Idu Mishmi Cosmology Offers Insights on Indigenous Conservation in Arunachal

The Idu Mishmi people of Arunachal Pradesh's Dibang Valley maintain a cosmological worldview in which forests, animals and humans exist in relationships of reciprocal obligation — a framework that has historically sustained biodiversity in one of the world's most significant hotspots. The community faces growing cultural and ecological pressures as development expands into their traditional territories.

The Idu Mishmi inhabit primarily the Dibang Valley, lower Dibang and Lohit districts of Arunachal Pradesh, a region that constitutes part of the Eastern Himalaya biodiversity hotspot. Approximately 104 million indigenous people across 705 ethnic groups reside in India, with communities like the Idu Mishmi representing distinct cultural traditions with deep ecological knowledge embedded in their languages, rituals and land management practices. For the Idu, the forest is not a resource to be managed externally but a living relationship woven into everyday life from childhood.

International environmental discourse increasingly characterises indigenous communities as guardians of biodiversity, and the empirical evidence broadly supports this: indigenous-managed territories consistently show higher biodiversity retention than comparable state-managed forests. However, this framing risks instrumentalising cultural practices as conservation tools while failing to address the political and economic pressures that erode indigenous governance. The Idu Mishmi case illustrates how cosmological frameworks encode ecological restraint in ways that formal protected area management cannot easily replicate.

As development infrastructure expands into Dibang Valley — including hydropower projects and road networks — the Idu Mishmi face pressures that challenge the viability of their traditional relationship with the landscape. Conservation researchers and indigenous rights advocates argue that protecting the ecological integrity of these territories requires securing Idu land rights, supporting intergenerational transmission of ecological knowledge and ensuring free, prior and informed consent in all development planning. India's Kunming-Montreal commitments to recognise indigenous conservation areas are relevant to this context.

Key figure — India hosts over 104 million indigenous people across 705 ethnic groups