FoxHershockMappingCommunities

COMMUNITY-BASED MAPPING:
A TOOL TO GAIN RECOGNITION AND RESPECT OF NATIVE CUSTOMARY RIGHTS TO LAND IN SARAWAK
with the documentation as presented through photographs
and community maps. With the Rumah Nor's victory in
2000, demand and interest for community mapping grew
within the ranks of community mappers in Sarawak.
The use of community maps in court has subsequently been
written up in law reports and journals, which has helped to
preserve the communities' knowledge of their territory.
These written materials also serve as an alternative official
documentation against the state Land and Surveys
Department's refusal to acknowledge and document the
communities' native customary rights claims.
Although hand drawn community maps were already
effective in asserting communities' native customary rights,
they have their limitations. Hand drawn maps take time to
produce, and this could hinder the efforts of communities
who filed land dispute cases in court. Moreover, hand
drawn maps' utility as tools for resource management is
limited when dealing with land use patterns that are
constantly changing. For these reasons, BRIMAS decided to
adopt geographic information systems (GIS) technology in
2002. With the upgrade in technology, BRIMAS enhanced
its capacity to analyze and document significant spatial
features within the communities' territories.
What maps were produced
With the proliferation of community mapping activities by
different actors, it is important to standardize the
production of community maps that are being brought to
courts or used for other purposes by the community.
On the one hand, community maps submitted as evidence
in court need to be well defined and need to use accurate
data for the maps to have legal bearing in court. For
example, in 1998 a court dismissed a community's case due
to technical errors on its map. In 2003, another community
that had worked on their map for two years had to redo
their map in order to file it in court because the map did
not provide enough information and contained errors.
These problems occurred because some community
mappers were not adequately trained. They might have
difficulties in using a GPS or may not have properly
documented events during the field survey, for example.
Furthermore, many organizations do not have a proper
system for field data organization, which often hampers
data access and compilation. For example, BRIMAS has
seen a lawyer who was representing a community in court
who could not access mapping data due to improper
organization. Since the data were still raw, the lawyer had
difficulty interpreting it.
On the other hand, too much information revealed on a
map–for example, the location of valuable resources that
could be exploited by outsiders with access to the
maps–could have damaging effects for the communities
and organizations involved. It is important that communities
identify information that is deemed to be sensitive and
exclude it from maps, particularly if it is not essential for the
purpose of showing evidence of occupation.
The community should agree not only on what features are
going to be mapped, but also on the accuracy of the
information. The community maps produced for court cases
can be divided into two categories. The first type focuses
on a community's contiguous customary land territory
(pemakai menoa). These include the boundaries of
communal lands (antara menoa); of individual farm plots or
plots left to fallow (temuda); of present longhouses (rumah
panjai), villages (kampong) or farm huts (langkau umai); of
communal forests (pulau); of previous settlements
(tembawai); of gravesites (pendam), spiritual or sacred sites
and historical sites; and of hunting and foraging grounds
and waterways.
Occasionally, there were minor disagreements among
community members regarding the location of communal
or individual customary land boundaries. Conflicting
schedules between organizations carrying out mapping
activities and community members' schedules as dictated
by agricultural growing sometimes results in community
members being unable to participate in meetings held prior
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