FROM RESISTENCE TO
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The Uncanny Lore project collaboratively investigates how a holistic understanding of Indigenous cultural practices can legally empower Indigenous activists to secure and protect access to ancestral land and preserve cultural heritage. Driven by the Hai||om community involved in an ancestral land claim for the Etosha wilderness, in collaboration with the Khoi-San Council of Namibia, human rights lawyers, earth lawyers, legal anthropologists, educational sociologists and other scholar activists. What we are aiming for is shifting the way in which legal empowerment movements shift the rule of law, where it is directly adjusted by Indigenous peoples’ needs. This can provide a robust and inclusive legal framework as part of the recognition that culture can play an important role in the achievement of dignity, secure access to land and natural resources and recognition of human rights of indigenous peoples. The wider co-created research programme provides evidence to inform changes in national legislation to reform cultural heritage management, access to ancestral land and rights of nature. The longer term project also explores the legal reform that is needed so marginalised communities can voice their concerns in Courts and mobilise their culture, beliefs and worldviews as a source of law, ensuring the courts change to become more empathetic and receptive to plural knowledge systems. The wider ethos of this project is to boost local capacity so Indigenous communities can use effectively the rule of law to protect and preserve their ancestral land and cultural heritage. The project also strives to enhance health and welfare of Indigenous peoples through a greater understanding of existing local health practices and applications of traditional healing.This is part of a wider quest to decolonise law and legal practices. See our work on "Decolonising law".
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