Multispecies mourning: grieving as resistance on the West Papuan plantation frontier

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the cultural, political, and affective significance of mourning among the Indigenous Marind communities of rural Merauke West Papua, whose intimate and ancestral relations to native plants, animals, and ecosystems are increasingly threatened by mass deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion. Cross-pollinating Indigenous more-than-human philosophies with environmental humanities scholarship, I examine three emergent practices of ‘multispecies mourning’ on the Papuan oil palm frontier – the weaving of sago bags as a form of collective healing, the creation of songs prompted by encounters with roadkill, and the transplanting of bamboo shoots as part of customary land reclaiming activities. Multispecies mourning offers potent avenues for Marind to memorialize the radical loss of lives and relations prompted by capitalist landscape transformations. At the same time, multispecies mournings constitute forms of active resistance and creative refusal in the face of extractive capitalism’s ecocidal logic. Bringing together plants, people, and places, their dispersed sentience and materiality offer hopeful pathways for multispecies solidarities, in and against the rubble of agro-industrialism and its necropolitical undergirdings.