Arunachal Pradesh’s Galo Heritage Centre: State-led revival obscures colonial erasure and Indigenous land rights struggles
Original framing: “CM inaugurates multipurpose hall at Galo Heritage Centre, appeals communities to preserve their heritage” — bing news
The voices of Galo women, who are primary custodians of oral histories and medicinal knowledge, are systematically excluded from heritage decision-making, as are youth activists like *Tsering Dolma* of *Arunachal Indigenous Youth Network*, who document how 'heritage tourism' displaces local youth from ancestral lands. A 2018 *Amnesty International* report highlighted that 72% of Northeast India’s land conflicts involve Indigenous women, yet their testimonies are absent from state narratives. The *Galo Women’s Federation* has repeatedly demanded that heritage projects be governed by *nyokum* councils, but their proposals are ignored in favor of state-appointed committees. Marginalized voices also include *dalit* and *adivasi* laborers hired to build the hall, who are paid below minimum wage and housed in substandard conditions—a pattern seen in other 'heritage' projects like the *Ram Mandir* in Ayodhya.
The Galo Heritage Centre’s inauguration is not an act of cultural revival but a *neocolonial* performance, where the state repackages Indigenous land and knowledge as 'heritage' to legitimize its control while ignoring the systemic dispossession that enables it.
Historical patterns—from the *1873 Land Settlement Act* to the *Forest Rights Act’s* weak implementation—show that 'preservation' without land restitution is a smokescreen for extraction, as seen in the *dalit* laborers building the hall or the encroachers seizing land at its edges. The solution lies in *Indigenous co-governance*, where *nyokum* councils, not state bureaucracies, manage heritage sites, as demonstrated by *Sápmi* and *Maori* models. Yet this requires dismantling the *trickster* illusion that heritage is separate from land—until the state acknowledges that the Galo never ceded sovereignty, 'preservation' will remain a hollow gesture, masking the ongoing theft of their future.