Introduction

Research within Indigenous forest landscapes cannot be reduced to the mere application of methods, techniques, or tools for data collection. Forests are not simply physical settings in which research is conducted; rather, they constitute lived socio-ecological worlds embedded with histories, memories, identities, spiritual meanings, and enduring relationships between human and non-human life (Ingold, 2000; Escobar, 2018). Within Indigenous contexts, forests are simultaneously material and symbolic spaces through which communities sustain livelihoods, reproduce cultural practices, generate knowledge, and negotiate their relationships with nature, society, and the state.

In Northeast India, particularly in Mizoram, forests have historically functioned as spaces of socio-ecological continuity and transformation. They connect hills and plains through networks of mobility, exchange, memory, and social relations, while serving as sites for the production of Indigenous epistemologies, collective identities, and socio-political histories. At the same time, forests have been arenas of political contestation, conservation interventions, displacement, ethnic tensions, and struggles over land, citizenship, and recognition (Chakma, 2025). Consequently, forests cannot be understood merely as geographical locations or environmental resources; they are dynamic landscapes through which everyday life, belonging, and well-being are experienced and negotiated.

The socio-political context of Mizoram presents distinctive methodological challenges. The state is characterised by complex relationships between majority and minority communities, competing claims to indigeneity, memories of displacement, and the continuing influence of ethnic nationalism in shaping everyday social and political interactions (Chakma, 2025). In such contexts, the researcher cannot be regarded as a neutral observer. Rather, researchers enter the field carrying particular social identities, histories, and relationships that shape access, trust, interpretation, and representation. Questions of insider and outsider positioning therefore become central to the research process, particularly in contexts marked by historical inequalities, contested identities, and asymmetrical power relations.

This chapter emerges from long-term engagement and research among Indigenous communities in Mizoram and the wider borderlands of Northeast India. It is informed not only by formal fieldwork but also by sustained interactions with communities whose lives have been shaped by conservation-induced displacement, ethnic conflicts, developmental marginalisation, and struggles for recognition and justice. These experiences demonstrate that Indigenous mental well-being cannot be understood independently of land, identity, ecological relationships, social recognition, and historical justice.

For many Indigenous communities, forests are not merely sources of livelihood or environmental resources; they are repositories of collective memory, cultural knowledge, spiritual practices, and intergenerational relationships that sustain both individual and collective life (Ingold, 2000; Kohn, 2013). The disruption of these relationships through displacement, exclusionary conservation policies, environmental change, or socio-political conflict often extends beyond material loss to affect social cohesion, cultural continuity, identity formation, and psychological well-being.

This chapter reflects on these methodological concerns through eight interconnected themes: the forest as more than a research site; the dilemmas of insider and outsider positioning: reflexivity and positonality; the advantages and challenges associated with insider research; the limitations faced by outsider researchers; ethics beyond institutional procedures; and the broader project of decolonising forest research. Together, these discussions provide a framework for conducting research that is not only academically rigorous but also socially accountable to the Indigenous communities whose knowledge, experiences, and aspirations form the foundation of this study. Ultimately, the chapter argues that methodology is not merely a question of how research is conducted but also of whose knowledge counts, whose voices are heard, and whose realities are represented. In Indigenous forest contexts, methodology becomes an ethical, political, and epistemological commitment to understanding well-being through the lived experiences of communities themselves.

The Forest as More Than a Research Site

Conventional approaches to forest research have often conceptualised forests as bounded ecological landscapes and sites of scientific observation, conservation, and resource management. Such perspectives tend to reduce forests to environmental resources, ecological units, or physical settings that merely provide a backdrop for human activity. In doing so, they separate nature from culture and transform forests into administratively defined spaces that can be measured, regulated, and controlled (Scott, 1998; West et al., 2006). However, an emerging body of scholarship challenges these assumptions by conceptualising forests as relational and lived worlds rather than passive environments. Ingold (2000) argues that landscapes are constituted through processes of dwelling, movement, and social engagement, while Escobar (2018) critiques the modernist separation of nature and society and emphasises relational ontologies in which territories emerge through interconnected social and ecological relationships. Similarly, Kohn (2013) demonstrates that forests are active sites of meaning-making rather than inert environmental backdrops, and Brosius (1999) highlights how dominant environmental narratives frequently obscure local histories, meanings, and social relations.

These critiques are particularly relevant to understanding the forested landscapes of Mizoram and the adjoining Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHTs), where forests have historically functioned as socio-ecological worlds rather than bounded territorial units. My understanding of forests emerged not only through engagement with these theoretical perspectives but also through long-term lived experiences and sustained fieldwork among Indigenous communities in Mizoram and the wider borderlands of Northeast India. During my doctoral research in and around the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) Forest, it became evident that local communities understood forests in ways that extended far beyond dominant conservation categories such as wildlife habitats, protected areas, or ecological resources (Chakma, 2025). Rather, forests were perceived as historically constituted socio-ecological landscapes that connected people, places, memories, histories, and identities across time and space.

Historically, the forests of Mizoram and the adjoining CHTs functioned as spaces of socio-ecological fluidity and continuity. Long before the emergence of contemporary state boundaries, protected areas, and conservation regimes, the Dampa–Kasalong landscape connected hills and plains through networks of mobility, exchange, kinship, livelihood practices, and social interaction. The Sajek Hill Range, which today marks the international boundary between India and Bangladesh, historically formed part of a shared socio-ecological landscape through which people, wildlife, goods, and ideas moved with relative ease. Communities such as the Chakmas, Mizos, and Reangs traversed these forests for shifting cultivation, hunting, fishing, trade, and social obligations, creating relationships that transcended contemporary notions of territorial belonging and political boundaries.

Oral histories collected during fieldwork consistently revealed that forests were not perceived as isolated wilderness areas but as lived landscapes embedded within everyday social life. Elderly respondents recalled how villages situated on both sides of the present-day border maintained kinship ties, exchanged agricultural products, and shared access to forests, rivers, and cultivation areas. Movement across these landscapes was not experienced as crossing political frontiers but as travelling within a familiar socio-cultural world. Rivers, hills, and forests functioned as connectors rather than barriers, facilitating interactions among communities and enabling the circulation of knowledge, cultural practices, and social relationships. In this sense, forests served as sites through which socio-political histories were produced, collective identities were negotiated, and Indigenous epistemologies were transmitted across generations.

Among the Chakmas, Mizos, and Reangs living in and around the DTR Forest, continue to occupy a central place in everyday life and social imagination. Oral traditions, myths, rituals, medicinal knowledge, hunting practices, and shifting cultivation systems reflect historically evolved understandings of human–nature relationships that challenge dominant conservation frameworks. Rather than viewing forests as spaces separate from human society, local communities understand them as inhabited landscapes shaped through continuous interactions between people, wildlife, rivers, hills, and spiritual worlds. For both the Chakmas and the Mizos, forests feature prominently in myths, folklore, and cultural narratives, where animals, rivers, and mountains are not passive environmental features but active participants in shaping human life, morality, and social order.

Similarly, shifting cultivation (Jhum) has historically functioned as more than an agricultural practice. It constitutes a socio-cultural institution through which labour is organised, ecological knowledge is transmitted, and community relationships are maintained. Hunting practices were likewise embedded within customary norms and ethical obligations that regulated relationships between humans and wildlife. These practices reflected a broader worldview in which environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and collective well-being were deeply interconnected.

Fieldwork further revealed that forests function as repositories of memory, history, and identity. References to forests were frequently intertwined with memories of former villages, ancestral lands, and experiences of displacement. Elderly respondents narrated stories of villages such as Ponsury and other settlements that once existed within what is now designated as protected forest land under the DTR Forest. Although these villages have disappeared from official maps, they continue to survive in collective memory through stories of cultivation fields, rivers, fruit-bearing trees, burial grounds, hunting locations, and places of worship. Respondents often described these landscapes in remarkable detail, recalling not only their physical characteristics but also the social relationships, cultural practices, and sense of belonging associated with them.

The significance of these memories became particularly evident in the context of conservation-induced displacement. For many respondents, displacement from the DTR Forest represented not only the loss of land and livelihoods but also the disruption of long-standing socio-ecological relationships that connected people to place, community, and history. While villages were physically erased, they remained alive in memory and continued to shape contemporary experiences of identity, belonging, and exclusion. Stories associated with particular hills, streams, cultivation sites, and forest paths frequently narrated experiences of migration, coexistence, conflict, displacement, and resilience. The forest therefore serves not merely as a material environment but as a historical and mnemonic landscape through which communities remember their past, negotiate their present, and imagine their futures.

At the same time, forests are not only ecological and cultural landscapes but also deeply political spaces. My doctoral research revealed that the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) Forest was experienced and interpreted differently by various communities inhabiting and surrounding the reserve. While the DTR Forest opened an avenue for employment and livelihood opportunities associated with conservation and state development initiatives, many Chakma and Reang (Bru) communities viewed the reserve through a different lens (Chakma, 2025). For these communities, the establishment of the DTR Forest became intertwined with broader histories of ethnic marginalisation, exclusion, contested citizenship, displacement, land alienation and dispossession from their ancestral land.

Interviews conducted during fieldwork revealed a widespread perception among displaced Chakma and Reang households that conservation interventions were not merely environmental projects but also political processes that disproportionately affected minority communities. Respondents frequently situated their experiences of displacement, restricted access to forests, and loss of customary land rights within wider narratives of ethnic tensions and unequal power relations in Mizoram. Consequently, the DTR Forest was often understood not simply as a protected area but as a political landscape through which competing claims over territory, identity, citizenship, and belonging were negotiated and contested.

The establishment of the DTR Forest therefore fundamentally transformed historically embedded relationships between Indigenous communities and their forest environments through new regimes of conservation, regulation, exclusion, and territorial control (Chakma, 2025). Landscapes that had previously functioned as spaces of habitation, cultivation, mobility, and cultural reproduction were reconfigured into protected conservation territories governed by state institutions and scientific management frameworks. In this process, forests became sites where competing visions of conservation, development, indigeneity, and territorial belonging intersected, revealing the inherently political nature of environmental governance in the region.

Understanding forests as living socio-ecological and political worlds has important methodological implications for research on Indigenous mental well-being. Forests are not passive sites of data collection but spaces through which identities, memories, relationships, power, agencies, and forms of belonging are continuously produced and negotiated. Research in such contexts therefore requires approaches that take Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies seriously while recognising the complex social and political realities embedded within forest landscapes. This, in turn, raises critical questions about who conducts research, whose knowledge is privileged, and how experiences are interpreted—issues that lie at the heart of the insider–outsider debate.

The Insider–Outsider Dilemma: Reflexivity and Positionality

Recognising forests as living socio-ecological and political worlds inevitably raises questions about the position of the researcher within those worlds. Research in Indigenous forest landscapes is never conducted from a position of complete neutrality. Access to knowledge, relationships with participants, interpretations of lived experiences, and the representation of communities are shaped by the social location of the researcher. Consequently, questions concerning who conducts research, whose knowledge is privileged, and how realities are interpreted become particularly significant in contexts characterised by historical inequalities, contested identities, and unequal power relations.

The insider–outsider debate has long occupied a central place within anthropology, sociology, Indigenous studies, and qualitative research (Merton, 1972; Smith, 2021). While conventional discussions distinguish insiders from outsiders based on shared cultural, linguistic, ethnic, or social affiliations, field realities are rarely so clear-cut. Researcher positionality is fluid and relational, shifting across contexts, participants, and institutions. Throughout my doctoral research in and around the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR), I occupied both insider and outsider positions simultaneously.

As a member of the Chakma community born in Ponsury village before its displacement by the DTR project, I entered the field with personal, historical, and emotional connections to the landscape under study. My language, cultural background, family history, and lived experiences shaped not only how I understood the field but also how participants understood me. Many respondents did not view me primarily as an academic researcher but as someone who shared experiences of displacement, marginalisation, and attachment to the landscape. These shared histories often facilitated conversations that might not have been possible for a researcher perceived as entirely external to the community.

Advantages of Insider Positioning

Insider status offered important methodological advantages. Shared language, cultural familiarity, and existing social networks facilitated access to participants and enabled the development of trust in politically sensitive contexts. Discussions concerning displacement, ethnic relations, citizenship, and conservation frequently involved deeply personal experiences that participants were often willing to share because they perceived me as someone capable of understanding their realities.

Insider positioning also facilitated a deeper understanding of local meanings and cultural references. Narratives concerning forests, ancestral villages, shifting cultivation, displacement, and belonging frequently moved between history, memory, mythology, and everyday experience. Understanding these narratives required more than linguistic competence; it required familiarity with the cultural and historical contexts through which meanings were produced and transmitted.

Challenges of Insider Research

Despite these advantages, insider status generated a series of methodological, social, political, and emotional challenges.

    A. Community Expectations and Role Conflicts

A major challenge arose from the expectations that communities attached to the researcher. Because I was already known through family networks, community relationships, educational achievements, and previous social activism, many respondents viewed me as more than a researcher. Some expected me to advocate for community interests, others hoped the research would help address issues of displacement and marginalisation, while some regarded me as a potential intermediary capable of influencing government institutions. Such expectations blurred the boundaries between researcher, community member, activist, and representative, creating tensions between scholarly inquiry and community accountability.

    B. Social Hierarchies and Political Affiliations

Fieldwork also required navigating complex social hierarchies and local political dynamics. Different social groups expected me to associate with them and, in some instances, avoid others. Village leaders, teachers, educated elites, and political actors often anticipated closer engagement because of their social status. However, much of the research required spending time with displaced cultivators, economically marginalised households, hunters, and others directly affected by conservation interventions. These choices occasionally generated dissatisfaction among influential groups who interpreted my interactions through political or social lenses.

The challenge was further complicated by kinship and family affiliations. In closely connected rural communities, individuals are rarely perceived as independent from their family networks. Because members of my family were associated with particular political and social groups, respondents frequently interpreted my actions through these affiliations. Regardless of my intentions as a researcher, assumptions were often made regarding my political sympathies and community loyalties.

    C. Suspicion, Research Funding, and the Commodification of Knowledge

One of the most significant challenges concerned perceptions regarding the purpose of the research itself. As a doctoral student affiliated with a foreign university and supported through international funding, rumours circulated that I was receiving substantial financial benefits from collecting information and conducting interviews. Some respondents questioned why community members should provide information if they did not directly benefit from the research. Others feared that their experiences and knowledge were being transformed into a source of personal gain.

These perceptions occasionally generated reluctance to participate in interviews and, in some instances, active discouragement of participation by others. Such situations required considerable effort to explain the objectives of academic research and to reassure participants that their knowledge was not being commodified for personal enrichment. The experience highlighted broader questions concerning ownership of knowledge, representation, and accountability in research involving marginalised communities.

    D. Blurred Boundaries Between Personal and Professional Life

Unlike outsider researchers, who often maintain a degree of social distance from the communities they study, insider researchers remain embedded within everyday social relationships. Throughout the fieldwork, it was often difficult to separate professional responsibilities from personal obligations. Community members continued to engage with me not only as a researcher but also as a relative, acquaintance, activist, former student leader, and member of the community. Expectations concerning social interactions, participation in community affairs, and even personal and family matters frequently extended beyond the research itself. Maintaining appropriate boundaries therefore became an ongoing challenge.

    E. Emotional and Psychological Burdens

Perhaps the most demanding challenge was emotional and psychological. Many of the narratives collected during fieldwork resonated with personal memories, family histories, and broader experiences of the Chakma community. Stories of displacement, exclusion, insecurity, and loss were not distant historical events but realities that had shaped the lives of people known to me and, in many respects, my own life trajectory. Maintaining analytical distance while engaging empathetically with such narratives required continuous reflexivity. The challenge was not simply to document experiences but to critically analyse them without allowing personal attachments or prior experiences to predetermine interpretation.

These experiences demonstrate that insider status does not provide uncomplicated or privileged access to knowledge. Rather, it situates the researcher within a dense web of social relationships, political affiliations, moral obligations, and emotional attachments that continuously shape the research process. Insider research therefore requires ongoing reflexivity regarding how belonging, identity, power, and responsibility influence the production of knowledge. The challenge lies not merely in being close to the community but in critically negotiating that proximity while maintaining methodological rigour and ethical accountability.

Challenges of Being an Outsider

While my position as a Chakma researcher facilitated access to displaced Chakma communities, it simultaneously created significant challenges when conducting fieldwork in Mizo villages and interacting with actors associated with the dominant social and political institutions of Mizoram. In these contexts, outsider status was not simply a matter of cultural difference or unfamiliarity. Rather, it was shaped by the historical and contemporary tensions between Chakma and Mizo communities and by the politically sensitive nature of the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR).

      A. Being a Chakma Researcher in Mizo Spaces

The most immediate challenge arose from the fact that I entered Mizo villages not as a neutral stranger but as a member of a community that has historically experienced conflict, exclusion, and political contestation with the dominant Mizo society. As discussed earlier, debates surrounding indigeneity, citizenship, land rights, and conservation remain deeply sensitive in Mizoram. Consequently, my identity as a Chakma researcher often preceded the research itself. Before respondents evaluated my questions, they evaluated who I was.

This was particularly evident in Phuldungsei village, where I conducted a substantial part of my fieldwork. Obtaining interviews and appointments was often difficult, and requests for discussions were occasionally declined. Unlike in the Chakma villages, where familiarity facilitated interactions, access in Mizo villages had to be negotiated carefully and gradually. Participants frequently approached discussions with caution, especially when conversations involved displacement, conservation policies, ethnic relations, or the DTR Forest.

      B. Suspicion and the Management of Information

A recurring challenge was the suspicion with which my presence was sometimes viewed. Throughout the fieldwork, I became acutely aware that I was being observed and assessed not only as a researcher but also as a Chakma. The issue was not simply whether respondents trusted me personally but whether they trusted how information would be used and represented.

Many respondents were reluctant to have their identities disclosed and insisted on anonymity, even when discussing matters that were not directly controversial. Written consent was often impractical because participants feared creating records that might later be associated with them. As a result, oral consent became the primary basis of many interactions. In several cases, I deliberately refrained from taking notes during conversations and avoided using recording devices in order to reduce anxiety and facilitate more open discussions. Trust was established not through formal research procedures but through repeated assurances that identities would remain protected.

Only after such trust was established did respondents begin discussing issues that were highly sensitive within local contexts. These included criticisms of conservation practices, dissatisfaction with aspects of the DTR Forest project, and accounts of hunting practices that were publicly condemned yet privately acknowledged. Such information would almost certainly have remained inaccessible without prolonged efforts to build confidence.

      C. The Politics of Representation

Another challenge emerged from concerns about representation. Participants were aware that the DTR Forest was politically contentious and that different communities interpreted its history in fundamentally different ways. Consequently, respondents were often concerned about how their views would be portrayed. Some appeared reluctant to express opinions that might be interpreted as criticism of conservation policies or local institutions. Others worried that their statements could be misrepresented within broader ethnic and political debates.

This created an additional methodological burden. Fieldwork was not simply about gathering information but about convincing respondents that their narratives would be represented fairly and responsibly. The challenge extended beyond access to questions of accountability, confidentiality, and the ethical consequences of knowledge production.

    D. Living with Ambiguous Positionality

Perhaps the most significant lesson from the fieldwork was that outsider status was never absolute. Although I was an outsider in Mizo villages because of my ethnic identity, I was not a complete stranger to the broader social and political context of Mizoram. I spoke the language, understood local histories, and had lived experience of many of the issues under discussion. Yet these forms of familiarity did not automatically translate into acceptance. Instead, I occupied a position that was simultaneously familiar and distant, known and unknown, trusted and distrusted.

The experience demonstrated that outsider status is not determined solely by geographical origin or cultural knowledge. Rather, it is produced through historical relationships, political contexts, and perceptions of belonging. In the case of the DTR Forest, my identity as a Chakma researcher shaped access to knowledge as much as my academic training or methodological choices. The field therefore became a space where positionality was continually negotiated, reminding me that knowledge production in politically contested environments is inseparable from questions of identity, power, and history.

Ethics Beyond Institutional Procedures

The ethical challenges of this research extended far beyond the formal procedures commonly associated with academic research. While institutional ethics frameworks emphasize informed consent, confidentiality, anonymity, and voluntary participation, conducting fieldwork in the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) region required a more situated and relational understanding of ethics. The field was not a neutral social space but one shaped by displacement, ethnic tensions, conservation conflicts, political marginalisation, and unequal power relations. Consequently, ethical practice became less about compliance with predetermined procedures and more about responding responsibly to the realities and vulnerabilities of those who participated in the research.

      A. Trust Before Documentation

One of the first ethical dilemmas concerned informed consent. Standard research protocols often privilege written consent forms as evidence of voluntary participation. However, in the context of this study, written consent was frequently neither practical nor ethical. Many respondents were discussing politically sensitive issues relating to displacement, conservation authorities, forest governance, hunting practices, and ethnic relations. Creating written records linking individuals to such statements risked exposing participants to unwanted attention and possible repercussions.

For this reason, oral consent became the primary ethical mechanism through which participation was negotiated. Before every interview, respondents were informed about the purpose of the research, how the information would be used, and their right to decline participation. More importantly, trust was built through repeated conversations and assurances rather than through signatures on documents. In many cases, participants spoke openly only after becoming convinced that their identities would remain protected. The ethical obligation, therefore, was not simply to obtain consent but to create conditions in which participants could exercise that consent without fear.

      B. Protecting Participants from Representation

The question of anonymity similarly extended beyond institutional requirements. Throughout the fieldwork, many respondents expressed concerns about how their statements might be interpreted by village authorities, conservation officials, political actors, or members of neighbouring communities. Consequently, protecting identities became an ethical commitment rather than a procedural requirement.

There were instances where respondents expressed no objection to being identified by name. Nevertheless, I chose not to reveal their identities because the broader political context made future consequences difficult to predict. Information that appeared uncontroversial during fieldwork could become sensitive when placed within wider debates concerning conservation, displacement, or ethnic politics. Ethical responsibility therefore required considering not only present risks but also potential future vulnerabilities.

      C. Ethics of Listening and Presence

Fieldwork also revealed that ethics involves how knowledge is produced. In several situations, note-taking and audio recording created discomfort among respondents. The presence of a notebook or recording device altered the atmosphere of conversation and sometimes reinforced fears that information would be circulated beyond the immediate interaction. Consequently, there were occasions when I deliberately avoided recording conversations and instead prioritised listening and engagement.

Such decisions challenged conventional assumptions about data collection. Yet they reflected an ethical judgement that maintaining trust and protecting participants was more important than producing a complete documentary record. In this sense, ethics required balancing the demands of academic evidence with responsibilities towards those whose lives and experiences formed the basis of the research.

      D. Negotiating Expectations and Reciprocity

The ethical complexities of the field were equally evident in the expectations that communities placed upon the researcher. In the Chakma villages, many respondents knew me not merely as a doctoral researcher but also through previous social activism, community engagement, and public advocacy. Some viewed my presence as an opportunity to draw attention to longstanding grievances associated with displacement and conservation policies. Others expected guidance, assistance, or intervention in matters affecting village life.

These expectations created ethical dilemmas that could not be resolved through institutional guidelines. While maintaining academic independence was necessary, completely distancing oneself from the concerns of participants would have ignored the relationships through which access and trust had been established. Ethics therefore involved continuous negotiation between professional responsibilities and social obligations. It required acknowledging community expectations without making promises that could not be fulfilled.

      E. Ethics in a Politically Divided Field

The DTR landscape was characterised by competing narratives and unequal power relations. Displaced Chakma and Reang communities, Mizo villagers, forest officials, conservation personnel, and political actors often held fundamentally different understandings of conservation, displacement, and justice. In such a context, ethics could not be reduced to neutrality. Decisions about whose voices were recorded, how competing claims were represented, and what information was included or excluded inevitably carried political implications.

The challenge was not to eliminate positionality but to remain reflexive about it. Ethical practice required engaging seriously with competing perspectives while recognising the structural inequalities through which some voices were amplified and others marginalised. Rather than treating all perspectives as equally situated, the research sought to remain attentive to the experiences of those most affected by displacement while also engaging critically with institutional and conservation narratives.

      F. Ethics as an Ongoing Relationship

Ultimately, ethics in this research was not a stage completed before entering the field but an ongoing process that shaped every interaction, decision, and interpretation. It involved protecting identities, negotiating trust, managing expectations, and reflecting critically on the consequences of representation. The field demonstrated that ethical research in politically sensitive environments depends not only on following institutional procedures but also on sustaining relationships of respect, responsibility, and accountability. Ethics, therefore, emerged not as a checklist of requirements but as a continual practice of care towards the people whose experiences made this research possible.

Towards Decolonising Forest Research

The experiences of conducting research in and around the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) Forest raised broader questions concerning how forests, conservation, and Indigenous peoples are studied. Throughout the fieldwork, it became increasingly apparent that many of the assumptions informing conventional conservation research reproduced the same epistemological hierarchies that shaped conservation policy itself. The DTR Forest was frequently represented through administrative categories, wildlife statistics, biodiversity indicators, reserve boundaries, and management plans, while the histories, memories, ecological knowledge, and lived experiences of Indigenous communities remained largely absent from official understandings of the landscape. The challenge was therefore not merely methodological but epistemological: whose knowledge counts in understanding forests, conservation, and environmental change?

Questioning the Colonial Legacy of Forest Knowledge

The history of the DTR Forest demonstrates that contemporary conservation cannot be understood separately from the historical processes through which forests became objects of state control and scientific management. My Doctoral thesis has shown, colonial and postcolonial interventions transformed historically fluid socio-ecological landscapes into bounded administrative territories or defined geography to be governed, managed, protected and managed through laws, regulations, and conservation institutions. Forests that had long functioned as spaces of habitation, livelihood, mobility, memory, and cultural reproduction were reimagined as protected areas requiring bureaucratic management. This transformation privileged state knowledge while marginalising Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to the environment.

The establishment of the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) Forest exemplifies this process. The conservation project was justified through the language of biodiversity protection and tiger conservation, despite the absence of tiger population within the reserve. Yet the histories narrated by Chakma, Mizo, and Reang communities reveal a much more complex socio-ecological landscape shaped by human settlement, shifting cultivation, customary resource management, hunting regulations, sacred sites, and long-standing interactions between people and wildlife. The contrast between official conservation narratives and local ecological histories illustrates how certain forms of knowledge become authorised while others are rendered invisible.

Recovering Indigenous Ecological Knowledge

A central contribution of my Doctoral thesis has been the documentation of Indigenous understandings of human–nature relationships within the DTR Forest. It demonstrates that ecological knowledge is embedded within oral histories, myths, livelihood practices, customary norms, rituals, and everyday interactions with the environment. Human–nature relationships are not external to social life but constitute an integral component of cultural identity, social organisation, and collective memory.

For example, the narratives collected among Chakma and Mizo communities reveal that forests are understood not merely as repositories of natural resources but as living landscapes inhabited by humans, animals, spirits, ancestors, and memories. Similarly, Jhum cultivation emerges not as an environmentally destructive practice, as is being portrayed within official conservation discourses, but as a historically evolved system of ecological adaptation and resource management. Such practices embody generations of accumulated ecological knowledge developed through continuous interaction with local environments. Understanding the DTR Forest solely through scientific management frameworks therefore obscures important forms of environmental knowledge that continue to shape local ecological practices.

Therefore, decolonising forest research requires recognising these knowledge systems and not as supplementary cultural beliefs but as legitimate forms of environmental knowledge capable of informing conservation debates and practices.

From Researching Communities to Learning from Communities

Fieldwork within the DTR Forest repeatedly demonstrated the limitations of approaching Indigenous communities merely as research subjects. Many respondents possessed detailed knowledge concerning wildlife behaviour, forest regeneration, bamboo flowering cycles, hunting practices, water systems, seasonal changes, and environmental transformations. Such knowledge often extended beyond the information available in official reports because it emerged through generations of lived engagement with the landscape.

The research therefore required moving beyond the extraction of information towards learning from communities as producers of knowledge. Oral histories, life histories, myths, and everyday conversations became indispensable for understanding environmental change and conservation. Participants were not simply providers of data; they were interpreters of environmental history whose experiences challenged dominant assumptions concerning conservation, degradation, and ecological restoration.

Challenging the Separation of Nature and Society

One of the central arguments emerging from my Doctoral thesis is that the DTR Forest cannot be understood through the conventional separation of nature and society. The displacement of communities from the DTR was not merely the removal of human populations from a conservation area. It disrupted livelihood systems, altered ecological practices, transformed social relations, affected patterns of wildlife use, and reshaped the broader socio-ecological system. In other words, the displacement of people simultaneously displaced ecology.

The findings therefore challenge conservation approaches that conceptualise forests as spaces requiring protection from human presence. Instead, they point towards a relational understanding in which people, forests, wildlife, memory, and ecological processes are historically interconnected. Such an understanding resonates with Indigenous experiences of the DTR Forest, where society and nature are not conceived as separate domains but as mutually constitutive dimensions of life.

Decolonising Forest Research as a Political and Ethical Project

Ultimately, the broader project of decolonising forest research is inseparable from questions of power, knowledge, and justice. The history of the DTR Forest demonstrates that conservation conflicts are not merely disputes over environmental management but struggles over whose histories, whose knowledge systems, and whose relationships with nature are recognised as legitimate.

By foregrounding oral histories, local ecological knowledge, lived experiences, and the perspectives of communities affected by displacement, my doctoral research seeks to contribute towards a more inclusive understanding of forests and conservation. Decolonising forest research does not require rejecting scientific knowledge. Rather, it requires challenging epistemological hierarchies that privilege bureaucratic and technocratic forms of knowledge while marginalising Indigenous ways of knowing. It calls for recognising forests as lived socio-ecological worlds and Indigenous peoples not as objects of conservation but as knowledge holders, historical actors, and co-producers of environmental futures.

The DTR Forest illustrates that socially just and ecologically meaningful conservation cannot emerge through the exclusion of Indigenous peoples. Understanding forests begins by recognising that people, memory, history, and ecology are inseparable from the landscapes that conservation seeks to protect.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that research within Indigenous forest landscapes cannot be reduced to the application of methods, techniques, or tools for data collection. Drawing upon experiences from the Dampa Tiger Reserve (DTR) Forest and the wider borderlands of Northeast India, it has demonstrated that forests are not passive research sites but living socio-ecological and political worlds through which histories, identities, memories, relationships, and knowledge systems are continuously produced and negotiated. Consequently, methodology must move beyond conventional approaches that treat forests as bounded ecological spaces and Indigenous communities as objects of investigation.

The chapter has further shown that research in such contexts is fundamentally shaped by questions of positionality, power, representation, and ethics. The insider–outsider dilemma, the challenges of navigating contested social and political landscapes, and the ethical responsibilities arising from long-term engagement reveal that knowledge production is never neutral. Rather, it is embedded within relationships of trust, accountability, historical inequalities, and competing claims to knowledge and belonging. Methodology therefore becomes not merely a technical concern but an ethical, political, and epistemological practice.

Ultimately, the broader project of decolonising forest research requires recognising Indigenous peoples as knowledge holders, historical actors, and co-producers of knowledge rather than passive subjects of research. It calls for approaches that privilege lived experiences, oral histories, local ecological knowledge, and relational understandings of human–environment interactions. Decolonising methodology is therefore not simply about adopting alternative research methods; it is about challenging the hierarchies of knowledge that have historically marginalised Indigenous voices and creating more inclusive, accountable, and socially just forms of knowledge production.

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Dr. Shyamal Bikash Chakma is PhD SOAS and is currently Director Centre for Tribal Studies and Action

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