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A guide to understanding its role in strengthening Indigenous land rights
Maps are part of the background of our lives, tools we use to get from Point A to Point B – navigating our neighborhoods, commutes, and shared spaces. Maps are so deeply ingrained in our lives that we rarely stop to think about their significance.
But for Indigenous communities with tenuous land rights, maps hold a very different kind of power. Instead of charting a path to somewhere new, these maps are tools for staying put – anchoring communities to their ancestral lands and protecting what they treasure most: their culture, livelihoods, and the deep connection to their environment. Community maps become shields against outsiders eager to exploit forests, rivers, and resources. They tell a story of belonging, resilience, and stewardship. Through community mapping, Indigenous peoples reclaim their narratives and reshape how their lands are understood by others.
What is community mapping and how does it differ from other maps?
Community mapping is the process by which Indigenous communities document their land use, resources, and cultural landmarks. Unlike government-issued maps that generally prioritize administrative boundaries, or corporate maps that prioritize resource extraction, community maps are deeply personal and rooted in both lived experience and history. They reflect the intricate relationships Indigenous peoples have with their land, marking burial sites, spiritual places, ancestral farmlands, key fishing spots, and hunting grounds. And while satellite mapping captures visible structures and geographic features, community mapping goes beyond the surface. It incorporates firsthand knowledge – and this rich context makes community maps invaluable tools for advocating land rights and protecting cultural heritage.
Why is mapping important for Indigenous land rights?
Mapping is a vital tool for Indigenous communities facing the dual threats of cultural erosion and environmental destruction. In places like Sarawak, where logging, plantations, mines and dams encroach on native lands, official maps routinely fail to acknowledge customary and ancestral territories. This omission leaves communities vulnerable to displacement and exploitation. Community mapping provides a counter-narrative – one that asserts Indigenous land ownership, strengthens advocacy efforts, and preserves ecosystems. These maps are not merely geographic records; they are powerful evidence that visually ties land, culture, and identity together, making a compelling case for protection.
One key example comes from Sarawak’s Penan community. For the Penan, mapping has served as both a shield and a lifeline. Like other Indigenous groups in Sarawak, their rainforests are more than a habitat – they are the essence of their identity, culture, and survival. With no written tradition prior to missionization, Penan history and spirituality are embedded in the land itself: rivers, mountains, burial sites, and trees serve as markers of their ancestral past. However, industrial deforestation and land encroachment threaten to sever these connections, risking not only ecosystems but the cultural memory they hold. The Penan communities of eastern Sarawak, with our partner organizations KERUAN and Bruno Manser Fonds, have documented over 5,000 river names and 1,000 topographic features linked to their traditions, ensuring that their stories and rights are inscribed in ways that courts and policymakers cannot ignore. These maps have since been used countless times as critical documentation to prevent logging and protect native customary lands.
The Borneo Project has been involved in community mapping for decades, conducting community mapping training and workshops with Kenyah, Kayan, Iban and Penan communities in the mid nineties. More recently, the Baram Heritage Survey trained Indigenous field technicians with GPS and a specialized smartphone app to document their traditional ecological knowledge and create maps of their hunting, fishing and communal use territories. These maps also logged the locations of key biodiversity, including the presence of threatened and endangered species such as hornbills, pangolins, and gibbons. They also captured the impacts of logging and other environmental threats.
How are community maps created?
Creating a community map is a collaborative process that combines traditional knowledge with modern tools. It often begins with sketch mapping, where community members draw rough outlines of their territory, identifying key landmarks and boundaries. Territory walks, guided by elders and knowledge holders, help refine these maps as significant sites and boundaries are marked using GPS devices. Alongside this, elders share oral histories and stories tied to specific areas, adding cultural depth to the map. Once a draft is created, it undergoes community review and validation to ensure accuracy and inclusivity. Finally, the maps are digitized, printed, and distributed among communities, ready to be used for advocacy, legal claims, or conservation planning. Community members themselves decide how the data is collected and used. These maps become living documents of their ancestral territories.
What challenges do communities face in asserting their land rights?
The challenges faced by Indigenous communities in Sarawak are monumental. Industrial logging, palm oil plantations and urban development have degraded nearly 90% of Sarawak’s primary forests. Hydroelectric dam projects have displaced many communities, severing their connection to the land. A lack of written documentation of land use and culture has long been exploited by corporations and government bodies to deny Indigenous land claims. This gap in physical evidence remains one of the primary obstacles to achieving recognition of customary land rights.
In Sarawak, the self-determination approach of community mapping aligns with adat (customary law), while the state understanding of property entitlement relies on common law principles. While the Sarawak Land Code does incorporate some adat principles, community maps currently hold little weight in official land disputes, further marginalizing these communities. To establish native customary rights (NCR), the Sarawak government relies heavily on aerial imagery gathered prior to the Land Code being enacted in 1958. This approach has the same problem as using only satellites for mapping, which can only identify geographic features and have no possible understanding of Indigenous land use. Government officials often deny communities access to these aerial maps, leaving them with no clear basis for dispute. This deeply flawed approach stands at odds with the principles of community mapping.
Indigenous territories often have fluid and shared territories, complicating mapping efforts. Indigenous understanding of territorial bounds often don’t translate neatly into lines on a map, and instead have generous overlapping areas engulfing whole watersheds or expansive hunting grounds. Forests shared between neighbouring communities are functionally impossible to divide on a map. For these reasons, some dismiss community maps as artificial, or even fraudulent, created only in response to contemporary pressures.
Additionally, the process of mapping itself requires significant resources – time, funding, and technical expertise – which are often out of reach for rural Indigenous groups. Despite these hurdles, mapping fosters a sense of empowerment, unity, and identity, enabling communities to reclaim their narrative and resist land encroachment.
Can mapping support forest conservation?
Mapping plays a crucial role in forest conservation, especially in Sarawak, where the stakes couldn’t be higher. Indigenous communities are the most effective stewards of land and forests, relying on and managing their forests sustainably for generations. Community maps make their stewardship visible and provide evidence of the biodiversity and ecological value of their lands. For example, in Sarawak, communities have used maps to halt logging activities, protecting precious resources and cultural sites. The Penan communities of Long Ajeng, Long Lamam, and Long Murung successfully stopped logging around Batu Siman, a key cultural and geographical landmark, by asserting their mapped community boundaries. By documenting their territories, communities not only safeguard their heritage but also contribute to global efforts to combat deforestation and climate change.
Mapping is more than just drawing lines on paper. For Indigenous peoples, it’s a lifeline – a way to assert their presence, protect their heritage, and defend their futures. In a world where land is increasingly commodified, community maps stand as powerful reminders that some treasures can’t be measured in monetary terms, only in their significance to the people who call them home.
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