How food estate policy intensifies intergenerational trauma among Papuan women: Ecological loss and embodied memory

This article examines how Indonesia’s Food Estate program reshapes the everyday lives, ecological relations, and embodied memories of Papuan women. Based on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2021 and 2025 in Merauke, Boven Digoel, Yahukimo, and Jayapura, the study draws on interviews, participant observation, women’s gatherings, church networks, and community testimonies to explore the impacts of forest loss and land conversion. The findings show that Papuan women understand forests not merely as natural resources but as living spaces of care, kinship, memory, and cultural continuity. Sago groves, gardens, forest paths, and local food practices are central to sustaining families, transmitting knowledge, and maintaining relationships with ancestors and community. Participants described how plantation expansion under the Food Estate program has disrupted ecological and social worlds, producing grief, fear, economic insecurity, and cultural displacement. Environmental destruction was linked to militarization, restricted mobility, changing gender roles, and dependence on market food systems. The article argues that ecological violence in Papua is inseparable from gendered and intergenerational trauma, emerging through the erosion of ecological conditions sustaining memory, care, and belonging. Papuan women cultivate resilience through storytelling, communal lament, Noken weaving, and food-sharing practices that maintain relationships to land, ancestry, and community despite ongoing dispossession.