Tag: Climate resilience

By Devira Sari When the bulldozers came for Dijah’s land, she was not home to stop them. Dijah, a member of the indigenous Dayak people of West Kalimantan, returned from work to find her family’s ancestral forest being cleared for a palm oil plantation. The expansion has stripped communities of their forests, their traditional medicine, and a matrilineal way of life passed down through generations. When Dijah organized her community to resist the land clearing, she was met with state repression. Members of BRIMOB (The Mobile Brigade Corps) detained her, aiming to silence her defense of the communal lands. Dijah’s experience reflects the broader structural violence that underpins Indonesia’s palm oil industry where state-corporate collusion, gendered marginalization, and environmental destruction intersect. Yet despite intimidation, Dayak women continue to resist, embodying both ecological and cultural resilience against an economy that prioritizes profit over justice. Dijah’s story is not an isolated tragedy, it is a repeated experience of Dayak women who have long...