June RUBIS

Dr. June Rubis is a Bidayuh scholar and Indigenous strategist from Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. Trained as a conservation biologist with over a decade of big cats and primate fieldwork and conservation implementation in Borneo and rest of Malaysia, she earned her DPhil in Geography & Environment from the University of Oxford. She is currently a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, leading Decolonial Cartographies, a project that recentres Indigenous sovereignties in biodiversity mapping and global governance, and an Indigenous Fellow at the University of Arizona. She also has served as a consultant to UN global agencies, contributing to Indigenous and local communities environmental governance. 

Her scholarship advances frameworks such as contra-memory, which reframes Indigenous stories as acts of resistance, and reimagining conservation through Indigenous sovereignties and ritual governance, moving beyond critique to affirm Indigenous worlds as foundations for global environmental futures. She currently sits on the Editorial Board of Progress in Environmental Geography, and was recently selected as a Lead Author for the IPBES Second Global Assessment.

She co-founded Building Initiatives in Indigenous Heritage (BIIH), a Bidayuh-led foundation revitalising rituals and kinship governance in Borneo and a supporting partner to JOAS (Indigenous Peoples Network of Malaysia). She speaks internationally at UN fora and global symposia, bridging scholarship, policy, and Indigenous lived experience.