Can There Be Justice Here?

Abstract

This article examines the intersecting forms of social and environmental injustice shaping the lifeworld of Indigenous Marind communities and their more-than-human ecologies in the Indonesian-controlled province of West Papua. Over the last decade, large-scale deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion have radically undermined Marinds’ intimate and ancestral kinships with sentient forest plants and animals, as well as the moral principles that undergird interspecies relations. These transformations are exacerbated by conservation practices that are undertaken in the name of corporate sustainability but that are problematically premised upon an assumed divide between humans and the environment. The exclusion of Marind from natures both exploited and preserved sits in turn within a long-standing and ongoing history of violence and discrimination perpetrated against West Papuans under Indonesian rule. Drawing from Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols of more-than-human relationality, I examine how Marind conceive and contest the possibility of justice now and in the future—for themselves, forest organisms, and oil palm—amidst multiple, overlapping, and intersecting injustices provoked by capitalism, conservation, and colonialism. I invite an expansion of the scope and subjects of justice beyond the human that remains nonetheless acutely attentive to the persistence of capital-colonial regimes systematically positioning Indigenous peoples as killable before the law.