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hat are the costs of living with oil and coal? What is the ongoing relationship between militarization, resource extraction, and border conflicts? How do our roles as researchers impact the lives of foothill residents in Assam and Nagaland? The difficult truth is that both state powers and extractive resource companies have instrumentalized community members and leaders in Assam and Nagaland to acquire more land for oil and coal exploration and set up hydrocarbon rigs and gas gathering stations. Timothy Mitchell drew connections between fossil fuels and Western democracy, yet this has not been the case in other parts of the colonized worlds like Asia and settler colonies in Australia and North America. But Mitchell provides us a much-needed clarity by drawing on the relationship between coal and industrialization to understand energy companies’ operations around the world (Mitchell 2013).
Andrew Curley’s generous reading of my book frames the significance of drawing on Mitchell’s work and focusing on Indigenous worlds. Curley highlights how carbon expands the social world of the communities in the foothills of Assam and Nagaland and shapes the multiple experiences and lives here. His own work invites us to reflect on how sovereignty within the Navajo nation continues to be shaped by laws and policies related to coal and oil – what he refers to as ‘carbon sovereignty’ (Curley 2023). In my book, I focus on the everyday lives of Naga coal mining villages and border towns and villages in Assam to examine how social relations and connections incorporated and attributed coal mining operations – and conversations about loss of land and damages due to hydrocarbon activities – as actions of self-determination. Curley’s picks on the theme of fantasy and the future in my book. The nature of the mining landscape and the seasons determine rat hole coal mining activities in the Naga village. Thus, the hydrocarbon landscape is not static. It is every changing and deeply informs the shape of the future. I appreciate Curley’s engagement with the book as he dwells on the layered jurisdiction in sites of extraction, and the conflicts that emerge from overlapping sovereign claims on the land. He rightly notes that coal, oil, and love from the state are fantasies. Across the foothills, the greatest fantasy is how hydrocarbon resources will improve and change the lives of the poor, but experiences on the ground tells us a story about being let down time and again.
In her response, Andrea Nightingale underlines how the book discusses love, kinship, and social relations in the foothills. She highlights the story telling structure of the book as deeply affective, presenting complex experiences and narratives about violence and expectations in compelling ways. I will take up her generous review about the importance of dwelling on stories. Stories and working with oral narratives of Indigenous communities to understand colonialism and extractive regimes was essential for me as I developed the themes of this book. Studies on Indigenous communities in India and elsewhere continue to regard stories as mere data that are irrelevant to understand intellectual questions that researchers outline within the academy. Such practices highlight the hierarchal and deeply colonial process of research that continues to dictate many disciplines including Anthropology. I realize how I left out numerous accounts and notes as I wrote this book since I was unsure of how to integrate them. I failed to practice generosity to the plants, animals and birds who helped me to reflect and understand the foothills. Returning to my fieldwork from the foothills more than a decade later, I wrote a piece titled Extractive Stories and Theories from Northeast India (Kikon 2022) and centered stories as foundations of Indigenous epistemologies. This was my homage to the foothill world that transformed my life as a writer thinker and researcher. I found myself reflecting on the term world, a meaning that implies life and invites me to work harder to focus on living, suffering, and what constitutes a sustainable future from Indigenous lens.
As I reflect on these questions, I appreciate Phurwa Gurung’s insightful review and inputs. His enquiries about a just post-extractivist world are apt and I am grateful that we share meditations about the future. I struggled to write the conclusion of the book. How do we end a book? I had two options. To “analyze” and pronounce a future without extractive regime, or end with a story about the realty on the ground. I chose the latter because I could not bring myself to imagine a just post-extractivist world for the sake of making an intellectual point. If no one in the coal mining villages imagined a post-extractivist world, could I make a statement about the future of life and cut through the reality? I managed to conduct fieldwork for two years. On hindsight, perhaps I wrote the conclusion to figure out my own commitments, anxiety, and questions. Increasingly, violence and poverty are themes that appear in accounts about extractive resources and Indigenous communities. While it requires experts and academics like us to write about these accounts, it is absurd that the reality is inescapable for those living on the land, while researchers disappear after wrapping up their fieldwork. Ethnography has intimately shaped the way academics, especially those who do fieldwork engage and participate in the production of knowledge. Certainly, the power imagination is exceptional, and we must imagine so we can build a shared sustainable future. However, it is only staying with the reality can we decide what collaborations and engagements mean for us and how our epistemology and pedagogy speaks for justice. As I wrapped up fieldwork in 2011, the coal mining villages were focused on making ends meet, waiting for the next coal season, and planning how to fix the mountain roads so they could access new coal sites. They seemed eager to be stay alive in a militarized landscape. Will they migrate? Become landless? Will the water become toxic one day? Many stayed on, carrying the coal from the broken mountains on bamboo baskets, and sharing pork dishes and rice during their lunch breaks. Staying with the reality allows us adopt sharp lens to focus on the future.
I am grateful for Tyler McCreary’s generous and detailed reading of the book. His review allowed me to reflect on the challenges of conducting fieldwork and the places and accessing important contacts (especially oil offices, engineers, and executives in Assam). The hierarchies at play for ethnographers is real, and what constitutes as connections in the field depends on the social and cultural standing of the researchers. Yet, inaccessibility to the ONGC experts in Assam allowed me to theorize about the opaqueness of extractive regimes and their practices. Across the foothills, the natives are defined as unscrupulous and untrustworthy, a category that is taken from the manuals of the Indian security forces who protect the oil, coal, and large tea plantations. What do I say about Tyler’s questions about where to situate and understand “foothill extractivism”, who profits from these operations, and whether local politics connect with the politics of climate change in the region? Northeast India is an enclave economy and neocolonial frontier region, and the everyday practices and politics of resource extraction in the foothills of India is a microcosm of what is played out across the region. In the grand scale of accounts about hydrocarbon extraction, the everyday cultural and political transformations of the communities most impacted by these operations are missing. Security forces, engineers, contractors, and politicians manage the commodity flows in militarized zones for corporations. I write these responses as violent conflicts sweep across the foothills of Assam and Nagaland. Corporate interests have arrived in the foothills seeking more land to start oil palm plantations (Assam Tribune, 2025). In the 21st century, the foothills of Northeast India continues to attract new investors and extractive operations. Instead of climate adaption, there is extractive adaption. State love remains a desirable fantasy.
Finally, I engage with Sara Smith’s insightful response. I consider the two chapters on love as the “heart” of the book. Love and affection became the theoretical framework for me to work though the multiple co-constitutive sovereign powers across the carbon landscape of the foothills and beyond. As a feminist geographer, Sara’s work on love, territoriality, and sovereignty (Smith, 2020) in Ladakh inspires me. As a fellow feminist ethnographer, I also witnessed how identities and boundaries were constantly established on the land and social relations. Everyday practice from the home to the village, marketplace to the coal mines, oil rigs to the security garrisons, Northeast India as an ecological and resource frontier came alive for me during my fieldwork. Love matters. Ordinary, without complications, loyalties and histories are tested every day and put under the spotlight. If love resides in a broken heart and a bruised body, or a dying stream in an exposed hydrocarbon landscape, how should we learn to listen and write about it? Sara’s reading about the storytellers of the land brought alive the elders who taught me to read the land and lives in the foothills. Many of them have passed away. Some died in their sleep, others in hospitals with ailments that sent their families in debt. They approached their end in the foothills and were buried here. Stories are theories. They are about worldmaking and time passing by. I return to the conclusion of my book, and why I chose to leave the reader with the predicaments of living in a violent extractive landscape. The reality are the signs of the future dangling from the children’s neck in Champang village which said, “I am a donkey because I speak Lotha and Nagamese” (Kikon 2019: 153). The children punished to fit into a carbon future said nothing. Researchers are expected to speak for the communities. If we remain committed to look around, and choose to walk up and down the foothills, mountains, and valleys, then there is nothing to stop us. We must stay and walk with them. One day the children will speak up. They will use their voice. One day. Don’t leave them.
Dolly Kikon is an Indigenous anthropologist and author from Nagaland, India. She is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz.
