Part 1

• Indigeneity in Southeast Asia: Mobilization, Meaning, and Contestation Antoine Laugrand University of Otawa Susanna Barnes University of Saskatchewan

  In Southeast Asia, indigeneity emerges less as an inherited status than as a situated practice shaped by colonial legacies, postcolonial state formations, and global rights discourses. From the highlands of northern Vietnam and Taiwan to the forests of Borneo and Malaysia, and the islands of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Timor-Leste, claims to indigeneity are entangled with nation-building, development, and environmental governance. Far from a settled category, it functions as a contested and strategic identity, mobilized in struggles over land, resources, language, and cultural recognition.
  This panel examines how Indigenous communities and their allies mobilize, translate, and contest global frameworks, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), within Southeast Asian contexts. Contributors explore the bureaucratic and discursive mechanisms—from education reforms and ancestral domain laws to NGO advocacy and environmental regulation—that shape who can claim to be “Indigenous” and under what terms. They also highlight acts of endurance and creative adaptation, including linguistic revitalization, ritual reinvention, and digital activism, through which communities assert continuity and belonging amid renewed imperial and extractive pressures.

• Currents of Tanah Air - Orang Laut Cultural Activism in Singapore Nazry Bahrawi University of Washington

  In the 2020s, Singapore saw the emergence of a public discourse surrounding the meaning of indigeneity that is anchored in its Orang Laut community, a traditionally nomadic maritime ethnic group whose members can trace their ancestry to the premodern Temasek kingdom there. This presentation will explore currents of the tanah air (or, land-water) imaginary of indigeneity in the tiny but prosperous island-state by considering two cultural activism projects that have been influential to this newfangled discourse: namely, the small business Orang Laut SG established in 2020, and the play Tanah Air first staged in 2019. It will consider the implications of such a cultural imaginary in refining the longheld view that the Malays are native to Singapore, encapsulated in Article 160 of the Singapore constitution.

• Negotiating Indigeneity: Zomi Pentecostal Narratives of Homeland, Identity, and Belonging Thang San Mung Oral Roberts University

  This paper examines how Zomi Pentecostal communities negotiate and reconfigure indigeneity through lived religious narratives of homeland, identity, and belonging. While dominant frameworks often approach indigeneity in terms of territorial claims, legal recognition, or political mobilization, this study foregrounds the role of religious imagination and communal storytelling in shaping indigenous self-understanding. Drawing on qualitative ethnographic data from twenty-four Zomi participants across homeland regions and diaspora contexts (Malaysia, Australia, and the United States), the paper explores how indigeneity is articulated not only as a fixed ancestral inheritance but as a dynamic and interpretive process.
  The findings show that Zomi Pentecostal narratives construct homeland as both a historical memory and a meaningful horizon of identity, while diaspora experiences further complicate and expand notions of belonging. In these narratives, indigeneity is negotiated through a continuous interplay between displacement and rootedness, loss and hope, locality and transnationality. Religious practices and discourses function as key mediating frameworks through which communities reinterpret their past, orient their present, and imagine their future.
  By situating Zomi Pentecostal perspectives within broader debates on indigeneity in Southeast Asia, this paper argues that indigeneity should be understood not merely as a legal or political category, but as a lived and contested process shaped by cultural, historical, and religious factors. It contributes to ongoing discussions by highlighting how minority communities actively construct meanings of indigeneity in ways that both engage with and extend beyond dominant global and state-centered frameworks.

• Indigeneity in Manatuto Vila: The Contested Territory of Lulik and Christianity Jose Trindade University of Melbourne

  Across Timor-Leste, the encounter between Indigenous cosmology and Christianity has reshaped local understandings of sacred authority. Manatuto Vila provides a distinctive setting for examining how Lulik—often translated as “sacred” or “forbidden”—continues to coexist with Christianity in everyday life. Rather than functioning as separate or competing belief systems, Lulik and Christianity interact through ongoing processes of negotiation and reinterpretation shaped by the historical encounter between Indigenous cosmology and missionary influence. These encounters also raise broader questions about the continuity and transformation of Timorese Indigeneity under conditions of colonial and postcolonial religious change.
  This paper examines how residents conceptualize higher spiritual authority through key terms used in ritual language and everyday discourse, including lumut bobreno, wo anin, Avo Lulik, amu deus, and maromak. Based on ethnographic conversations with elders and ritual authorities in Manatuto Vila, the analysis shows how these expressions represent layered understandings of the sacred linking ancestral presence, natural forces, and the Christian concept of God within a shared cosmological landscape. The figure of Santo António provides a particularly revealing example. While the Catholic Church often interprets devotion to Santo António as evidence of successful Christian conversion, many residents understand him as a spiritual figure incorporated into the cosmological order of Lulik.
  The findings demonstrate that church participation does not replace obligations to ancestors or the Uma Lulik. Instead, Christian prayer, ancestral invocation, and ritual practice address different dimensions of the same sacred order. In this sense, Lulik remains the underlying cosmological framework through which sacred authority and the presence of the divine are interpreted, revealing how Timorese communities sustain and reinterpret Indigeneity within a plural religious landscape.

• Years of the Locusts: Negotiating Indigeneity in Resistance to the Malaysian State in Sabah, Borneo Sharmini Aphrodite National University of Singapore and King's College London

  My paper seeks to understand how ‘Indigeneity’ in the state of Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, is articulated through Christian-inflected resistance to the Malaysian state. Non-Muslim indigenous peoples—communities such as the Kadazans, Dusuns, Muruts, Rungus, Lundayehs and Orang Sungai in Sabah—contest the framework that purportedly frames indigeneity in the Malaysian state: the bumiputra, meant to encompass all ‘native’ peoples in Malaysia by ostensibly according them special recognitions and rights. Baked within it, however, is a hierarchy that privileges the state’s dominant Malay population, who are not recognised as Indigenous Peoples by United Nations working definitions. Furthermore, constitutional imbrication of Malay ethnic identity with Islam has led to an ‘Islamisation’ (through forced and systemic conversions to Islam) of Malaysia’s non-Muslim indigenous populations to shore up Malay political dominance, predicated on this appropriation of indigeneity.
  Within these sites of contest, my paper explores how indigenous Sabahans weave Christianity into their conceptualisation and articulation of indigeneity, thus frustrating Malay dominance and the bumiputra framework. In Sabah, it was under Mustapha Harun’s (1967-1976) tenure that Islamisation of indigenous communities with the backing of the Malaysian state began in earnest. My paper uses this period as a jumping point to analyse how Christianity generated an indigenous resistance to Islamisation in Sabah during Mustapha’s tenure through an assessment of state and church documents, biographies, periodicals, missionary archives, and oral histories. It then reflects on how subsequent generations of Christian activists in Sabah assert indigeneity through tying this local moment to emerging global frameworks, such as the Vatican II’s turn to inculturation, church networks, and international human rights’ charters premised on indigenous self-determination. My paper thus explores how indigeneity in the case of Sabah is neither static nor essentialist but rather relational, fortified through resistance to the Malaysian state and engagements with global Christianity.

Part 2

• From Margins to the Center: The Philippines’ Role in Shaping Indigenous Rights through UNDRIP Emmanuel Alba University of the Philippines Diliman

  This study investigates the role of the Philippines in the drafting and passage of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), with a particular focus on its function as a small state norm entrepreneur in international law. While much scholarship has examined the domestic implementation of indigenous rights frameworks, this research shifts the lens to the international arena, analyzing how the Philippines – drawing on its own progressive legal instruments such as the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act of 1997 (IPRA) – helped shape global indigenous rights discourse. Through a qualitative analysis of archival records, UN documents, and statements from Philippine delegates, this study traces the diplomatic efforts, advocacy strategies, and coalition-building that allowed the Philippines to exert normative influence despite its limited material power. The paper contributes on norm entrepreneurship, the agency of small states in international negotiations, and the evolution of indigenous rights as a global norm. Ultimately, it argues that the Philippines played a catalytic role in bridging local experiences with global norm-making processes, illustrating the potential of small states to drive progressive change within multilateral institutions.

• State Recognition, Ethnogenesis, and Sangir-Sangil Indigeneity Nexus Amorisa Wiratri National University of Singapore

  Sangir is an ethnic group originating from the North Sulawesi Islands, Indonesia, whose members migrated to the southern Philippines in several waves before Philippines and Indonesia independence. The earliest migrants were officially recognized by the Philippine government as an indigenous community under the name Sangil. While some scholarly literature uses Sangir and Sangil interchangeably, the Sangir community rejects this equivalence, asserting they are distinct. Currently, the Sangil enjoy formal indigenous recognition, whereas the Sangir remain largely outside the state’s indigeneity framework.
  This study argues that the Philippine state’s criteria for indigeneity are heavily land‑based and sedentary, marginalizing the Sangir, who have historically practiced a maritime, semi‑nomadic way of life with sustained transnational ties to Indonesia. In contrast, the Sangil, who are settled recognized as part of the Muslim and Bangsamoro, fit more readily into state administrative categories. Ethnographic data were collected across four barangays in the southern Philippines from 2020 to 2021 amid COVID‑19 travel restrictions, utilizing local assistants for interviews and participant observation.
  By examining the divergent fates of these two closely related groups, the study expands the conceptual understanding of indigeneity for island populations in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates that ethnic identities in the Philippines are actively shaped, and at times fractured, by state recognition mechanisms rather than emerging solely from communities.

• State-mobilized Indigeneity and the De-mobilization of Public Participation in Bali, Indonesia Tody Utama Leiden University

  Discussions on the mobilization of indigeneity and traditional institutions have largely focused on how these are strategically used in grassroots movements to assert cultural identity and claims over land and resources. Less attention has been paid to how such mobilization can also be initiated by the state actors to consolidate their power. Focusing on Bali, Indonesia, this paper explores how (and why) sub-national governments mobilize customary (adat) institutions, and why this process carries the risk of limiting public participation on the island.
  Through a combination of cultural framings and bureaucratic measures, the provincial government of Bali has encouraged thousands of customary villages and other adat institutions to become the “last fortress of Balinese culture.” In this arrangement, adat institutions serve not only as custodians of tradition but also as key partners in governance. They are actively involved in managing public assets and resources, waste management, security measures, and responses to crises such as COVID-19 and rabies control.
  However, this mobilization has ambivalent consequences. In the past decade, the Bali provincial government has deployed traditional security forces to contain demonstrations and public protests under the pretext of maintaining order and harmony on the island. During the 2024 general elections, political support was mobilized through customary villages, hamlets, and temple congregations, consolidating votes at the community level at the expense of individual preferences.
  This case reflects a paradox of legal pluralism. While state recognition and support are important for managing institutional and legal diversity, they also make indigenous institutions vulnerable to co-optation, trapping them in clientelistic relationships with those in power. More broadly, the state’s mobilization of adat poses a warning for democratic governance and citizenship, as it facilitates the conditions Mahmood Mamdani describes as “decentralized despotism.”

• Who Counts as Indigenous? Recognition Politics and Indonesia’s Ata Modo Community Ucu Martanto University of Melbourne

  This paper examines the uneven politics of indigenous recognition in Indonesia through an ethnographic study of the Ata Modo community in Komodo National Park. Across the country, claims for recognition as Masyarakat Adat often arise in response to development and conservation projects that appropriate community territories and disrupt local livelihoods. Although the early 2000s “Adat Revivalism Movement” enabled some groups to secure legal acknowledgement of their status and customary land rights, many others remained excluded despite sustained advocacy efforts dating back to the Suharto’s authoritarian regime (1966-1998). Why is recognition achievable for some, but not for the others? Drawing on nine months of fieldwork with the Ata Modo, this study argues that indigeneity as a descriptive or cultural category is not the sole basis for the state’s recognition of Masyarakat Adat. Instead, recognition operates within a broader field of political, economic, and cultural contestation embedded within conservation governance, competing resources interests, and divergent identity narratives. By situating this struggle within Indonesia’s shifting political landscape, the paper highlights the negotiated, selective, and deeply contested nature of Masyarakat Adat-State relations in Indonesia.

• The UNDRIP and Semai Orang Asli: Indigenous-Determined Life Projects in Peninsular Malaysia’s Forests Anthony (Bah Tony) Williams-Hunt Kenraak Orang Asli NGO Karen Heikkilä University of Helsinki

  Forest reserves in Peninsular Malaysia are a colonial construct, prioritized for forestry production over conservation. These “reserved forests” (i.e., essentially woodlots for harvesting in the future) have served the needs of empire as well as the postcolonial Malaysian state’s imperatives of nation-building and economic security. As such, traditionally forest-dependent indigenous, Orang Asli groups like the Semai have seen their customary forestland in forest reserves fragmented or totally cleared. This paper discusses the impact of the UNDRIP on Semai communities, to articulate and defend their rights to forests on the basis of custom, religion and culture. By increasingly asserting their communities’ “indigeneity”, Semai and other Orang Asli have crossed over from being “tribal” or “aboriginal” to co-opting a space that had thus far belonged exclusively to Malays, the ostensible, de jure indigenous people of Malaysia. While Orang Asli forest access and use are already protected under the Aboriginal Peoples Act, these rights and privileges have, in practice, been obstructed in various ways. The paper will explore the ways in which the terms of the UNDRIP have been strategized by the Semai to anticipate, question and defend against various land development projects. How the UNDRIP has empowered Semai and other Orang Asli groups to challenge the paternalism and ineffectualness of the Orang Asli Affairs Department (the federal government body tasked with protecting Orang Asli rights and interests) will also be discussed. The paper concludes with a reflection of the UNDRIP’s success in positively influencing nature conservation through equating forest protection with the protection of indigenous livelihoods and cultural survival. This has served to increase the esteem of indigenous forest heritage and stewardship in relation to safeguarding the integrity of forests, thereby providing local communities like the Semai with an anchoring discourse to pursue greater rights and freedoms in forests.

Part 3

• Ambiguous Attunement: Batak People’s Encounters with Indigeneity-Invoked Environmental Governance in North Sumatra, Indonesia Muhammad Lubabun Ni'am Heidelberg University

  This paper examines the Batak people’s encounter with the intensified presence of indigeneity-invoked environmental governance operating within the nexus of state, extractive, and conservation projects in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Using the case of nature conservation dynamics in the Batang Toru landscape of the Sumatran rainforests, it explores how the Batak people who inhabit the area find themselves entangled in conflicting attributes of entitlement to their indigeneity—simultaneously as village citizens, forest dwellers, land claimants, and masyarakat adat (adat community). Although conservation proponents often blame them as one of the main threats to habitat integrity, the Batak people remain deeply involved in conservation programs that seek to incorporate, reconstruct, and even overcome them and the selective characteristics of indigenousness ascribed to them. Yet the Batak people’s attunement to various schemes, approaches, and programs of forest and habitat protection does not require them to hold a clear comprehension of the environmental governance imposed on them, nor does their engagement depend on criterial identification or formalized recognition as an adat community. Through this ambiguous attunement, they cultivate a relational form of interdependency that enables them to explore possibilities of sharing within particular conditions where disparate and seemingly contradictory actors, practices, rules, and aspirations converge. This situated practice of dwelling draws indigeneity-inflected outsiders into what the Batak people continually articulate as more hopeful relationships within an increasingly unattainable landscape such as Batang Toru.

• Green Resistance: Indigeneity, Climate Action, and Conservation in Kawthoolei after Myanmar’s Coup Helene Maria Kyed Danish Institute for International Studies Justine Chambers Danish Institute for International Studies

  This paper examines how indigeneity has become a strategic political discourse through which the Karen National Union (KNU) - Myanmar’s oldest Ethnic Resistance Organization - mobilizes climate action and environmental conservation as part of its efforts to consolidate territorial sovereignty in the aftermath of the 2021 military coup. While Karen Indigenous environmental activism and conservation predate the coup, the collapse of central state authority and the intensification of armed conflict have enabled the KNU to expand conservation and climate initiatives as part of its resistance to the military regime and its broader project of alternative state-making. The enlargement of the Salween Peace Park and the recent launch of the Thawthi Taw-Oo Indigenous Park by the KNU and Karen civil society organizations illustrate how articulations of indigeneity—as both a marker of identity and a framework for human relations with land and the environment—can advance not only environmental protection but also a form of “green resistance” against military regime expansion while strengthening claims to territorial self-determination. Similarly, the Kawthoolei Climate Change Action Plan - launched by the KNU in 2025 as “the world’s first Indigenous-led nationally determined contribution (NDC)” - positions the KNU as a legitimate environmental steward contributing to global climate change mitigation, while simultaneously seeking international recognition as a de facto state despite lacking formal statehood. Indigeneity thus functions not simply as an identity claim but as a political strategy of green resistance centred on consolidating territorial sovereignty, building domestic legitimacy, and gaining access to international arenas. At the same time, the paper highlights the tensions and challenges of this green resistance. Despite strong commitments to environmental protection, conservation initiatives remain shaped by the contradictions of protracted violent conflict, including ongoing extractive activities and militarized violence within Karen areas.

• The Right to Health of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples: The Indigeneity of Traditional Medicine Liu Pi-chen Academia Sinica

  Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples speak Austronesian languages, and their language and culture are more closely aligned with those of the islanders of Southeast Asia than with the Han Chinese, who make up over 97% of Taiwan’s population. Having historically faced colonization by Han Chinese and the Japanese, they began launching social movements in 1983 prior to the lifting of martial law, advocating for the constitutional renaming of “mountain people” to “Indigenous peoples,” as well as for autonomy, land rights, and cultural rights. In 1997, they successfully enshrined the term “Indigenous peoples”—which carries collective rights—in the Constitution, thereby securing the state’s recognition of the value of their identity and civil rights.
  Due to the aging population and lower average healthy life expectancy among Indigenous peoples, the government began to focus on indigenous traditional medicine and public health after the implementation of the Indigenous Peoples Basic Law in 2005. In response to President Tsai’s 2020 policy emphasizing the health rights of Indigenous peoples and addressing inequalities in welfare and healthcare, the Council of Indigenous Peoples began promoting a program to revitalize Indigenous traditional medical knowledge, bringing the Indigeneity of traditional medicine into the political spotlight. On the other hand, after World War II, Christianity entered Indigenous communities, and many people rejected traditional healers due to their conversion. In recent years, however, many young Indigenous people have sought to better understand these interrupted traditions and have begun to revive traditional cultural healing practices, sparking a grassroots-driven contention.

• Forming Indigenous identities in Portuguese Timor Laura S. Meitzner Yoder Wheaton College Susanna Barnes University of Saskatchewan

  In Portuguese Timor/Timor-Leste, identity is reflected in relationships to land. We examine three moments where political and legal factors reconfigured ideas of indigeneity as expressed through land governance, law, and policy. First, from the late 1800s through 1910s, the colonial government intervened in indigenous agriculture by production regulations, land redistribution, and legal classifications of native land. Second, from the 1930 Colonial Act through the 1960s, state policies and laws further institutionalized Indigenous status while offering native subjects pathways to formally transcend this categorization through assimilation. The third movement involved new Timorese conceptualizations of national identities, with reference to agrarian life and the land as symbolic of their self-determination. These moments illustrate the array of forces that influence the changing and contested meaning of Timorese identity through and beyond the colonial period.

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

Keywords

• Adat institutions
• Ata Modo
• Batak
• Belonging
• Christian cosmopolitics
• Christiniaty
• Cultural Activism
• Diaspora
• Ethnography
• Forests
• Green resistance
• Health Rights
• Homeland
• IPRA
• Identity
• Indigeneity
• Indigenous Sabah
• Indigenous Spatiality
• Indigenous communities in the Philippines
• Indonesia
• Islamisation
• Komodo National Park
• Legal pluralism
• Lulik
• Malays
• Malaysian Borneo
• Manatuto Vila
• Masyarakat Adat
• Melangun
• Mobility
• Mustapha Harun
• Myanmar
• Nomadic Ontology
• Orang Rimba
• Peninsular Malaysia
• Pentecostalism
• Politics of Recognition
• Portuguese Timor
• Public participation
• Religious Narratives
• Sangil
• Sangir
• Semai Orang Asli
• Singapore
• Southeast Asia
• State Territoriality
• State mobilization
• Taiwans Indigenous Peoples
• Timor-Leste
• Traditional Medicine
• UNDRIP
• Zomi
• adat
• climate change
• colonialism
• conservation
• environmental governance
• ethnogenesis
• indigenous rights
• indigenous rights in the Philippines
• land governance