FoxHershockMappingCommunities

However, the equipment acquired for this mapping project
remained at Koppesda, necessitating reliance on a Jakarta
based consultant to finish the work and to train two YTNS
staff members as surveyors. Therefore YTNS adopted SIT
unplanned and unprepared as it took over the role of local
partner to the EWC in order to complete an unfinished
project.
2. Pemberdayaan Pengelolaan Sumber Daya Alam
Kerakyatan (PPSDAK) (Empowerment of People's
Natural Resource Management) Pancur Kasih
PPSDAK is a unit of SEGERAK (Sekretariat Gerakan
Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Dayak, the Secretariat of the
Movement of Dayak Peoples' Empowerment) Pancur Kasih,
a Pontianak (West Kalimantan) based indigenous Dayak
organization that was first established as a social
organization with activities in education. After a new
generation of university graduates of Dayak descent joined
the organization, Pancur Kasih began to build a Dayak
movement by establishing units to work on cooperatives,
research, community forestry, and indigenous rights as a
means of empowering Dayak peoples. Through its
interactions with the environmental movement at the
national level, Pancur Kasih learned that mapping land
claims is central to defending indigenous land rights.
To tap the knowledge about mapping a researcher from the
Institute of Dayakology Research and Development (IDRD),
Pancur Kasih's research unit on Dayak cultures, joined
mapping exercises at the site of the proposed Kayan
Mentarang National Park (East Kalimantan). The Worldwide
Fund for Nature (WWF) had just started employing SIT to
map ancestral lands around the park as a part of its Ford
Foundation funded Culture and Conservation project with
the assistance of Jefferson Fox from the EWC. With the
help of Frank Momberg, a consultant from the WWF, the
IDRD carried out the first mapping exercise in Sidas Daya
(northeast of Pontianak) in 1994. Other Dayak communities
heard about this exercise and began to request Pancur
Kasih to map their lands. A year later Pancur Kasih set up
PPSDAK as a unit that works primarily to map indigenous
Dayak lands and to advocate for the recognition of adat
(indigenous) lands. With land hungry economic activities,
primarily forest and plantation concessions, continuously
threatening indigenous lands, requests from Dayak groups
kept coming to PPSDAK asking the latter to map their
kampongs (indigenous villages of Dayak peoples). This
Pancur Kasih unit rapidly developed and by 2003 had
mapped a total area of 1,037,709 hectares of Dayak lands
or about 7% of the lands in West Kalimantan province.
With grants from the Ford Foundation and the now defunct
USAID funded Biodiversity Support Program, PPSDAK now
has an office that houses mapmaking equipment and GIS
with a staff of thirteen, mostly those directly involved in its
mapping program. To accommodate the large number of
requests from Dayak communities to map their lands,
PPSDAK recruits and trains non-paid community mappers
who assist the NGO in promoting its mapping program to
the communities and in collecting data.
I found slightly different understandings among the staff
members regarding the purpose of adopting countermapping.
One respondent said that the goal of adopting
the counter-mapping program for PPSDAK is to return
peoples' rights to lands and natural resources and to
promote awareness of land rights. Another respondent
stated that the goal is to document peoples' territories in
the form of maps. Whatever the case, defending
indigenous lands through mapping is the clear goal.
Due to its focus on mapping and its achievements in
mapping indigenous lands, PPSDAK has been a key player,
and can even be considered as a center of excellence in the
counter-mapping movement in Indonesia. This organization
has provided training to most Indonesian NGOs that have
counter-mapping programs. Its programs cover
government/business observation, media/public
campaigns, environmental monitoring, and community
organizing.
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