'Contaminated' cultures: Can conservation protect nature while excluding Indigenous peoples?

The January 2025 Gunma symposium at Gunma Ongaku Center brought together global heritage experts to discuss authenticity, communities, and sustainable development through the lens of heritage ecosystems. The event led to the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems. Credit: Simon Kieser

At an international heritage symposium in Japan, I heard a word that stayed with me: "contaminated." The discussion concerned whether Indigenous peoples needed to be named explicitly in a new World Heritage framework. One argument was that Indigenous cultures had changed through contact, survival and adaptation, and therefore no longer required distinct recognition. I found that deeply troubling.

Survival is not contamination. Indigenous peoples have survived colonization, displacement, assimilation and state violence. They have also adapted, moved, rebuilt and carried knowledge into new circumstances. None of this erases their rights, identities or relationships with ancestral lands.

That experience became one of the reasons I wrote my recent commentary on the Gunma Declaration on Heritage Ecosystems, a new World Heritage framework developed after the 2025 ICOMOS Japan symposium in Gunma Prefecture. The work is published in the International Journal of Cultural Property .

The declaration asks a simple but important question: What if heritage is not a collection of separate heritage categories, but an ecosystem of relationships?

Why nature and culture are not separate

Conservation systems often divide the world into categories. A forest may be treated as natural heritage. A monument may be treated as cultural heritage. A song, ceremony or language may be treated as intangible heritage.

For many Indigenous peoples, those categories do not reflect how the world is lived.

Lands, waters, animals, plants, ancestors, stories, laws, languages and responsibilities are connected. A river may be a living ancestor, a legal relation, a food source, a story place, a teaching space and an ecological system at the same time. Protecting only one part of that relationship can damage the whole.

This is why the Gunma Declaration matters. It brings Indigenous peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) into a World Heritage discussion about cultural authenticity.

In the World Heritage system, authenticity helps determine whether cultural heritage genuinely expresses the values for which it is recognized. The Gunma Declaration moves that idea in a more relational direction. It recognizes that natural heritage, cultural heritage, intangible heritage and Indigenous peoples' relationships with place cannot always be separated.

In my view, that is an important step.

Inclusive language is not the same as shared power

But the declaration also shows a deeper problem. International institutions often produce polished final documents that speak of inclusion, diversity and participation. The process behind those documents can be much messier.

During the symposium, I saw how difficult it can be for heritage institutions to speak honestly about Indigenous peoples' rights. Some discussions reflected the assumption that Indigenous cultures must remain unchanged, isolated or "pure" to be considered legitimate. That assumption is not neutral. It repeats a familiar colonial pattern: First, Indigenous peoples are disrupted by colonial systems, and then the effects of that disruption are used to question whether they still count as Indigenous.

This is not only a cultural problem. It is a governance and human rights problem.

If a protected area is managed without the authority, knowledge and consent of Indigenous peoples, conservation can become another form of dispossession. This is sometimes called "fortress conservation": the idea that nature must be protected by keeping people out. Such approaches ignore the fact that many ecosystems have been shaped and sustained through Indigenous law, knowledge and practice over very long periods of time.

The difference between consultation and authority

A heritage ecosystem approach offers a different path. It asks us to see heritage as living, relational and connected. It can help conservation move beyond the old division between nature and culture.

But that will only matter if Indigenous peoples are treated as self-determining rights-holders, not merely as stakeholders.

A stakeholder is one voice among many. A rights-holder has legal and political standing. Indigenous peoples have rights to self-determination, culture, lands, territories, resources, knowledge systems and free, prior and informed consent. Those rights must shape how conservation and heritage decisions are made from the beginning, not after the main decisions have already been taken.

What comes next

The Gunma Declaration is promising because it opens a door. It recognizes relationships between nature, culture, Indigenous peoples and heritage governance. But the real test is implementation.

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