Indigenous Activist Shields Borneo's Forests From Fire

When Kynan Tegar looks at fire maps of Indonesia, she sees a powerful pattern: where Indigenous land rights are recognized, the forests aren't burning.

The Indigenous activist and filmmaker from Sungai Utik, a community in Indonesian Borneo, has watched agricultural corporations intentionally set fires across 119,000 acres of her homeland this year. But her community's protected forests remain green, proof that Indigenous stewardship works.

The fires trace back to the 1970s, when Indonesia's government leased vast stretches of land to logging, palm oil, and mining companies. Those corporations drained 2.5 million acres of peatland, turning one of the world's largest rainforests into a tinderbox.

Now climate change and El Niño are making things worse. Indigenous communities struggle to find freshwater in the middle of a rainforest, an irony Kynan highlights in her advocacy work.

In 2024, she released a spoken-word music video called "Earth Defender" to share her community's century-long fight to protect their land. The film tells a stark truth: every 48 hours, an Earth defender loses their life protecting forests and ecosystems.

"It's this very real story of heading off excavators using our bodies," Kynan says. She describes relatives lost, leaving behind only a machete or a few belongings, stories that have happened in far too many places.

Her activism comes with personal risk. Indonesia's president recently designated LGBTQ culture as a nonmilitary state threat, forcing Kynan, a transgender woman, to question how freely she can speak. She sees connections between her identities: being queer and being Indigenous both mean facing overlapping oppression.

The Ripple Effect

Kynan is one of 50 Indigenous filmmakers creating "A Day on Earth," a global film shot simultaneously on Earth Day 2025 and set for release in 2027. The project shows what the planet means to Indigenous communities as climate threats grow more urgent.

Her community of Sungai Utik offers a working model. Their customary longhouse and strict environmental laws have preserved their forests for generations, teaching younger members to follow the same conservation path.

Fire maps don't lie: Indigenous land management stops destruction in its tracks. When communities control their ancestral territories, forests thrive and fires vanish.

Kynan's hope for Indonesia's Indigenous youth is simple but profound: "The kind of future that I want to imagine is a future that exists."