This article explores how ecological change transforms children and child‐rearing among Indigenous Marind in West Papua. Marind children become ‘anim' (persons) by immersing themselves within the ecology of sago palms and their suckers, or ‘sago children’. Conversely, deforestation and oil palm expansion – the defining traits of the place, period, and production mode I term ‘Papuan Plantationocene’ – subvert the mutual maturation of humans and sago by confining children to the oppressive environment of the village and preventing them from supporting sago's growth through sago transplanting and felling. Meanwhile, oil palm itself is alternately characterized by Marind as a vulnerable child subjected to totalizing human control and as a figure of hope for future Marind generations. The article provides a deeper and broader consideration of ‘childhood’ beyond the human in understanding how monocrop capitalist production reconfigures the form and possibility of multispecies social reproduction for people and plants.

中文翻译：

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棕榈树的孩子：巴布亚种植园中的植物和成长中的人

本文探讨了生态变化如何在西巴布亚的土著马林德人中改变儿童和抚养子女的方式。马林德的孩子们成为了动物（人们）沉浸在西米棕榈及其吸盘或“西米儿童”的生态环境中。相反，森林砍伐和油棕树的扩张是指地点，时期和生产方式的标志性特征，即我所说的“巴布亚种植园新世”，通过将儿童限制在村庄的压迫环境中并阻止他们的抚养来破坏人类和西米的共同成熟。西米通过西米移栽和砍伐而生长。同时，马林德（Marind）也将油棕本身描述为一个脆弱的孩子，受到全面的人类控制，对马林德（Marind）的子孙后代充满了希望。