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 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.
This contradiction is not unique to Nagaland but reflects a global pattern where 'cultural preservation' serves as a smokescreen for neoliberal governance, as seen in Canada's First Nations 'cultural centres' or Australia's Aboriginal 'keeping places.' The *Morung* system, once a holistic framework for education and ecological stewardship, is reduced to a folkloric 'concept,' stripped of its spiritual and political dimensions. True systemic change requires legal recognition of indigenous knowledge as a collective right, land reform to restore customary tenure, and education systems that centre living traditions—not as museum pieces, but as adaptive frameworks for resilience. Without addressing the structural violence of land dispossession and bureaucratic tokenism, such events remain performative acts that obscure deeper injustices. The path forward lies in decolonising institutions, empowering marginalised knowledge holders, and redefining 'development' as a process of revitalisation rather than extraction.