Nurul Syazwani Binte Mohamad Shahril

Urbanisation across Southeast Asia places the sacred and cultural spaces of the Indigenous under growing pressure, transforming landscapes of memory into contested sites of negotiation. This dissertation examines how Indigenous groups such as the Orang Laut in Singapore and the Orang Dayak in Sarawak preserve Indigenous belonging through storytelling, translation and outreach in contexts shaped by urbanisation, development and state regulation.

It argues that land and sea function as living archives—spaces where memory, identity, ritual and authority are embedded in everyday practice and where Indigenous communities continue to negotiate the meaning of place in the face of displacement and abstraction. Rather than treating heritage as fixed or static, the dissertation approaches it as a contested and living process shaped by oral histories, digital storytelling, community mapping, heritage programming and public engagement. 

The study is organised around three themes. First, it considers storytelling as a mode of claim-making and preservation, showing how family memory, food practices and community narratives sustain Indigenous identity and territorial belonging. Second, it examines translation between knowledge systems, focusing on how Indigenous concepts are rendered into legal, heritage and public languages and what is gained or lost in that process. Third, it analyses outreach, engagement and public recognition, exploring how communities address different audiences through workshops, institutional collaborations, radio, social media and advocacy campaigns. Together, these themes show that Indigenous resistance is not only legal or political, but also cultural, archival and communicative. 

Methodologically, the dissertation adopts a qualitative approach grounded in decolonial and critical heritage perspectives. It draws on textual, visual and digital materials to examine how Indigenous communities represent themselves and respond to dominant frameworks of planning, 

Indigenous communities represent themselves and respond to dominant frameworks of planning, heritage and recognition. By comparing Orang Laut and Orang Dayak experiences, the dissertation highlights both shared challenges and context-specific strategies in Southeast Asia. It contributes to the critical heritage studies by showing that safeguarding Indigenous heritage requires more than preservation alone—it requires recognising Indigenous communities as authors of their own histories, meanings and futures.