Beyond the Papuan Rebel - Land as First Ontology: A West Papuan Philosophical Perspective

Land is not one value to be weighed against others; it is the irreducible ground of being itself, prior to any metaphysical claim built upon it. Drawing on Kogoya’s wider Psycho-Cosmocide project, this paper develops that claim into four theses: an ontological thesis that land precedes and grounds every cosmology; a formal instrument — the Canvas Principle — anchored in an embodiment argument (thinking presupposes embodiment, embodiment presupposes ecology, ecology presupposes land) explaining why every cosmology requires a canvas before it can become a picture; a diagnostic thesis that civilisation operates as a symbolic apparatus — the Civilisational Psycho-Cosmocide Virus, together with the Eight Atlases and Seven Cages of existence — converting shared land into hierarchies of the sacred and the profane; and a political thesis about what follows for a colonised people. The ontology is built in dialogue with Vine Deloria Jr., Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and extended through land as a canvas on which every civilisational worldview is painted, so that colonisation becomes the systematic repainting of reality itself. The Lani NATAKA triad bridges this account of being to jurisdiction, continuous with recognised international indigenous-rights instruments. The paper’s most contested claim, a qualified defence of TPNPB armed resistance, receives the most sustained scrutiny: Fanon’s account of anticolonial violence is placed alongside Arendt’s critique of violence as incapable of founding legitimacy, and the resulting ambivalence is left unresolved. Wonesis, Kogoya’s constructive antidote to Psycho-Cosmocide, is then read alongside Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson as a resurgence rather than merely a resistance project. The Canvas Principle synthesises Indigenous land-as-identity philosophy, phenomenology, and critical theories of ideology and coloniality into a single concept none of these literatures produces alone; the conception of existence and diagnosis stand as independently defensible contributions, while the political programme of armed resistance remains a separable, open question.