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Gastrocolonialism: the intersections of race, food, and development in West

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Gastrocolonialism: the intersections of race, food,

and development in West Papua

Sophie Chao

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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS
https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2021.1968378

Gastrocolonialism: the intersections of race, food, and

development in West Papua
Sophie Chao
Department of History, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper explores how racial discrimination and agro-industrial Received 7 January 2021
development undermine the right to food of Indigenous Accepted 11 August 2021
communities in the West Papuan district of Merauke. Traditional
KEYWORDS
forest foodways express the cultural and territorial identity of Food; racism;
Marind and affirm their intimate and ancestral relations with each gastrocolonialism;
other and with the sentient forest ecology. Yet these foodways development; West Papua
are routinely cast as culturally, evolutionarily, and nutritionally
backward by State and corporate actors. Paternalistic
development discourses, compounded with the rhetoric of
national food security, have legitimated rampant deforestation
and agribusiness expansion, with dire impacts on local food
availability, access, and quality. Drawing from Chamorro scholar
and activist Craig Santos Perez’ concept of ’gastrocolonialism’, I
argue that the contemporary transformation of Marind’s
alimentary regimes is rooted in and perpetuates the historically
entrenched, racialised violence of settler-colonialism and
attendant human rights abuses in West Papua. Gastrocolonialism
operates alongside other forms of structural and everyday
discrimination enabled by the systemic violation of Indigenous
communities’ right to free, prior, and informed consent – from
population dilution and settler favouritism, to land appropriation
and Indigenous displacement. I conclude by assessing the
potential of framing alimentary racism in West Papua through the
lens of food as right, security, sovereignty, and justice.

Introduction
Since 2010, Indigenous Marind communities in the West Papuan district of Merauke
have seen some 1.2 million hectares of their lands and forests targeted for conversion
to agro-industrial oil palm and timber plantations under the Merauke Integrated Food
and Energy Estate.1 Promoted under the slogan ‘Feed Indonesia and feed the world,’
this six-billion-dollar mega-project was designed by the government to achieve national
food security and make Indonesia a net exporter of staple foodstuffs.2 Its inception also
correlates with the 2008 food, fuel, and finance crisis, which saw an unprecedented spate
of large-scale land acquisitions (or ‘land grabs’) across the Global South.3 Regional econ-
omic development and rural poverty alleviation constitute two further drivers of agro-
industrial expansion in Merauke. To date, approximately fifty corporations have been

CONTACT Sophie Chao sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 S. CHAO

granted permission to establish oil palm and timber concessions ranging from 10,000 to
100,000 hectares.4 With dozens more applying for permits, agribusiness continues to
expand relentlessly across the region.
The Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate sits within a long and violent history
of top-down resource exploitation since West Papua’s de facto incorporation into the
Republic of Indonesia in 1962 – from pulp and paper projects, to logging, rice cultivation,
and nickel, copper, and gold mining.5 Oil palm and timber developments in particular
have intensified in scale and number across West Papua in the last decade, from the wes-
ternmost district of Sorong to the north and easternmost regions of Jayapura and Boven
Digoel.6 In Merauke as elsewhere, these developments have undermined local commu-
nities’ rights to a healthy environment by provoking rampant deforestation, biodiversity
loss, water pollution, soil erosion, and the disruption of critical ecosystem services such as
nutrient cycling, water purification, and soil stability.7 Agribusiness projects are routinely
implemented without the free, prior, and informed consent of local landowners – a fun-
damental right of Indigenous peoples under international law – who are instead margin-
alised from decision-making, benefit-sharing, and stakeholder participation.8 Indigenous
Marind communities also face growing local food and water insecurity as a result of land
dispossession and agro-industrial developments that, paradoxically, are driven by the
imperative of achieving national food sovereignty.9 Those who oppose or contest agribu-
siness projects are subject to harassment from military and police forces working in col-
lusion with the private sector, in gross violation of their right to freedom of opinion and
expression.
The violation of Marind’s rights to consent, land, livelihoods, and food resulting from
the MIFEE project, together with the threat to their collective survival as a people posed
by population dilution and migrant influx, were highlighted in three consecutive sub-
missions from civil society organisations to the Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination under its Urgent Action and Early Warning Procedures in
2011–2013. They were further reiterated in two formal communiqués to the Special Rap-
porteur on the Right to Food and the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples in 2013.10
To date, however, justice or remedy have yet to be delivered to Marind communities
on the ground. The Indonesian government has not responded to concerns over human,
land, and food rights violations raised directly with them by the CERD Committee in
2011 and 2013, or to the Special Rapporteurs’ joint statement of 2012 regarding the
potentially adverse effects of MIFEE on the food security of some 50,000 people.11
National and provincial regulations continue to take precedence over international
laws and to naturalise Indigenous land dispossession in the name of national food secur-
ity and neo-liberal economic development.12 Collusion between government regulatory
institutions, agribusiness corporations, and military forces with shared financial and pol-
itical interests in the expansion of the palm oil sector is rampant, paving the way for state-
facilitated corporate crime and the lax implementation of human rights protections on
the ground.13 Meanwhile, government surveillance has intensified in response to grass-
roots campaigns, including in the form of arbitrary interrogations, extra-judicial incar-
cerations, and systemic physical and psychological intimidation.
Drawing from eighteen months of anthropological fieldwork and prior human rights
investigations in Merauke, this paper examines from an ethnographic perspective how
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 3

the food security and developmental discourses undergirding agro-industrial expansion

intersect with entrenched and emergent forms of racial discrimination in West Papua.14 I
begin by outlining how Marind’s traditional forest foodways sustain their sense of collec-
tive identity and territorial belonging, express their intimate relations with the forest
environment, and enable the intergenerational transmission of valued ecological knowl-
edge. I then analyse how Marind’s forest-based foodways are recast in State and corporate
discourse as evidence of Papuan backwardness and primitivism. Such discourses in turn
are instrumentally deployed to justify agribusiness expansion as a means of transforming
Papuans into civilised, modern subjects of the Indonesian nation-state. I illustrate this by
analysing the racialised valences of two foodstuffs: sago, a native staple consumed by
Marind and other Papuan peoples, and rice, the imported staple of Indonesians and
non-Papuan settlers.
Taking inspiration from Indigenous Chamorro scholar, poet, and activist Craig Santos
Perez’s concept of ‘gastrocolonialism’,15 I argue that the transformation of Marind’s ali-
mentary regimes is firmly rooted in and perpetuates the historically entrenched, racia-
lised violence of settler-colonialism in West Papua and attendant human rights abuses.
Elaborated by Perez to characterise the erosion of Hawai’an foodways and health pro-
voked by the mass importation of, and growing dependency of Indigenous peoples on
cheap, processed commodities produced by multinational conglomerations, gastrocolo-
nialism describes imposed alimentary regimes that perpetuate the racial violence of capit-
alism and imperialism through the medium of (equally racialised) food.
The concept of gastrocolonialism offers a critical analytical entry point into the racia-
lized violence of settler-colonial rule in West Papua.16 Historically and in the present,
gastrocolonialism in West Papua operates by concomitantly infantilising and animalising
Papuan bodies, behaviours, and traditional food practices. It also reduces the nourishing,
multispecies forest environment from which Marind derive their food and sense of iden-
tity into an extractive and contaminated zone of agro-industrial exploitation. Alimentary
racism, in other words, operates in conjunction with environmental racism. The viola-
tion of Marind’s right to food and to a healthy, biodiverse, and nourishing environment
in turn sit within a broader denial of their right to consent, decision-making, and
freedom of expression.17
Indeed, food racism is part and parcel of a broader array of structural and everyday
forms of discrimination that are invoked by Marind as manifestations of the slow-
motion genocide unfolding in West Papua.18 These include population dilution, settler
favouritism, land appropriation, and Indigenous displacement. Each of these processes
intersect in one way or another with the rise of the plantation sector and its racialised
dynamics within the particular locale of Merauke. Each also furthers the long-standing
history of human rights violations that has plagued West Papua since its forceful incor-
poration into the Republic of Indonesia.
Bringing together applied and academic insights derived from my activist and ethno-
graphic engagement with Marind communities since 2011, this paper seeks to highlight
how food and foodways constitute particularly potent mediums for the expression of
racial difference and discrimination in West Papua. Specifically, I argue that changing
food systems speak in visceral and figurative ways to the erosion of Indigenous
well-being, identity, nourishment, and survivance in the teeth of settler-colonialism
and its extractive logic of exploitation and modernisation. Here, racial hierarchies
4 S. CHAO

manifest in political and moral assessments surrounding what one eats, with whom,
where, and how, as well as where foods come from, how they are procured, and what
they symbolise for their respective producers and consumers. Drawing from the
diverse facets of the gastrocolonial regimes at play in Merauke’s plantation nexus, I con-
clude by critically assessing the potential and limits of framing alimentary racism in West
Papua through the lens of the right to food, food security, food sovereignty, and food
justice respectively.

Forest foodways
Marind in the Upper Bian have traditionally relied on the forests, swamps, and groves for
their subsistence. Sago flour, the staple starch food, is supplemented with forest tubers
and roots (mainly taro and yam), fish, and forest game such as Rusa deer, lorises,
possums, cassowaries, fowl, kangaroos, crocodiles, and wild pigs. Fruit including
mangoes, rambutans, papayas, bananas, jackfruit, and coconuts are also obtained from
the forest, alongside leaves, roots, barks, resins, and saps. Forest foods are gathered
during collective expeditions that take place approximately every two months and can
last over a month. Participants range from eight to over thirty individuals and usually
include the nuclear family as well as members of extended families and clans.
Forest foodways are widely associated by Marind with satiety (I. kekenyangan).19 This
satiety is linked to the particular plants and animals from whom forest foods are derived.
Described by Marind as ‘grandparents’ (M. amai) or ‘siblings’ (M. namek), forest organ-
isms share kinship through common descent with Marind clans from ancestral spirits
(M. dema).20 Procuring and consuming these foods involves an array of ritual codes
that communicate respect for these interspecies kinships – from the techniques by
which animals are hunted, to the ways in which foods are cooked, the songs performed
before they are shared, and the myths told when they are consumed.
Forest foods are said to be most satisfying and satiating when eaten in the forest itself.
Here, eating is accompanied by attentive listening and observing, which together enhance
the flavour of the foods consumed. For instance, Marind pay attention to the sound of the
rivers and the fleeting movements of insects and birds. They notice the patterned bark of
vegetation and the footprints left by itinerant packs of wild boars. Just as important as the
environment and foods one consumes are the people with whom one eats. Satiety derives
from sharing food with those who obtained and prepared it, with whom one travelled the
forest, and with whom one entertains kinship through descent or marriage. Collectively
consuming foods in the forest reminds people of their relations to the plants and animals
from whom these foods derive. Villagers recount how ancestral spirits fashioned these
diverse species into being in time immemorial. They also recall with fondness the
travels of their living and deceased relatives across the landscape, and the places they
satiated themselves along the way.
Many Marind describe forest foodways as nourishing because they enable the sharing
of skin (M. igid) and wetness (M. dubadub) among humans and between humans and the
forest environment.21 Skin refers to the exterior and visible surface of the body and
includes the skin of human beings, but also the bark of trees, the coats of mammals,
and the laminae of leaves. Wetness refers to the various fluids that animate human
and other-than-human bodies – for instance, blood, grease, muscle, sweat, saliva, sap,
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 5

resin, and pith. Skin and wetness operate in conjunction with one another to produce
bodies that are glossy, shiny, and taut. These physical traits are key markers of beauty
and health among Marind and subject to detailed scrutiny and cultivation.
Just as important as the nourishment obtained by Marind from the forest is the nour-
ishment that Marind themselves provide for their other-than-human kin. Being Marind,
as young Marind woman Marcella put it, means becoming ‘good food for others’ (I. jadi
makanan enak buat lain). For instance, the sweat of community members sustains the
growth of vegetation when it comes into contact with branches, leaves, and twigs.
Sweat also infiltrates the soil as people labour in the grove, nourishing a diverse commu-
nity of insects and gastropods, including centipedes, ants, snails, and grubs. Human
blood, too, becomes fodder for hematophagous critters such as leaches and mosquitos
that swarm the forest during the monsoon season.
Marind continue to become good food for their other-than-human kin after their
death. While burial in the village cemetery is now widely practiced, many among my
companions affirmed that they preferred to be interred in the forest, because that way
their bodies would become ‘useful’ (I. berguna). As the body decomposes, human flesh
and fluids seep into the ground where they are consumed by subterranean creatures
including earthworms, beetles, and millipedes. Larger mammals, reptiles, and birds
that prey upon these organisms absorb in turn the skin and wetness of the deceased,
passing it on to their own progenies through reproduction and eventually returning it
to the forest ecology when they themselves die or are consumed. In these interspecies
chains of eating and being eaten, humans and non-humans, both living and deceased,
constantly shift across the subjectivities of feeder, fed, and food.
Forest foodways and their associated forms of labour are further inflected along gen-
dered and generational lines. Men are primarily responsible for hunting game, collecting
betel nuts, setting traps, and felling and rasping sago palms. Women, meanwhile, see sago
processing and cooking as their main chores, alongside skinning game and tending fires.
Women also breastfeed or cradle children and keep elderly group members entertained
with the latest stories, gossip, and events. Elders play a central part in educating children
in the arts of forest subsistence. They transmit to children the genesis stories of organisms
encountered in the grove, their kinship to particular ancestral spirits, and the ecosystems
they rely on to survive and thrive.22 They teach children the rituals that must be per-
formed when animals are captured, sago palms felled, and food consumed. They also
encourage children to exercise respect, care, and caution in and for the forest by pointing
out to them the species that should not be hunted during gestational periods, or those
that are poisonous or inedible.
Satiation is enhanced when forest foods consumed are produced by the collective
labour of all group members. These labours are not ranked in order of importance or
value. Rather, they complement each other in ways that draw from the respective
strengths, skills, and knowledge of different group members. The diversity of foodstuffs
obtained from these complementary activities is the condensation of the hard work,
effort, and care of each individual involved. As Marcia, a young woman from Khalaoyam
village explained, ‘When there are many different foods to eat, we know everyone has
shared skin and wetness with each other, and with the forest. The food will taste of every-
one’s hard work. This is what makes food nourishing.’ Forest foodways in the Upper
Bian, then, are nourishing in concomitantly cultural, affective, corporeal, and social
6 S. CHAO

terms. They communicate and affirm Marind’s ancestral connections to the forest land-
scape and its diverse organisms.23 They enable inherited knowledge of the forest to be
transmitted from one generation to the next. And they are rooted in a multispecies
ethos that frames humans and non-humans as bound in reciprocal relations of eating
and being eaten.

The racialisation of Papuan foods, bodies, and ecologies

Over the last decade, Upper Bian Marind’s access to forest foods has been radically
undermined by the expansion of oil palm plantations, whose boundaries creep right
up to the edge of the villages, encroaching on sago groves, hunting zones, sacred
forests, and ceremonial feasting sites. Forest foods are now increasingly substituted by
imported commodities that Marind purchase from kiosks in the villages, obtain at a sub-
sidised rate from government agencies, or receive from corporations as part of Corporate
Social Responsibility schemes. The shift from a nutritionally diverse and abundant forest
diet of game, fish, vegetables, fruits, and tubers, to a nutritionally impoverished, high-salt
and sugar-content, and quantitatively restricted diet of rice, instant noodles, biscuits, and
fizzy drinks, has resulted in unprecedented rates of wasting, stunting, and low body
weight across Merauke. Data I obtained from the community health clinic (Puskesmas)
in Timase reveal that malnutrition rates in the Upper Bian almost doubled and wasting
more than tripled between 2014 and 2019. Stunting in babies is particularly prevalent in
the villages of Khalaoyam, Mirav, and Bayau, which are within closest proximity to the
plantations.
Widespread protein and micro-nutrient deficiencies among Upper Bian villagers
manifest as poor physical growth, weak teeth and bones, and a weak immune system,
which in turn enhances the vulnerability of individuals to respiratory infections, bronchi-
tis, parasitism, skin inflammations, measles, and a range of gastrointestinal and muscu-
loskeletal diseases. With medical facilities only available in the township of Timase some
two hundred and fifty kilometres away, several infants have succumbed to malnutrition-
related conditions, including dysentery, pneumonia, and heart failure. Importantly, com-
parisons between aggregated cases of malnutrition, wasting, and stunting and monocrop-
driven forest loss reveal a strong to very-strong positive correlation. In other words,
where forest loss occurs, higher rates of malnutrition tend to follow.
Agribusiness expansion in Merauke thus radically undermines Marind’s right to food
(and by consequence, to health) as well as their right to the traditional environments and
modes of subsistence upon which their collective identity as an Indigenous people
depends. And yet malnutrition was routinely downplayed or dismissed by government
officials from the Ministry of Health whom I spoke to in the field. These individuals
often attributed diet-related illnesses to Marind’s forest-based, ‘backward,’ (I. terlantar)
mode of subsistence and their incapacity to take care of their own health and that of their
children. The idea that environmental degradation might be part of the story was routi-
nely rejected in light of the fact that Marind now had access to modern, nutritious foods,
like powdered milk, rice, and canned meat. ‘They should be getting fatter and healthier,’
one ministry representative exclaimed, ‘If they still suffer from malnutrition, it must be
because they are not choosing to eat right. And that’s a problem of education.’ These per-
spectives echoed the statement made in July 2018 by then Regent of Merauke, Frederikus
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 7

Gebze, who publicly denied that child malnutrition was a significant problem in the dis-
trict and dismissed the statistics as ‘exaggerated’ (I. dibesar-besarkan).24
Racial discrimination is also at play in the clinics and hospitals where Marind seek
treatment for malnutrition-related conditions, when they can afford to. Many villagers,
for instance, reported being treated in a condescending and patronising manner by
the primarily non-Papuan doctors and nurses working in these clinics, being blamed
for not knowing how to feed their children properly, and in some cases, being asked
to keep a distance because of the bad smell (I. bau) of their black skin.25 Some women
reported doctors donning gloves and masks for consultations, even where no physical
examination was needed, or nurses refusing to approach visibly underweight patients
out of fear of contracting HIVAIDS from them. In several instances, doctors have sent
away patients suffering from malnutrition-related diseases after only a perfunctory exam-
ination. Circia, a young woman from Khalaoyam village, was one among them. ‘A friend
who studies nursing in Merauke City told me I had developed pneumonia because I
wasn’t eating well, and that I should go to see a doctor in Timase. I didn’t want to,
but she said my cough was really bad. The doctor took one look at me and said,
‘you’re not sick. You’re just hungry.’ Then, he sent me away with some candy and a
few packets of instant noodles for the kids. After that, I never went back to the hospital.’
The clinic is also where self-responsibilisation becomes deeply imbricated with a sense
of shame and incapacity for many Marind. Women whom I spoke to, for instance,
described having to be educated by doctors and nurses in how to feed their children
as symptomatic of their failure to be good mothers in the first place. Others admitted
they did not fully understand the scientific terms, diagnosis, and advice given to them
by biomedical practitioners, but did not ask for clarification lest they be perceived as
ignorant, stupid, or illiterate. Some women reported being openly blamed by doctors
for neglecting their children’s health – for walking the forest instead of attending govern-
ment-organised nutritional health workshops in the City, for feeding their children sago
instead of bio-fortified milk, and for failing to boil river water before cooking with it.
These forms of technocratic racism are prevalent in the narratives that accompany bio-
medical diagnoses at the clinic.26 They imbue malnutrition and malnutrition-related dis-
eases with moral judgment that exacerbates the shame and guilt of those afflicted by these
conditions. As Sofia, a mother-of-two from Bayau village put it, ‘We go into the clinic
with the disease of hunger. We come out of the clinic with the disease of shame.’
Marind are exposed to similarly condescending discourses on the part of corporations
and government officials during land negotiation consultations in the villages. During
such consultations, corporate and State representatives frequently point out with
dismay the emaciated bodies of children and teenagers, and attribute them to the ignor-
ance and lack of education of their parents. Eating rice and instant noodles, villagers are
often told, is a form of progress (I. kemajuan). It will enable Papuans to enter and par-
ticipate in the modern world (I. dunia modern), to leave the forest and sago groves
behind, and to become civilised (I. berbudaya) members and participants of the Indone-
sian nation-state. Agribusiness expansion obliterates the very environments from which
Marind derive their culturally valued forms of subsistence. And yet the development of
oil palm plantations in particularly is often framed as a solution to malnutrition and food
insecurity because it will allow parents to get jobs, earn a salary, purchase healthy and
nourishing foods for their families and offspring, and stop eating from the forest ‘like
8 S. CHAO

animals’ (I. macam binatang). Individuals who refuse to surrender their lands are blamed
for depriving their children of healthy foods and inflicting them hunger and pain. Those
who do concede to land transfers, meanwhile, are lauded for their responsible decisions,
and rewarded with cartons of rice, biscuits, and instant noodles.
The incitement to eat imported foods is thus thoroughly entangled with, and expres-
sive of, the denigrating ways in which the government and corporations recast the valued
foodways and environments of the rural Papuans whom they seek to salvage from
poverty (I. kemiskinan) and backwardness (I. keterbelakangan) through development
projects and the exportation of Indonesian foodways.27 The all-pervading discourse of
national interest in particular routinely prevails over respect for Papuan peoples’ collec-
tive and individual rights, in direct contravention of the Vienna Declaration and Pro-
gramme of Action of 1993, which declares that ‘while development facilitates the
enjoyment of all human rights, the lack of development may not be invoked to justify
the abridgement of internationally recognised human rights’.28
State and corporate narratives also tend to frame hunger and its alleviation as a matter
of individual choice. In doing so, they conveniently elide the reality and racialisation of
nutritional structural violence, or the broader political, historical, cultural, and economic
contexts that make systemically marginalised populations particularly vulnerable to
hunger’s physiological and psychological effects.29 This is compounded by the fact that
opportunities for material advancement offered by agribusiness corporations are often
by the preferential treatment of non-Papuan settlers.30 While Marind often cede their
lands in the hope of earning money to provide better and more abundant food for
their families, verbal promises made by oil palm companies often fail to materialise in
practice. Most jobs tend to be allocated instead to non-Papuan settlers or labourers
brought in from other parts of the archipelago by oil palm corporations, who are said
to be more hard-working, efficient, and disciplined than their Papuan counterparts.
Just as demeaning for many Marind as the way in which their traditional foods and
practices are represented in State and corporate discourse are the ways in which imported
and processed foods are obtained. For instance, many Marind describe queuing at the
plantation headquarters to receive welfare food packages, shrouded in the dust raised
by passing oil palm fresh fruit trucks and bulldozers, as a deeply humiliating experience
– one that, as thirty-year-old Bayau resident Karola put it, ‘makes us feel like we are
beggars.’ This sense of belittlement is often exacerbated by the verbal exchanges that
take place between the villagers and the Human Resources employees distributing the
food. ‘They tell us this food is a gift from the companies,’ Karola continued. ‘They
expect us to thank them for it – even though we gave them all our land and they
never gave us the money or jobs or scholarships we asked for. And yet still, they want
us to be grateful. Still, they want us to think that instant noodles are worth more than
the forest.’
No less degrading for many Marind is the experience of purchasing imported foods
from kiosks in the village. These kiosks are predominantly owned and managed by
non-Papuan settlers who are said to behave in an arrogant (I. sombong), rude (I.
kasar), and racist (I. rasis) manner towards local community members. Many of my com-
panions, for instance, reported that kiosk-owners would pretend not to understand them
because of their ‘poor Indonesian’ and make them repeat themselves several times.
Others reported that kiosk-owners would claim to be out of stock in particular items,
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 9

that then made their way into the hands of non-Papuan inhabitants of nearby transmi-
grant settlements. Some Marind believed that the owners concealed a large portion of
their goods in storage in order to prioritise their own families and friends or upped
the prices when selling them to Papuan people. Particularly resented by many Marind
are the barbed wire screens that separate them from the goods and owners in the
shop, and the small holes through which commodities and payments must be exchanged.
These alienating infrastructures, villagers explained, seem to suggest that kiosk owners
are afraid that Marind might steal their produce, attack them, or touch them with
their dirty, dark skin. ‘When we queue for food at the company offices,’ Karola explained,
‘we feel like poor beggars. But when we queue for food at the kiosks, we feel like dirty
thieves.’
The ways in which Papuan foods and bodies are framed in biomedical, corporate, and
State discourse epitomise the conjoined logic of infantilisation and bestialisation that
Australian anthropologist and historian Chris Ballard and Papuan theologian and activist
Benny Giay identify as central to the logic of race and racial construction in West
Papua.31 In these discourses, the nutritional and civilisational condition of rural
Papuans is characterised as inferior and primitive. This in turn serves to legitimate the
expansion of oil palm plantations as a form of development (I. pembangunan) that
will purportedly uplift Papuans from their poverty and precarity. In this framing,
Papuan peoples are recast as civilisation ‘projects’ (I. proyek) of improvement that take
as their premise the inferiority of Papuans in concomitantly cultural, dietary, and
racial terms.32
The racialisation of Papuan foods, food environments, and food practices in turn
operates in direct conjunction with the capitalistic logic that drives the transformation
of nourishing multispecies forests to industrial monocrop plantations in the name of
national food security, and at the detriment of Marind’s right to a culturally meaningful
and healthy food environment. Much like agribusiness development is represented as the
solution to Papuan backwardness, so too agribusiness development seeks to convert and
optimise putatively idle and unused tracts of land into economically productive and
profitable capitalist frontiers.33
Importantly, Marind affirm that they are not the only ones exposed to food insecur-
ity as a result of these environmental transformations.34 The foraging and hunting pat-
terns of their plant and animal kin, too, are ruptured as plantations are fenced off with
barbed wire and forests razed to make way for monocrops. Forest creatures find them-
selves cut off from their drinking sources when rivers are diverted to irrigate the planta-
tions. Wild pigs and cassowaries that venture into the concessions are hunted down and
eaten or sold by company workers. Meanwhile, bamboo and sago groves collapse as the
soil is depleted of minerals and nutrients. With little forest left to walk in, Marind can
no longer share skin and wetness with forest organisms to sustain or enhance their
growth through their tactical engagements and physical labours. Much like Marind
struggle to find nourishment in forest foods, so too their non-human kin are robbed
of the nourishment offered by reciprocal and interspecies relations of eating and
being eaten in the forest. Environmental and nutritional racism find particularly
potent expression in the symbolic meanings of sago and rice, which I examine in the
next section.
10 S. CHAO

Native sago, foreign rice

The traditional diet of Upper Bian Marind revolves around the starch of the sago palm, a
carbohydrate-rich flour that is obtained from the trunk of the tree following repeated
leaching. Sago flour is usually consumed as dakh kakiva (M.), a mixture of sago,
coconut flesh, larvae, or meat, cooked inside bamboo stalks over a fire. In another
variant, dakh sep (M.), the ingredients are wrapped in banana or coconut leaves, and
cooked on hot stones covered with sago fronds or eucalyptus leaves. In its most
simple form, sago starch is moulded into balls and cooked on sticks over a fire. Impor-
tantly, sago in the Upper Bian is primarily procured from the wild rather than cultivated.
This is because domestication is widely perceived by Marind as a form of human control
that does violence to forest organisms by depriving them of their ‘freedom’ (I. kebeba-
san). This principle also applies to other plants and animals and speaks to a generalised
ethos of restrained care in Marind-environment relations – one that demands that
Marind respect the autonomy and wildness of their other-than-human kin while also
protecting and enhancing the environment that these organisms depend upon.35
Upper Bian Marind frequently describe themselves as ‘sago people’ (M. dakh-anim).
Sago is said to be the most nourishing and palatable of foods. It makes the body strong
and healthy. It allows men to hunt for days on end, women to bear numerous children,
and children to develop a strong skin and abundant wetness. True Marind, as Khalaoyam
dweller Maria put it, are Marind who eat sago. Indeed, and as in other parts of Melanesia
and Oceania, the cultural significance of sago for many Marind extends far beyond the
pragmatics of subsistence.36 The satiation and nourishment it offers is intrinsically con-
nected to the socialities and ecologies that it both depends upon and sustains.37
For instance, procuring, consuming, and exchanging sago in the grove is said to create
an atmosphere of harmony, peace, liveliness, and good humour among those who collec-
tively partake in these activities. The grove itself is described as a place of safety and
freedom, where Marind can temporarily evade the military, the police, and the agribusi-
ness corporations whose presence pervades everyday life in the villages. Morally valued
forms of social behaviour, such as collective work, sharing food, joking, teasing, singing,
and storytelling, serve to further enhance the sociality of the grove.
These affective dimensions are conveyed by the Marind saying ‘sharing sago makes
kin’ (I. bagi sagu jadi keluarga). The making of kin through sago consumption takes
place within and across Marind settlements, but extends beyond Marind clans to encom-
pass Wambon, Kei, and Muyu communities who have settled in Merauke, and who are
said to ‘eat sago from the same grove and share women of the same blood.’ It also
includes other Papuan ethnic groups across the island of New Guinea and Melanesia
more broadly who, like Marind, derive their subsistence primarily from sago. Together,
sago-eaters thus partake across time and space in a shared gastro-identity that encom-
passes the ecological assemblages, cultural values, and social relations embodied in the
food that they consume.
As people eat sago, they are also reminded of the story (I. cerita) of the sago palm itself
– where it came from, how it made its way to the mangroves, and when it first yielded its
nourishing pith. Tracing sago’s ancestral lifeway in turn invokes to community members
the many other forest species that entertain symbiotic relations with sago palm, and that
must be consumed together with the starch in order to make for a balanced and diverse
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 11

meal. These species include the sago palm weevil that incubates in rotting sago trunks,
the possums, tree kangaroos, and bats that roost, nest, or feed in the sago grove
canopy, and the cassowaries, pigs, and anteaters that forage in the undergrowth. Never
procured nor consumed alone, sago starch is said to be most flavoursome when it is pro-
duced collectively by kin and clans, and when accompanied by the array of plants and
animals with whom sago palms share the forest, during and beyond their lifecourse.
Finally, the cultural significance of sago is further enhanced by its association with
women and with children.38 As in other parts of Melanesia, Upper Bian Marind identify
correlations between the growth and reproduction of sago palms and human beings.
Sago suckers, for instance, are referred to as ‘children’ (M. izmi) and named after
Marind children who were born concurrently to them. Pre-inflorescent palms are
described as ‘pregnant’ (M. gakhum) because their starch-filled trunks resemble
women’s swollen wombs. Meanwhile, dark red sago starch is compared to menstrual
and postpartum blood, and white sago pith to breastmilk. In line with the gendered attri-
butes of the palm, the most nutritious and flavoursome sago flour is said to be that pro-
duced by women, because both the plant and its pounders are bearers of sustenance and
fertility – the one of edible starch, the other of human offspring.
Over the course of the last fifty years, and particularly since the beginnings of large-
scale deforestation and oil palm expansion in Merauke, rice has increasingly replaced
sago as the staple source of carbohydrate among Upper Bian Marind. Unlike sago,
however, rice is said by many villagers to be bland, tasteless, and unsatiating. It is a
food and crop that was introduced from Indonesia, rather than a native species and
staple of Papuans and Melanesians. Indeed, rice featured centrally in the original
design of MIFEE under then President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who spoke of trans-
forming Merauke into a ‘national rice barn’ (I. lumbung padi nasional). The alien origins
and attributes of rice as food and plant in turn evoke to many Marind the foreignness of
the people who consume and introduce it. Referred to by Marind as ‘rice people,’ these
entities include the Indonesian soldiers, settlers, and government and corporate actors
who occupy, control, or otherwise exploit Papuan lands and resources, who now rep-
resent over sixty per cent of the District’s total population.39
Rice for Marind does not hold the culturally valued and gender-inflected meanings,
kinships, and relations that imbue sago with nourishment and flavour. Unlike sago,
that is procured and prepared through the collective efforts of the broader community
and that is consumed alongside a diverse range of foodstuffs in the forest, rice is often
eaten in the village by individuals in their homes, and purchased with money rather
than exchanged for other foodstuffs across families and households. Rice is not subject
to ritual treatment nor shared among the community through reciprocal forms of
gifting. Nor is rice the product of the valued labour of women or of the intergenerational
transmission of valued forest knowledge. As a result, eating rice fails to conjure or
produce the collective affects and memories associated with forest foods and their associ-
ated commensalities. Whereas sago is communally procured and consumed in the grove,
rice is cultivated in places, soils, and ecosystems unknown to Marind, and by people
whom they have never met or interacted with. The fact that rice is cultivated in the
first place contravenes the ethos of restrained care that Marind associate with interspecies
relations. Unlike forest plants and organisms, rice production entails domination of
12 S. CHAO

humans over crops, which deprives them of their autonomous modes of growth, and thus
constitute a form of interspecies violence.40
The lack of nourishment offered by rice is exacerbated by its uncanny ability to exacer-
bate the hunger of those who consume it. Children, for instance, are said to clamour for
more food within hours of eating rice. Women described how they would rice through-
out the day but always crave more. Young men, meanwhile, talked of having become
‘addicted’ (I. kecanduan) to rice, which they would eat in copious amounts without
ever feeling full. Rice, then is a food that is imposed by outside forces, and culturally
and politically representative of Indonesian – rather than Papuan – foodways. Rice
cannot offer adequate satiation, and in fact fuels and intensifies the hunger of those
who consume it. Its incapacity to offer nourishment arises as much from its physical
properties as from the absence of culturally valued activities, knowledges, and inter-
actions that, for Marind, imbue foods with their nourishing attributes.41
The contrapuntal meanings of rice and sago described above are in turn embedded
within prevalent State and corporate discourses that position rice (and rice consumers)
as inherently superior to sago (and sago consumers). Within these discourses, sago pro-
curement is associated with a forest-based, nomadic, and immediate-return way of life,
that is framed as vastly inferior to an agriculture-based, sedentary, and delayed-return
way of life. This mode of subsistence is often invoked by State and corporate actors in
explaining the tendency of Marind and Papuans more generally to ‘laziness’ (I.
malas).42 As one government official whom I spoke to put it, ‘Marind just live off the
forest on a day to day basis. They don’t think ahead. When they are hungry, they just
go and collect sago. They don’t store any of it for later. This is why they struggle to fit
into the modern economy and keep their jobs. They don’t understand forward-planning.
That’s why they are lazy.’
The imposed substitution of forest-based sago foodways with village-based rice food-
ways is thus imbued with deep-seated political and moral meaning for Indigenous
Marind communities.43 These transforming foodscapes echo powerfully the processes
of ‘gastrocolonialism’ described by Perez in the context of Americanized foodways in
Hawai’i. In West Papua, gastrocolonial transformations in the alimentary structures of
social life are not just a side effect of colonisation, militarisation, or neo-imperialism.
Rather, these alimentary structures are actively instrumentalised by those in power to
further their expansionist, developmentalist, and assimilationist agendas.44 Importantly,
gastrocolonialism in West Papua reveals how seemingly mundane everyday choices,
practices, and possibilities surrounding food are in fact always positioned within
broader architectures and hierarchies of ongoing settler-colonial domination, inferiorisa-
tion, and enculturation. These architectures and hierarchies themselves are in turn
embodied and mediated through food types that are imbued with distinctive symbolic
materialities, cultural meanings, and political valences.
In West Papua, architectures and hierarchies of State and corporate power manifest in,
but also vastly transcend, the materiality and morality of foods themselves. This is
because alimentary racism is both enabled by and enabling of, an array of related
forms of discrimination that together have come to shape the violently oppressive
pasts and presents of Indigenous West Papuans. Such forms of discrimination and
human rights abuses include naturalised land dispossession, systemic natural resource
exploitation, population dilution, physical and psychological violence, settler
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 13

favouritism, and the exposure of West Papuans to racially-motivated verbal abuse and
social exclusion – both in their native region and across the archipelago.45
If transforming foodways express the ongoing subjection of West Papuans to racialis-
ing assemblages on a concomitantly symbolic and material level, then food insecurity and
malnutrition express gastrocolonial violence in a far more visceral way. They speak to the
positioning of Papuan bodies and futures as inherently disposable and killable in the eyes
of the Indonesian state and its corporate allies – Papuans not as rights-holders but as
merely ‘bare flesh’.46 The rise of local food insecurity and its congeries of adverse
health and reproductive consequences further reinforce the belief among many
Marind that they are the targets of an intentional, slow-motion genocide on the part
of the State.47 Here again, humans are not the only victims of alimentary and environ-
mental discrimination. Agribusiness expansion, along with other infrastructural develop-
ments, also result in the obliteration of Marind’s plant and animal kin, whose futures and
wellbeing, too, are increasingly jeopardised as native habitats disappear. Relations of
mutual nourishment between humans and other-than-humans are eroded in this multi-
species omnicide, along with the many stories, intimacies, events, memories, and affects
that imbue these beings and relations with meaning.
Finally, for many Marind, the racial violence of settler-colonialism is not just a dom-
estic affair, but rather one that has been enabled by the tacit complicity of the inter-
national community. Historically and in the present, my companions would remind
me, the world remains apathetic and indifferent towards the plight of West Papuans.48
Foreign governments remained silent when the Indonesian government handpicked
1,026 Papuan individuals and coerced them into voting for the region’s incorporation
in 1969, in egregious violation of their collective right to self-determination. Indonesia
signed business deals with the United States promising access to mine gold and
copper in West Papua even prior to this controversial referendum.49 The United
Nations systems failed Papuans by placing political priority on appeasing Indonesia in
the Cold War Context above fulfilling its commitment to decolonisation and human
rights.
Historical and ongoing forms of betrayal on the part of the global community are
often in turn associated by Marind with international collusion in the processes of defor-
estation and agro-industrial expansion underway in Merauke. For instance, oil palm
developments are driven by the global demand for food and fuel, and particularly policies
of renewable energy use in the United States and Europe. Palm oil produced from
Marind soils lands on the shelves of supermarkets across the world. Those who purchase
them, however, are oblivious to the dispossession and hunger that their choices and con-
sumption provoke on the ground. As Mirav elder Pius put it, ‘The world does not speak
up for West Papua. It does not listen to our voices. Our land and resources are used to
supply the world – timber, coal, goal, palm oil. But while the world is being fed, we are
going hungry.’

Conclusions
This article has explored how top-down development schemes designed to enhance
national food security perpetuate cultural and racial discrimination against Papuans by
denigrating the traditional foods that express and sustain their collective identity as
14 S. CHAO

Indigenous peoples, as well as the environments and practices that imbue these foods
with symbolic and sensory meaning. I began by outlining how and why forest foods
matter to Marind communities in light of their association with ancestral and more-
than-human kinships, the socialities and memories that these foods produce, and the
valued forms of labour, interspecies care, and sensory immersion that accompany
their procurement and preparation. I then examined how deforestation and oil palm pro-
jects have undermined Marind’s food security while also subjecting them to paternalistic
discourses of development and progress, that instrumentally reframe forest foodways as
primitive and bestial in order to legitimate the expansion of modern, capitalistic infra-
structures. After examining how alimentary forms of racism manifest in the contrapuntal
moral and political valences of sago and rice, I situated nutritional violence in Merauke
today within a broader process of gastrocolonialism, that is indissociable from the demo-
graphic, economic, and ecological dimensions of human rights violations in West Papua.
Each of these dimensions are in turn rooted in the historical and contemporary denial of
Papuans’ right to free, prior, and informed consent – in terms of their food systems, cul-
tural ways of being, access to land and resources, and self-determination as Indigenous
people.
This article has given empirical and analytical precedence to the lived, everyday
experiences and narratives of Marind communities themselves as they grapple with an
increasingly precarious food environment and its diversely deleterious impacts on
their collective health, well-being, identity, and futures.50 In doing so, the article has
sought to foreground the central and complex, but often elided role, that foods play in
the production and hierarchisation of cultural and racial difference.51 It has also
attempted to highlight the racialised dimensions of agro-industrial food systems and
their accompanying rhetoric of development. These systems and their constituent
actors, I contend, conjure Papuan primitivism and backwardness in order to legitimate
their top-down civilisational and productionist agendas – even as they obliterate the
environments, relations, and practices from which Marind derive their sense of collective
wellbeing, identity, dignity, and belonging.
Marind’s localised experiences invite us to reflect more broadly on four prevalent (but
also contested) concepts in food-related policy and rights discourse: food security, the
right to food, food sovereignty, and food justice. Food security for Marind communities
has been radically undermined by deforestation and agribusiness expansion, that
together both limit the availability of, and access to, adequate and sufficient amounts
and types of food. At the same time, Marind’s understandings of what a nourishing
diet is vastly transcends issues of accessibility, quantity, and nutritional balance. This
is because foods’ nourishment derives as much from the foods themselves as from the
environments in which they are found, the people and practices invested in them, the
memories and affects they produce, and the kinships and cares they foster across
species lines.
The notion of food sovereignty, in contrast, offers a more expansive understanding of
food security as a phenomenon that is indissociable from democratic land control
coupled with ecologically sound farming systems. And yet as the MIFEE example
demonstrates, food sovereignty can easily be co-opted by governments to legitimate pro-
jects that undermine local food security in the name of national food security.52 The
framing of food as right, while backed by numerous international human rights
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 15

instruments and deployed by Marind themselves in their advocacy through United

Nations organs, has proved problematic on several fronts. First, it limits the subjects
of the right to food to humans alone. This restrictive scope contravenes Marind’s under-
standing of eating as an interspecies relation of nourishment, that happens both within
and across, the realm of the human. Second, the use of any rights-based discourse by
Papuans has all too often been conveniently interpreted by State actors as an expression
of aspirations for self-determination, and consequently responded to with heightened
surveillance, harassment, and intimidation.53
Most importantly, the possibilities for Indigenous food sovereignty in West Papua
cannot be dissociated from broader questions surrounding political sovereignty and
the violent legacies of settler-colonialism in a region where militarized control and
occupation perdure and where the right to self-determination continues to be denied
to Indigenous Papuans.54 In this context, achieving Indigenous food sovereignty
would demand equal attention to the environmental, social, and racial dimensions of
food – and consequently, of food justice. It would require addressing perduring
forms of structural discrimination and engaging with the material and cultural struggles
of people for whom development schemes represent but one more realm of margina-
lisation and oppression.55 Importantly, Indigenous food justice demands that the cri-
teria for what counts as a good diet and good food be anchored first and foremost
in the values of Indigenous peoples themselves. Among Marind, food justice is at
once an intra and interspecies issue.56 It entails an ongoing struggle among Papuans
to retain their humanity in the face of denigratory State and corporate discourses
and practices that render them disposable before the law. But it also entails a more-
than-human notion of justice – one that takes as its subjects the diverse plants,
animals, and ecosystems with whom Marind entertain relations of eating and being
eaten, and who continue to play a vital role in sustaining Marind cultural identities,
social relations, and multispecies futures.57

Notes
1. Coordinating Ministry for Economic Affairs, 2011, Masterplan for Acceleration and Expan-
sion of Indonesia Economic Development. In this article, the term ‘West Papua’ refers to the
present-day Indonesian provinces of Papua (I. propinsi Papua) and West Papua (I. propinsi
Papua Barat), that together form the Indonesian-controlled eastern territory of the island of
New Guinea. This region was known as Dutch New Guinea (Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea)
under Dutch colonial rule. Following Indonesian independence, it was renamed ‘Irian
Barat’ during the Soekarno era (1962–1971) and ‘Irian Jaya’ during the Suharto era
(1973–1999).
2. Takeshi Ito, Noer F. Rachman, and Laksmi Savitri. ‘Power to Make Land Dispossession
Acceptable: A Policy Discourse Analysis of the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy
Estate (MIFEE), Papua, Indonesia’, Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 1 (2014): 29–50.
3. On large-scale land acquisitions in the Global South prompted by the food, fuel, and finance
crisis of 2008, see Saturnino M. Borras Jr and Jennifer C. Franco, ‘Global Land Grabbing and
Trajectories of Agrarian Change: A Preliminary Analysis’, Journal of Agrarian Change 12,
no. 1 (2011): 34–59; Derek Hall, ‘Land Grabs, Land Control, and Southeast Asian Crop
Booms’, Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 4 (2011): 837–57; Annelies Zoomers, ‘Globalisa-
tion and the Foreignisation of Space: Seven Processes Driving the Current Global Land
Grab’, Journal of Peasant Studies 37, no. 2 (2010): 429–47.
16 S. CHAO

4. Yafet L. Franky and Selwyn Morgan, West Papua Oil Palm Atlas: The Companies Behind the
Plantation Explosion, 2015, https://awasmifee.potager.org/uploads/2015/04/atlas-sawit-en.
pdf (accessed May 15, 2021).
5. See Down to Earth, ‘Twenty-Two Years of Top-Down Resource Exploitation in Papua’,
2011, http://www.downtoearth-indonesia.org/story/twenty-two-years-top-down-resource-
exploitation-papua (accessed May 15, 2021); Denise Leith, The Politics of Power: Freeport
in Suharto’s Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003); Environmental
Paper Network, PUSAKA, GRAIN, WALHI, Greenpeace, Global Forest Coalition,
KSPPM, Biofuel Watch, and Rainforest Rescue, Swallowing Indonesia’s Forests, March
2021, https://environmentalpaper.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2021-03-Swallowing-
Indonesias-forests.pdf.
6. Franky and Morgan, West Papua Oil Palm Atlas.
7. Greenomics Indonesia, ‘Peatland and Forest at Serious Risk from Merauke Food and Energy
Estate Development’, 2012, http://www.greenomics.org/docs/Report_201202_Merauke_
Food_and_Energy_Estate.pdf (accessed May 15, 2021); Awas MIFEE, ‘An Agribusiness
Attack in West Papua: Unravelling the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate’,
2012, https://awasmifee.potager.org/?page_id=25 (accessed May 15, 2021); Tempo, ‘A
Time Bomb in Merauke: Investigation’, April 15, 2012, http://tapol.org/sites/default/files/
120415_Tempo_report.pdf (accessed May 15, 2021).
8. Sophie Chao, ‘Cultivating Consent: Opportunities and Challenges in the West Papuan Oil
Palm Sector’, New Mandala, August 26, 2019, https://www.newmandala.org/cultivating-
consent/; Sophie Chao, ‘The Truth About ‘Sustainable’ Palm Oil’, SAPIENS, June 13,
2019, https://www.sapiens.org/culture/palm-oil-sustainable/; Forest Peoples Programme,
Pusaka, and SawitWatch, ‘A Sweetness Like Unto Death’: Voices of the Indigenous Malind
of Merauke, Papua, 2013, Moreton-in-Marsh: Forest Peoples Programme, https://www.
forestpeoples.org/en/topics/other-private-sector/publication/2013/sweetness-unto-death-
voices-indigenous-malind-merauke-p. Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) has
emerged as a key principle of international law. It refers to the collective right of Indigenous
peoples to make decisions through their own freely chosen representatives and customary or
other institutions and to give or withhold their consent prior to the approval by government,
industry or other outside party of any project that may affect the lands, territories and
resources that they customarily own, occupy or otherwise use. The United Nations Declara-
tion on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) most clearly articulates the right of Indigen-
ous peoples to FPIC and related rights to be represented through their own institutions; to
exercise customary law; to the ownership of the lands, territories and natural resources that
they traditionally own or otherwise occupy or use; to self-identification; and, more funda-
mentally, to self-determination (UNDRIP, Art. 28, 32). In international jurisprudence
and in the statements of United Nations bodies and Rapporteurs, respect for the right to
FPIC has also been interpreted as an obligation (or legal duty) of governments that have
committed themselves as members of intergovernmental bodies through their ratification
or endorsement of one or more of the following instruments: International Labour Organ-
isation Indigenous and Tribal Populations Convention No. 107; International Labour
Organisation Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent
Countries; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; International Covenant
on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; International Convention on the Elimination of
all Forms of Racial Discrimination. FPIC is also obligation of corporations as recipients
of loans from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and as members of sus-
tainability certification standards, including for palm oil (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm
Oil), soy (Roundtable on Sustainable Oil), sugar (BonSucro), and timber (Forest Steward-
ship Council). See Marcus Colchester and Sophie Chao. 2014. Respecting Free, Prior and
Informed Consent: Practical Guidance for Governments, Companies, NGOs, Indigenous
Peoples and Local Communities in Relation to Land Acquisition. FAO Governance of
Tenure Technical Guide No. 3. Rome: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization,
http://www.fao.org/3/a-i3496e.pdf.
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 17

9. Forest Peoples Programme, Pusaka, and SawitWatch, ‘A Sweetness Like Unto Death’; Yando
R. Zakaria, Emilianus O. Kleden, and Yafet L. Franky, MIFEE: Tak Terjangkau Angan
Malind (Jakarta: PUSAKA, 2011); Agus Andrianto, Heru Komarudin, and Pablo Pacheco,
‘Expansion of Oil Palm Plantations in Indonesia’s Frontier: Problems of Externalities and
the Future of Local and Indigenous Communities’, Land 8, no. 56 (2019): 1–17.
10. Request for Urgent Assistance to Address the Imminent Threat to the Right to Food of the Indi-
genous Peoples in Merauke, Papua Province, Indonesia, 2011, https://www.forestpeoples.org/
en/topics/un-human-rights-system/publication/2011/letter-un-special-rapporteur-right-
food-re-request-ur; Request for Consideration of the Situation of Indigenous Peoples in
Merauke, Papua Province, Indonesia, under the United Nations Committee on the Elimin-
ation of Racial Discrimination’s Urgent Action and Early Warning Procedures, 2011,
http://www.forestpeoples.org/sites/fpp/files/news/2011/08/EW_UA Indigenous Peoples
Merauke Indonesia July 31 2011 Final.pdf; Request for Further Consideration of the Situation
of the Indigenous Peoples of Merauke, Papua Province, Indonesia, and Indigenous Peoples in
Indonesia in General, under the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s
Urgent Action and Early Warning Procedures, 2012, http://www.forestpeoples.org/sites/
fpp/files/publication/2012/02/2012-cerd-80th-session-ua-update-final.pdf; Request for
Further Consideration of the Situation of the Indigenous Peoples of Merauke, Papua Province,
Indonesia, under the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’s Urgent Action
and Early Warning Procedures, 2013, https://www.forestpeoples.org/en/topics/un-human-
rights-system/publication/2013/request-further-consideration-situation-indigenous-pe;
Sawit Watch and Forest Peoples Programme, ‘Joint Statement at the Asia Regional Consul-
tation with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on the Situation
of Indigenous Peoples in Asia. 12th – 13th March 2013, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’, 2013,
http://www.forestpeoples.org/sites/fpp/files/publication/2013/03/fppsawitwatch-statement
march2013.pdf.
11. Olivier de Schutter and James Anaya, ‘UN Rights Experts Raise Alarm on Land Develop-
ment Mega Projects’, May 23, 2012, http://www.srfood.org/en/south-east-asia-agrofuel-
un-rights-experts-raise-alarm-on-land-development-mega-projects (accessed May 17,
2021); Alexei Avtonomov, ‘UN CERD Formal Communication to the Permanent Mission
of Indonesia Regarding the Situation of the Malind and Other Indigenous People of the
Merauke District Affected by the MIFEE Project, 2013, http://www.forestpeoples.org/
topics/un-human-rights-system/publication/2013/un-cerd-formal-communication-
permanent-mission-indone; Anwar Kemal, ‘UN CERD Formal Communication to the Per-
manent Mission of Indonesia Regarding Allegations of Threatening and Imminent Irrepar-
able Harm for Indigenous Peoples in Merauke District Related to the MIFEE Project’ 2011,
http://www.forestpeoples.org/sites/fpp/files/publication/2011/09/cerduaindonesia02092011
fm.pdf.
12. Longgena Ginting and Oliver Pye, ‘Resisting Agribusiness Development: The Merauke Inte-
grated Food and Energy Estate in West Papua, Indonesia’, ASEAS - Austrian Journal of
South-East Asian Studies 6, no. 10 (2013): 160–82; Ito et al., ‘Power to Make Land Dispos-
session Acceptable’; Moureen Lamonge, Neo-Liberalism, Social Conflict and Identity of
Papuan Indigenous People. Case Study of Merauke Integrated Food & Energy Estate
(MIFEE) in Papua (The Hague: Institute of Social Sciences, 2012).
13. Ronald C. Kramer, Raymond J. Michalowski, and David Kauzlarich, ‘The Origins and
Development of the Concept and Theory of State-Corporate Crime’, Crime & Delinquency
48, no. 2 (2002): 271–72.
14. I undertook doctoral fieldwork between August – December 2015, March – July 2016, and
August – November 2017 in the Marind villages of Mirav, Khalaoyam, and Bayau, which are
located along the upper reaches of the Bian River in Merauke, West Papua. The paper also
draws from my prior interactions with Upper Bian Marind as a Project Officer for UK-based
Indigenous rights organisation Forest Peoples Programme over the course of 2011 to 2013.
15. Craig S. Perez, ‘Facing Hawai’i’s Future’, Kenyon Review, July 10, 2013, https://www.
kenyonreview.org/2013/07/facing-hawaiʻiʻs-future-book-review/.
18 S. CHAO

16. In using the term ‘settler-colonialism’ to describe West Papua’s historical, cultural, and pol-
itical landscape, I explicitly acknowledge the ongoing force of racialized violence and terri-
torial dispossession experienced by Indigenous Papuans under Indonesian rule. While itself
situated within longer-standing histories of Dutch colonial rule preceding Indonesian inde-
pendence, settler-colonialism in West Papua today operates along a distinctively Asian-Mel-
anesian (rather than White-nonWhite) racial divide. As Candace Fujikane and others have
highlighted in their analyses of Asian American privilege over Indigenous populations in
Hawai’i, settler-colonial histories, actions, and legacies are often plural and layered, inviting
attending to uneven distributions of power and privilege that operate along, but also outside
or alongside, prevalent White-nonWhite distinctions (Candace Fujikane and Jonathan
Y. Okomura, eds., Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Every-
day Life in Hawai‘i (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); see also Haunani-Kay
Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii (Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawai’i Press, 1999); Haunani-Kay Trask, ‘Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hege-
mony: ‘Locals’ in Hawai’i’, Amerasia Journal 26, no. 2 (2000): 1–24). While Indonesian
settler-colonialism in West Papua bears notable differences from White settler-colonialisms
in other parts of the world in terms of its constitutive ethnic distinctions and hierarchies, it
remains nonetheless premised on a similar logic: namely, the intentional appropriation and
exploitation of native lands, achieved through the relocation of settler populations whose
cultures and ways of life are assumed to be superior to those of native populations (see
Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, ‘Introduction: Making Space in Settler
Colonies’, in Making Settler Colonial Space, ed. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope
Edmonds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 1–24; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism
and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409).
17. The right to adequate food is a legally binding human right under international law,
enshrined in Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights and Article 25 of the International Declaration of Human Rights. Additional legal
guarantees are enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child. In 2004, the Committee on World Food Security and Member
Nations of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation adopted the Voluntary
Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in
the Content of National Food Security. These non-binding guidelines and associated gui-
dance documents reiterate the commitment of States to support the progressive realization
of the human right to adequate food and offer policy and practical recommendations
towards its implementation (see Colchester and Chao, 2014, Respecting Free, Prior and
Informed Consent).
18. See Tracy Banivanua Mar, ‘A Thousand Miles of Cannibal Lands’: Imagining Away Geno-
cide in the Re-Colonization of West Papua’, Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 4 (2008):
583–602; Jim Elmslie and Camellia Webb-Gannon, ‘A Slow-Motion Genocide: Indonesian
Rule in West Papua’, Griffith Journal of Law and Human Dignity 1, no. 2 (2013): 142–66.
19. Terms in Marind and in Indonesian or logat Papua (the Papuan creole version of Indone-
sian) are italicized, with the former preceded by ‘M’ and the latter by ‘I.’ While elderly com-
munity members in the villages where I undertook fieldwork still speak the Bian dialect of
Marind, logat Papua has become the lingua franca between different Marind and non-
Marind ethnic groups in the area, and between old and young Marind generations. Pseudo-
nyms have been used for all persons and places, with the exception of major cities and
provinces.
20. Sophie Chao, ‘In the Shadow of the Palm: Dispersed Ontologies Among Marind, West
Papua’, Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 4 (2018): 621–49; Sophie Chao, In the Shadow of
the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2022); Sophie Chao, ‘Wrathful Ancestors, Corporate Sorcerers: Rituals Gone Rogue
in Merauke, West Papua’, Oceania 89, no. 3 (2019): 266–83.
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 19

21. See Sophie Chao, ‘Hunger and Culture in West Papua’, Inside Indonesia, October 30, 2019,
https://www.insideindonesia.org/hunger-and-culture-in-west-papua; Sophie Chao, ‘Eating
and Being Eaten: The Meanings of Hunger among Marind’, Medical Anthropology, 2021,
https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2021.1916013; Sophie Chao,‘Wetness’, Art + Australia 8,
no. 57.1 (2021): 94–7.
22. Sophie Chao, ‘Children of the Palms: Growing Plants and Growing People in Merauke,
West Papua’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28, no. 2 (2021): 245–64.
23. See Sophie Chao, ‘There Are No Straight Lines in Nature: Making Living Maps in West
Papua’, Anthropology Now 9, no. 1 (2017): 16–33.
24. Abdel Syah, ‘Ini Kata Bupati Merauke Soal Anak Kurang Gizi’, Kabar Papua, July 11, 2018,
https://kabarpapua.co/ini-kata-bupati-merauke-soal-adanya-anak-kurang-gizi/.
25. On the institutionalized nature of racial discrimination against Papuans, see Sophie Chao,
‘West Papua and Black Lives Matter’, Inside Indonesia, June 17, 2019, https://www.
insideindonesia.org/west-papua-and-black-lives-matter; ‘Children of the Palms’, 8–14;
Sophie Chao, ‘We Are (Not) Monkeys: Contested Cosmopolitical Symbols in West
Papua’, American Ethnologist, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13023.
26. On technocratic racism in West Papua, see Jenny Munro, ‘Global HIV Interventions and
Technocratic Racism in a West Papuan NGO’, Medical Anthropology, 39, no. 8
(2020) :704–19.
27. For comparable examples across West Papua, see Martin Slama and Jenny Munro, eds.,
From ‘Stone Age’ to ‘Real-Time’: Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities, and Religiosities
(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015).
28. Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, 1993, Art. 10.
29. On structural violence, see Paul Farmer, ‘An Anthropology of Structural Violence’, Current
Anthropology 45, no. 3 (2004): 305–25. On nutritional structural violence, see Stanley
J. Ulijaszek, Neil Mann, and Sarah Elton, Evolving Human Nutrition: Implications for
Public Health (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
30. See Sophie Chao, ‘The Plastic Cassowary: Problematic ‘Pets’ in West Papua’, Ethnos 84, no. 5
(2019): 828–48.
31. Benny Giay and Chris Ballard, ‘Becoming Papuans: Notes Towards a History of Racism in
Tanah Papua’, Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association (Chicago, 2003). See also Chris Ballard, ‘‘Oceanic Negroes’: British Anthropol-
ogy of Papuans, 1820-1869’, in Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940,
eds. Chris Ballard and Bronwen Douglas (Canberra: Australian National University, 2008),
157–201; Filep Karma, Seakan Kitorang Setengah Binatang: Rasialisme Indonesia Di Tanah
Papua (Deiyai, Jayapura: Cetakan Pertama, 2014); Eben S. Kirksey, ‘Lively Multispecies
Communities, Deadly Racial Assemblages, and the Promise of Justice’, The South Atlantic
Quarterly 116, no. 1 (2017): 195–206; Stuart Kirsch, ‘Ethnographic Representation and
the Politics of Violence in West Papua’, Critique of Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2010): 3–22.
32. The rhetoric of ‘development’ (I. pembangunan) at play here finds its roots in earlier pro-
cesses of enculturation that began during the interim period of 1949 to 1969 through the
process of Indonesianisasi (I.), or ‘Indonesianisation’, and which aimed to strengthen
national unity by incorporating Papuans into the Indonesian state through formal edu-
cation, national media, economic development, and transmigration. See Jan Pouwer, ‘The
Colonisation, Decolonisation and Recolonisation of West New Guinea’, The Journal of
Pacific History 34, no. 2 (1999): 157–79.
33. On the conjuring of capitalist resource frontiers in the Global South, see Anna L. Tsing,
‘Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers’, Economic and Political Weekly 38, no. 48
(2003): 5100–6.
34. See Chao, ‘In the Shadow of the Palm’; Sophie Chao, ‘A Tree of Many Lives: Vegetal Tele-
ontologies in West Papua’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10, no. 2 (2020): 514–29;
Sophie Chao, ‘The Beetle or the Bug? Multispecies Politics in a West Papuan Oil Palm Plan-
tation’, American Anthropologist, https://doi.org/10.1112/aman/13592.
35. See Chao, ‘The Plastic Cassowary’, ‘Children of the Palms’.
20 S. CHAO

36. For comparable examples across the region, see Alison Dundon, ‘The Sense of Sago:
Motherhood and Migration in Papua New Guinea and Australia’, Journal of Intercultural
Studies 26, no. 1–2 (2005): 21–37; Roy Ellen, ‘Local Knowledge and Management of Sago
Palm (Metroxylon Sagu Rottboell) Diversity in South Central Seram, Maluku, Eastern Indo-
nesia’, Journal of Ethnobiology 26, no. 2 (2006): 258–98; Diana Glazebrook, Permissive Resi-
dents: West Papuan Refugees Living in Papua New Guinea (Canberra: Australian National
University Press, 2008); Rupert Stasch, Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West
Papuan Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
37. See Sophie Chao, ’Sago: A Storied Species of West Papua’, in The Mind of Plants: Narratives
on Vegetal Intelligence, eds. Patricia Vieira, Monica Gagliano, and John C. Ryan (Santa Fe:
Synergetic Press, 2021), 317-25.
38. See Chao, ‘Children of the Palms.’
39. Aris Ananta, Dwi Retno Wilujeng Wahyu Utami, and Nur Budi Handayani, ‘Statistics on
Ethnic Diversity in the Land of Papua, Indonesia’, Asia & The Pacific Policy Studies 3, no.
3 (2016): 458–74; Jim Elmslie, ‘The Great Divide: West Papuan Demographics Revisited;
Settlers Dominate Coastal Regions but the Highlands Still Overwhelmingly Papuan’, The
Asia-Pacific Journal 15, no. 2 (2017): 1–11.
40. Chao, ‘The Plastic Cassowary’. The notion of domestication as a form of immoral violence
towards other-than-human beings is also at play in Marind’s criticisms of the industrial oil
palm industry and its technoscientific and agronomic undergirdings (see Chao, ‘A Tree of
Many Lives.’)
41. Sophie Chao, ‘‘In the Plantation There Is Hunger and Loneliness’: The Cultural Dimensions
of Food Insecurity in West Papua’’, Mongabay, July 14, 2020, https://news.mongabay.com/
2020/07/in-the-plantations-there-is-hunger-and-loneliness-the-cultural-dimensions-of-
food-insecurity-in-papua-commentary/.
42. The derogatory characterization of sago and sago-eaters is a recurring motif in the Indone-
sian government’s promotion of rice and other cash crop cultivation projects across the
archipelago. For instance, Gerard Persoon notes how State discourses around rice cultiva-
tion in Mentawai placed moral evaluation on sago as a ‘lazy man’s food’, in contrast to
rice which was promoted as a symbol of civilization (Gerard Persoon, ‘From Sago to
Rice: Changes in Cultivation in Siberut, Indonesia’, in Bush Base, Forest Farm: Culture,
Environment, and Development, ed. Elisabeth Croll and David Parkin (London: Routledge,
1992), 187–99, p. 192). In a similar vein, Celia Lowe points to how government discourse
portraying sago consumption as a sign of savagery, poverty, and backwardness, has led
Sama in the Togean Islands to conceive of store-bought rice as a more civilised foodstuff
(Celia Lowe, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago (Prin-
ceton: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 95). On the cultural politics of rice and sago in
Indonesia, see also Herman D. Rijksen and Gerard Persoon, ‘Food from Indonesia’s Swamp
Forest: Ideology or Rationality?’, Landscape and Urban Planning 20 (1991): 95–102; Otto
Soemarwoto, ‘Constancy and Change in Agroecosystems’, in Cultural Values and Human
Ecology in Southeast Asia, ed. Karl L. Hutterer, Terry A. Rambo, and George Lovelace
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 205–48.
43. See Andre Barahamin, ‘Hikayat Beras Pemangsa Sagu: Etnosida Terhadap Malind-Anim
Melalui Mega Proyek MIFEE’, IndoProgress, October 21, 2015, https://indoprogress.com/
2015/10/hikayat-beras-pemangsa-sagu-etnosida-terhadap-malind-anim-melalui-mega-
proyek-mifee/; JUBI, ‘Destroying Sago Trees Will Kill the Papuan People’, September 6,
2013, http://westpapuamedia.info/2013/09/11/destroying-sago-trees-will-kill-the-papuan-
people/; Kompas, ‘Sawit Marak, Sagu Mulai Hilang’, April 17, 2015, https://regional.
kompas.com/read/2015/04/17/17575481/Sawit.Marak.Sagu.Mulai.Hilang.
44. Perez, Facing Hawai’i’s Future; see also Paloma Fresno-Calleja, ‘Fighting Gastrocolonialism
in Indigenous Pacific Writing’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
19, no. 7 (2017): 1041–55.
45. See Karma, Seakan Kitorang Setengah Binatang; Eben S. Kirksey, Freedom in Entangled
Worlds: West Papua and the Architecture of Global Power (Durham: Duke University
 THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 21

Press, 2012); Budi J. Hernawan, ‘Torture as a Mode of Governance: Reflections on the

Phenomenon of Torture in Papua, Indonesia’, in From ‘Stone Age’ to ‘Real-Time’: Exploring
Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities, and Religiosities, ed. Martin Slama and Jenny Munro
(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2015), 195–220; Carmel Budiardjo and
Soei Liong Liem, West Papua: The Obliteration of a People (TAPOL, 1998); Camellia
Webb-Gannon, Morning Star Rising: The Politics of Decolonization in West Papua (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2021).
46. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1998); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopoli-
tics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
47. John R. Wing and Peter King, Genocide in West Papua? The Role of the Indonesian State
Apparatus and a Current Needs Assessment of the Papuan People (Broadway: Breakout
Design and Print, 2005); Otto J. Ondawame, ‘West Papua: The Discourse of Cultural Gen-
ocide and Conflict Resolution’, in Cultural Genocide and Asian State Peripheries, ed. Barry
Sautman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 103–38; Rosa Moiwend and Paul Barber,
‘Internet Advocacy and the MIFEE Project’, in Comprehending West Papua, ed. Peter King,
Jim Elmslie, and Camellia Webb-Gannon (Sydney: University of Sydney, 2011), 37–50;
Elmslie and Webb-Gannon, ‘A Slow-Motion Genocide’.
48. Emma Kluge, ‘West Papua and the International History of Decolonization, 1961–69’, The
International History Review, 42, no. 6 (2020): 1155–72; Peter King, West Papua and Indo-
nesia Since Suharto: Independence, Autonomy, or Chaos? (Sydney: University of New South
Wales Press, 2004); Bilveer Singh, Papua: Geopolitics and the Quest for Nationhood (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008).
49. Leith, The Politics of Power.
50. On the importance of ethnographically grounded accounts of food insecurity, see Johan
Pottier, Anthropology of Food: The Social Dynamics of Food Security (Malden: Blackwell,
1999); Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ‘Hungry Bodies, Medicine, and the State: Toward a Critical
Psychological Anthropology’, in New Directions in the Study of Psychological Anthropology,
ed. Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey M. White, and Catherine A. Lutz (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1992), 221–48; Kirsten Hastrup, ‘Hunger and the Hardness of
Facts’, Man 28, no. 4 (1993): 727–39.
51. Claire J. Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Hiʻilei J. Hobart and Stephanie Maroney, ‘On
Racial Constitutions and Digestive Therapeutics’, Food, Culture, and Society 22, no. 5
(2019): 576–94; Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Rachel Slocum and Arum Saldanha, ‘Geographies
of Race and Food: An Introduction’, in Geographies of Race and Food: Fields, Bodies,
Markets, ed. Arun Saldanha and Rachel Slocum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 1–24.
52. Bina Agarwal, ‘Food Sovereignty, Food Security and Democratic Choice: Critical Contradic-
tions, Difficult Conciliations’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 6 (2014): 1247–68; Raj
Patel, ‘What Does Food Sovereignty Look Like?’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 36, no. 3
(2009): 663–706; Irene I. Hadiprayitno, ‘Behind Transformation: The Right to Food, Agri-
cultural Modernisation and Indigenous Peoples in Papua, Indonesia’, Human Rights Review
16 (2015): 123–41.
53. See Chao, ‘A Tree of Many Lives’, 522–5.
54. Sophie Chao and Dion Enari, ’Decolonising Climate Change: A Call for Beyond-Human
Imaginaries and Knowledge Generation’, eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the
tropics, forthcoming.
55. Jahi M. Chappell, Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte,
Brazil, and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018); David Billings and
Lila Cabbil, ‘Food Justice: What’s Race Got to Do with It?’, Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary
Global Contexts 5, no. 1 (2011): 103–12.
 22 S. CHAO

56. Sophie Chao, ’Why Multispecies Ethnography Matters for Human Rights and the Climate’,
in Earth Cries: A Climate Change Anthology (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2021), 97-
102.
57. Sophie Chao. ’Can There Be Justice Here? Indigenous Experiences from the West Papuan
Oil Palm Frontier.’ Borderlands, forthcoming; Sophie Chao, Eben Kirksey, and Karin Bolen-
der, eds., The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Durham: Duke University Press, under
contract).

Acknowledgements
I thank the Marind communities of the Upper Bian for their hospitality and support during my
fieldwork. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 5th Annual Symposium of the Aus-
tralian Food, Society, and Culture Network, the University of Sydney’s History Department
Seminar Series, the Department of Indonesian Studies Seminar Series, the Charles Perkins
Centre Breakfast Seminar Series, and the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre Research Conference.
Fieldwork towards this article was supported by an Endeavour International Postgraduate Scholar-
ship, a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, Engagement Grant, and Post-PhD Research
Grant, and a Macquarie University Fieldwork Grant. The research presented in this article was
approved by the Macquarie University Human Research Ethics Committee, Reference Number
5201500051 on 31 March 2015.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, the Charles Perkins Centre, and
the Department of Anthropology at Macquarie University.

Notes on contributor
Sophie Chao is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Department of History, University of
Sydney. Her anthropological and interdisciplinary research investigates the intersections of Indi-
geneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie Chao previously worked for
the international human rights organisation Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia and the
United Kingdom. For more information, please visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

ORCID
Sophie Chao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5434-9238

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