This article explores Indigenous relations to craft, vernacular materials and cultural assets in Borneo to raise awareness around the complexities, entanglements and precarity surrounding natural resources and craft practice(s) located within Indigenous communities. The authors present two case studies based in Sabah and Sarawak, Malaysia from the Cultural-Assets and Vernacular Materials project and in so doing highlight the role ancestral wisdom and embodied knowledge play in the cultivation, conservation and crafting of natural materials towards situating craft as a living, ecological and regenerative practice. We locate an expanded notion of craft whereby the intimate relations to materials - growing, harvesting, preparing - are integral to materialities of place as site-specific, place-based and communal bodies of knowledges that reside within Indigenous communities. We position an ontological framing of design research as a set of practices that broaden the ways craft can advance new ways of understanding, becoming and doing. In such a reframing design-led innovation approaches are cognisant of and informed by the plurality of contexts that reside within and emerge from Indigenous communities as sites of situated knowledges.

Acknowledgments
The C&VM team would like to express their deepest gratitude and appreciation to each of the practitioners, artisans and communities who participated in, and supported, the programme. Thanks to Yasmin and Asnida Iman from the Borneo Cultures Museum, Think & Tink and Borneo Coffee Lodge for their generous support and hospitality. Thank you to Dato Hii Chang Kee (Permanent Secretary of Sarawak Tourism Department - Arts and Cultures) for opening the Serumpun Exhibition. We extend thanks to the Borneo Laboratory in particular Asa Esa Film Group, Kang Chia-Wei, Chou Tsai Yu, Kinai Wong, Jason Lim, Abigail Langgi, Valerie Juliet and Reening Lau. We are especially grateful to Gamia Dewanggamanik and Dr Marianne McAra for their contribution to the Cultural-Assets and Vernacular Materials Project and Florence Lambert, the British Council for her ongoing support.

Funding Details
This work was supported by the British Council under the British Council’s International Collaboration Grants, which are designed to support UK and overseas organisations to collaborate on international arts projects.