Systemic neglect of indigenous knowledge systems persists despite state-led tokenism in cultural preservation
Original framing: “Art & Culture dept. promotes indigenous knowledge” — bing news
The original framing omits the historical context of colonial erasure and post-colonial state assimilation policies that systematically dismantled indigenous knowledge systems. It ignores the role of corporate and state-led development in displacing traditional agricultural practices (e.g., shifting cultivation) through land-use changes and monoculture expansion. Marginalised voices—particularly Naga farmers, women custodians of seed knowledge, and youth who are abandoning traditional practices due to lack of support—are entirely absent. Indigenous critiques of 'development' as a continuation of colonial extraction are also erased.
High structural omission detected in mainstream coverage.
The narrative is produced by a state-controlled department (Department of Art & Culture) for domestic and international audiences to project cultural inclusivity, masking the department's role in perpetuating extractive development models that displace indigenous lifeways. The framing serves neoliberal governance by depoliticising indigenous knowledge into 'cultural heritage' rather than recognising it as a living, adaptive system of governance and ecology. This obscures the complicity of state institutions in land grabs, forced assimilation, and resource extraction that threaten the very traditions being 'celebrated.'
The colonial and post-colonial state has systematically dismantled indigenous knowledge systems through policies like the Assam Land Revenue Regulation (1886), which imposed private property regimes on communal lands, and India's Forest Acts (1865, 1927), which criminalised traditional forest use. In Nagaland, the 1960s 'modernisation' programmes and later 'green revolution' policies displaced traditional agriculture, replacing diverse millet and tuber crops with hybrid seeds and chemical inputs. The *Morung* system, once central to Naga social organisation, was eroded by Christian missionary education and state schooling that denigrated indigenous epistemologies as 'primitive.'
The Nagaland Department of Art & Culture's event exemplifies how state institutions instrumentalise indigenous knowledge to project inclusivity while perpetuating the very systems that erode it—colonial land tenure, extractive development, and assimilationist education.