Opinion Editorial December, 2024: Indigenous Girl of the Year
I photographed my "Indigenous Girl of the Year" for 2024 a long time ago. She is from a small Kreung community close to the town of Ban Lung in northeastern Cambodia. I returned to that area last month for the first time in twelve years. Of course, I expected to see changes since my last visit.
The kind of changes one would expect to see were immediately apparent. Ban Lung now has only concrete buildings and some of them are high rise (less than a dozen stories). There is now a supermarket in the town which has become a de facto social gathering point. Almost everyone from teenager up to the age of forty finds it difficult to put down their mobile phone. The number of tourists who visit the area is increasing.
But the biggest change I saw came as I left town to travel south to another small provincial capital, Sen Monorom. The distance is only about 200 kilometers. Nonetheless, twelve years ago this was not a journey for the faint-hearted. It was a dirt road all the way. It was a literally impossible journey in the rainy season that otherwise took all day.
Needless to say, I didn't attempt it back then. If I had, I would have passed through small, indigenous wooden-hut farming villages situated mainly inside hardwood forest land. I did make the three-hour journey last month on a now fully-paved road. Sen Monorom has changed in exactly the same ways as Ban Lung.
The degree of (legal and illegal) deforestation that has taken place since the road was completed a few years ago is somewhat documented. However, only a few days ago six Cambodian environmentalists were detained in the area and released only on condition that they discontinue their documentation work.
Seeing the deforestation with your own eyes is alarming. Most of the same indigenous wooden-hut farming villages are still there, but the proportion of non-indigenous settlers has increased as the cleared land has been developed for large-scale agribusiness. The once-tiny community of Kaoh Nheak is now a modern, bustling town.
We should not be surprised by any of these impacts to indigenous peoples from the new road. From the Silk Road to Brazil's BR-364, such impacts have always been largely the same. Similarly, Mexico's Tren Maya demonstrates that similar projects have similar impacts. Only a few days ago, Survival International published a report documenting the impacts of nickel mining to the uncontacted indigenous Hongana Manyawa people on the Indonesian island of Halmahera. When an A330 landed in Nuuk, Greenland three days ago, the changes it portended for the indigenous Inuit were as clear as the sky from which it descended.
We typically use the word 'progress' to label these kinds of changes. Yet for the indigenous peoples impacted the harm often outweighs the benefits. The indigenous Kreung have witnessed a generation of changes since I took this photograph. Whether their road to a better future has been paved remains to be seen.
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