Indonesia’s booming forestry industry is increasingly pushing pulp and paper companies into conflict with indigenous groups. The global demand for paper products has caused the country to lose almost three quarters of its natural forest. A group of us from the International Reporting Program at the University of British Columbia traveled to Sumatra to hear the story of the Koto Sebelimbing and the forestry companies that the indigenous group’s leaders accuse of stealing their land.

Plantations span across Sumatra

Meeting Koto Sebelimbing children in Sumatra, Indonesia

Visiting a logging concession in Sumatra that the Koto Sebelimbing claim is on their ancestral lands

Chief Saripudin shows us the site of a mosque that the Koto Sebelimbing claim was destroyed by a pulp and paper company