In April 2013, the Supreme Court of India delivered a historic judgement recognizing the cultural, religious and spiritual rights of the Dongria Kondh Adivasis, an Indigenous community residing in the Niyamgiri Hills of Odisha state in eastern India. The community fighting against bauxite mining in their sacred landscape had articulated that “our way of life allied to the ‘sacred law,’ as prescribed by Niyamraja (King of Law, the deity presiding over the hills) disallows exploitation of the forest and the land.” The Niyamgiri judgement is one of those rare moments where the modern state and law came close to recognizing the interconnectedness that communities have with the more-than-human world (the web of life). Indigenous and other nature-dependent communities across the world have often articulated, as part their resistance to external domination, an inseparability of nature from humans. At this year’s COP16 U.N. biodiversity conference to implement a plan to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, Indigenous leaders say this relationship with nature is necessary to reach the goal. To cite a few more examples of what this worldview looks like: “For you the river might be megawatts of electricity, but for us, the river is our mother,” said Adivasis of 300 villages gathered on the banks of the Indravati River, in Maharashtra state, central India, to protest plans for two mega-hydropower dams in the 1980s (both were abandoned). “When we cross the river, we pray to her; we have a connection with her, she is a living being and water is…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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