“Jokowi grants first-ever indigenous land rights to 9 communities”, 9 Jan 2017

For the first time, Indonesia’s central government has recognized the rights of nine indigenous communities to the forests they call home, a milestone for a national indigenous peoples movement that is seeking to bring to a close an era of abuse and discrimination at the hands of the state.

…The nine “customary forests” — known as hutan adat in Indonesian — acknowledged by President Joko Widodo’s administration…encompass a total of 13,100 hectares (32,370 acres). But the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) has mapped more than 8.2 million hectares of customary lands it says belongs to the nation’s adat groups, as those who practice ancient modes of knowledge, belief, community and economy are called here.

By point of comparison, Indonesia’s nine biggest oil palm firms in 2013 had planted nearly 2 million hectares…

The actual Ministry of Environment and Forestry decrees establishing the customary forests have yet to be released, so the exact parameters of what they entail remain unclear. “Hutan adat” is a new land-use designation with no clear legal precedent. AMAN’s ultimate goal is to secure hundreds of “customary territories” — wilayah adat — which contain not only forests but other lands too…