Jenu Kuruba voices join global indigenous forum in Nairobi

Representatives of the Jenu Kuruba community from Karnataka's Nagarahole forest, spread between Kodagu and Mysuru districts, took their long-running dispute over ancestral land to an international gathering of indigenous peoples in Nairobi, Kenya.

Shivu J.A., 31, was among delegates from 16 countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas who attended the event, titled "Our Land, Our Nature". Other participants included members of the Qom and Mbya Guarani communities from Argentina, the Uchupiamona from Bolivia, the Kua from Botswana, the Bunong from Cambodia, the Baka from Cameroon, the Pasto from Colombia, the Kichwa from Ecuador, the Maasai from Tanzania, and the Diné and Dakota from the United States.

The gathering was organised by Conservation Solutions Afrika and Survival International. The organisers said at least three million indigenous people were paying the price for conservation with their land and their lives, while governments and conservation organisations expand protected areas and carbon markets create fresh pressures on indigenous territories.

On September 25, the newly formed Indigenous Lands Alliance issued a "Nairobi Declaration". It stated that true conservation is part of indigenous traditional systems and rejected conservation driven by market mechanisms, land grabbing, the financialisation of nature, greenwashing by major polluters and what it described as false nature-based solutions. The declaration demanded equality, consent, transparency, respect and dignity, and opposed the use of sacred animals such as the jaguar, the lion, the elephant, the whale and the buffalo, along with their ecosystems, as carbon sponges or as sources of biodiversity credits and offsets for corporate pollution.

The alliance also sought the return of ancestral lands, including those taken for parks and wildlife sanctuaries, and asserted that conservation must be led by indigenous peoples. It voiced opposition to the commodification of indigenous relationships with land, air, water and all living things, to carbon trading and offsets, REDD+, biodiversity credits and offsets, and to geoengineering, as well as to colonial and fortress conservation and to extraction presented as protection.

Speaking by phone from Nairobi, Mr. Shivu said the organisers had known the community for decades through its resistance to attempts to remove it from ancestral lands, whether by declaring the area a tiger reserve or a protected area. He said false cases made it difficult even to obtain a passport, and that the community reached Kenya on September 21 through crowdfunding and the organisers' support, given the significance of the event.

He described what he called historical injustice dating back to British rule and continuing after Independence, and said conservation efforts were aimed at commercialising forests through NGOs and large companies without giving forest dwellers, whom he credited with a 15,000-year history in the region, any say. Pointing to similar situations elsewhere in India, he asked whether Adivasis, forests and animals were responsible for all the problems caused by climate change, and whether declaring eco-sensitive areas and tiger reserves would solve them.

Thimma J.K., 56, a community leader, said the event allowed participants to meet communities facing comparable challenges worldwide. He said the absence of consultation was common everywhere and that NGO interference must stop, adding that the forests are the community's motherland and the animals its family deities. The community conserves the forests, he said, so there is no reason for a third party to be involved, and the land does not belong to the government either.