While not a monolith, Indigenous communities around the world have close relationships to land, sea, and sky. However, Indigenous ways of life are severely threatened by commercial logging, rampant poaching, construction, land theft, and climate change. As access to cultural landscapes is limited, human-flora-fauna-ancestor-spirit relationships are lost, and trauma exacerbated. These issues reflect the broad global crises of dispossession, discrimination, and neglect faced by Indigenous Peoples.

Baka communities, Indigenous hunter-gatherers, who live in and around the Dja Faunal Reserve, have been dependent on the forest for their identity, health, wellbeing, and subsistence for centuries and the forest is very significant for Baka culture and spiritual relations.

Our project supports Baka communities to lead the mapping of their tangible and intangible cultural assets in the local landscape at their request. It aims to deconstruct external landscape control and associated violence. Our project works towards the rematriation—a term combining repatriate and restoration of Indigenous relationships with natural resources—of Indigenous land and life. Our initiative is built on the premise that integrating Indigenous Knowledge Systems and information gathered through Indigenous-led mapping can decentre non-Indigenous perspectives, navigate the complex differences between community and external perspectives on landscapes, and enhance support from authorities.

We hope to hear from your innovative projects supporting participatory mapping with Indigenous Peoples of limited (reading, writing, or technolgy) literacy that empower remote communities with their own data, technology, and skills. Our data will be shared with key stakeholders including NGOs and ministry officials at a formal Baka-led presentation in September 2026, as in 2025 UNESCO welcomed the involvement of local communities in consultation meetings to improve the effectiveness of the management of the Dja.