The Resistance for Collective Land Rights in Contemporary Indonesia: Institutionalization of Indigenous Peoples’ activism, Changes in Land Control, and Questions of Indigeneity in the Toba Highland, North Sumatra

This paper examines how marginalized rural communities articulate and mobilize indigenous identities in their struggle for collective land rights, including forest tenure rights. Focusing on the Toba Highland in the province of North Sumatra, it analyzes how the highly contested concept of indigeneity, inter alia, indigenous peoples’ rights, is gradually institutionalized to support claims to collective land titles over the past decade. The paper’s main aim is to advance an understanding of the shift of applied indigeneity, the changes in land control, and the dynamics of the institutionalization of indigenous human rights activism in cross-border spheres. This paper, which is part of my current PhD project titled “Indigeneity and the Movement for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Contemporary Indonesia, uses the tools of critical ethnography by following multiple and interconnected struggles of sites in various scales, within and outside of indigenous peoples’ rights movements. Data collection includes participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and conversations with different actors—marginalized rural communities, social and environmental activists, NGOs, and state representatives at local and national levels, including religious leaders and journalists—who mobilise and contest indigeneity within unequal power relations shaped by political and economic conditions. Using interpretative approaches to experiences in the everyday activism, the methodological significance of this research lies its relevance to (1) enrich the body of literature on applied indigeneity in the way it seeks to move the discourses on indigenous movements beyond dominant binary perspectives, but as dynamic and socially negotiated; and (2) the way in which it explores how ideas of indigeneity are interpreted, adapted, and put into existing multiple spheres of social movements, ranging from, human rights movements, agrarian movements to the environmental movements, which frequently intersect in advocacy for collective land rights, rather than a fixed, idealised, or binary. Likewise, the practical impacts of this study lie in the researcher’s positionality as a critical scholar and long-term activist within Indonesian land rights, environmental movements, and non-governmental organizations. With more than fifteen years of experience, the researcher can draw on knowledge of how social movements have seized political opportunities to challenge unequal structures, framed land rights struggles, mobilized marginalized communities for collective action, and built and sustained networks within the state and across civil society. This embedded engagement also provides insight into policy processes that have produced and maintained unequal access to land. However, occupying this dual position necessitates sustained reflexivity to critically assess how such proximity shapes the research process, interpretations, and outcomes, and to ensure that the research maintains analytical rigor while generating meaningful broader impacts. Keywords: Resistance, institutionalization of indigenous activism, collective land rights, land control, indigeneity