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WORLDWIDE FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS
Kalimantan, Indonesia: Old Ways Die with the Falling Forest
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Forest Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises
http://forests.org/
2/8/97
OVERVIEW, SOURCE & COMMENTARY by EE
Following is an excellent depiction of changing Dayak lifestyles in
Kalimantan, Indonesia. Indigenous knowledge is being lost as the
logging boom eradicates their rainforest homes. The article is from
the _Sydney Morning Herald_ in Australia.
g.b.
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Old ways die with the falling forest
KALIMANTAN
Saturday, February 8, 1997
Sydney Morning Herald
By Louise Williams
PHOTO: People of the wilderness ... a Dayak woman fishing near her
home in Kalimantan. Right, a boy sits in one of the last longhouses on
Dark Mountain.
The once-fierce headhunters of Borneo are living through the
destruction of their tribal culture and are caught up in violent
conflict with new migrants. Herald Correspondent LOUISE WILLIAMS
reports on the Dayak people in the Kelam district of Kalimantan.
THERE are many entrances to the communal thatched longhouse, but
strangers are directed to a particular notched wooden log, topped
with a carved wooden head, and motioned to clamber up.
On the final step, visitors cannot avoid looking down at the
stiff wooden face as they step over the threshold. It stares back
up, frozen in the beginning of a smile, a tentative welcome which
could just as easily slip back into a sneer.
The longhouse of the Dayak tribe lies is in the shadows of Dark
Mountain, an eerie, mystical mass of rock deep in what were once
the magnificent rainforests of Kalimantan, the
Indonesian-controlled territory on the island of Borneo.
There are many stories told about the mountain and the spirits
which inhabit the steep forests that cling to its base. In the
past, the Dayak tribes would pray to these trees and to the birds
that lived in them. Every part of this remote wilderness was
sacred, protected for centuries from Malay traders and Dutch and
British colonisers by the impenetrable jungle and the ferocious
Dayak headhunters.
Now, most of the Dayaks are Catholics, and only the old can
remember the "head houses" they built to display the skulls of
their enemies.
Three years ago, the bulldozers of the logging contractors
finally reached the district of Kelam. Now a dirt road leads into
the village where there was once only a walking trail. The
descendants of the headhunters are debating how much longer they
can go on, living hidden away here, backed up against the
mountain, carving a subsistence living out of the shrinking
forest.
The Indonesian Government's policy for the tribal people of its
most remote mountains is "to bring them in, out of the Stone
Age". On offer are basic wooden cottages a few kilometres down
the road on the edge of a rubber plantation.
At the same time, the Government is sending tens of thousands of
new settlers, known as transmigrants, into Kalimantan to work the
plantations of rubber, palm oil and timber which have replaced
the virgin forest. Most of the settlers are from the islands of
Java or Madura and are Muslims with no cultural or ethnic link to
the Catholic indigenous people with whom they share the land.
In recent months, the stresses between the indigenous
tribespeople and the migrants have exploded into bloody
confrontation. This week, the province of West Kalimantan was on
red alert, with major roads cut by military roadblocks, the
provincial capital, Pontianak, under curfew, and wild rumours of
bloody massacres.
In this remote village, the same 32 families have been living
together in the one expansive thatch longhouse for as long as
anyone can remember. And together they have followed the Dayak
laws, unwritten codes which tell them which family has the right
to till which fields, which children can marry when they grow up,
and what punishments they must suffer for breaches of community
laws.
Johannes is the chief, a small, muscular, solemn man of 46. His
original name was Tapan before the Dutch Catholic missionaries
arrived to convert his people almost three decades ago.
He has not inherited his power from his father, but has earned it
and so has been democratically chosen by his people. In the
longhouse, every family is allocated the same amount of private
space. The veranda is where the cloth is woven and the rice
pounded with heavy wooden poles, the cows and pigs foraging in
the earth below, thick shafts of sunlight breaking through the
cracks in the thatch.
Johannes would like to leave and take his family to the
government houses down the road. But Dayak law states that a
member of the community cannot be absent for more than three days
at a time without paying a fine to those left behind. He does not
know the origin of this law, but perhaps it goes back to the
times of the tribal battles when a community could not afford to
let its people go.
For every day away, he says, a new plate and dish must be donated
to the longhouse. He cannot afford to leave.
Only when all his people are in agreement can the longhouse be
shut and the old ways abandoned. There is no consensus here, so
they must stay. Only one other longhouse remains in the district,
an hour or so away by foot, still safe in the trees from the
coming of the roads.
Muri, Johannes's wife, has gathered the women together on the
mats of her floor. Only the youngest speak Indonesian, so the
translation moves slowly and uneasily through two languages. The
rhythmic blows of the rice poles rattle noisily up and down the
smooth wooden floors.
Muri's mother-in-law, Jamu, thinks she might be about 80. Her
teeth are blackened by betel nut, her back is slightly humped.
"When I was a child I was always sent by my parents to the fields
because there were so many animals I had to keep out, so many
wild pigs and deers," she says in Dayak.
"If the Dutch missionaries came, we would run inside and close
the doors and hide up in the roof," she says, gesturing at the
spindly bamboo poles of the loft above us.
Outside, Johannes leads us to the rice fields, across a rickety
bridge of bamboo poles. Through shrubs and mud we march, dripping
with sweat, to the edge of next year's rice field, where rice
seedlings and cucumbers have been threaded between the blackened
stumps of the burnt-out forest. We stop at a kind of marker of
sticks. It was here, he says, that the chickens and pigs were
sacrificed before the planting began: an offering to the old
animist gods for the crop's success.
We forge on, stumbling over charcoal logs, clumsily squashing
seedlings beneath our boots, to the edge of the virgin forest.
The trees look deceptively close, but our progress is painfully
slow.
All this land will produce is enough rice to feed one family. The
crop will be husked by hand. Johannes gestures up the mountain to
the distant clearings in the forest. Some families have to walk
for hours every day to tend their fields. Then every year, they
must move again. This is how the cycle works. Each field must be
left fallow for nine years out of 10, so the jungle can grow back
and the poor tropical soil be replenished. When all the land has
been used, the community must move on, in a wide circular pattern
through the jungle.
"I expect our children to be educated," Johannes says. "We have
many paddy fields on the mountains, but the children now go to
school so there is no-one to do the work.
"Now we have a road so they can see the towns, they know how hard
their life is so they don't want to walk 1 hours to the
mountains."
Malay traders established sultanates along the island's coast and
thousands of Chinese migrants arrived to pan gold, but few made
inroads into the land of the headhunters. Those explorers who
succeeded in finding their way through the towering jungles
returned with tales of war parties taking hundreds of heads,
poison darts capable of killing a man in four minutes and locally
forged blades able to slice through the barrel of a musket in a
single sweep.
IN 1825, a Dutch official named George Muller led a party to the
Kapuas basin, where the village of Kelam now lies. Muller had
signed a treaty with the Sultan of nearby Kutai, which recognised
Dutch sovereignty, and had crossed the mountains to the Kapuas
River.
There a party of Dayaks, hired by the Sultan, ambushed Muller and
hacked off his head. The Dutch colonial administration kept
silent about the killing and the agreement was never recognised.
Johannes does not have too much to say. No, he says, his people
were the hunted, not the hunters. "It was the tribes over there
on the Melawi River," he says, gesturing vaguely. "They hunted
our heads."
The locals say headhunting continued at least until the 1930s.
"It was done by young men to prove themselves in the eyes of the
girls," said Brother Peter, a Catholic missionary. "They had to
look for a head - a man, woman or child - because after you took
it, the spirit of the person came to you and gave you courage."
We followed the Melawi River and found a village on one of its
tributaries. The chief, Bangun, was 37. The longhouse was closed
when he was about 10.
YES, we were headhunters, he says, conferring with his friends on
the edge of a canoe drawn up to the bank. "There is still a term
for cutting off the head. It means that if you can bring a head
back then you are a strong man, that you can disperse the enemy
from the village. If you can bring back a head, then you are
entitled to hold a party."
The wooden houses sport a parabola for picking up satellite
television. There is little left here of the traditional culture,
Bangun says.
"The last animal sacrifice we made was about 26 years ago, when
we closed the longhouse. When I was young, this area was still a
forest. The nearest town was a week away by canoe. It's like a
dream for me to see this situation, I could have never imagined
our life would end up like this," he says, surveying the
plantation where the forest had once been.
"When the bulldozers came, three-quarters of the people were
scared because they couldn't understand what we could do without
the trees."
A government official approves of the changes. "We don't want to
keep them living in the Stone Age," he says. The current target
is to permanently resettle 20,000 families a year. Shifting
cultivation, officials maintain, has destroyed many of the virgin
forests.
Brother Peter does not approve. "If they just waited, shifting
cultivation would die out in 10 to 15 years, anyway," he said.
"It's very difficult for people to move to intensive cultivation.
"Many Dayak people leave, but they don't end up as rice farmers,
they end up squatting on the edges of towns filling the dirty
jobs in the plywood factories."
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