Few places on the planet can lay claim to a greater digital divide than Malaysian Borneo, where nomadic hunters and gatherers continue to subsist in dwindling rainforests less than 100 miles from the high-tech, urban power centers of Asia. With limited access to schools, towns, technology and markets, indigenous groups in Borneo’s interior struggle for power, justice and equality in an increasingly technologically advanced society. In recent years, a number of remote tribes, with assistance from The Borneo Project, have learned and applied digital mapping technology in a way that is helping to reconfigure the imbalance of power and return control of customary lands to the rightful stewards.

In the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah, on the island of Borneo, native groups have witnessed the fastest rates of deforestation in the world. The impacts of the timber industry have left the world’s oldest, most diverse rainforest in tatters, and once thriving villages impoverished. The oppressive power relationships between the resource extractors (who pay millions a year in legalized bribes to government officials) and forest-dependent indigenous peoples appear entrenched and unchangeable. However, access to and training in digital mapping technology have enabled indigenous villagers to convincingly tell their own story and regain a voice in the democratic process.

Today, satellite navigation systems, remote sensing imagery, internet data sharing, and computerbased cartography provide a strong technological bridge for the most isolated and politically dispossessed peoples of Borneo. Armed with sophisticated maps documenting ancestral land claims, traditional forest use and natural resource conservation practices, communities have become a force to be reckoned with in the Malaysian courts and political system.

In recent years, indigenous communities have won a series of unprecedented victories in court thanks to digital mapping initiatives. The mapping work carried out in Sarawak has been such a success that indigenous groups from more than two dozen countries have asked Malaysian coordinators for assistance in establishing similar programs in their own communities.

It is worth noting that this is only one of six program areas designed to address, in a holistic way, the social, economic, political and spiritual issues facing Borneo’s indigenous communities: Indigenous Forest Restoration Initiative, Green Energy, Penan Radio Initiative, Rural Economic Development, and Borneo Voices. For each program, outlined above, The Borneo Project relies upon richly talented and dedicated local leaders who design programs, mobilize staff and volunteers and deliver vital services to villages in need.


Links: www.borneoproject.org

The Borneo Project was created in 1990 by a handful of environmental activists in Berkeley, California, who had witnessed the success of citizen diplomacy in easing the cold war. The project initially applied the tools of citizen diplomacy to the interrelated causes of rainforest preservation and promotion of indigenous rights. In part to educate the American public, and in larger part to provide political cover for native groups, the Berkeley activists formed a sister city relationship between Berkeley and Uma Bawang, a long-house in the Borneo interior, a leader in the resistance to unjust and illegal logging in native lands. Working through the sister city framework, The Borneo Project and Uma Bawang formed an alliance that attracted experts with relevant skills. On the Borneo side, activists who had experience organizing indigenous peoples were drawn to the idea that native peoples should gain control of the technologies that define power. Also attracted to the idea were traditional elders in whose collective memory exists unparalleled knowledge of thousands of unique forest species and their interconnections. This alliance of the traditional and the technical reasoned that if the world is parsed by people who make maps, then native peoples could learn the technology, translate their oral knowledge into the digital realm and seize the power to recreate their world. In 1995, The Borneo Project held Malaysian Borneo’s first community mapping workshop. Currently, over 200 communities are in the process of mapping their land.