Paper short abstract:

This paper explores "multispecies mourning" as an act of resistance and remembrance among Indigenous Marind inhabiting the West Papuan oil palm frontier.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua, this paper explores the cultural and political significance of mourning among Indigenous Marind communities whose intimate and ancestral relations to native plants, animals, and ecosystems are increasingly threatened by mass deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion. Cross-pollinating environmental humanities scholarship with Indigenous multispecies philosophies, I examine three emergent practices of “multispecies mourning” on the Papuan oil palm frontier – the weaving of sago bags as a form of trauma therapy, the creation of songs prompted by encounters with roadkill, and the transplanting of bamboo shoots as part of customary land demarcation and reclaiming activities. Multispecies mourning offers potent avenues for Marind to collectively memorialize the radical loss of lives and relations prompted by capitalist landscape transformations. At the same time, multispecies mournings constitute forms of active resistance and creative refusal in the face of extractive capitalism’s ecocidal logic. Bringing together plants, people, and places, their distributed sentience and materiality offers hopeful pathways for multispecies solidarities, in and against the rubble of agro-industrialism and its necropolitical undergirdings.