Wonder and Kent discuss the documentary, Battle for Laikipia, which follows the violent struggle over land use between landowners in Laikipia, Kenya, who trace their properties back four generations, and the pastorialists, who have been herding cattle on those same tracts of land for hundreds of years. Emerging themes include indigenous relationship to land vs European ways of thinking, how that relationship might be understood when it is uncoupled from ownership and property, and the enormous complexity of speaking on these issues when opposing forces have such strong (and often unexamined) feelings about the issues. Astrologically these themes relate to the 4th house (land and ancestors) and Mars (fighting for something). Kent and Wonder ponder what indigenous ways of thinking might add to the European concept of the 4th house of land, family, and ancestry, sans property ownership by one individual or family.
Distribution: More info
Directors: Daphne Matziaraki & Peter Murimi
Run Time: 90 minutes
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.479] Kent Bye: My name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All the Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories, focusing this season on Sundance 2024, specifically the documentaries there. We are in episode two of six on our section on Family, Land and Ancestors. And today we're going to be diving into a film called The Battle for Laikipia, which is a part of the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance 2024, and directed by Peter Murimi and Daphne Matziaraki. So, Wonder, maybe you could read the synopsis for us.
[00:00:48.629] Wonder Bright: The Battle for Laikipia. Unresolved historical injustices and climate change raised the stakes in a generations old conflict between indigenous pastoralists and white landowners in Laikipia, Kenya, a wildlife conservation haven. Co-directors Daphne Matziaraki, formerly of 4.1 Miles and The Me You Can't See, and Peter Murimi of I Am Samuel craft The Battle for Laikipia with empathy, compassion, and brutal truth. Weaving together themes of environmentalism, colonialism, and conservationism, the film delicately showcases the impact of these crucial topics on the indigenous farming community of Kenya's Laikipia region. Handled with care, Matziaraki and Murimi's The Battle for Laikipia takes us through a journey that elicits frustration, awe, curiosity, and wonder. And that synopsis comes to us from the Sundance programmer whose full name we don't have, unfortunately, but the initials are BB.
[00:01:54.053] Kent Bye: Yeah, this was a very tense film because it's a lot of battles of land and land rights ownership. And, you know, the broader context, it's set in Laikipia, there was a number of British colonialists that go back to the turn of the 20th century. And so there’s, like, four generations of descendants of these British colonialists that have acquired quite a lot of land in this area where they have a lot of their own businesses of raising cattle. But I think the primary tension in this film is the fact that there's this more indigenous population of Kenyan pastoralists who are normally just following the rain and following wherever grass may be without much of a historical concept of land ownership, where there was always an abundance of grass, but now with climate change, there's a lot less grass, a lot less water and resources. So by having these more nomadic indigenous pastoralists going in and off of these lands in order to feed their cattle, because the cattle is such a vital part of how they're even surviving and a deep part of their culture. And so you have this tension between these settler colonialists who have been there for many generations and these indigenous populations that are trying to survive in the context of the droughts of climate change. And so you see a lot of these tensions that are playing out. And what I think is really brilliant about the film is that it actually embeds itself into really telling the stories from each of these two different perspectives and kind of embedding themselves and weaving together these two sides of the story. But there's also quite a lot of tension because it feels like at any moment there could be, you know, as the drought goes on, there's more and more violent measures that are being taken. Some of the white settler colonial landowners are being killed and murdered. And so there's this election that's happening, and then one of the politicians is sort of, like, inciting violence to say “you should take all means necessary to get access of grass to your cattle”. So you have all these other dimensions that are playing out with authorities that are there. And this film could very easily fit into the Dominant Systems and Structures of Power because there is these power systems that are still a legacy of colonialism. You know, Kenya got independence in 1962, but with these landowners that are there, there’s still a legacy of these colonial artifacts, without having land rights embedded into the law then it ends up being the current government that has to enforce land ownership rights on the side of the the white landowners, rather than recognizing the indigenous rights of these pastoralists. So still a lot to be settled out in terms of restoring some of these indigenous rights, but I found myself on the edge of my seat, not knowing if some of the people that we’re following were going to survive the entire film.
[00:04:45.478] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I totally see why you're saying it could fit within the section that we named Deconstructing Dominant Power Systems. However, I think the filmmakers, to their credit, didn't do a lot of deconstruction. They actually did, as you say, embed us, because they were themselves embedded in the families that were being affected by this confrontation. And they didn't pull back a great deal to give us any broader context. They let the context be spoken about by the people who were living the situation in the moment. They allow the context to be detailed by the people who are actually living in Laikipia at the moment, on both sides of this very polarized issue. And that means that there isn't a lot of breakdown of how these people find themselves here or what's happening. But this is a tale that's being told all across the world. And, as an American who has some familiarity with what was stolen from the indigenous people of the land that I live on, some understanding, it was really quite striking to watch the story unfold, because in the United States, the history of indigenous peoples land being taken from them, and brought into a state of ownership, which wasn't necessarily like a way of thinking about it before European settlers arrived, that process has been going on roughly since Europeans landed here in 1492. And certainly in, like, the 16th through 19th centuries, when Native Americans were put into reservations, and that's when we started taking their children from them and putting them into schools, into residential schools, there's been this extreme effort to separate Native peoples from the land here. And it's been going on for a long time. To the point where, as an American living in a fairly large city on the West Coast, I don't personally know any Native Americans around me. I couldn't name the tribes who used to inhabit this land that our House, that we own legally, is on. And so I live at a real remove from the circumstances that we see happening right in front of us as we're watching Battle for Laikipia. And it took it away from the space of deconstructing it as if it were outside me, and put it into like, no, this is, like, the land is being taken right now. People are fighting for it right now. It's a battle that's in the name of the film. Battle for Laikipia. We're not deconstructing anything. We're fighting for something. And we're fighting for land. And we're fighting for whose ancestors have a stake in this land that means that we should be able to walk here. So it wasn't until after I watched the film that I kind of, like, I had to - they give some historical precedence for it, there’s some news clips showing European settlers arriving around the First World War perhaps… but it wasn't until I like went away and kind of did a little bit more research to try and understand how long this had been going on and where it was that I had a greater context for it. It’s, like, barely a century. Four generations of white colonialist settlers descended from Europeans living in this territory. And in contrast to that, the indigenous population, the pastoralists, have been living there for how many centuries? We don't know. You know, like they don't ever themselves say how many generations. I don't know that they're necessarily thinking about it in terms of counting the generations. It's actually the white landowners who keep talking about I'm a fourth generation descendant as if they can lay claim to the land through that history. And the lack of awareness on their part that the pastoralists have literally been on that land for centuries, not generations, Kent Bye: maybe even millennia. Wonder Bright: It's just, I mean, it was really, honestly, quite breathtaking. If that's how you're going to claim your land is through your ancestors, surely the pastoralists are the ones that might lay claim to the land, which is especially appalling in light of the fact that it's probably because of the pastoralists who've been raising their herds on this land for centuries, that the land is as fertile as it could possibly be, because we know now that that kind of pastoralism where you chase the rains and you carry your herds and you move your herds around rather than keeping them on one pasture for a length of time, that’s actually what sequesters carbon and makes land really rich and fertile soil. So the colonialists who have been there for four generations are benefiting off of the efforts of literally centuries worth of herding that pastoralists have been going through. And yet they're laying claim to the land. as if they could own it because it's been in their family for 100 years.
[00:10:48.726] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think we each had some moments where we were frustrated or angry at this lack of awareness. There was almost like a 12th House experience of being exiled or a stranger in a strange land saying, look, I'm fourth generation Kenyan and I speak the language I should be accepted as any other Kenyan. But yet there's the broader colonial context of that and the money that came in and the fact that they're owning tens of thousands of acres of the land and they're now in a situation where they can be a gatekeeper as to whether or not these pastoralists can even survive in these drought conditions. They may have more than enough land to have these pastoralists on there, or there's these environmental conservationists who are either doing tours and bringing people in to conserve the nature, but yet it's actually perhaps denying the livelihood of the native indigenous population there. And so they're very quick to speak about how they're preserving these endangered species while at the same time denying these entire populations and cultures with these literally tens of thousands of acres of land that have lots of grass that would have probably normally had the pastoralists have this sense of abundance. And so you have this lack of awareness. There was this kind of moment of revelation of, like, that same type of anger, of that argument of, like, well, the ancestors have been here and we sort of have this right, is the same type of argument that we ourselves, as we're living on unceded territories here in the United States, where it's not four generations, it might be 10 or 20 or 30, however long you want to go back into ideas of ownership, land ownership, because I think a lot of times indigenous populations didn't even have a concept of land ownership. And so they may have been entering into some of these legal agreements without fully understanding the implications of what it means to even own land, because there is this more nomadic orientation that they may have had. So there's some sections in the film where you see some of the native pastoralists who are kind of digging through the archives and saying, okay, this is the moment when one of their ancestors had ceded control over these lands, and now it's many generations later, and now it's impacting them in this way. You have this situation in Laikipia where, with climate change and the scarcity of the resources that are available, it comes down to a life or death situation where they really have to fight or they're limited because the power structures are on the sides of upholding the law, and what the law is in terms of the land ownership, and everything else, you know There's a rule of law that's in Kenya that's being followed, but yet there's maybe historical injustice for how those laws or how these settler colonialists had come into ownership of some of these pieces of land, so there's a broader discussion around what are the indigenous rights that might need to be implemented. But when I think about this film, it is diving deep into these themes of the land, ancestors, also what is the home? What does it mean to belong? But there's also, for me, a primary signature of Mars / fighting, battling in the 7th House, which is, like, the oppositional perspectives where two parties are not in agreement. And because it is this matter of life and death, you know, 1st House versus 8th House, and also the preservation of 11th House dimension of their culture for how much of these cattle are a part of their culture. And cattle could be a 6th House, where these animals could be kind of seen as enslavement and service, where they're providing for the livelihood of these cultures. But for me, again, the center of gravity, though, comes back to Mars and the aspects of Mars, because there is so much fighting and battling, both with words and disagreements, but also literally coming down to, kind of, the 10th House governmental authorities, sometimes enforcing the law by going in and actually slaughtering some of the cattle of these pastoralists, which is like a whole nother level of trying to enforce the law, by, if you break the law, rather than putting the human in jail, you destroy their livelihood by massacring their cattle. So yeah, those are some of the primary signatures that came up for me when I was watching it, but love to hear some of your thoughts.
[00:15:03.868] Wonder Bright: Yeah, for me, it's 4th House all the way down. I think land and resources are pretty much the primary things that human beings fight over. And we can expect to see more of that as our resources grow shorter in the wake of climate change. But of course, it's nothing new. And the fact that this fight is happening between colonialist settlers and indigenous people on the land that these colonizers have settled on, I mean, this is a worldwide tale. And, you know, there's two things for me around that. The first is just on a really deeply personal level, there was just this moment where I was so frustrated and angry at the white Kenyan families. I just found myself just furious. How could they not see? And then there was a moment where I just, I could not judge them any longer because I am, myself, living on unceded territories. And I am a beneficiary of centuries of colonialism. And I can't judge them without judging myself, which is probably the path to healing. And now I'm talking myself into being angry at them again because they're lacking that judgment. Come on, we all need to start judging ourselves a little bit better, my fellow colonialists, my fellow settlers. Let's fight against this regime in our own minds. And I think ultimately, I have to come back to this being a 4th House experience, because if we're going to think about new definitions for these traditional ways of thinking, then who better than indigenous people to teach us new understandings about what the 4th House might mean? I don't think I ever really, really truly understood what it might be to have ancestors until I started encountering indigenous conversations on that matter. Because to me it just was a dry word that meant that the people that were in your bloodline, or that you had descended from, I didn't understand it as something that could be an ongoing conversation where you were still practicing the rituals and traditions of your ancestors, and that that was a way of enriching your experience of the world around you. Because I, you know, I'm first generation on my father's side, third generation on my mother's side, I think I'm born into being a settler and being somebody who leaves and is not tied to the land in the way that indigenous peoples have been for centuries. So there's something there around what land might mean, what the 4th House might mean, what ancestors might mean, if we could uncouple ourselves from a marriage to a settler mindset, that there's something in this film that points to that. So yeah, I would be really curious to hear other people's ideas around what the 4th House might mean if it wasn't related to ownership, to property, and to, like, the right to things.
[00:18:30.868] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know that ancestors certainly is one dimension of that, because there's an aspect of the 4th House that is everything that came before you. So the ancestors are certainly a part of that. So that tends to be a way that I at least orient to that. And I wanted to come back to the land acknowledgement that you talked about, because when you said that you weren't able to identify what lands that we’re on, I, myself, would not be able to, off the top of my head, to say all of the tribes that are in where we're at here in Portland, Oregon. I just Googled it and the Portland Parks Foundation actually has a little section that says, the Portland metro area rests on traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Cathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. And I wanted to just give voice to that because I feel like there is this intention behind the land acknowledgement, which is to have this aspiration towards being in right relationship. I think to think about our ancestors and the unethical moral transgressions of our ancestors that have been compounding over many generations, like, how do you start to write that relationship? And I think the idea behind the land acknowledgement is to just speak it and to say, look, these are unceded territories, and these are the people who were the indigenous tribes of this land, who were stewards of the land, and that there was some transgression in the history where that land was taken away from them. Just to even say that is a pointer towards cultivating a culture such that if we go to events in Portland - we’re pretty much hermits. We don't go to very many things. We're not hearing the people who are the leaders of the cultural institutions giving these land acknowledgements. So there's just a lack of repetition. As this repeats, then you get to know more of it off the top of your head rather than having for me to Google it and look it up and to see more specifically where we're at right now in all these different lands and regions. I just wanted to speak into that because I feel like in talking to different indigenous people where a land acknowledgement can be just the mouthing of the words and they can be just, like, a checkbox that you're checking off. And I don't think we wanted to have that kind of experience where we're just kind of mouthing the words without taking real action. And so I wanted to at least speak that because I feel like that's part of, like, maybe a first step is through that speaking of the relational history and those dynamics that at least creates an intention to start to build up more relationships and to see where that goes in the future. I feel like Canada is probably a really good example of a country that is a lot further along for how to repair some of those different relationships, or at least from an official government perspective, start to recognize some of those historical injustices. Whereas in America, I think it's a lot further behind. But yeah, those are just some thoughts I want to share because there was some similar moments where I had that anger and part of that anger was a bit of this maybe unconscious shadow projection of things where that's a part of my own life that is not resolved in some ways.
[00:21:46.132] Wonder Bright: Yeah, well, we had an extensive conversation about land acknowledgements and should we do them. And when I say that I don't know the tribes, it's not because I can't Google them, but just because I can read them off doesn't mean that I know those tribes. And that's the thing that has it stick in my throat, you know. To me it was really striking in Sugarcane where they have the conversation about Justin Trudeau stepping into the Sugarcane community and speaking about this grievous harm that was wrought onto the indigenous people, you know, at the site of that particular residential school. And then the filmmakers definitely point out that he's there as the community is getting all this national attention because they've been invited to the Vatican to receive this public apology from the Pope. And Trudeau's actions and speech there is just words, just like the Pope's apology was just words. So, I always love it when I hear land acknowledgements. I like being reminded that I live on unceded territories, not because I like the fact that these territories are unceded, but because I like to hear the truth. I like to remember that my place in this landscape is complicated and it's come at cost and I need to be mindful of that. And at the same time, like, I just have an awkward relationship to the land acknowledgements because I don't have, I'm not in right relationship with indigenous communities in this area. After we watched Sugarcane, I woke up in the middle of the night one night and I just ended up, like, doing all this research for, like, two or three hours on residential schools in Oregon. Oh my gosh, it was such a rabbit hole. And so I learned all this really interesting stuff. Like, I had no idea that Portland, Oregon has the ninth largest urban population of indigenous peoples, nor did I know that there's actually a residential school in Oregon that is one of four residential schools still operating. It is no longer operating because they're removing children from their homes and sending them to this school. It actually has a fairly mixed but good reputation, relatively speaking, at this point for teaching Native American children from all across the country. Yeah, so I learned all this stuff, but it's still operating from a space of the intellect. And that to me is not, I don't know - I don't know what would be enough, but it doesn't feel enough to lay claim to understanding whose tribes are the unceded territories upon which I live.
[00:24:48.885] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I am completely on the same page because I feel the same way being disconnected from actually being in relationship to the local indigenous communities. But one of the things that Peter Murimi, one of the co-directors of this piece said in both the artist statement, as well as the introduction to this film, Battle for Laikipia, he said that, you know, this is a film that is very specific to this area, but it’s also talking about themes that are relevant to what's happening around the world. And I think that really landed more as we were watching it and seeing how much the history of four generations of colonialism, it feels so fresh, and new, and novel in this situation where it gives this feeling of, like, why don't they see this dimension of the injustice, but yet it's something that is many different timescales around the world where it's a little bit more entrenched or a little bit more new. So yeah, I feel like the relevancy of a film like this that is able to really show the very specifics of this situation, this dynamic, but it is diving into a lot of the deep core dynamics of settler colonialism, and also climate change, which is a huge feature of the changing of the environment that is really bringing a lot of these different issues to a head. And this is a situation, like I said, that is bringing it to a situation of life or death. And so you end up having these conflicts of these populations. But as we move forward, we're going to have more and more climate change migrants that are being forced off of their land into migrating into other areas, so you have this kind of 12th House refugee situation that is going to be happening more and more. So in some ways, this film is giving a little bit of a sneak peek when it comes to the constrained resources of a specific geographic area, how the larger dynamics of climate change is putting pressure on those lands, and start to distribute that pressure all across the world as we have more climate change migration. So yeah, I guess, who would you prescribe The Battle for Laikipia to?
[00:26:51.440] Wonder Bright: I would prescribe The Battle for Laikipia for anyone who really wants to understand why we fight for our 4th House, why land matters, and how deeply connected it is to our experience of having roots ourselves. You know, we think of a tree as having roots and we think of us as having roots to our ancestors. But it's interesting because the ancestors are often rooted in the land just like a tree is. And this is a particularly poignant window into what happens to a landscape where we have two different forces who can lay claim to the land in a really meaningful way, and the difficulty, profound difficulty, in being able to resolve the differences that arise in that situation. I had been thinking about this film as being more of a micro rather than a macro expression, but in many ways it really is a macro expression of battles that are going on throughout the world, much as you detailed Pete Murimi saying, that this film is very specific, but in that specificity, it is a universal statement.
[00:28:19.164] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And as I think about what to bear witness to in this film, I really want to bear witness to the filmmakers of Daphne Matsuraki and Peter Murimi because I feel like, by showing the full expression of each of the different perspectives, you can understand the internal institutional logic for how this situation is really coming to a head. You have on the one hand, abiding by the rule of law. You've owned the land. You have the rights. It's enforced by the current laws of the land. And then you have the more indigenous perspective of the land rights and the historical injustices of colonialism. Like you said earlier, they're not necessarily deconstructing the power dynamics. And so they're really just sharing the perspectives and the rationale for how each of the sides have come to their respective conclusions for why there's this disagreement, and this battle for what would be fair and just, especially when you consider the indigenous rights to land that is not currently enshrined in the law in the way that is protecting the indigenous populations. And so, yeah, I feel like it's a type of movie where each of the sides could watch it and see that it was accurately reflecting their perspectives without having too much judgment of the larger context of the situation. Like you said, they're not zooming out and showing us that larger perspective. And so we're just left with what's happening on the front lines of this battle. So I just want to really bear witness to how the directors were really able to show both sides of the story, because I feel like it's an instance where you're really seeing each side kind of accurately represented, as far as I could tell. I mean, I'd have to hear from each of the sides to hear what they thought of how it was all edited together. But I feel like it's accurately capturing the polarized perspectives that these two sides have.
[00:30:07.734] Wonder Bright: Yeah, I would like to bear witness to the filmmaker's ability to bear witness also, because you couldn't feel them in the story. There didn't seem to be a bias, although I can't imagine they came to this situation without some strong feelings, they were able to really be with the people as they presented themselves. And that only happens when you're actually able to befriend people and really be able to be present with them in a really profound way. To a one, every single person that we met on screen seemed to feel real autonomy and freedom to speak their mind in very forthright ways. And it was extremely refreshing to just be landed in the middle of that and to hear everyone out. Yeah, it allowed me the space to sit with my own judgments and hear them as much as anything else. And that was a real gift.
[00:31:22.418] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, that's all that we have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do, spread the word, tell your friends, and consider signing up for the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
