More-than-human loss: Exploring the intersections of Indigeneity, conflict transitions and memory in Cambodia

The growing interest in Indigenous experience raises important questions for memory studies. Indigenous communities are thought to hold worldviews that include alternative conceptions of temporality, to remember social and cultural life in co-constitutive relationships with the more-than-human world, while occupying fraught relationships to the erasures that follow from dominant histories sanctioned by (colonial) state authorities. Drawing on interview data from two Indigenous communities in Cambodia, this article aims to complicate assumptions made about Indigeneity and memory, especially in terms of the dynamics between environmental harms, on the one hand, and the material scaffolds of memory, on the other. We pay particular attention to ambivalences around more-than-human memories of ecological harm, noting the material shaping of (lost) forest landscapes through war and peace transitions, as well as tendencies to grieve the loss of forests as a constitutive source of Indigenous heritage and identity. We argue that memory is a central site for articulating Indigeneity through forms and claims of absence that specifically emerge from the remaking of the material and epistemic scaffolds of Indigenous life.