Another decade has passed by, but the opposition remains. Some residents cite the absence of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), an international principle introduced by the United Nations to uphold the human and territorial rights of indigenous peoples, during the park mapping process as the reason behind the continued opposition.

The tensions later took the form of an illegal gold rush inside the contested parts of Sebangau, where at least 13 traditional mining sites are operated by local residents on the banks of the Rasau River.

Hidden gold fever

From the edge of Petak Bahandang, it takes an hour by klotok (traditional wooden boat) to travel through Rasau amid the noise of heavy equipment thundering on the outskirts of Sebangau, where many miners are working to recover gold from under the peatlands.

A further ride passing through the same river route found that the gold rush had crept into the park area. Agus Rahman, a Petak Bahandang villager who hails from Central Java, was working with his wife Wita, a Ngaju woman, in a plot of peatland they had turned into a gold mining site since 2023.

During a lucky episode, Agus said he could bring home a whopping Rp 120 million from four days of extracting the gold, far exceeding his previous income as a plantation worker.

Heavy machinery has been brought into a strip of Sebangau that intersects with the village, where miners like Agus use mercury to bind the precious metal, unaware of the irreversible damage the toxic chemical poses to the environment and, by extension, to themselves.

Mercury residues can infect food chains when it reaches water and is consumed by river wildlife later eaten by humans. Prolonged direct exposure to the chemical may also cause health problems, such as kidney failure.

Despite multiple inspections from park authorities warning Agus about the ownership of the land and demanding he stop mining, he has refused to back down. The land, Agus said, has been passed down for generations in his wife’s family.

“Some time ago, [the Sebangau park authority] warned us, asking 'Pak, please clear this river area',” Agus said. “But why should we clear it? This is our land. My father-in-law grew up here and has nurtured this land since he was a child. We also have a rubber plantation here. We won’t leave unless there is fair compensation and a proper resolution.”

A vast tract of gold tailings can be easily seen along the Katingan roads to Petak Bahandang village, proving that gold fever has become contagious among the villagers and beyond. After the COVID-19 pandemic, extracting gold from the peatlands became widespread among the community as gold prices soared while cash crops like rubber and palm oil lagged behind.

For generations, the Ngaju people only practiced small-scale, traditional gold mining as part of their local beliefs. Others have also tried to grow rubber and wood crops like rattan and gaharu (agarwood) inside Sebangau for their living. But the designation of the national park has excluded them from their ancestral lands.

“We were never involved by the government. They only installed border markers along the forests, while grabbing our land,” said Hardianto, the damang (indigenous Dayak chief) of Tasik Payawan.

“Therefore, we no longer have land to grow cash crops to make ends meet,” he went on to say. “That’s why many Dayak decided to start mining gold. We don't want to only be bystanders.”

Elders Hardianto (third right) and Dobe (second right) of the Ngaju community, one of the largest Dayak subtribes, pose on April 29 with Petak Bahandang village chief Eman (third left) and other members of the tribe in front of a Dayak traditional house in the village, Tasik Payawan district, Katingan regency, Central Kalimantan. (JP/Noufal Helmy)

The land conflicts tell a bigger story of land grabbing that has plagued numerous indigenous Dayak communities across Kalimantan, according to Alfianus Genesius Rinting, head of the Central Kalimantan chapter of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN).

"The encroachment on our lands has gone slowly but surely, eroding the forests we used to rely on for survival. As these forests disappear, our ancestral traditions are fading away as well,” said Alfianus, who is also a member of the Ngaju community.

According to Alfianus, the designation of Sebangau as a national park put more pressure on the indigenous Dayak communities.

In multiple reported cases, indigenous and local communities were often not consulted before the establishment of national parks, though the boundaries overlapped their ancestral homes.

“It’s like it was decided merely from behind their desk. They saw the forest as an empty place and thought: ‘Let’s just draw the boundary lines’,” he said.

Ruswanto of Sebangau National Park office said the management had launched campaigns to educate residents on park boundaries. At the same time, joint authorities of village officials, as well as military and police personnel, launched raids targeting artisanal miners.

“But of course, we have to maintain a persuasive approach,” he said.

Pricing the parks, for whom?

Hundreds of kilometers away from Sebangau, government officials and politicians in Jakarta decided earlier this year to form a new National Park Financing Task Force, aimed at generating more revenue from various activities and projects inside several national parks.

President Prabowo officiated the new task force through a presidential decree that allows the government to turn specific zones of national parks into carbon trading and ecotourism venues.

The task force, led by the President’s younger brother and mining tycoon Hashim Djojohadikusumo, is planning to “seek innovative and sustainable funding models that involve the private sector” in the hopes of boosting the global standing of the country’s national parks.

“We see that several national parks haven’t been optimal at improving their governance,” said Satyawan of the Forest Ministry.

“But improving them needs money that cannot all be provided by the state budget, therefore, there’s a need to tap into innovative funding approaches in various forms.”

The task force has a monthly meeting to report the progress of its assigned duties to Hashim and his two deputies, Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni and senior economist Mari Elka Pangestu.

In one of the meetings, the task force decided to pick 13 national parks, including Sebangau, where such projects will be launched in the near future.

In the carbon market, governments or polluting companies can buy carbon credits by investing in forest recovery initiatives to balance out their emissions. One of the world’s largest carbon projects is located near Sebangau, where more than 140,000 ha of forest under the Katingan REDD+ initiative offers credits purchased by multinational companies, such as oil giant Shell and Dutch airline KLM.

Ichwan of the JPIK argued that creating new revenue sources inside national parks would not be sufficient without solving the entrenched problem of poor law enforcement and the collective abandonment of forest ecosystems, including the indigenous peoples, in the country.

Without accountability and transparency, Ichwan said that any projects assigned by the new financing task force would not benefit local and indigenous communities, and may well prolong the destruction and abandonment of national parks, including Sebangau.

The approach to calculate carbon values inside national parks would turn conservation areas like Sebangau into a mere commodity, according to Wahyu of Pantau Gambut.

"Adopting an approach that solely capitalizes carbon value will only result in the monetization of ecological ecosystems that may fail to guarantee restoration efforts, as it merely quantifies and values carbon metrics,” Wahyu said.

Locking certain forested areas for carbon projects, he added, would further displace and squeeze indigenous populations out from the area.

But Satyawan denied the move would commercialize the parks. Instead, the task force will find untapped potential revenues that could be generated through ecotourism and carbon projects without losing the core goal of nature preservation.

“The real objective is to improve the governance of national parks, elevate environmental services and make sure that the community will get more benefit from the parks.”

Moves to establish two task forces related to forested national parks have been perceived as decisions to tighten the government’s grip over forests that affect the lives of people dependent on the landscapes.

It was late in April this year, when more than a dozen Ngaju people gathered in Petak Bahandang to recall the two-decade impact of Sebangau, a national park they described as protecting everything on the forest but its people.

“If they genuinely acknowledge our customary law, a proper resolution must be established. If not, tensions will continue to persist as our community will relentlessly defend their ancestral rights,” Ngaju leader Dobe said.

“The Sebangau park authorities and the indigenous peoples must find common ground.”