, etc.. That is, if they want to continue living in the city. Nikola Levinets: An Alternative Approach to Alternative Living People like Anton and Artem have worked hard to create alternative livelihoods for themselves in an urban environment that preferences corporations and conformity. This is the inevitable struggle that comes with the urban experience. There are some people, however, who choose to abandon the urban life they grew up with and pursue alternative livelihoods and lifestyles far from the city, where there is more freedom of expression, land, and fewer laws. Nikola Levinets is the brainchild of Nikolay Polissky and Vasily Shchetinin, two artistic visionaries who sought to develop a free space for artists to live in, interact with nature, and produce creative work. Begun in 1980, it quickly gained momentum and is now buoyed by grants from private institutions and festival revenues. 200 km west of Moscow in the Kaluga region, the community covers 650 hectares along the winding Ugra River. Every year, artists submit proposals for a new landscape installation and the winner receives funding to construct it. Installations range from massive labyrinths hidden in fields of dandelions to climbable wooden towers and sculptures. The space is free and open to the public, although its remoteness makes it difficult to access for people without a vehicle. I desperately wanted to experience Nikola Levinets before I headed east to Siberia and asked Anton of Fruits and Veges if he was down for a spontaneous road trip. He was! On Saturday morning, despite thunderstorm warnings, we jumped onto his vintage (code for rickety) motorcycle and sped 740

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out of the city towards Kaluga. By some miracle it didn’t rain and we didn’t die on the horrible Russian roads. We spent the whole afternoon tromping through colorful fields, wetlands, and pine forests, stumbling across installations in the most unlikely places. The experience felt almost too idyllic. While perfect for a visit, Nikola Levinets felt far too removed from the struggles of everyday human existence, both urban and rural, for me to want to stay there too long. Despite the inevitable calm that greets you in utopian communities like Nikola-Levinets, I could never justify living out my days in this way. It feels too privileged and escapist to me. I need to surround myself with some reminder of the hardships of everyday people, as it gives meaning to my life and a purpose to work for. I am not drawn to design for the sake of creating interesting installations. I don’t want to turn the world into some sort of utopia (Corbusian, Nikola-Levinetsian, or otherwise). I want to design buildings because I see it as a useful way to change the status quo around who has power, justice, and access to resources (environmental and social) in the built environment. I see my field contributing to the success of people like Anton and Artem, who seek only to bring something they love to their communities. In being a designer, I hope I contribute in some small way to creating the type of dynamic, people- and planet- centered perma-culture that we ultimately need to survive. That’s the closest to “sustainable development” I think I’ll ever get.

Latter installation

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Cabin in the woods installation 743

ON WOMEN May 28, 2015 Last Friday I went to an old art cinema in Moscow and watched a matinee in a nearly empty auditorium. It was a nice break from people and also incredible because I could laugh as loudly as I wanted. The movie: "Jacky au royaume des filles" ("Jacky in the Kingdom of Women"), was a French film dubbed in Russian, so most of the dialogue was lost on me. But the plot was nevertheless understandable and riddled in the type of politically incorrect (and culturally offensive) humor that the French are masters of. In summary, it was about a parallel universe where women run the government and the households and men wear burkas and serve in the domestic sphere. Jackie, the main character, is a lowly and dutiful househusband whose biggest dream in life is to meet the young and alluring leader of the country. One day his wife dies and he is thrown into a life of servitude in another household. When the kingdom is called to solicit its young and eligible men to vie for the chance to marry the country's leader, Jackie must face all odds to get to the royal palace and meet her. Essentially, it's a Cinderella story told in reverse with a strange twist at the end, which I didn't fully understand (French speakers help me!!).

Spiritual space by the river

The film brought up three important topics for me that I have been dwelling on ever since: clothing (this film is another stab by the French at Islam, which really pisses me off), body language of the oppressed, and women in public office. I elaborate more below: (1) Clothing: What is the difference between a woman wearing a burka and a woman wearing highheels, make-up, and a tight dress if both are done with respect to how men will react. Women are confined to identities as sexual objects in both cases. In the first case, they are mandated by society to cover themselves in order to prevent inappropriate sexual thoughts and behavior by men. In the second case, they dress to be sexually appealing. I honestly don't know where I stand on the issue of hijabs, dupatas, orthodox scarves, etc. for women. And as a non-religious person with little cultural fluency in the subject, I don't know if I should have an opinion. But I do truly believe that women should have full autonomy to make decisions about their attire. And I hope that collectively as female-identified people, we can overcome our social training to always consider men when we get dressed in the morning. If I want to wear a revealing black dress and shave my legs on a Friday night because I like how it makes me feel, that's my prerogative. But I damn well am not doing it to try to attract a sleazy, pub-crawling man. And if my Muslim, Orthodox, and Hindu friends want to cover their heads and wear long clothes because they like the connection they feel to their faith and heritage through the practice of these customs, then I am in total support. As long as they are not being coerced by their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, or governments.

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Clothing is one thing most men never really have to consider. Especially in countries I grew up in (Australia, Germany, and the US), most men couldn't give a flying fuck if they rolled out of bed and went to work in wrinkled jeans and a smelly t-shirt, or if they were wearing a suit. Unless their professional status depends on it, men rarely dress with respect to what other people, especially women, 745

will think. And they're not judged for it! (2) Body Language of the Oppressed: Most of you reading this are familiar with the AMAZING BLOG, http://mentakingup2muchspaceonthetrain.tumblr.com. Our position in society drastically impacts our feelings of entitlement to other people's bodies, to the space we occupy, and to our very existence. In this film, men walk around with weak, hunched, and insecure demeanors. Their posture, stance, walking pace, and way of engaging with others seems to say, "I don't feel worthy of even existing in this space and am trying to make myself seem as small as possible." Sadly, most people would classify this physical comportment as feminine. But is it innately feminine or is it just the way the patriarchical hegemony teaches women to behave? This film shows that what we may consider natural tendencies of the female sex are in fact learned behaviors of an oppressed gender. (3) On Women as Public Officials: I have long believed that some of our biggest social problems would be resolved if more women assumed leadership rolls on police, military, and diplomatic forces. Women are both genetically wired and socialized to be more empathetic, less inclined to testosterone-linked exertions of dominance, and more sociable. I have two examples: In many developing countries with corrupt democracies, corruption most tangibly permeates legal and police forces. Male policemen and law enforcers often seek bribes or operate within "boys clubs" that obstruct justice for the sake of maintaining relationships with other powerful men in their communities. I have witnessed this type of corruption and beaurocracy all over South and Southeast Asia, South America, Ethiopia, and now Russia, as well. When women join police forces, they are usually outnumbered by men and do not have loyalties to "boys clubs". They are not power-hungry or exert their authority because they are struggling simply to maintain their positions amongst their male peers. Women, I've noticed, are far less likely to ask for bribes or try to hamper the judicial process. My step-sister recently joined the upper ranks of the United States military and I had a long discussion with my father about the ethics of her involvement with what I consider to be the most destructive and corrupt organization in the world. My step-sister, although it may contradict her interest in the military and foreign affairs, is very liberal. She aligns herself more with socialist values, is a vocal advocate for human rights, and has been really supportive of my environmental campaigns in the past. My father told me that the military would continue whether or not she climbed its ranks. "Wouldn't you rather see anti-war, rational women making decisions as military commanders instead of the nutcases we have running around today?" He asked. And it's true that women make the best soldiers. In Afghanistan, the only positive stories I ever heard told of US troops were of the female translators and negotiators who came in after civilian areas were attacked (although who knows if these accounts were simply propaganda...). Women are typically more empathetic in war zones, which often makes it easier for them to gather intelligence, negotiate, and avoid bloodshed. While I don't think my step-sister is ever going to be able to prevent a US foreign military engagement (American weapon lobbies are far too invested in these engagements for us to become pacifists at the hands of female leaders), I would rather have a female humanist leading a mission than a blood-thirsty, testosterone-charged man's man.

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Out on the Irtish River

Ugra State University Taiga Research Station 752

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View of old Khanty-Mansiysk from one of the sacred hills

Khanty realms of the universe (left to right: underground, earth, and heavens) 754

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On the Agan River

A MONTH WITH THE KHANTY IN WESTERN SIBERIA June 28, 2015 “If no tent remains on this land after I am gone, what will I have lived for?” -Khanty elder as quoted by Yuri Vela in “The Last Monologue” Understanding the meaning of our lives is a universal quest. While there are those of us who choose to withdraw from ourselves and society, most of us spend the majority of our time on this earth trying to leave some mark, be it altruistic, artistic, scholarly, monetary, or physical. In order to promote the continued functioning of our sociopolitical systems, most societies promote productivity among its citizens, encouraging us to work hard and reap the reward of a good life. Our jobs, our wealth, our contribution to collective knowledge bring purpose to our lives, we are told from childhood. This is not a recent development, nor is it confined to Fordist and post-Fordist societies. The Soviets ingrained the mantra “To have more, we must produce more,” into Russians’ psyches with such vigor 774

that people still believe they must live and work in the same paradigm today. The meaning of life for most Russians is in their ability to have a family, an apartment, and a car; to exist passively in the nebulous, post-Soviet urban landscape. For the Khanty, one of Russia’s 23 indigenous tribes, life’s meaning is not found in a brutalist apartment building of a city. Their purpose in life has always been tied to the taiga, to being stewards of its forests, rivers, and swamps. Despite 3,000 years of invasions, persecution, forced integration, and disenfranchisement, the Khanty have held onto this purpose as it is what has always defined their identity. But after surviving the Soviet regime, in which they were forced to abandon their homes and value system in favor of the new socialist order, many Khanty are now wondering how they can regain their life’s meaning in a land that is quickly slipping from their grip. The sad truth is that today, a Khanty man has only 50 years on average to ensure the continuation of his land and legacy. Shockingly, only 70% of Khanty live beyond age 60, ten years below the national average. When I asked a friend in St. Petersburg why people in Russia’s rural communities die so young, she told me it was because of the stress of living through the Soviet Union. Perhaps this is 775

true, but the Soviet Union collapsed 24 years ago and these statistics are not changing. Sure, someone far removed from the reality of rural life could say, “They die young because they’re all alcoholics and smokers,” as they themselves sit in their comfortable flat with a cigarette in one hand and a bottle in another (true scenario). But let’s allow ourselves to imagine that the Khanty’s abhorrently short life expectancy may in fact be due to a combination of Soviet and post-Soviet environmental conditions; conditions the state, bootlegging corporations, and they themselves have shaped with troubling consequences. la foto 1Western researchers and activists have written several compelling books and articles on the Khanty and their struggle for survival in the face of the oil and gas complex. This is how I first came to learn about Sasha Aipin. 350’s Western Caucus Coordinator, Yulia Makliuk, published a post highlighting the resilience of the Aipin clan in the face of the oil companies illegally drilling on their land. Yulia gave me Sasha’s contact and after 13 months of Google-translated email exchanges, I found myself sitting in the log cabin of his summer settlement, surrounded by his male kin, eating reindeer stew and salted fish. I spent the past month in this way, exploring the homes (in cities, villages, and settlements) of Khanty families along the Agan and Kazim, two rivers that feed the majestic Ob-Irtish, the world’s third-largest river system. While most of the articles about the Khanty concentrate on the injustices done to them in the last 100 years, these landscapes told of a much more ancient struggle, one that goes back over 3,000 years and relates as much to the Khanty’s livelihood security as it does to their identity as a people. This post cannot possibly do justice to the last month’s worth of experiences, new friends, and research I gathered. However, I hope that in reading this you will at least glimpse the reality for a people whose existence in this environment from the very start has been a struggle. And I hope you will see how our world’s insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and the corruption of this government and the corporations invested in it impact not only Khanty’s life expectancy but life meaning, as well. Taming the Taiga I assumed that after ten months in equatorial climates, a month in Russia’s cool northern forests would be a nice break from extreme conditions. On the contrary, these were the harshest environmental conditions I have faced thus far: extremes of hot and cold, white nights, and worst of all mosquitoes. When I visualized Borneo, the Amazon, and the Omo Valley, mosquitoes were a big part of the picture. But the numbers in those environments were nothing compared to what you find in the taiga. The Ob-Irtysh River system drains the west Siberian basin, defined on the east by the Yenesi River highlands, the south by the Altai steppes, and the west by the Ural Mountains. In May, several meters of ice and snow break apart and flood the valley, submerging 1.6 million km2 (the size of Alaska) of peat-swamps and conifer forests under water. Not only does this make building difficult and maintenance costly, it provides the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes and disease-bearing ticks. Sub-zero winters and mosquito-ridden summers coupled with poor soil quality may not sound like an ideal environment for a group of subsistence agriculturalists from the Ural steppes. But in 2,000 B.C., when Central Asian tribes were expanding north, the Khanty had little choice but to settle the 776

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lower-Ob. For several hundred years they subsisted off of fish, game, and berries. They built large communal subterranean homes along the tributaries of the Ob and Irkutsk. As the world south of them became more connected with the Silk Road, trade of furs for tools, vessels, fabrics, and beads gained importance. Invading Nomads (800-1600 A.D.) Beginning in 800 A.D., a series of nomadic peoples swept across south Siberia, most notably the Tatars. For several hundred years, the Tatars controlled the major ports along the rivers and imposed a tax (of furs) on the Khanty. Warfare over the control of the fur trade led to the rise of a stratified society, led by chieftains. Simultaneously their living systems formalized into fortified villages along main waterways. There was some cultural exchange and intermarriage between the Khanty and Tatars but the Khanty continued to adhere to their traditional modes of livelihood and their cultural identity stayed largely intact. Colonization by the Tsars and Church (1600-1917 A.D.) The early 1600s marked the start of 300 years of tsarist rule. The Russians spread east quickly, establishing administrative centers and using both physical violence and religious proselytizing to undermine the Khanty chieftains and shamans. Following the demise of their caste system, Khanty scattered from fortified towns to family settlements. Greater Russian access to the hinterland put pressure on game and fisheries. But despite the occupation of their land by the Russians, the Khanty maintained their identity as a people and stewards of the taiga. They began to define borders around family hunting grounds and many north of the Ob adopted reindeer herding as a means of guaranteeing year-round meat availability for consumption and trade. As caretakers of the deer, they had to ensure their access to fresh “pastures” (coniferous forests with thick floors of white lichen). Herders adopted a nomadic lifestyle to follow the deer to seasonally-appropriate pastures. This expanded their conceptualization of their “home territory”. Surviving the Soviets During the Civil War, when tsarist and Soviet troops swept across the taiga killing anyone who might be their opposition (i.e. everyone), many Khanty retreated upriver. Beginning in the 1930s, however, Soviet collectivization forced most Khanty into villages and working cooperatives. Ugra (officially Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug today) was rich in natural resources (namely timber, fish, and fur). The government therefore prioritized the establishment of working cooperatives here in order to fill the deficit of these resources in the west. Clans with reindeer were required to hand them over to the state, then form cooperatives to herd them collectively. Clans south of the Ob whose livelihoods depended on fishing had to turn in their catch; those who were caught fishing and selling privately were held in contempt of the state and punished. Collectivization was intended to break individual connection to property and capital by reorganizing labor on a communal basis, centrally administering production, and distributing resources “equally” across all of Russia. But this totalitarian methodology did not have the desired effect. Working coop778

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eratives (based on clan divisions) were already a part of many Khanty communities so peoples’ sense of personal entitlement was not destroyed in the same way it was with neighboring Russian communities. Several Khanty villages, including Kazim and Varyogan where I stayed, found means of both active (in the case of the 193X Kazim Revolt) and passive resistance to collectivization. The Aipin clan, for example, kept settlements along the Agan and Enel Rivers while simultaneously living in Varyogan and sending their children to school at the mandatory Internat boarding schools. Things changed for the Khanty in 1960s with the discovery of oil. The state began to drill immoderately, with no regard to environmental preservation or conservation of the Khanty’s sacred cultural sites. Large towns sprang up near the oil fields, notably Beloyarski near Kazim and Novoagansk near Varyogan. The 1970s marked the forced relocation of families from their traditional hunting and herding territories to make room for oil and gas development. As towns grew, roads constructed, and game and fish dwindled (from over-consumption by incoming Russians and habitat loss), many Khanty chose to move into town to access services and employment. According to Fondahl, by the 1980s, planned burning and oil spills had already destroyed 220,000 km2 (the size of the UK) of reindeer pasture and hunting grounds. By the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, most Khanty had homes in town, owned cars and snowmobiles, and earned wages. But while Soviet development may have created dependency on the cash economy and increased rates of alcoholism and crime, it had not erased the Khanty’s identification with their land and culture. Environmental Injustice in the 21st Century Post-Soviet privatization led to the dissolution of the state oil monopoly and bootlegging oil companies took over production. Legislation was introduced in 1993, which allowed the Khanty to redraw their customary land boundaries prior to the Soviet Union. However, land rights have been poorly implemented and protected because government officials have vested interests in companies eager to drill on Khanty land. Companies are supposed to obtain lease and compensation agreements from the Khanty before drilling or building related infrastructure, but these are often falsified, signatures are coerced, and drilling continues without the Khanty’s knowledge or consent. Many Khanty complain that even when they do give conditional consent, companies do not fulfill their promises for compensation (read Chapter 7 of Andrew Wiget’s Khanty, People of the Taiga to learn more). Without protection or effective political voice, many Khanty who choose to stay on their lands are literally witnessing their demise. This report for Greenpeace includes a fairly comprehensive list of environmental disasters in Ugra associated with oil pollution. I saw my own fair share of spills, careless burning and clearing of sites for pipelines and oil fields, polluted waters, and the long-term impact this activity has had on fisheries and forest health. I first stayed with a family near Kogalym who had given permission for a company to drill adjacent to their property line (100 meters from their home). In exchange, both parents have jobs working for the company, receive pellets for their reindeer, and get electricity wired to them from the station. While it is trivial price for the company to pay for the huge profits it is raking in off of this land, the cost for this family is still unfolding. Runoff from leaky pipes has wound up in their drinking water supply, their reindeer are now isolated from their traditional feeding grounds, and the family is dependent on the company for their livelihood generation. Who knows what will happen in the future. 780

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Security checkpoint to get past Luk Oil to the Khanty settlements

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Ayelita with her mother, Aliona, in the background washing dishes

Barn with reindeer

Kids eating macaroni

Denni holding moose anlters (left) and fish trap in river (right)

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Oil spill near Dennis and Aliona’s house

Khanty settlement along the Agan River

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After Kogalym, I took a boat up the Agan River to Sasha Aipin’s summer settlement. As Yulia details in her article, Sasha’s family has been one of the few to actively fight the invasion of companies. As a family that has one foot in each world – splitting their time between Varyogan and Novoagansk, where the women work and children attend school, and the settlements, where the men tend to their reindeer, hunt and fish – the Aipins understand the importance of safeguarding the environment from reckless profiteers, both for the conservation of their deer’s habitats and for their own health and longevity. The Aipins were the only family I met who were relatively successfully able to balance their lives between the forest and the town. 797

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Portrait of Sasha 804

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Inside the summer cabin

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On the waterfront in Novoagansk with oil refinery flares in distance

Semyonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house in Novoagansk 838

In the north, 30 km east of Beloyarski is Kazim, a traditional Khanty village famous for its resistance to Soviet collectivization in the 1930s. There, I spent a week with a family who has nearly lost touch with their forest and therefore distanced (but not removed) from the impact of oil. In Kazim, less than 15% of families still herd reindeer. The rest commute to Beloyarski daily to work in the service, cultural, or oil sector. While they still celebrate the aesthetic elements of their culture â&#x20AC;&#x201C; including clothing, basket-making, stories, and traditional music â&#x20AC;&#x201C; I wondered how their children will be able to identify as Khanty if they never know the forest or its forms of livelihood generation. 839

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Rima and Igorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house in Kazim

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Nares Juk - a traditional Khanty string instrument

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If no tent remains on this land after I am gone, what will I have lived for? In his article for Cultural Survival, Wigit explains eloquently: “(Establishing resource security and autonomy in choosing one’s own future) is obviously an enormously complex process, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Russia, where the process is constrained by the absence of a legal basis for recognizing native peoples as distinct communities with their own interests, by deeply embedded authoritarian habits, and by an economy driven by the need for hard currency derived from the export of Siberian natural resources. As Russia moves toward developing regulations that balance national interests with private development, what is needed is an effective, integrated process of environmental, social, and cultural impact assessment.” Action needs to be taken on all levels if the Khanty are to regain their livelihood security and preserve their identities, which are tied to the forests. Decreasing consumption of fossil fuels on an international level, calling out the international human rights violations being undermined, lobbying federal and oblast administrations to strengthen and uphold the legislation they create, and grassroots action by Khanty communities themselves are all critical. Dependency is the biggest threat I see to resisting the injustices happening to them. Dependency causes fragmentation, blindness, apathy, and loss of identity. But there is power both in the telling of this struggle and the retelling of the Khanty’s past. I got to spend my last week in Ugra at a Khanty children’s summer camp upriver from Kazim. There, thirty children gathered to learn from elders about their Khanty roots. Separated from the televisions and smartphones that acculturate them at home, they spent the week sleeping in a chum (a traditional “tipi”), making baskets and jewelry, playing games, and performing Khanty theater and dance. Witnessing these children’s excitement was an inspiring way to end my time in Ugra. It shows that their identity and life purpose might be able to encompass both worlds: that of the forest and that of our inescapable mainstream society. And with this evolved identity can come unity, resilience, and hopefully justice: a fine thing to have lived for. Further Reading: Dean, Bartholomew, and Jerome M. Levi. At the risk of being heard: identity, indigenous rights, and postcolonial states. University of Michigan Press, 2003. Gerasimova, Elena. “Russia: Khanty take action to stop road construction through sacred site by oil company.” Reindeer Herders, April 30, 2014. Haller, Tobias, ed. Fossil Fuels, Oil Companies, and Indigenous Peoples. LIT Verlag Münster, 2007. Ingram, Verina, and Willemse, Reimond. “West Siberia Oil Industry Environmental and Social Profile.” Report for Greenpeace, 2001. Makliuk, Yulia. “Will the Khanty Save Russia?” 350.org, 2013. Wiget, Andrew, and Olga Balalaeva. Khanty, People of the Taiga: Surviving the 20th Century. University of Alaska Press, 2011. 874

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LIFE OFF THE HIGHWAY: MY WEEK IN AN ALTAI VILLAGE July 10, 2015 I first learned about Altai from my Russian visa agent, Debbie Chapman. I mention her because I learned just before my arrival in St. Petersburg that she died tragically in April. Debbie had traveled extensively in Russia and was well-connected with many environmental and human rights organizations here. She strongly urged me to travel to Altai and, looking back, I am so glad that I took her advice. This post is dedicated to her and all the lives she touched. As I explained in A Personal Statement, I have consciously chosen to enter communities this year without reading about them first. Most of the resources available in academic databases follow highly prescribed Western scholastic frameworks. For the purpose of my field research, it was essential for me to enter with as few preconceived ideas and bias as possible and to practice as pure a form of onsite, local-knowledge-acquisition as I could. I have come to understand Altai and its history from the narratives that local people told me. But having spent less than two weeks in Altai Krai and Altai Republic, my knowledge of this place is still limited. I have attached a list of additional resources at the bottom of this blog — should you be interested in reading more — that do a good job explaining the current status of development in Altai while also being critical of Western ideologies. What Is Altai and Who Are the Altaians? I first came to hear of Altai as an “ecoregion” from the international conservation organizations that Debbie put me in touch with. Like the name suggests, an ecoregion is a large area of land that contains a geographically distinct climate and collection of species. The Altai-Sayan Ecoregion describes a mountainous area encompassing parts of present-day Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and China. The Ob and Yenisei — two of the world’s largest rivers — originate in its mountains and over twenty ethnic groups have called its valleys home for several thousand years. Most of these ethnic groups are Turkic and today identify themselves as a larger totality: Altaian. The Altaians are believed to have settled the ecoregion in 200 BC but fossil records reveal the presence of neanderthals and other early humans here as early as 1.5 million years ago. Driven across Eurasia by competing civilizations and the Silk Road, the Altaians found sanctuary in these mountains. For over a thousand years they were nomadic, subsisting off of hunting, trapping, and herding cattle, sheep and goats. Portions of their territory were annexed throughout the Bronze and Iron Ages, first by the Xiongnu Empire, then by the Mongolic Xianbei State, Rouran Khaganate, Mongol Empire, Golden Horde, and finally the Zunghar Khanate. But Altai was a large region and the most these great powers were able to do was collect tribute (usually of furs). Altaian livelihood patterns did not change much until Russian tsars ventured into their mountains in the mid-18th Century. Occupation by the Russians The Russians annexed the northern portion of the Altai Ecoregion (present-day Altai Krai and Altai Republic) because of its wealth of mineral resources, timber, and furs. Tsar-sponsored entrepeneurs 880

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soon founded the port cities of Barnaul and Gorno-Altaisk as distribution and manufacturing centers for metal ores, coal, and timber. Trade routes between Russia, Mongolia, and China wound their way through the narrow mountain passes of southern Altai. With the construction of roads to facilitate this trade came Russian settlers and Orthodox missionaries. Up until this point, the Altaians had maintained a relatively autonomous lifestyle. Most were Tengrists or Shamanists and felt a deep connection to the land that sustained them. While the Orthodox Church gained a handful of converts and some Altaians settled to work for Russian enterprises, the majority felt the imposition of Russian authority and culture as a threat. During the 1917 Revolution and resulting Civil War, the Altaians attempted to make their region a separate republic. But they were unsuccesful and eventually succumbed under Stalin’s harsh Soviet policies. Collectivization by the Soviets When the Altai Republic was formally incorporated into the USSR in 1922, the regime began the process of collectivizing rural people into large towns and labor camps. Industrialization policies brought many Russian immigrants to Altai, reducing the population of indigenous Altaians from 50% to 20%. Every Altaian was forced to farm wheat, develop infrastructure, or work in factories. The Soviets brought the end of nomadic pastoralism and by the 1950s, most Altaian families were living in a Russian-style house, growing potatoes, fruit, and vegetables, and subsisting off of the milk of one or two cows. Over 75% of the forests were cleared for agriculture during this period, causing the decline of game and fisheries. By the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Altains were dependent on the cash economy for their basic needs. Forced acculturalization had suppressed their identities as Altay people and they were left in the 1990s in a state of confusion and insecurity about the future. Altai Today and Tomorrow A long economic depression ensued in Altai’s rural areas after the fall of the USSR. Today, Altai Republic and Altai Krai rank among Russia’s poorest oblasts. With few remaining ore deposits and no oil and gas, its future prosperity rests in the hands of the tourism industry, which is fast emerging. In the last five years, property values in Gorno-Altaisk and along the Katun River have doubled, as Russia’s urban elites have bought up land for summer homes and resorts. This has had resounding consequences for low-income Altaians living in cities, as most must now spend more than 70% of their monthly income on rent in a competitive market. The development of Altai has attracted the attention of multiple international stake-holders (namely Western conservation organizations that oppose the type of development model, which China is pursuing in its portion of the ecoregion). Most notable is the decade-long debate over a road that would connect Russia with China and facilitate international tourism and improve quality of life for rural Altaian communities in the mountains. A comprehensive case study on the politics of this project explains, 882

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“While at the Chinese side of the border road construction went ahead, in Russia, a coalition of globally connected ecologists, romantic ‘Eurasianists’, nostalgic conservationists and anti-Chinese xenophobes turned the road into a political hot potato… In many instances, opposition to local authorities’ development plans tends to come from international organizations and foreign tourists, rather than residents or domestic tourists. The clash of views about the road through the Altai, this shared periphery of Western and Chinese civilizations, reveals profound disagreements on the meaning of development and of the ‘good life’ on the two sides of the border.” Another project that international and local activists have voiced their concerns over is the development of a 2600 km natural gas pipeline, which will connect gas fields in Western Siberia with Northwestern China. The pipeline has been built as far south as Gorno-Altaisk but activists are contesting its continuation through the Ukok Plateau (home to many rural Altaians and several charismatic megafauna). According to the Altai Project’s report, the pipeline would mean the damage to sacred monuments, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and tundra wetland and permafrost; increased access for poachers using service roads and restrictions in access to traditional natural resources by indigenous peoples. Life off of the Highway All of these conversations about tourism, pipelines, and the future of Altai felt like a far-off battle in the context of village life. As is so often the case in the rural, indigenous communities I have spent time in this year, geographic isolation, political disenfranchisement, and chronic livelihood insecurity render native people unaware, or at most apathetic to the high-level battles over their environment. I wanted to experience, first-hand, what life has become for rural Altaians in the 21st century. Three weeks ago I blindly made the 2300 km from Khanty-Mansiysk by bus and train through Tjumen, Novosibirsk, and Barnaul before reaching Gorno-Altaisk, the capital of Altai Republic. As usual, my plans and contacts formalized last-minute, and I was again saved by CouchSurfing. Alexandra, the only active member on CS in Gorno, invited me to visit her mother in her native village Inya, 400 km to the south. Alexandra, who speaks perfect English, was not able to join me, as she was working and living in Novosibirsk. I spent a night in Gorno with her best friend Ksenia, an unemployed architect who opened my eyes to the reality for those who leave their villages in search of a “better life”. The next day I set out in a van full of Altaians on a five-hour journey up the Katun River. Just before leaving Gorno, I read in the news that Putin would be vacationing that week at his summer home, 30 km from Inya. Of all the places in Russia for him to land his helicopter, it happened to be right next door to me. It gets weirder: the second I stepped out of the car in the village, the driver pointed to a helicopter flying directly overhead and said, “That’s Putin!” Putin undoubtedly spent his week in a far different fashion than I did. Every time his helicopter passed over us, I wondered if he might land in the village to greet the 700 people at the periphery of his reign. Perhaps he was worried that the site of abandoned buildings, discarded vodka bottles, and old women herding their cows would ruin his appetite. Whatever the reason, we never got to shake his hand. I spent the week in Alexandra’s home, with her mother Alya and older sister Chechesh. The days 884

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Chechesh (left) and Alya (right)

were slow, full of gardening, milking, and TV shows with intermittent chai breaks. Alya recently underwent heart surgery and prolonged physical exertion pains her. She and her daughter Chechesh are dependent on each other and are relatively co-sufficient in maintaining their small homestead. She has two sons also living in Inya but I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see either of them doing much to support their mother; the younger one only showed up to invite me to drink with him. Walking around this village, you would not know that it was once the thriving capital of Altaiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s southern Angudei district. Inya emerged as a settlement in the late-19th century in large part because of its ideal geographic position: on a plateau at the crossing of the Katun River on the important trade route between Bisk (an industrial hub to the north) and Mongolia. Merchants had campaigned private investors for years to build a road and bridge through the area, to facilitate trade. They finally built the road at the turn of the 20th century and a bridge, which can still be seen from Inya today. During the Soviet Era, Inya became the center of manufacturing for farm-equipment. Thousands of people lived in the town, as agricultural or factory laborers, military personel, or service workers. It boasted several government buildings and a college. When the Soviet Union collapsed and wheat 886

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production stopped, Inya’s economy faltered. The government lacked capacity to maintain rural services; over the next twenty years most businesses, the military base, and the college closed. Many people left for Altai’s larger cities to attend university and find viable employment. What is left is a quaint spattering of homesteads, each with its own barnyard, kitchen garden, and both Russian and traditional round house. Chronic unemployment has led most men here to alcoholism. This impacts not only their health and potential, it drains their families’ savings and puts a huge burden on women to pick up the slack. I spent my week in one of these female-headed households, and the rest of this post is dedicated to the women I came to know. Fruits of Her Labor Today 80% of Altai people live in rural areas, subsisting off of small kitchen gardens and a handful of cows, goats, and chickens. Dairy (milk, cream, sour cream, curds, cheese, and butter) is a staple here and is supplemented with vegetables from the garden and grains and meat from the general store. Women are responsible for taking care of the livestock and garden. Every morning, Alya and Chechesh wake up at 6 am to water the garden, milk the cow, and process the milk. The cow and her calf leave the farmyard to spend their day down by the river or feeding on shrubs in the hills. The days are hot now and they return with a thirst that no less than 8 buckets of water can cure. All water comes from the well or the small rainwater cistern. Alya’s house has electricity (government-supplied) but no plumbing so every drop we use in the house we must fetch ourselves from the well. It’s a grueling job hauling bucket after bucket for the livestock, garden, and our own consumption. Inter-generational families are a blessing in this way: the younger generation can do the more laborious tasks and the elderly can control the processes requiring more experience (like cooking). Starting now through the end of September, the women busy themselves with processing the harvest. Apples and berries of all kinds make the best jams. Cucumbers, cabbage, beets, and tomatoes are pickled or preserved in oil. This harvest is an important component of peoples’ food security; the general stores carry limited produce and everything is up-priced since it must travel long distances to reach the village. The World Through a TV Screen It’s amazing how much influence telecasted messages can have on people who are otherwise cutoff from the outside world. Alya and Chechesh spent hours in front of their television screen, watching the news and various serials. I could only bare to sit through some of it. The news was always the same thing: live coverage of the war in Ukraine, an update on America’s two prison escapees, something amazing Putin did, followed by more news about Ukraine. Russian news, especially the stations that are available in rural areas is notoriously full of anti-Western, nationalist propaganda. It basically makes you think, “wow, our leader is doing everything he can to make our country great and any problems we have we should blame on the Americans.” If people in Inya are being exposed to any stories about the development of Altai via their television sets, it will likely be framed in a positive light. With no internet and a “brain drain” of youth, people have little opportunity to learn the potential ramifications of new roads, pipelines, parks, and resorts in their district. I see television as another form of oppression: it sedates and pacifies people, prevent888

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ing them from fighting for their rights to livelihoods and better services. Women Who Will Alexandra and Ksenia are among the many young women who are choosing to leave Inya for a better life in the city. When I asked Alexandra about the difference between young men and women’s aspirations, she explained that far more women seek higher education and jobs in the city than men. The reasons for this are unclear, although I suspect it has to do with men’s dependency on their mothers and with women’s desire to find more desirable life partners in urban areas. Alexandra explained that 90% of people in their early twenties leave Inya to study in the cities. Many students who qualify as low-income receive grants for tuition, room and board. After university, only 10% return to Inya. The rest stay in larger cities to work and get married. I asked Alexandra if she thought rural-to-urban transition and a separation from customary livelihoods and environments would lead to acculturation in her generation. She explained that in the last ten years there has been a surge of pride for one’s Altai identity. “For youth it’s cool to know the history of Altai Republic, to speak the language, and to dress up for holidays,” she explained. I saw a similar trend of reclaiming cultural identity in Khanty-Mansi Okrug. It is inspiring to see this next generation of leaders break free from the Soviet mentality of uniformity and cultural suppression. Pride in one’s culture and identity is critical in standing up for one’s place in the world. And knowing that here in Altai this pride and ambition stems from the hearts of young women like Alexandra and Ksenia inspires me even more. This blog has not done a good enough job telling the stories of heroines in the communities I visited this year. That’s not to say that I haven’t been collecting them. I have been highly attuned to women’s experiences in every place I have spent time in and I plan to compile some of them in my next blog. Until then, I’ll be traveling bareback through the Gobi Desert. Dasvedanya, Russia! Further Reading Barabanov, Oleg. “Greater Altai: A proposed alliance of the regions bordering Central Asia and Siberia.” Russia and Central Asia: Uneasy Neighbors 2 (2003): 20-25. Dell’Amore, Christine. “Is This Russian Landscape the Birthplace of Native Americans?” National Geographic. February 3, 2012. Nyíri, Pál, and Joana Breidenbach. “The Altai road: visions of development across the Russian– Chinese border.” Development and Change 39.1 (2008): 123-145.

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View of highway passing through Inya

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Alya’s house

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Walking into Alya’s house

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Details from Alyaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s traditional Altay costume

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In the Valley of Eden

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In Gorno Altiask

NOT JUST A PROBLEM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH July 21, 2015 Several Russians have asked me why I bothered to come all the way here to study indigenous housing insecurity when I could make a very good project out of studying the same issues in the United States or Australia. “Touché,” I say. It’s really not fair for me to go through this entire year condemning the actions of foreign governments, companies, and majorities without at least mentioning my home countries. Because many, if not all of the processes I’ve described this year (forms of development, marginalization, deprivation of political rights) are also at work in the United States and Australia to varying degrees. I know shamefully little about the the indigenous struggle in the United States and Australia beyond what I learned in primary and high school. But my parents live in “Indian country” as do my maternal and paternal grandparents, as does (respectfully) everyone I know living on American and Australian soil. Legally, of course, this land now belongs to the state or non-Native citizens. But can we 922

really respect and feel justified within a legal system that has been (and continues to be) fraught with coercion, violence, and lack of reinforcement? While Americans recognize the brutality Whites inflicted upon Native Americans during the settling of the New World, most ignore the de facto and de jure injustices that plague our indigenous communities today. Since America’s founding, U.S. Presidents have made over 400 treaties with Native American tribes and have yet to meet their obligations on any of them. From 1953-1964, 109 tribes were terminated and federal responsibility and jurisdiction was turned over to state governments. Approximately 2,500,000 acres of reservation land were stolen and sold to non-Indians the tribes lost official recognition by the U.S. government. This has made availability of and access to key services by Native Americans much more arbitrary. While the Department of Justice has repeatedly ruled it unconstitutional, many states and districts today deny those living on reservations the right to receive the same services granted to other citizens of the state (schools, polling booths, clinics, and roads, to name a few). The termination policy has also helped pave the way for modern energy, economic and social de923

In Irkutsk and on Lake Baikal

velopment on indigenous American tribal lands. Water, energy, and mineral resources sourced from Native American lands have fueled agricultural production and both urban and suburban expansion across the American West. Extraction is only a small part of the environmental injustices Native communities face today. The disposal of nuclear and petro-chemical waste, as well as the “accidental” contamination of groundwater and soils from pipelines and hydro-fracking all contribute to health and livelihood insecurity. In 2004, the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights stated that, “It has long been recognized that Native Americans are dying of diabetes, alcoholism, tuberculosis, suicide, and other health conditions at shocking rates. Beyond disturbingly high mortality rates, Native Americans also suffer a significantly lower health status and disproportionate rates of disease compared with all other Americans.” Despite the fact that Native communities lack access to affordable healthcare, medical facilities, healthy homes and safe land, the unjust conditions many are bound to are often used as fuel for continued de facto discrimination against them. Culture of poverty arguments and the perpetuation of racist stereotypes (related to violence, ignorance, and alcoholism) prevent Native people from gaining 924

equal footing in this “Land of the Free”. The current oppression and marginalization of Australia’s Aborigines is similar to that of the United States. While the Commonwealth Electoral Act of 1962 (which recognized Aborigines’ voting rights) and the Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976 (which was the first piece of legislation to grant land rights to those who could prove traditional association with it) were important steps towards legal justice for Aborigines, deeply entrenched discrimination and injustices are proving harder to dismantle. Particularly in remote regions, standards of health and education among indigenous people are often lower than among the general population. Rates of obesity, diabetes, alcoholism, and suicide are notably higher in Aboriginal communities. For example, the average life expectancy for Aboriginal men is 59, compared with 77 for non-indigenous men and child mortality is three times higher than the nation average. These disparities relate both to the unequal access to public services and associated chronic poverty, as well as the higher level of environmental risk that rural and urban Aboriginal communities face. 925

But, as is the case in the United States, White Australians often ignore these statistics, or worse, use them as leverage for further prejudice and discrimination. Sadder still is the lack of resources going to address the problems affecting citizens on our own soil. For example, in 2012, the Australian government spent $3.5 billion on indigenous-specific programs. In the same year it spent $5.4 billion on foreign development assistance. It’s funny how we (I’m referring to the predominantly White, Western, middle-class that I identify as) so often focus our donations, time, and attention overseas. Why do we choose to ignore or trivialize problems happening in our own backyards? This question naturally leads into the issue of neo-imperialism and the white-savior complex. It is also interesting to consider how it intersects with nationalism. Are we too proud as citizens of our own Western countries to admit that there are serious flaws undermining the foundations of justice and democracy here at home? It would be easy to say, “Well, I consider myself a citizen of the world and therefore feel it is my moral duty to work in places I deem most critical.” That is far too Kantian an ideal. Legacies of colonialism, racism, and military interventions cannot undo national borders so easily. It is a privilege if you think otherwise: most of the world still feels those borders and those labels acutely. I wanted to bring up the topic of Whiteness and neo-imperialism because it relates to the United States, Australia, and Russia. When I speak to Russians about the problems in indigenous communities (lack of affordable housing and access to employment, bad grocery stores, loss of land tenure, etc.), everything always comes back to, “They’re all unemployed alcoholics, leaching off of state resources!” Strange that I hear the exact same response when someone brings up the same issues in Native American or Aboriginal communities at home. But as soon as I start talking about my experiences in Borneo, Bolivia, Peru, or Ethiopia, the response is resoundingly sympathetic: “Those poor people! How can their government allow this to happen?” corporatisation cartoonCould it be that we tend to view minorities in the Global South (particularly those who have any type of exotic aesthetic) as greater victims, and their governments as more dysfunctional, than our own? I realize that there are many metrics showing that in terms of corruption, open-democracy, and human development, nations in the Global South rank far lower than those in the North (with Russia as the most notable exception). But I would argue that these rankings fall the way they do in large part because of the North’s longstanding leeching of Global South resources and political interventions.

Only in studying these four distinct areas was I able to understand the global systems at work destroying indigenous livelihoods. It’s no surprise that the places where we are extracting the most natural resources are the places where people (indigenous and not) are facing the greatest challenges. It’s also no surprise that the environments most sensitive to climate change and other forms of degradation are often the home of minority and indigenous people (permafrost tundra, equatorial countries, dry continental interiors, etc.) because that is where they have been relegated to through the process of urbanization and imperial expansion. I felt a great sense of urgency in sharing these stories with you this year. The struggles I have documented are in no way new; all of these people have long legacies of oppression, many of which have been well-documented. But today is a different beast. Today, corporations are more powerful, governments are less autonomous, indirect compounding drivers like foreign consumption and climate change exist at a whole new magnitude, and the impacts are more opaque. And because the causes are so complex and the impacts less discernible, most of the world is blind or misinformed to what is truly happening, regardless of whether we talk about the United States or Borneo. You have the obligation as a consumer and global citizen to understand the violence you are indirectly causing to indigenous and non-indigenous communities around the world. You buy petrol, medicines, electricity, hardwood furniture, and food products made of palm oil. You help set global agendas arguably more with your purchasing power than with your vote or annual donation to the World Wildlife Fund. At the same time, to say everything I’ve reported on this year is your fault and responsibility would be far too absolute. Giving people in the “developed world” all the culpability and agency simultaneously denies the agency of local governments and indigenous communities, themselves. Rendering them as victims rather than autonomous people capable of maintaining their own lives and livelihoods is one of the biggest problems I see of neo-imperialism. We need to start recognizing the rights of all people, indigenous and immigrants alike, to secure livelihoods and in so doing also recognize their autonomy and agency. And while it is definitely important to understand the impacts of our consumption and imperialism on places and people far from where we live, we must not forget that people are still battling for survival in our own backyards. Further Reading:

I don’t want to get into the ethics of foreign aid and development. I just want to call attention to the bias in how we perceive indigenous people around the world differently.

Barak, Gregg, Paul Leighton, and Jeanne Flavin. Class, Race, Gender, and Crime. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010.

I chose to compare indigenous communities in Malaysia, Peru, Ethiopia, and Russia because they were all countries I had studied abstractly in the past through various lenses. When I was developing my proposal for the Watson Fellowship, I realized that each tribe I originally selected to focus on (the Penan, Matsés, Omo Valley tribes, and Khanty) was being threatened by a different set of forces. The Penan, who had originally battled logging on their customary land are now fighting mega-dams; the Matsés are threatened by international oil and pharmaceutical companies, the Omo Valley tribes face losing pasture to plantations and dams, and the Khanty are being poisoned by the oil industry. Compounding these direct attacks to their homes are more indirect forms of slow violence: climate change, tourism, corruption, lack of political agency, alcohol, acculturation, cash economy dependency etc.

Bullimore, Kim. “The Aboriginal Struggle for Justice & Land Rights.” Green Left Weekly, 2001.

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Cunneen C. “Conflict, politics and crime: Aboriginal communities and the police.” Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police. – 2001. Gumbert M. Neither justice nor reason: a legal and anthropological analysis of aboriginal land rights. – St Lucia, Qld., Australia; New York: University of Queensland Press, 1984. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present. Pan MacMillan Pub., 2003. 927

Old monastery in Ulaanbatar, Mongolia

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THE END OF AMERICA June 29, 2015 As a citizen of three countries, I have the enormous privilege to choose how I identify myself to others in various contexts. Often when I travel internationally I choose to use my Austrian or Australian passports and identify myself as Australian simply because I dread being written off as a naive, obnoxious, meddling American. This piece is about my love-hate relationship with my American identity and how it has changed over the past eleven months. I just finished Naomi Wolfe’s The End of America (shame on me that I made it through Wellesley without reading this book!) and it brought up a lot of memories about my introduction to the United States: 1994: I am sitting intently in front of a large shipping box on the white woolen rug of our living room as my mother unpacks its contents. Craft macaroni and cheese, Oreos, a rainbow wig for my sister, and my mother’s collection of Barbie dolls from the 1960s. Emblems of America’s capitalist, mass-consumer culture that Australia was still largely cut off from.

2012: Studying abroad in Copenhagen with a large cross-section of Americans is arguably the most eye-opening glimpse into the multiple realities that exist around my country. Sorority sisters, homophobia, ignorance and apathy about the most basic “foreign” norms and politics are all part of my new image of Americans. I knew such realities existed but for some reason I pretended that they only applied to older generations, and only in the Bible Belt. 2014/2015: Perhaps it’s because I only read the news once a week now or because my American friends on Facebook are particularly informed, but it feels like America is on the cusp of revolution. Every time I go online, I learn of a new act of police brutality against our communities of color or a new bigoted move by Obama and Congress to set us back in the battle against climate change. But at the same time I feel a mass swell in the collective mind of Americans. The recent victory for gay marriage and the #BlackLivesMatter movement are proof that people are continuing to fight against injustice and for the freedoms our Founding Fathers laid out for us. “The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times. The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we know its meaning.” -Justice Kennedy

1998: We fly to my grandparent’s home in Atchison, Kansas to celebrate Christmas. Their house is filled with stuff and they have a whole basement full of toys. It is my first white Christmas and I feel like I am inside a Hollywood movie. I collect snow in a bowl and eat it with maple syrup. I’m enchanted.

After reading Naomi Wolfe’s book, I really reflected on my privilege of being an American and my duty to continue fighting for that privilege so others may also enjoy it in equal dimensions. I also felt a surge of pride for my American identity, despite it’s flaws and the image others project of it internationally.

2002: The summer after 9/11 we are in the Newark airport on the way to visit my grandparents at their new home in Oregon. TIPS has just been enacted and my mother, traveling alone with two young children, is pulled aside for questioning by TSA. She is asked who she voted for in the 2000 election and what she has been doing outside the country for the past ten years.

Australia and Austria have nowhere close to the amount of acceptance, diversity, and awakeness. Australia is miles behind America in terms of its openness to people who differ from the white, straight male standard. In Australia, we are openly oppressive to immigrants, aboriginals, women, and gays on a sardonic level far worse than what I have found in America. Even more troubling is the general lack of interest in international affairs or environmental consequences of internal development amongst the Australian public. Austria is also incredibly xenophobic and conservative around many social issues (but as I’ve never lived there, I cannot speak much more to the nature of it’s social fabric).

2003: I am sitting in my 6th grade class and we are having a class discussion about the War in Iraq. Everyone seems to be either passive or for the “war”. “They’re terrorist and they could kill us,” one boy says. Coming fresh from a country where media is critical of Bush’s agenda, I am shocked. “This is not a war,” I practically yell. “This is an invasion that has nothing to do with 9/11!” 2004: Since we don’t have cable TV, I don’t learn about Bush’s reelection until I am on the bus to school the next the morning. As tears stream down my face, my friend Alana tells me, “Don’t worry, Mayrah. There’s nothing left for Bush to fuck up.” Oh how she was wrong. 2006: I make my first trip to the Bible Belt to visit my father at his new home. Driving down Oklahoma’s five-lane highways, we pass billboards with babies condemning abortion and pictures of Mexican girls in white dresses saying, “prom is not your wedding night.” We pull into a Walmart parking lot and I see that most parked cars are running, to keep them cool for their passengers’ return. What is this place? 2010: I go from one progressive intellectual community in Corvallis, Oregon to another in Wellesley, Massachusetts. While I an now surrounded by much more diversity, both ideologically and physically, it still feels like a largely progressive and intellectually elitist group. 930

Ultimately, I think this comparison of nations is stupid (as is nationalism in general). A country’s political agenda, no matter how democratically elected the government is, does not reflect an entire country’s needs and interests. Americans should not be defined by their government’s involvement with Israel and the Middle East anymore than Australian’s should be defined by Abbot’s reversal of climate change legislation. Money speaks louder than voices, unfortunately, in these capitalist democracies. But at least we have the platform to raise our voices when we need to. I think my most important responsibility as a person, regardless of how I define my citizenship or where I’m living, is to stay awake to what’s happening both locally and globally. As Naomi Wolfe states poignantly, “Time and time again, when people have awakened to danger and risen together to confront those who have sought to oppress them, citizens in their thousands have crumbled walls and broken open massive prisons.” When we know what to live for, there is no power that can hold us back. 931

UNSUNG HEROINES July 29, 2015 This post is dedicated to the women I came to know during my fellowship, to highlight their strengths and commemorate their (often trivialized) struggle. Sexism and rigid gender roles exist in almost all societies and indigenous communities are no exception. In every community I spent time in this year, women are responsible for child rearing, cooking, cleaning, collecting water, taking care of their husbands and elders, and farming. In many cases, when men — because of alcoholism or activism — have stopped supporting their families entirely, women must also take on an additional role as breadwinners. Because women are first and foremost socialized to be the caretakers of their families, they have much less flexibility than men to be engaged in any type of activism. This — compounded by sexist notions of female inferiority, ignorance, and docility — can stifle women’s voices in the the indigenous rights movement. In the communities that are actively fighting for their rights, many men told me that they felt alone in their battle, unsupported by their women. I saw a completely different reality. I saw women who took on both burdens: supporting their men in the struggle for state recognition, political rights, and land titles as well as raising the next generation of culturally-whole people. I believe that raising and providing for the next generation is as important, if not more important than waving banners and soliciting donations. I hope these profiles show you why: Lynn and Lily (Kayan, Sarawak): single mothers from upriver who were both working full-time at my guesthouse in Miri in order to ensure their children would have good futures. Their biggest supporters were their mothers, who helped with childcare while they were at work. Imelda, Amy, and Esther (Tering, Sarawak): I never saw any of them give a speech or take credit for organizing their land-rights case. But they came to every event, networked with others in their community to garner interest in and support for their tribe’s legacy, and inspired their children to grow up as Tering. Maria and her sisters (Penan, Sarawak): While her husband and chief, Panai, left to represent the Penan at various protests and conferences in Kuala Lumpur, Maria and her sisters maintained their households, farms, and forests, were leaders in their church and helped mediate conflicts between community members. Their daughters were also stepping up as leaders; when I visited Ba’Abang, all of them were living in the nearby town or on the coast to study. Comparatively, the boys had a much lower rate of attendance in school. Niloh (Iban, Sarawak): A legal advocate in Kuching, she is a vocal supporter of Orang Ulu all over Sarawak. When I visited her, she was working on several dozen land-rights cases and knew everything about the state’s political history and current forms of corruption. In addition to being a fulltime and paid activist, she is a dedicated wife, mother, and grandmother. Lucy (Kelabit, Sarawak): an estate planner and former school principal in Bario, she also runs a homestay on the edge of the town to share a piece of Kelabit culture with visitors. She is highly intellectual and believes that justice and cultural preservation can come only through the empowerment 932

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that education cultivates. As a principal, she worked tirelessly to create incentives for remote Penan and Kelabit families to send their children to Bario for school. Sue (Penan, Sarawak): a woman about my age who was born in Batu Bungan, the designated resettlement area for the Penan who were displaced when Mulu National Park was founded. Sue works at the guesthouse on the edge of the park to support her mother and save for her future. She dreams of moving to the city but doubts that she will ever have the money to fly there. Lun (Kenyah, Sarawak): An old woman living in the Sungai Asap resettlement area who has fought and survived more than fifty years of oppression. In the 1980s she and the other women in their village took over the road blockades when their husbands were arrested, to stop the illegal logging of their forests. Again in the 1990s, she protested and blockaded the companies that had come to build Bakun Dam. This time the company won and she moved with the rest of her village to Asap. Today she lives alone in her unit of the longhouse, weaving baskets and playing with children on the longhouse veranda. Caroline (Kenya, Sarawak): A vocal activist and feminist, she is one of the few women in the movement for Orang Ulu rights who has been allowed onto the stage alongside men. She works with Save Rivers and often speaks at conferences, particularly trying to engage women more directly in the struggle for environmental justice. Emerenciana (Quechua, Peru): A wife, mother, farmer, and entrepreneur living on the remote Amantani Island of Lake Titicaca. Two years ago she established contacts with a mainland agency and got her family’s house remodeled to provide space for guests. Her initiative and hospitality has made her a favorite for tour companies who send clients to the island for a two-day immersive homestay experience and has ensured her family’s longterm economic security. Maria and Sylvia (Matsés, Peru): my host mother and sister whose physical strength and agility impressed me greatly. While Matsés traditions of polygamy and serving the patriarch still hold true, many jobs that women are typically barred from in other societies are split equally in San Juan. Maria and Sylvia would fish, cook, wash, collect water, weed and harvest heavy loads of yucca and plantain, and care for the children in their family. They were also unbeatable volleyball players. Khasa Desta (Irob, Ethiopia): because her husband worked as a security guard in Geblen (most men are farmers and herders and do not work for wages), Khasa Desta took on the extra role of herding their small flock. While I was there, the village was busy preparing the soil for the rainy season and Khasa Desta spent her days in the hot sun, lifting bowls of earth and rocks to build terraces. Then she would walk thirty minutes to collect water, gather the herd, and return to cook for her husband and son. As domestic workers and cultivators of the land, women in rural Ethiopia have a much more physically demanding role than men do. Mazha (Ahmaric, Ethiopia): a young woman from a nearby city who oversaw the soil and water conservation projects in Geblen. She was well-educated but incredibly humble and I was so impressed with her ability to insert herself into a community that continues to undervalue women’s authority and experience. She was the only woman on a leadership team that was trying to revitalize Geblen’s soils so that farmers can grow enough to feed themselves.

of family and neighbors all day. An incredibly gentle and regal soul, she was such an evident role model for her daughters and sons. Under her leadership, they went to school daily and worked hard on in the fields and around the house. Despite the stress of supporting and raising a family alone, I never saw her without a smile. Duka (Hamar, Ethiopia): a mother of five and first wife of a charismatic and popular Sago, she went through a phase of emotional turmoil when he decided to take a younger and more beautiful woman as his second wife. Today, Duka appears much tougher because of it. Perhaps needing to assert her authority, she showed great charisma, competence, and independence when I stayed with her. Chowli (Kara, Ethiopia): made a widow after her husband was killed by a neighboring tribe and handicapped by a spine injury from her childhood, she has had to become extremely resourceful in a community, which tourism has rendered highly competitive and apathetic. She is the mother of two young children, who spend most of their time in the plains to shepherd the family’s small herd. Chowli has been lucky to host nearly all of the foreign researchers and journalists who have visited the Kara. Her financial sense makes her neighbors, especially the young men, resentful. But unlike them, she spends her money wisely, choosing to save for a new roof for her home and for her childrens’ education instead of on alcohol and motorbikes. Katya and Ira (Khanty-Mansi, Russia): the women of the Aipin Clan, they play a critical role in supporting their families and preserving their lands and cultures. Although the Aipin men are more engaged in activism and protest against the companies invading their land, they are also unemployed and some enjoy their liquor. To continue living in both the settlements and the towns, benefiting from both urban and forest resources, their families must have a steady income. It is these women who simultaneously bring in the bread and care for their men and children. Rima, Marina, and Lena (Khanty, Russia): three incredible women living in Kazim, a traditional Khanty village in the north of the state. They are all working in different capacities to pass down the Khanty’s cultural legacy. Rima writes books for children and adults about Khanty folklore. Marina is the curator of the Kazim anthropological museum. And Lena is a teacher and organizes the Khanty summer camp that I attended. Their passion for all things Khanty has inspired the village’s younger generation to preserve their customs, as well. Alexandra and Ksenia (Altai, Russia): two young women who left their village for university and employment in the city. They both have a deeply nuanced understanding of the rural-to-urban transition taking place in Altai and what it means for their culture and livelihoods. While they are driven to succeed professionally, they are also incredibly cognizant of and committed to their roots. Alexandra just recently quit her job in the big city and moved back home to care for her aging mother. These profiles present only a handful of the women I met this year who inspired me. Their strength comes from their commitment to their families, superior ability to network, and drive to take advantage of new opportunities that (often only recently) are available to them (higher education being one of them). They are living proof that we must stop construing women, particularly of the underclass, as victims. On the contrary: they are pillars of resilience, pulling their families through generation after generation of adversity. They enable change. And it’s about time we start talking about them more.

Agalo (Ari, Ethiopia): a single mother of five and a magnet for her hillside community, she took care 934

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Ming architecture, Beijing 936

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Beijing Temple of Heaven

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GOING (HOME?) August 1, 2015 This will be my last post on this blog. I sincerely thank my readers who have stuck with me through the end. Knowing you care about what I have to report has been a huge motivator for me throughout the year. I also believe with all my heart that the positive thoughts you sent my way from all corners of the globe have kept me safe and well. They kept me going through the multiple bouts of food poisoning and infections, sweltering treks through jungles, mountains, desert, plains, and taiga, physical assault and harassment, civil unrest, uncountable number of treturous highways, rivers, and flight paths, and moments of severe loneliness, confusion, and anxiety. Thank you! While the thoughts and love you sent me from afar were undeniably important, my real guardian angels were the people I stayed with on this journey. These are people who, despite not knowing me and having no reason to trust me, opened up their homes and lives for me to experience. I have always had confidence in the innate goodness of humanity. People often mocked my optimism when I was little, telling me that I would eventually learn that there is very little good in human nature. The people I meet continue to prove them wrong. Yes, we are all susceptible to succumbing to hatred, violence, jealousy, egotism, and greed (what Buddhists refer to as kleshas). These are innate to the human experience: in the evolutionary order they helped us survive when it was every man for his own. But more important than these behaviors we deem socially unacceptable in abstract is the understanding of the power of positive relationships. It is relationships-alliances if you will-that allow us not just to survive, but to thrive. They bring purpose and happiness to our lives and they help shape our identity. They also have the power to help us overcome patterns of behavior that are driven by these kleshas.

wooded plains of the lower-Omo Valley, and a Khanty who knows the life of a forest by the scent of the air and tracks on the ground all have different definitions of home, relationships, and identities. Their unique environments shaped their diets, the music they compose, the way they build, and the way they understand the cosmos. Their land, and the people they share it with, define them. Take it away, and what do you have? Even the people I met who had relocated into resettlement areas and cities still consider their customary land as their true home. For them, a unit in a concrete urban block could never be a replacement. Its privatized and partitioned architecture lacks both the cultural elements and access to the life-giving resources that people depend on, both for their spiritual and physical wellbeing. Urbanization is inevitable, and considering how this physical and cultural shift will impact the wellbeing of our world’s indigenous communities is critical. Natural and man-made disasters, the deterioration of traditional livelihoods, dispossession from customary land, and the prospect of better opportunities in cities will continue to drive indigenous peoples’ into urban areas. Today, one billion people live in slums and by 2030, with the resettlement of both indigenous and refugee populations, this figure will have doubled. Knowing this, three big questions remain for me: (1) How will we ensure that these new urban dwellers have access to decent and affordable housing? (2) How can our world’s rich cultural fabric, which was created by and is arguably inseparable from rural environments, be preserved and celebrated in these new spaces? (3) Can these urban frontiers ever be true homes for our indigenous communities and, similarly, who will they become as people disconnected from their land? I suppose I have the rest of my life to find out.

I have met many people this year. And not every interaction I have had has been nice. But for every person I have met who has tried to hurt me out of entitlement, hatred, or greed there have been a hundred people who sought to develop positive relationships with me, no matter how short-lived they might be. This is the subthesis of my project: despite a seemingly insurmountable number of obstacles and forms of oppression, the people who are the happiest and most empowered are the ones who have created a solid network of positive relationships. That is why the indigenous movement is so powerful; it re-establishes a shared identity amongst people who have been torn apart over the last few hundred years through genocide, acculturation, assimilation, and capitalism. It reminds people of their shared history and dependence on their environments. It also helps people understand and stand up for their rights not just as individuals, but as part of a larger community. I have also come away from this project with a more nuanced understanding of what it means to have a home and how intertwined one’s home and identity are. An Orang Ulu who grew up in his grandmother’s longhouse along the Baram River, a Matses who spent her childhood chewing sugarcane and fishing with her aunts on the Rio Galvez, a Kara who used to shepherd his livestock across the 940

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LISTS FROM MY WATSON YEAR I kept lists constantly this past year: task lists, lists of books to read, lists of resources, etc. Things I love about Borneo: • How random strangers will stop everthing to help you get your car through a sticky situation • My name “merah” means red in Malay! • How versatile my sarong is: I can wear it as a dress, skirt, to bathe, as a towel, to sleep in, to carry fruit, or to wrap clothes in • How Willie makes me tea and oatmeal every morning even though breakfast is self-serve Weird things about Borneans: • How everyone takes the time to shake everyone’s hand before sitting down or leaving Things I hate about Borneo: • How I’ll spend time explaining my project to a man here and the only thing he’s capable of responding with is “you’re so beautiful.” As if my physical attractiveness is the most important validator of my existence and more important to point out than say, “how impressive you’re passion is.” • Being labeled a tourist • How I have been forced to become a second-hand smoker • Having Europeans diss Americans right in front of my. Um, you haven’t even been to America! Things I love about Peru: • • • •

The folk music dedicated to peoples’ hometowns The accent is really easy to understand How Andean women’s skirts and tights are the perfect outfits for peeing outdoors in public Causa!

Weird things about Peruvians: • People apologize for being early Things I hate about Peru: • Nothing!

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Things I love about Ethiopia: • • • • •

White cotton Coffee ceremonies My host in Addis The bling on public buses (Mary will save us from the perils of the road!) Hospitality

Weird things about Ethiopians: • • • •

They measure their time differently: 6 am is 12 am, 12 pm is 6 am They pray by every temple they pass (even in a moving vehicle) They collect money on busses and throw it out the window in bags when they pass churches Men just sit and chew leaves for hours

Things I hate about Ethiopia: • • • • •

How every man over the age of 40 carries around a gun in the rural areas Children on the streets Unproductiveness and general lack of interest in social change Misogyny Fences

Things I love about Russia: • • • •

Saunas everywhere all the time as a substitute for bathrooms The reflection of the pine trees in the flood waters of the taiga Everyone drinks tea all the time! How accessible and loved theater is

Weird things about Russians: • • • •

They drink their vodka with pepper They congratulate each other when they get out of the shower with “shnookenparum” They have a genre of music all about prison culture and the bus drivers love playing it loudly Sexism in everything

Things I hate about Russia: • • • •

Homophobia and racism Ignorant and apathetic about environmental consequences of consumption and developmen Mosquitos Alcoholism 943

Books I read and liked: • Alinsky, Saul, Rules for Radicals • Bluestone, Sarvananda, The World Dream Book: Use the Wisdom of World Cultures to Uncover Your Dream Power • Diamond, Jared, The World Until Yesterday (actually didn’t like it but good to read) • Easterly, William, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good • E-Flux Journal, Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art • Fromkin, David, A Peace to End All Peace • Kaplan, Robert, Surrender or Starve • Kaplan, Robert, Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos • Neruda, Pablo, Confieso Que He Vivido • Ruiz, Don Miguel, The Ten Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom • Thurman, Robert, The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Book of Natural Liberation Through Understanding in the Between • Verghese, Abraham, Cutting for Stone • Wolfe, Naomi, The End of America Books I want to read: • Abrams, Charles, Man’s Struggle for Survival in an Urbanizing World • Blotanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism • Davis, Wade, One River • Estes, Clarissa Pinkola, Women Who Run with the Wolves • Heidegger, Martin, (Sein und Zeit) Being and Time • Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception • Gawande, Atul, Being Mortal • Levi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques • Nagarjuna, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika • Rieff, David, A Bed for the Night • Straumann, Lukas, Money Logging • Whyte, William, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces Artists, poets, and visual journals: • • • • • • • • • • • 944

Adan, Martin Barnie, Matthew Eielson, Jorge Eduardo Hanson, Duane Henley, William Ernest, “Invictus” Hernandez, Lucho Kendridge, William Ong dan Luca, Edong, “Sarawak Style” Stafford, William Vallejo, Cesar Whiteread, Rachel

Films & shows I want to see: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Almodovar, Pedro, “La Piel Que Habito” Babenco, Hector, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” Bergman, Ingmar, “Brink of Life” Hurt, John, “Human Planet” (series) Jaacks, Jason, “Silent River” Joffre, Roland, “The Mission” Menshov, Vladimir, “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears Niccol, Andrew, “Gattaca” Paloma, Michael, “Desert Flower” Polanski, Roman, “Le Locataire” Pilger, John, “The Real War” Sander, Helke, “Eine Prämie für Irene” Sayles, John, “Men with Guns” Scott, Ridley, “Black Hawk Down” Smith, Shane, “The Vice Guide to North Korea”

Song of the month: July: Beyonce, “Drunk in Love” August: Drake, “HYFR” September: Phantogram, “When I’m Small” October: Ed Sheeran, “Give Me Love” November: Lord Huron, “She Lit a Fire” December: Lisa Mitchell, “Love Letter” January: Major Lazer, “Playground” February: Erik Satie, “Gymnopedie No. 1” March: Rhye, “The Fall” April: Tove Lo, “Habits” May: Hundred Waters, “Murmers” June: Local Natives, “Cubism Dream” July: Simon and Garfunkel, “Scarborough Faire” Visionaries and thinkers: • • • • • • • • •

Atwood, Margaret Bhavnani, Rikhil Clemens, Michael Dario, Ruben Gates, Karen Owen, Robert Spurn, Anne Terzani, Tiziano Wolfe, Aaron 945

Links, programs, and resources: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Color of Change The Dream Defenders Edible Estates Fallen Fruit Gaza Youth Breaks Out Housing Works Inc HIC Mass Design Million Dollar Blocks Project River Blindness Singularity University Strelka Truly Teach Me Taro Vicente Ferrer Foundation River Blindness Singularity University Strelka Truly Teach Me Taro Vicente Ferrer Foundation

Cool travelers I met: • A raw foodist who always travels with cinnamon, turmeric, and fresh ginger (and puts them in everything) • A guy tracking the kilometers he goes • Many people who only hitchhike (I was most impressed by the women doing this because I would never have the courage!) • A woman who will never fly if there is a bus • A woman who only writes long letters home (by registered mail, only) • An analogue photographer who develops his film and makes a book about every journey • A man who brings a Chinese tea-set with him • A man traveling exclusively by longboard Quotes: • “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” —African Proverb • “Does the law not have a duty to create and progress our morality?” — From the film “Belle” • “Laws that allow us to diminish the humanity of anybody are not laws. They are frameworks for crime.” —From the film “Belle” • “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, let us work together.” —Lila Watson

FURTHER READING “Achieving food security in the face of climate change: Summary for policy makers from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change”. CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). November 2011. Adams, David Wallace. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875–1928. University Press of Kansas, 1975. Alba, Carlos. Local Politics and Globalization form Below: the peddler leaders of Mexico City’s historic center streets. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. Aligica, Paul Dragos. “Julian Simon and the “Limits to Growth” Neo-Malthusianism.” The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1.3, 2009. Anderson, Kym, and Lee Ann Jackson. “Some implications of GM food technology policies for Sub-Saharan Africa.” Journal of African Economies 14.3, 2005. Angelei, Ikal. “Ethiopia’s Gibe III Dam Endangers Kenya’s Lake Turkana.” International Rivers, March 1, 2009. “Angry Papuan leaders demand Jared Diamond apologizes”. Survival International. February 4, 2013. Archer, John. Ethology and human development. Rowman & Littlefield, 1992. Azadi, Hossein, et al. “GM crops in Ethiopia: a realistic way to increase agricultural performance?.” Trends in biotechnology 29.1, 2011. Barabanov, Oleg. “Greater Altai: A proposed alliance of the regions bordering Central Asia and Siberia.” Russia and Central Asia: Uneasy Neighbors 2, 2003. Barak, Gregg, Paul Leighton, and Jeanne Flavin. Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: The Social Realities of Justice in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. Bassett, DK. British Trade and Policy in Indonesia and Malaysia in the Late Eighteenth Century. Hull, England: The University of Hull, 1971. Bechtel, Ellen. “How We Talk About “Climate Refugees” and Why It’s Complicated.” Huffington Post Blog, 2014. Blythman, Joanna. “Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?” The Guardian, 2013. Bullimore, Kim. “The Aboriginal Struggle for Justice and Land Rights.” Green Left Weekly, 2001. Brooks, David. “Tribal Lessons ‘The World Until Yesterday,’ by Jared Diamond”. The New York

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Times. Retrieved Jan. 10, 2013.

York Times, 2012.

Cagle, Suzey. “Are you a terrible person for eating quinoa?” Grist, 2013.

Gilpin, Robert, and Jean Millis Gilpin. The challenge of global capitalism: The world economy in the 21st century. Vol. 5. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Chambers, Andrew. “The Fight Against Eco-Imperialism.” The Guardian, 2010. Chua, Amy. World on fire: How exporting free market democracy breeds ethnic hatred and global instability. Random House LLC, 2004. Cobo, Martinez. “United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.” Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations. UN Commission on Human Rights, 1986.

Ghosh, Kaushik. “Between global flows and local dams: indigenousness, locality, and the transnational sphere in Jharkhand, India.” Cultural Anthropology 21.4, 2006. Glavatskaya, Elena. “Religious and ethnic revitalization among the Siberian Indigenous people: The Khanty case.” Senri ethnological studies, 2014.

Corry, Stephen. “Savaging Primitives: Why Jared Diamond’s ‘The World Until Yesterday’ Is Completely Wrong.” The Daily Beast, Jan. 30, 2013.

Greaker, Mads, et al. “A Kantian approach to sustainable development indicators for climate change.” Ecological Economics 91, 2013.

Cunneen C. “Conflict, politics and crime: Aboriginal communities and the police.” Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police, 2001.

Grim, John. Indigenous traditions and ecology. Harvard University Press, 2001.

Davis, Wade. “Death of a People: Logging in the Penan Homeland.” Cultural Survival, 1992.

Grootaert, Christiaan, and Deepa Narayan. “Local institutions, poverty and household welfare in Bolivia.” World development 32.7, 2004.

Davis, Wade. “The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamon – review.” The Guardian, Jan. 9, 2013.

Guillozet, Kathleen. “Forest investments and channels of contestation in highland Ethiopia.” African Identities 12.1, 2014.

Dean, Bartholomew, and Jerome M. Levi. At the risk of being heard: identity, indigenous rights, and postcolonial states. University of Michigan Press, 2003.

Gumbert M. Neither justice nor reason: a legal and anthropological analysis of aboriginal land rights. St Lucia, Qld., Australia; New York: University of Queensland Press, 1984.

Dell’Amore, Christine. “Is This Russian Landscape the Birthplace of Native Americans?” National Geographic. February 3, 2012.

Hall, Gillette. Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Development. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Diamond, Jared M., and Doug Ordunio. Guns, Germs, and Steel. National Geographic, 2005.

Haller, Tobias, ed. Fossil Fuels, Oil Companies, and Indigenous Peoples: Strategies of Multinational Oil Companies, States. Vol. 1. LIT Verlag Münster, 2007.

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