Forgotten: How COVID-19 Exacerbates Inequities for Indigenous Communities (Part 2)

In the first installment of my series on the effects of COVID-19 on Indigenous communities, I focused on the intersection of the Indigenous status and health among Indigenous women in Canada and the Māori in New Zealand. Since then, I have written about the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement and the layers of historic, legal, and social oppression that come with the intersectionality of the Black identity. 

Rather than a “redirect” in focus to the inequities for Indigenous peoples, I write this to further the conversation that the movement is spotlighting surrounding the unique oppression faced by Black and Brown people all over the world. While the reality of marginalization for certain groups may initially come as a shock, we must realize that this is a normalized and perpetuated reality that must be recognized as unjust.

With respect to the growing awareness of how COVID-19 is disproportionately affecting Indigenous communities, I am continuing to explore how the pandemic has taken a toll on Indigenous demographics around the world. In the second part of this series, I focus on groups in Asia and Africa.

Asia: The Kenyah Jamok (Malaysia)

The Kenyah people are native to the island of Borneo, with significant populations in the Malaysian state of Sarawak and the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan. The Jamok group of the Kenyah people reside in the Long Tungan settlement in Sarawak along the Baram River, which is a “lifesource for dozens of villages, around 20,000 [I]ndigenous people and a multitude of endemic animal species.”

With Long Tungan being the last community accessible by longboat along the Baram, the Kenyah Jamok is deeply isolated in a jungle of biodiversity—a jungle that is prey to the growing timber industry of Malaysia.

As a major figure in the global timber industry, Malaysia has produced and exported enough tropical timber products to reach 23 billion in Malaysian Ringgits (RM), or the equivalent of around 5.37 billion United States Dollars (USD), in 2019 alone. This comes at the cost of violating the rights of Indigenous groups like the Kenyah Jamok, who have a history of facing deforestation at the hands of timber companies like Samling.

The Malaysia Timber Certification Scheme was developed to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples to “control forest management on their lands and territories unless they delegate control with free, prior and informed consent to other parties.” However, Samling failed to properly consult the Kenyah Jamok about the 148,000-hectacre Gerenai timber concession. Instead, on April 12, the company and the certification authority SIRIM pushed through without approval from a single member of the Long Tungan community while Malaysia was in lockdown because of COVID-19. 

However, this isn’t the first time Samling overstepped its boundaries. In July 2018, the Kenyah Jamok people discovered Samling bulldozers encroaching on their reserve, and it took five visits to the company headquarters to ultimately settle for a mere RM 10,000 (or approximately 2,333 USD) for the 100 trees that were destroyed.

With the extension of the strict Movement Control Order to August 31, 2020 as a preventative measure for COVID-19, the Kenyah Jamok are caught in a catch-22: risk “facing heavy fines and up to 6 months in prison” when leaving their homes or risk Samling’s complacency without being able to physically confront its executive board. 

Africa: The Khoisan (South Africa)

The Khoisan people, having retained some genetic bits from the most ancient Homo Sapiens, have been said to be the first of sorts: the first people of South Africa, the first people of Africa, and even the first people of the world. The Khoisan group actually comprises two culturally distinct groups, the Khoikhoi and the San, which are coupled together because of their close evolutionary relationship as a result of displacement by the Bantu and colonization by the Dutch. While Khoisan language groups are supposedly present mainly throughout South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, and Namibia, I will be focusing on the Khoisan in South Africa.

Contrary to the statuses of groups like the Navajo Nation in the United States and the Māori in New Zealand, the Khoisan have not been recognized by the national government. Since 2017, Chief Khoisan SA—accompanied by a small group—has now twice trekked approximately 746 miles from the Eastern Cape to the Union Buildings in the capital to protest the government’s dismissiveness with preserving the Khoisan identity. From a three-week-long hunger strike in 2017 to a protest in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the group continues to put forth several demands: the Khoisan people must be recognized as the first nation in South Africa; the offensive term “colored” must be taken out of government documents; their language and their dialects must be made official; and they “must be given the land and resources to continue their culture and traditions.” 

Further, with no national census on people experiencing homelessness in South Africa, the Khoisan are a particularly vulnerable demographic in terms of access to services now more than ever. During the COVID-19 lockdown, the City of Cape Town published amendments to the Streets, Public Places and Prevention of Noise Nuisances By-law, allowing officials to impound or conduct a search and seizure if an offense is believed to have been committed. With no known report about measures to address the unmet needs of at least 500,000 Khoisan people without homes, let alone the demands to officially recognize and preserve the Khoisan culture, there is much left for the South African government to do.

Dr. Omphemetse S. Sibanda, a professor of law and the executive dean of the Faculty of Management and Law at the University of Limpopo, compares the initiative taken by Ecuadorian courts to convince the government to protect the Indigenous Waorani to the lack thereof with respect to South African courts.

“Reading the ruling of the Provincial Court of Pichincha reminded me of the suffering and challenges experienced by our fellow citizens, the Khoisan, whose leadership has declared that Covid-19 lockdown regulations are threatening their survival and sustainability; and that no sufficient and adequate government relief measures are designated for them or filtering to them as a community.”

So what?

Although native to their land, it is apparent that Indigenous communities are still grappling with the ramifications of cultural apathy by corporate and governmental bodies. As with my first piece in this series, I struggled to find more recent sources—and any sources at all—concerning Indigenous people and their experiences with COVID-19.

So what? We must continue recognizing systemic injustices by acknowledging that there must be systemic change. As Tauriq Jenkins – a South African Human Rights Commission monitor and high commissioner of the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin Indigenous Traditional Council – says, “What we have to be careful of is the fact that whatever the ‘new normal’ is now, it should absolutely not be the new normal for us as civil society.”

In my next piece for this series, I will be exploring the effects of COVID-19 on Indigenous people in South America. Until then, here are resources to help you stay informed about what is going on with Indigenous communities around the world: Cultural Survival, Human Rights Watch, The World Bank, and The World Economic Forum.