A few days before the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples this year, the Bangladesh Ministry of Information and Broadcasting circulated a message to all television channels across the country instructing that the word ‘Adibashi’ (Indigenous people) be avoided during any coverage of the occasion, even though Adibashis make up two per cent of the population.
It was yet another attempt at erasure of the roughly 45 different non-Bengali Indigenous communities living within Bangladesh’s borders that have long faced violent dispossession at the hands of state authorities.
The three districts of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) – Rangamati, Bandarban and Khagrachhari – endure de facto military rule and have shouldered much of this unwanted attention. At the southeastern frontier of Bangladesh, the region is home to 11 ethnic groups, collectively called Jumma peoples.
Over the last 25 years, the natural resources of the hill tracts, which are a hotbed of biodiversity, have been rapidly depleted by land-grabbing, agricultural monoculture, hill-cutting and stone extraction by private corporations, the
