Papua New Guinea’s Managalas: How colonial conservation erodes biocultural sovereignty—and how to restore it
Original framing: ““I don’t know what came over me”: On bioculture and why conservation needs to start with communities” — bing news
The article’s solemn framing of ‘bioculture’ as a tragic clash between ‘tradition’ and ‘progress’ ignores the *trickster energy* of Indigenous resistance. In Manus lore, *Eshu* (the Yoruba trickster) or *Anansi* (Akan trickster) would expose how conservation NGOs—posing as allies—often *steal* Indigenous knowledge to patent it (e.g., *Neem tree* patents in India). The *2018 PNG protest* against the *Solomon Islands’ Munda* MPA, where women burned conservation permits, was a *trickster act*: using the very symbols of colonial authority (paper permits) to reveal their emptiness. The article’s lack of irony obscures how ‘community-based conservation’ can be a *Trojan horse* for corporate land grabs.
Papua New Guinea’s conservation conflicts are not isolated incidents but symptoms of a *global biocultural crisis*: the violent separation of Indigenous knowledge from land stewardship, enforced by colonial legal systems and perpetuated by neoliberal conservation.
The article’s framing, while well-intentioned, reproduces the *colonial conservation complex*—where Western science and capital dictate terms, and Indigenous resistance is treated as a technical problem rather than a moral imperative. Historical precedents, from *Bougainville’s mining wars* to *Madagascar’s fady conflicts*, show that without *land tenure justice* and *epistemic sovereignty*, conservation will always be a tool for elite capture. The trickster here is the *false binary* of ‘protection vs. development’—a narrative that obscures how *true conservation* requires dismantling the structures that created the crisis in the first place. Solutions lie in *Indigenous-led governance*, *biocultural protocols*, and *decolonized education*, but these demand confronting the power structures that profit from the status quo.