Constructing the Leuser Reserves: Violence, Science, and Indigenous Erasure in Aceh, Indonesia, 1904–30

The Leuser region in the highland interior of Aceh, Sumatra (Indonesia) was a final frontier for the Dutch colonial regime. Decades of war in coastal Aceh (1873 – 1913) kept explorers from entering Leuser. In 1904, however, the Dutch military followed freedom fighters into the highland forests to carry out “the heavy-handed task” of suppressing indigenous resistance. The war created a perilous situation for the peoples of Leuser—the military massacred an estimated one-third of the Gayo and Alas—but it had the unintended consequence of protecting the forests. Leuser’s forests fascinated Dutch scientists and explorers due to its ecological rarities. They wrote of the space in utopic terms, describing a tropical paradise where orangutans, rhinoceros, and other species traversed terra incognita. These visions of Leuser contrasted sharply with those of soldiers and colonial officials. Military personnel mapped villages scattered throughout the forests and explained attempts to eliminate “bad elements” (i.e. freedom fighters) who resisted colonial incorporation. Both processes were marked with incredible violence and were central to the construction of the Leuser Reserves in the 1920s, and later Gunung Leuser National Park. The colonial military attempted to forcibly remove communities from Leuser, while researchers discursively and politically erased indigenous peoples in their scientific narratives. Yet in Leuser, the agency of indigenous peoples frustrated Dutch officials whose plans for the region were often contingent on the actions and responses of local communities. I suggest that anxieties and uncertainties permeated the administration even at the peak of Dutch power in the East Indies in the early twentieth century, as colonial subjects defied the wishes and agendas of the government. This paper examines how militarization, science, and conservation were intertwined in the colonial project of producing Leuser into a space of nature, and how indigenous people experienced, contested, and participated in the process.