Human-nature relations and political ecology of tiger conservation in the Idu Mishmi of Northeast India

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The primary aim of this fellowship is to produce publications from my doctoral research. During my PhD research, I identified a scientifically-unknown population of tigers in Northeast India thriving in an area called Dibang Valley, owned and managed by local people. Currently, less than 4000 tigers occur in the wild, most within strictly protected reserves patrolled by military-styled guards. Although this strategy has saved tigers in some areas, it has been criticized for dispossessing many local communities generating mistrust between them and the tiger conservationists. Therefore, the existence of this tiger population in close proximity to China (the largest consumer of tiger parts) without any formal protection mechanisms contradicted widely-held agreement within the conservation community on the conditions required to conserve wild tigers. In my thesis, I used a multi-disciplinary approach to explore the reasons for existence of this unique tiger population in Dibang Valley's ecology, the culture of its people, the Idu Mishmi, and its political history.Fieldwork lasted 25 months over 2013-15 during which I lived with Idu families learning the Idu language and participating in daily life including farming, hunting and local festivals. I conducted widespread surveys using remote camera technology (deploying nearly 300 camera 'traps'), genetic sampling and wildlife hunting surveys to understand the status of tiger and prey populations. Together, these methods allowed me to develop a nuanced understanding of the area's wildlife, Idu-nature relations, Idu shamanism and geopolitics of inter-ethnic relations. In response to the thesis question, I concluded that tigers had continued to thrive in Dibang Valley due to a multi-layered interaction of Idu land tenure and land-use system that prevent large-scale habitat change, taboos that impose restriction on hunting and wild meat consumption, seasonal migratory ecology which makes certain animals species unavailable to hunters for large parts of the year, and the Indian government's protectionist policies that have so far restricted large-scale outsider settlement in Dibang Valley. In particular, I found that Idu beliefs in kinship with tigers - an ideology grounded in equality and interdependence of human and natural worlds - had contributed significantly to their persistence while they had disappeared from the surrounding landscape.However, the Idu-tiger story is complicated by external factors, chiefly the Indian government's policies on large-scale hydro-power dam and highway development that is likely to have a lasting impact on local culture, and ultimately the tiger it has helped protect. This work questions the existing paradigm of separation between people and nature as fundamental to biodiversity conservation. It probes us to consider alternative models of nature conservation where local cultural practices could play a muchlarger role than conventional law-enforcement. Through the fellowship, I plan to engage with three user groups: (a) Academia - by publishing my research in peer-reviewed journals to further debates on the role of local people in biodiversity conservation; (b) Policy-makers and conservation practitioners - by supplying published material to freelance journalists and working with local advocacy groups on policy briefs to influence policy-making, particularly, regarding infrastructure development; (c) Local Idu people (who repeatedly lament the loss of Idu language and culture) - by co-producing, with a local partner, a course curriculum in 'Idu language and culture' for a local school. Finally, I also plan to write funding proposals that build upon my doctoral research and propose to conduct similar cross-disciplinary studies with another indigenous community in Northeast India to understand regional patterns in relationships between nature, culture and geopolitics.