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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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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:

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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