Editor: Siti Maimunah, and Noer Fauzi Rachman
Published by Insist Press for Mama Aleta Fund 2025
Forword
Knowledge as ceremony – Curating and handing down the art of resistance
Martina Padmanabhan
When women declare their place-based ritual as weapon, we smell a sense of danger and urgency. The need to defend themselves with the weapons of the weak (Scott 1985), the unequal power relations between the state and the people, in particular women are called upon. In this beautifully written [and illustrated???] ode to the creativity of resisting the devouring mechanisms of large scale extractivism, the editors Siti Maimunah and Noer Fauzi Rachman invite for a conversation with five prominent indigenous women leaders Aleta Baun, Mardiana Darren Dana, Gunarti, Maria Loreta and Jull Takaliuang. In the words of Wendy Harcourt (2025) they are Earth carers by creating spaces where resistances to dominant narratives can be cultivated.
This is a vivid example of an applied Feminist Political Ecology lens, bringing forward the practices, thoughts and affects of female pioneers in defending their traditional territories against mining, deforestation and food simplification. Understanding our embeddedness as humans in the animate and material world as inherently political and experienced though our bodies, an FPE approach celebrates the tacit knowledge in these women elders actions. Doing so by entering into a prolonged dialogue through storytelling, demonstrating and retreating with each, the defenders of their homelands share their motivations, strategies and tactics against environmental destruction. The performativity of the women’s wisdom is well captured in this collection of spells and rituals, underling the enacted and embodied property of their knowledge. Through this care-full getting closer and learning about the lifelines and struggles of female warriors, Noer and Mai unravel the transgressing power of breaking gendered expectations. What emerges out of this cornucopia of cooperative harvesting is a wealth of lessons in solidarity, resistance and hope across the archipelago.
Demanding their place and voice as indigenous women in the developmentalist state of Indonesia, the defenders of human and more-than-human rights articulate their ethics throughout via different evocations of the body. Speaking with Maimunah’s (2022) concept of tubuh-tanah-air, literary incorporating the body into the world of earth and water, they develop a compelling ontology through metaphors of making a strong case for the larger-than-human-body, Mother Earth.
Stones is quarries are evoked as bones, excavated from below the skin. Water flows like blood in the veins, connects and nourishes, if not poisoned and drained. Trees and plants cover and protect, like hair the delicate body and provide shelter. An awareness of finiteness of all beings endowed with life and gratefulness towards this shared property of food and feeders binds the environmental protectors to their country. This attachment to a specific locality and a conviction in the power of doing unites these women.
This beautiful book displays a wealth of courage bearing knowledge and lastly wisdom, born out of struggles in formal political arenas as well as informal activism to defend millet as staple, minerals as heritage and identity, fearless learning as developing voice and decolonizing knowledge while challenging destruction declared as development.
The honorary title of Nasus means literally “the stone who breast feeds”. This evocation allows a glimpse into a cosmovision, which juxtaposes the most intimate care with supposedly dead material as an expression of ties to place. This grounding of existence in specific matters goes hand in hand with an understanding of utter dependency yet covered in the most delicate and tender gesture of nourishing. The Mollo people of Timor link their linage to different rocks, underlining their identity tied to a location, a location that is able to nurture newborns and help them to grow and develop into responsible and response-able people. Highlighting the need of care to continue the line of life, this picture moves beyond the mere symbolic. The hardened sediment resonates with the warm and soft flesh, producing warm milk from the mammal glands for the sucking and demanding baby. Putting the motherly capacity to breastfeed at the centre of identity rituals tells a different story of development and growth. One confined by the limits of birth and death, relying on care, protection and maintenance for men and women alike.
In these seemingly mundane verses and riddles rest the potential of a spell. The spell, that condenses the power of accumulated knowledge in a mantra, that can guide and upkeep. A spell, that hopefully neutralizes or paralyses the commonplace parlance of efficiency and effectiveness, which works within the confined space of closed time and predefined entities. The concentrated understanding of the world in a nutshell serves to support the female defenders with energy to sustain their struggle.
An energy in great demand, as two worries haunt the warriors. Throughout their vocal fights, they bump against the invisible but painfully felt borders of appropriate and decent behavior for a woman in a patriarchal society. With biased rules trying to distort their vision of fairness, to mute their articulation of life-sustaining desires and to impede the actions of defense in a hierarchical setting, their constantly have to read, speak and act against the grain. With this never-ending drainage of courage, resources and stamina, the Nausus rightly ask, who feeds the caretakes? How are breast feeders nourished? Who protects the protectors? Here it comes again, the vulnerability of all human beings and their deepfelt need for support and solidarity. What seems like a call for local unity is valid all over the world, in local municipal councils to the parliaments of states, where solidarity among women office holders is the need of the day to sustain each other over the misogyny threats and carve out ways to build alliances. Just as this book brings together different women warriors for more-than-human well-being, knitting a network and provide visibility, the spells call out for the recognition of another world possible.
The spells serve another purpose. The next generation of human and more-than-human rights defenders wants to be initiated, encouraged and taught. The act of pioneering female vocalness and feeling the strength it required, makes these women conscious of the need of social reproduction. However, being the first in their communities to step out leaves them with the puzzle of how to pass on the torch when “The miners, the orderers and the criminals have generations. What about us?” The awareness strikes with urgency, that women have to cater for crafting the next generations as men do with the support of the pervasive patriarchal culture. The lack of institutions to groom girls into positions of power, the uniqueness of their transgressions and the constant precarity of their standing challenges the continuity of their efforts. Clinging to the fact of the shared birthdate, one Nausu reaches out to the Indonesian national idol Kartini, evoking her as a figure of female self-articulation and intellect. Thus this collection of mantras, spells and knowledge through retreats and story-telling can serve as an initiation for the further defenders down the line.
What runs through the portraits of courageous women is a sense of urgency to articulate the knowing and naming, caring and eating while listening to ancestors, country and the body. Coined and phrased in short meditations, the warrior’s wisdom takes the magic of spells, condensing their knowledge and making it available to the next generation of defenders. This lies at the heart of this conversation from the welcome to farewell biding: the mindful harvesting, preserving and carrying of tools, theories and tactics to make another world possible!
Literature
Harcourt, Wendy (2025) Conundrums of Care: Feminist Entanglements in Critical Development Studies. Bloomsbury. https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350459632
Maimunah, Siti (2022) Reclaiming “Tubuh-Tanah Air”: A Life Project on Doing Feminist Political Ecology at the Capitalist Frontier. Dissertation University of Passau. https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-uni-passau/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1165
Padmanabhan, Martina; Kurfürst Sandra (forthcoming 2026) Between the mountains and the sea: Performative approaches to human and more-than-human-relations in technoenvironments in Indonesia and Vietnam. TRaNS. Trans-regional and National Studies of Southeast Asia. Cambridge University Press.
Scott, James (1985) Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven. Yale University Press
