On what's working

Building trust is the precondition for everything, and it must be earned slowly and never taken for granted.

Lenny's account of working with the Mausu Ane people begins with being driven away with machetes. The community had been deceived by village leaders in the past and had no reason to trust outside organizations. For Lenny, gaining that trust requires sustained presence, transparency about intentions, and a clear demonstration that AMAN had no interests of its own in the territory. "We do not entice them with promises of what they will get from us,” she says. “What we want is for them to trust us and for us to work together."

The Rebi village case illustrates what this approach produces. When a company that held a logging concession from a neighboring village started extracting timber from Rebi's territory without permission, police detained thirty community members after the company accused them of theft for seizing the illegally extracted timber. Lenny advised the community to present their customary law and a participatory map they’d produced with AMAN’s support, showing the precise coordinates of their forest. The police could not counter the evidence and all thirty were released.

On the intersection of climate and PIACI rights

Isolated peoples are forest guardians whether or not they have formal knowledge of a climate change movement.

Lenny draws a direct connection between the presence of isolated peoples and the health of the forests they inhabit. The island of Seram never flooded before logging companies arrived and began clearing forest. The territories maintained by isolated communities remain intact, and that intactness has direct climate consequences. Isolated peoples do not need to understand the particulars of climate change to fight it; they already know which months the planting season shifts, when the fish disappear, and when the sea becomes unfriendly. They have always adapted to these patterns. These communities should be esteemed as the knowledgeable actors they are.

On the funding landscape

Funders' administrative requirements often fail to understand the realities of Indigenous communities.

Lenny describes a persistent and practical barrier: donors requiring documentation that many indigenous community members do not have and in some cases actively refuse, such as identity cards or formal registration. The gap between what funders require for accountability and what is actually possible in isolated or semi-isolated communities is significant, and navigating it consumes time and energy that should go toward the work. More broadly, Lenny observes that funding tends to arrive only after something goes wrong rather than supporting the preventive work that would stop crises from occurring in the first place.

On consolidating PIACI as a global category

Cross-regional exchange provides conceptual clarity, but the existing definitions need more flexibility to travel.

For Lenny, the most significant outcome of cross-regional exchange between Indonesian and South American counterparts was conceptual clarity. Discussions at the Indonesia convening helped her see where the Mausu Ane fit in the global framework for isolated peoples' rights. But the existing definitions proved difficult to apply to the Mausu Ane situation. The Mausu Ane do not fit neatly into the categories of “isolated” or “initial contact,” suggesting that the current global framework may need additional categories or greater flexibility to capture the range of situations that exist outside of the South American context where those definitions were developed.