ABSTRACT
I conclude with a note about the political position of this book. This research is committed to advocating for traditional environmental culture, practices, and ancestral knowledge and both challenges and contributes to existing knowledge of Indigenous peoples’ land stewardship while preserving information that might otherwise have been lost. This book is about rethinking land-water management and sustainability policies in the Laitu Khyeng Indigenous community in Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), Bangladesh, and how they want to retake control of their land-water and build their own sustainability. Retaking control of Indigenous land-water rights and building their own sustainability demonstrates how environmental management can be used both to wipe out particular ways of knowing and lead to suffering, as in the case of state forest development on Indigenous land, or else to promote healing and a transformation of individual and community through a reconnection to history and place. Based on a very different cosmology, set of values, and ways of teaching, “retaking control of Indigenous land-water rights and building one’s own sustainability” is a subtle exploration of how an Indigenous way of practice creates sustainable relationships with the land, its beings, the community, and one’s own self.
