Forests and Fields of Imagined Futures focuses on the multi-faceted ways in which indigenous communities and especially rural women in Northeast India interact with their ecology. This book attempts to engage with the complexities of women-ecology relationships by focusing on Dimasa, Karbi, and Khasi women in Assam and Meghalaya. Drawing upon indigenous epistemology that continues to guide everyday engagements with the multi-species world, the book asks: How do indigenous communities practice stewardship of the sensitive Eastern Himalayan ecology? What are women's unique gendered experiences as conservationists and guardians of these ecosystems? Are their interactions with their environment driven by their inherent femininity, livelihood obligations, or is there more to this dynamic? In tracing their gendered routes within the jhum lands, forests, homesteads, sacred groves, and marketplaces, the book locates the inherent contradictions that isolate women from these eco-spaces despite their everyday engagements with them. Confronted by the prospect of rapidly growing plantations, infrastructural development projects, and state-led 'conservation' initiatives, indigenous women undergo transformations that are potentially irrevocable. It is against this backdrop this book seeks to examine women's evolving ecological experiences and indigenous peoples' continuing practices of ecological management as they actively choose the future that they seek.