Peaceful Societies

A report published on Wednesday last week included some comments by Jumanda Gakelebone, a long-time leader of the G/wi and G//ana people of Botswana. As always, he forcefully expressed his passionate advocacy for fair government treatment of his people.

A young G/wi boy in New Xade (Photo from Wikipedia, in the public domain)

Gakelebone, 40, identified in this current story only as “secretary and spokesperson of Roy Sesana,” derides the continuing exploitation of the San people by the Botswana government. The G/wi, he explains, now subsist on herding cattle, but they receive no benefits. If a man is kicked by a cow or is otherwise injured on the job, he is laid off immediately and he receives no assistance.

He reviews the history of the San people in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the vast protected area in the center of the country, and how they were removed under orders from the government. The people were forced to resettle at a new settlement, New Xade, outside the CKGR, another form of government discrimination, according to Gakelebone.

“The government moved us because they wanted to make way for the hunting concession for the rich, which we the First People of the Kalahari do not benefit anything from,” he says. He goes on to complain that they were removed from their ancestral lands, in part, to make way for diamond mining concessions. “This is profound discrimination,” he argues and he points out that there is nothing the people can do about it.

A San woman collecting puppas in Ghanzi, just outside the CKGR — A San woman collecting puppas in Ghanzi

While this latest story about discrimination by the Botswana government against its minority San citizens has little new to report, and long-term readers of G/wi news stories in this website would be familiar with most of the facts it advances, it does provide a useful, brief overview of the situation. It is not clear whether the author of the article interviewed Gakelebone personally or quoted his statements from other sources.

After reviewing the court cases in which the people sought the right to return to their own lands, the author perceptively quotes the founding father figure of Botswana, the first president, Sir Seretse Khama. President Khama is quoted as saying on December 15, 1969, “We must at all times avoid the creation of a special class of highly paid people in the centre while the majority of our people are living in poverty in the periphery.”

Teachers at the University of French Polynesia have been telling their classes that their Polynesian languages are in danger, so the students studying Tahitian decided to take action. According to a story in a major Polynesian news source on February 16, students studying reo mā’ohi (the language of the Tahitians) highlighted the different Polynesian languages at the campus in Puna’auia, a suburb of Papeete, during the 10th year celebration of Polynesian Day on the 15th.

The university library at the University of French Polynesia — In the university library at the University of French Polynesia (Photo by MAES Gabriel on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The students are afraid their languages will be forgotten. “If we do nothing, they will disappear,” a 2nd year student of Tahitian said to the reporter, in the words of the Google translation. So they emphasized the language in the dances, the sketches, and the orero, the traditional storytelling by a trained public speaker during the festivities.

The students expressed their awareness of the differences in the uses of the Polynesian languages. Tevivi Amaru, from Tuamotu, said that at home they all speak pa’umotu in their family circles. However, the ones from the Marquesas regret that their reo’enana is not used nearly as much as reo tahiti. Warren Huhina, who is studying applied foreign languages at the university, told the reporter that speakers of Tahitian are lucky by comparison with other Polynesians since their language is spoken widely. As evidence, he pointed to the university itself, which teaches Tahitian.

A student at the University of French Polynesia in front of the library (Photo by MAES Gabriel on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Heiani Temanupaioura said that many young people lack the motivation to learn their Tahitian. She believes that some are even ashamed to speak it. She says she doesn’t understand such a reaction. She has spoken Tahitian since she learned it at home from her grandparents and at her Sunday school. She is clearly proud to be a student in the reo ma’ohi program.

Another student, Mirose Paia, blamed the general lack of motivation and commitment to Tahitian on the presence of the foreign languages in the lives of the students. She advised students to return home to their islands and continue practicing not only their native languages but also their traditional customs. The brief news report concludes on a hopeful note, however: enrollment in the reo ma’ohi program at the university continues to grow.

While the recent news story provides a commendable range of opinions on the importance of retaining Tahitian, it does not go into the fact that the construction of their language has helped to foster and preserve their peacefulness. Robert I. Levy focuses on the ways the language reinforces their nonviolent values in a number of his publications. Citing just a couple of them will give a better sense of the critical importance of this language to those traditions.

“Why Are You Angry? (No te aha oe riri)” by Paul Gauguin, a painting that conveys the ambiguity of the Tahitian emotion of anger (Photo by mark6mauno of the painting in the Art Institute of Chicago on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

In his 1969 article “On Getting Angry in the Society Islands,” Levy points out that the Tahitian word for anger is riri, a feeling that arises, for them, in the abdomen. Once this feeling arises, it is thought over in the head as feruri. There are other words for rage, irritability, and the like, and an examination of 301 words for states of feeling in an early Tahitian dictionary shows that 47 refer to anger. Out of those 47 words, 12 are trustworthy terms for anger, though only 3 were still in use when Levy was there.

Despite this contraction in the variety of emotion words for anger, the anthropologist continues, it is still “hypercognated” in comparison to words for other feelings, such as loneliness. Anger is always viewed as bad in Tahitian. Some words have double meanings, such as “to beat up” also means “to kill,” and the word for “unconscious” also means “dead.” Thus, an expression of violence carries the anxiety that the degree may be extreme.

A Tahitian wedding ceremony held at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii (Photo by Daniel Ramirez on Flicker, Creative Commons license)

Levy also analyzed the importance of positive words for affection for the Tahitians. In his landmark 1973 book Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands, he writes that the Tahitian word for love, here, emphasizes an active feeling for a relationship. For couples, it carries the implication that they want to be together, to do things together, both with their minds and their bodies. A man, caught in a situation of eating a meal away from his home, would want to take food back to his wife.

Levy quotes from his informants for several pages but a brief extract will give a flavor of the importance to them of their own understanding of love. When the anthropologist asks Manu if he and his wife still love one another, the man replies, “Yes, if we didn’t love each other, our life would not be going properly….If only I hered Tetua, and she did not here me, then she would go and do the things that she desired …” She would tend to ignore him and vice versa, he explains (p.318).

A man who only desires a woman physically, even when he lives with her, doesn’t have a proper feeling of here for her unless he completely focuses his thinking on her. Here is clearly different from and much more than just a desire for sex. The word may also be used for parent-child, sibling, and friendship relationships, since it may apply to actions and actual behaviors rather than simply to intentions.

Whether or not the students in the University’s reo ma’ohi program are aware of Levy’s arguments about the value of their language for fostering their peacefulness probably does not matter too much. The important news is that they are doing something to preserve their spoken Tahitian.

According to a recent journal article, Rural Thai male adolescents are just as prone to feelings of anger and expressions of violence as their urban counterparts. The authors of the study, Wongtongkam et al (2016), wrote that the rate of violence seems to be increasing in Thailand, a serious cause for concern.

The commander of the Bangkok police department, Major-General Chakthip Kunchorn na Ayuthaya, in June 2008 (Photo by Adaptor – Plug on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

In 2010, the Royal Thai police reported that in 2009 the rate of arrests of young men in Bangkok had doubled over the previous year and increased by nearly 50 percent for just physical assaults alone. Most of the arrested males were students at vocational educational institutions. The news elicited a lot a public concern but not much was known about the factors that prompted the rise in violent behavior and whether there are different rates of violence among college students in the capital city compared to similar students at rural institutions. Wongtongkam and her associates decided to investigate.

The purpose of their research was to focus on violence among Thai adolescents, particularly young Thai males between the ages of 15 and 19, in both urban and rural settings, and to compare the two groups. Their goal was to assemble baseline information about violent behaviors which would provide policy makers and practitioners more effective ways of reducing violence in Thailand, as well as to allow examinations of differences between rural and urban behaviors related to the prevention of violence. The authors also hoped to provide data about the role of anger in fostering antisocial behaviors and violence.

Students at the Pittyakom School in Nakhon Ratchasima (Photo by Jake Bailey, U.S. Air Force, in the public domain)

They conducted their research in nine different technical colleges, five in Bangkok and four in an unnamed city in Nakhon Ratchasima province. The provincial capital, the city of Nakhon Ratchisima, is located about 140 miles northeast of Bangkok in the Isaan region of Thailand. In 2011, the city had 166,000 people while Bangkok had over 8 million. Over 1,700 students were invited to participate from the two cities; however, some did not want to be involved or were disqualified for several reasons. The majority of the participants, nearly 58 percent, had a good or a very good grade point average.

The researchers used several different self-reporting measures with the participants. One, a self-report of violent behaviors, included such activities as gang fights, robberies, sexual assaults, and attacks with weapons. Participants reported how frequently they had gotten involved in those activities over the previous six months. Another measure assessed violent offenses by asking respondents to report how often in the previous six months they had hit, pushed, shoved, threatened, yelled, called mean names, or threatened with a weapon. A third asked the participants to rate how frequently they had experienced elevated feelings of anger.

Kasetsart University students at a Bangkok mall (Photo by Ian Fuller on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Almost surprisingly, the students in Bangkok and in Nakhon Ratchasima province reported very similar results in the occurrences of interpersonal violence, with no significant differences between the two groups, though slight differences did occur. For two of the measures of actual violence, participants from Bangkok did report more instances of chasing another person with weapons and injuring someone with weapons. On the other hand, the rural respondents reported higher expressions of anger than the people in the big city did, with correspondingly higher results in the suppression of anger as well.

The authors noted that the most prevalent form of violence among the students is teasing and name calling, both forms of bullying. This form of violence, they argued, is a type of instrumental aggression used to gain social status and control. They argued that controlling bullying can reduce anger and aggressive behaviors.

A training session for police cadets in Thailand for ending violence against women and girls (Photo by UN Women Asia and the Pacific on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

One difference between the capital and the rest of the nation is that people in Bangkok were more likely to own weapons, perhaps for self-defense. The authors suggested that because there does not seem to be much difference between anger and violence in rural versus urban Thailand, the country can and should focus on formulating a national-level program to address the issues.

They concluded that the similar levels of violence in the rural province and in the capital may be due to the fact that development throughout the nation has reduced the economic disparity between urban and rural people. Conversely, they suggested, the higher levels of reported anger in the province may be due to the rapid urbanization, which may have induced greater “health-risk behaviors,” as they put it rather adroitly (p.2296).

A group of Thai people laughing (Photo on Max Pixel FreeGreatPicture.com, Creative Commons license)

Unfortunately, the authors do not refer to Phillips (1965) and his analysis of the ways the Rural Thai of Bang Chan village more than 50 years ago dealt with feelings of anger and expressions of aggression. Presumably, that would have been beyond the scope of their research. In any case, Phillips found that the Rural Thai villagers had no toleration for direct, face-to-face aggressiveness. Not only were there no overt displays of aggression, the villagers had numerous devices that prevented it from being expressed—such as giggling and laughter when making requests, using intermediaries to soften dealings, walking away from people at the slightest possibility of trouble, and acting in an interpersonal manner of flattery, self-effacement, and comedy.

They were clearly aware that aggressiveness is always a latent possibility, which prompted them to maintain an aura of face-to-face pleasantness. Their constant gossip was a form of aggression, though people did not necessarily believe the nasty things they heard about others. A more formalized form of aggressiveness—still not face-to-face—allowed people to express their hostility to others in circumspect ways. For instance, a man would call a dog using the name of another man, within his hearing range, and claim it was a slip of the tongue. The other might retaliate by stealing the first man’s boat for a few weeks and then returning it, after causing a considerable amount of anxiety.

An elderly Thai lady near Chiang Rai, Thailand (Photo by Eric Montfort on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Phillips concluded that interpersonal aggressiveness was very weak among the Thai villagers of his time because everyone was so extremely careful to not provoke others. It was hard to get worked up over minor things. Further, he argued, since others would not respond to a show of anger, there was little incentive to displays of aggressive feelings. The anticipation of the suppression of hostility in effect dampened hostility in everyone. It was hard to get angry at people with whom one does not have strong emotional relations.

The research by Wongtongkam and colleagues is significant for showing the relative equality today between the rates of violence in Bangkok and in Nakhon Ratchisima. It’s a shame that the authors did not go farther by examining whether those bedrock Thai values that Phillips examined still persist among the rural people. Is it just the fact that they are more urbanized now, have more material goods, and experience the tensions of urban people everywhere? Or is the acceptance of violence in Nakhon Ratchisima unique to that province? More research is needed to fully explore the fate of peaceful values in rural Thailand.

Wongtongkam, Nualnong, Paul R. Ward, Andrew Day and Anthony H. Winefield. 2016. “The Relationship between Exposure to Violence and Anger in Thai Adolescents.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 31(13): 2291-2301

Last Thursday, CBC News celebrated Valentine’s Day by posting a story about a woman who has formed a matchmaking Facebook group for Inuit singles. The report gives an impression of the difficulties some Inuit singles experience in meeting eligible partners.

An Inuit woman carrying her child in Clyde River, Nunavut, in 2013 (Photo by GRID Arendal on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Angela Aula started the new group in January from her home in Toronto, calling it Uvanga Amma Ivvi, or, in English, the Casual Dating Group. She has lived in the city for 25 years and realizes she has an advantage over other Inuit who live in Nunavut. For the first eight years of her life she lived in Hall Beach, an isolated community in the territory with under 900 inhabitants, so she is quite familiar with remote conditions.

Living in a city, she says she can meet people at a local burger joint while folks in the remote villages are separated by vast distances from finding eligible possibilities for dates. Ms. Aula met her partner 11 years ago at a McDonald’s and they now have two children. Like other Inuit in the cities of Canada’s South, she could hang out in coffee shops and easily meet strangers—or check out the possibilities for dates if she should so wish on dating apps. The people in many villages across the North can’t do that.

An Inuit woman in 2012 (Photo by tsaiproject on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

So she decided to do something about it. Rather than design an app, however, she wanted to use Facebook, a platform that is widely used in the North. The Inuit already participate in FB groups, she realized, such as one called Inuit Hunting Stories of the Day, and she felt that a dating group would be more readily acceptable than a new app. So far her group has attracted 300 members.

It is a private group and she asks potential members if they are over 18, single, and Inuit before approving their memberships. However, she does not pry into their lives—she has no idea how many dates have happened as a result of her group. So far, some people have formed break-out groups, such as subgroups for members of different age categories, for people living in different regions of the North, and for LGBTQ people.

Two people on a boardwalk in Iqaluit (Photo by Tim Winkelmans on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The reporter interviewed Alexia Cousins from Iqaluit, the community that serves as the capital of Nunavut. A 30-year-old woman with one daughter, Ms. Cousins finds it hard to date successfully, even though Iqaluit is a small city of less than 8,000, since she is related to a large proportion—60 or 70 percent, she says—of the Inuit population there. She finds that the dating scene is difficult since people who show up for a date or who try to buy her a drink in a bar are often already in a relationship. She has also lived in New Brunswick and Toronto, where there “is a bigger pile to pick from,” she explains, so dating is easier in the South.

However, Ms. Cousins has not as yet joined the Facebook group. She acknowledges that it would be possible to meet new people with it, but Nunavut is huge and airfare is quite expensive for those who would like to travel around the territory. Also, she’s not had any luck from online dating so she is going to stick with trying to meet people offline. But just for fun, she loaded Tinder, a prominent matchmaking app, on her phone. The only possibility it came up with was a guy who lives 2,000 kilometers away. He said he just wanted to stay warm during the winter. So much for Tinder.

Last week the Sikkim Chronicle published a feature story about a retired Lepcha civil servant and educator who exemplifies the giving spirit of her society. Although this website published an article about her in 2012, Ms. Keepu Tsering Lepcha is inspiring enough to warrant another look at her accomplishments and ideals.

The Enchey monastery in Gangtok (Photo by lionel.viroulaud on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Ms. Keepu was born into a Lepcha family in Sikkim in 1942. Her father worked for the government in a job that required him to travel to many remote corners of the state. As a result, he raised her with an ideal of doing things for their society. She attended primary and secondary schools in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, and went to college in Darjeeling, a town in West Bengal to the south that also has a Lepcha community. After that, she did postgraduate work in Calcutta, the capital of West Bengal state. In 1967 she returned to Gangtok to take a position as a teacher.

She taught at the Enchey Senior Secondary School where she also served as the principal for a while. The school had been established as a refuge for Tibetan children, 400 of whom lived in a hostel attached to it. In its early history, the school was affiliated with the Enchey monastery. Ms. Keepu volunteered to live with the refugee kids, many of whom had lost their parents when they had fled from Tibet. She and the other teachers served as counselors for the children, advising them on personal hygiene issues such as bathing, cutting their hair, and washing their clothes, as well as on academic matters.

She then took a position for the state department of education as the assistant director, where she worked until 1994. She developed and published textbooks for the primary grades and organized training programs for elementary school teachers who taught the local languages.

A young Lepcha woman in a village in North Sikkim (Photo by Kandukuru Nagarjun on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Ms. Keepu also served for 28 years as the project director for the Rural Development Agency, which helps the rural poor in Sikkim. As part of her duties, she visited rural poor people, especially women, and learned how they cope with their problems. She took a variety of other jobs, finally retiring in the year 2000 from a position as secretary of the department of sports and youth affairs.

But those were just her formal positions. Since 1989 she has devoted herself to the role of mentor for children. She opened her home, called Lepcha Cottage, as a refuge for Lepcha kids. In her spare time, she tries to help other Lepcha people gain access to proper healthcare and to improve their economic and social conditions. She works to preserve the Lepcha traditional culture and the Lepcha language.

Children playing in a Lepcha village in North Sikkim (Photo by Kandukuru Nagarjun on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

She pursues these projects both on her own volition and in her role as chair of the Human Development Foundation of Sikkim (HDFS). She helped establish that NGO in 1997 with the assistance of donors from Switzerland and other places. The primary mission of the organization is to provide for the needs of underprivileged kids from Sikkim, primarily by ensuring that they get an education. Today, the HDFS cares for many children and runs its own school up through class X. Some of its graduates are now attending universities.

The impact of Ms. Keepus’s commitment to her people and particularly to the Lepcha children has been enormous. She was given the Sikkim Award in 2007 for her many contributions to her society and she received a prestigious award from the government of India, the Padma Shri, in 2009.

An elderly Lepcha couple in a village in North Sikkim (Photo by Kandukuru Nagarjun on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Her generosity is certainly a characteristic of the Lepchas in general. Geoffrey Gorer in his 1967 book Himalayan Village: An Account of the Lepchas of Sikkim describes the generosity of the people with one another. He writes, for instance, that whenever he gave one person, adult or child, a gift that could be divided, such as a pack of cigarettes, the recipient would carefully divide the contents with everyone else present. Even children of three or four years old would reciprocate gifts from the author with gifts of their own. Gorer concludes, “Lepcha children and Lepcha adults are extraordinarily unselfish… (p.253),” one of the key elements in their peacefulness.

More information about the Lepcha Cottage and the Human Development Foundation of Sikkim can be found on its website.

On Wednesday January 23, the political crisis in Venezuela deepened when Juan Guaidó, leader of the national assembly, declared himself to be the interim president until another election could be held. He maintained that the earlier presidential election had been corrupt and that the victory President Nicholas Maduro had declared for himself was therefore invalid. According to international news reports, the governments of the United States and Canada immediately supported Guaidó’s move. In addition to the protests by opponents of the Maduro regime in foreign capitals, Venezuelans responded to appeals for support by the national assembly and joined demonstrations in favor of Guaidó’s call for another election.

The Avenida Orinoco near the indigenous market in Puerto Ayacucho (Photo by Solem Josias in the Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Several young Piaroa in Puerto Ayacucho, the capital of Amazonas state, got involved in the demonstration that broke out that day in response to the announcement by the national assembly. A 19-year-old Piaroa man named José Francisco Díaz claimed he was just trying to intervene and prevent a brutal beating that the Bolivarian National Guard was inflicting on the young demonstrators, including some minors. He and a couple other Piaroa men were arrested by the police as they broke up the demonstration. His sister told one news service, in the words of the Google translation, “they put him in prison for defending some teenagers assaulted by the National Guard.”

The police had opened fire on a crowd of protesters, killing two men. They swept through the streets of downtown Puerto Ayacucho, capturing 23 people of whom 10 were indigenous. José Francisco and his brother were simply checking on transportation to return to their village in the Sisipa parish, Communidad Autana, when they got caught up in the police repression of the protesters. They saw the police attacking the teenagers and pleaded with them for mercy. The troops continued with their beatings.

A Piaroa man and his daughter, Katherin (Photo by Orlandojosevc in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

According to José Francisco’s father, Carlos Díaz, his son “shouted at them to leave the boys, who were human beings.” The National Guard did not stop. A relative of the Díaz brothers managed to free the older brother but not José Francisco, who was arrested and taken by truck to the command post. Two other Piaroa young people, Leandro Coronel, 22, and Ender Herrera, 20, were also among those who were arrested.

Three days later, on Saturday January 26, Judge Dayana Matera confirmed the detention of the protesters, which included the three Piaroa and seven other indigenous people. They were charged with terrorism, obstruction of a public roadway, instigation of public disorder, and other related crimes. They will be held for 45 days, enough time for the public prosecutor’s office to determine if there is enough evidence against them .

A Piaroa family in the Amazonas state of Venezuela (Photo by José Mijares that was in Wikimedia with a Creative Commons license)

Jorge Herrera, the father of Ender Herrara, argued that there is no evidence his son committed any of the crimes he is charged with. He was just coming home when the police arrested him. “He did not go to protest. He just went to look at what was happening,” Mr. Herrara said. Ender is a student at the Simón Rodríguez University, José Francisco is in the business of marketing manioc, and Leandro is a fisherman.

Two of the prisoners, juveniles, were released to their families in the afternoon of January 29, but the others are being detained in what could only be described as grim conditions. The jail evidently has no bathroom facilities so when a doctor was allowed to see them, he said that they smelled terrible. The prisoners have to sleep sitting up. Ender deserves medical help—he has an open wound on his head. The relatives of the prisoners were sending in food but they had no way of contacting their family members to see if they were getting any of it.

When the government of India split a new state named Telangana off from the older state of Andhra Pradesh in 2014, the capital of the much reduced state had to be moved. The capital of Andhra Pradesh had been the city of Hyderabad but that metropolis was located in Telangana and would remain its capital. Andhra Pradesh decided to build its new capital, Amaravati, between the small, historic town of Amaravathi and the much larger city of Vijayawada.

The Krishna River near Vijayawada (Photo by Kalyan on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

With Andhra Pradesh concentrating on developing the infrastructure for its new capital city, located on the south side of a sweeping bend in the Krishna River, The Hindu last week focused a news story on a group of Yanadi who live on or near the south bank of the river in the old town. The issue is that they lack a sufficient supply of clean water.

The reporter interviewed Ganga Raju, a Yanadi man squatting on a rock at the edge of the river near the point where sewage from Amaravathi empties into it. As he dips his 20-liter can into the froth produced by the waste water, he tells The Hindu that he collects his drinking water there every day and so far he has not caught any diseases from it. He earns money—200 to 300 rupees (US$2.80 to $4.20) per day—as a rag picker.

A Yanadi fisherman paddling a log boat (Photo by Only the Best on NationMaster.com and copyrighted, but released for all uses without reservation)

Mr. Raju joins 11 other Yanadi to walk back to their colony, where 78 families have settled in order to have access to pools of water along the edge of the river. Four families have resettled right onto the bank of the river, called a ghat, in order to be closer to the water. The water level in the river has been lower ever since a dam was built up river at Pulichintala for flood control, irrigation, and hydro power generation. Mr. Raju claims that the process of filling the new reservoir has lowered the level of water available for the Yanadi.

Ramnamma, a Yanadi woman who is also collecting water from the river, tells the reporter that a tanker truck brings water to the community only once a week. She says that the amount of water available is quite insufficient to meet the needs of the families, so the competition for it often leads to conflicts.

However, an official from the Amaravathi panchayat tells the reporter that a 4,000 liter tanker supplies water daily to the Yanadi colony at Chiru Poramboke. Because it is located in a wetland, however, the government cannot lay pipes for water. But he said the town has provided electric lines into the community.

Amareswar Galla, the Chief Curator of the Amaravathi Heritage Centre and Museum (Photo by Biswarup Ganguly in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

“Water is a cultural and human right,” the Chief Curator of the Amaravathi Heritage Centre and Museum, Amareswar Galla, tells The Hindu. He adds, “the three tribal communities, Chenchu, Yerukala and Yanadi, struggle for access to water and a decent livelihood. Anybody drinking putrid water is a shame on all of us.”

The chief executive of the Dindigul District in India’s Tamil Nadu took a lengthy trek into a remote Paliyan village on January 23 to listen to the people discuss their issues. According to an article in The Hindu, Collector T. G. Vinay hiked nearly 14 kilometers into the village of Moongilpallam in the forested Kodaikanal hills to spend a day with the Paliyan people. The same executive took a similar journey into the Paliyan community of Thalakadai in the Sirumalai hills of his district in April 2018 to hear what the people there had to say. The collector had the foresight to take along a reporter from The Hindu in both of his forays into the tribal villages.

The mountains of Kodaikanal (Photo by wishvam in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The collector was accompanied by a group of about a half dozen officials from the forestry, revenue, and district offices. They drove to Udumalpet, through the villages of Chinnnur and Manjampatti in the plains, and then they hiked for three hours into the forest of Kodaikanal to reach Moongilpallam. The 30 families in the hamlet were delighted to receive their visitors.

The Paliyan people in the village were unaware of many of the government welfare schemes that were available to them. Few had an Aadhar card, a general welfare certificate issued by the government of India. Some said that they had received pensions provided for the elderly only once in the past three or four months because they had to spend money to get into the plains to secure the funds. In response, the collector suggested they could specify a convenient spot in the plains where the government could build a facility to provide access for the welfare beneficiaries. The proposed facility also might be used for the education of their children.

A trail through a thick forest at Kodaikanal (Photo by solarisgirl on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The people told the collector that pregnant women were unable to trek to the primary healthcare facility in Mannavanur Panchayat, so they had to deliver their babies at home. The collector responded that permission would be sought from the Forest Department to build some roads that would make the facilities in the plains more accessible.

Remote and obscure as Moongilpallam clearly is, it also is strategically located near the border with Kerala. Three years ago The Hindu reported that a state-of-the-art solar collection facility had been erected in the community, with each home getting two LED lamps plus a charger for the mobile devices of the residents. All of the supplies for the solar collectors and the equipment needed to distribute the power to 28 homes had to be carried up to the village along forest paths the same way Dr. Vinay arrived a couple weeks ago. Four large batteries, each of which weighs 70 kg, power poles, large solar panels, and cables all had to be carried up into the hills by the villagers.

A Paliyan woman with her kids in the Sirumalai Hills of Tamil Nadu (Photo by vdakshinamurthy in Wikipedia, in the public domain)

That article in the newspaper does clarify the reason for the concern in 2016 by government officials for the good will of the Paliyans in Moongilpallam. Since a Naxalite attack had occurred in Kerala the previous year, in 2015, all of the remote tribal communities in the Theni and Dindigul districts were being watched and courted. While a cynic might argue that the recent visits by the collector may have been prompted by a lingering worry about the possible development of sympathies in villages such as Moongilpallam for the communist terrorists, Dr. Vinay’s genuine concern for the poor Paliyan forest dwellers does come through in the newspaper reports.

On November 30, the Election Court in Malaysia declared the results of the 14th general election last May in the Cameron Highlands district to be void due to corrupt practices. The High Court agreed on December 13 and a by-election was scheduled for January 26. The winner of the Cameron Highlands seat in parliament for the Barisan Nasional party, Datuk C. Sivarraajh, didn’t appeal the decision of the court. Of the 32,000 voters in the Cameron Highlands, a sizeable minority, about 6,000, are Semai.

An Orang Asli child in the Cameron Highlands (Photo by Mohd Fazlin Mohd Effendiy Ooi on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The Malaysian media has been filled with news stories regurgitating opinions of the different parties, particularly the BN and the winning coalition, the Pakatan Harapan, a fair number of which mention the Semai and reiterate the needs of the Orang Asli for better government support. However, a couple news articles published last week in the last days before the election did have some interesting things to say about the Semai.

The reporter for one news story interviewed the BN candidate, Ramli Mohd Nor, who is himself a Semai. He expressed optimism that he will have the vote of the Orang Asli people in the district. He denied that his supporters desire handouts from the government. He said those attitudes are patronizing. The news story quoted the candidate: “Respect and appreciate them. They do not need handouts of any form. Do you see them nagging and begging?” he said about his fellow Semai.

An Orang Asli village in the Cameron Highlands (Photo by anuarsalleh on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

He added in his interview with the reporter that the Semai “believe in voluntarism, and that explains their willingness to help us in this by-election.” He said that he does not approve of handouts, which foster bribery. He didn’t explain how the lack of decent roads into the Semai communities, commented on by other observers, related to evil government handouts or bribery.

The 61-year old former police officer is the son of a Semai man from the Cameron Highlands and a Temiar woman from Gua Musang in Kelantan. One of the issues he is campaigning on is what he says is an unacceptable level of illegal immigrants in the plantation sector of the district. Their presence requires “special security attention,” he told the reporter. The government and the BN should work together to solve the immigrant problem. He also touted the efforts by the BN government while it used to be in power to protect the environment.

Another news story about the by-election published on January 19 covered the issue of difficult road access to remote Semai communities. The journalist writing the article plus two colleagues decided to cover a campaign event in Kampung Ulu Tual, a community that has gained some notice for its innovative learning center for Semai children.

A road into the Semai village of Rening in the Cameron Highlands (Photo by tian yake on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The journalists were warned that while road access is not too bad, little or no internet service is available there. The 35 kilometer road into the community took an hour and a half in a four-wheel drive to negotiate and, more seriously, the phones could not receive signals. Many of the Semai were busily snapping photos of the visitors—they were excited about the sudden fame of their community—but one of the villagers, T.N. Alagesh, explained to the journalists that they could take pictures anywhere but they had to go to the next village to upload them to the internet. How far was that? An hour away by road.

Ermin Alok, a 44-year-old man, said that most of the villagers have phones but they usually leave them at home, normally taking them out only when they are planning to leave Ulu Tual. He said that everyone knows there are some spots in some of the villages where one can get signals, even though they may have to walk a few kilometers to get them. But normally they only use their phones to place occasional calls. He was surprised that the group of journalists had come to visit and warned them that if a vehicle has a breakdown along the way in or out, it can be a very long walk to get help.

A view of the Cameron Highlands (Photo by [email protected] on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Kamal Bad Ding, from another village in the Cameron Highlands, said that when his sister was bitten by a snake, her husband tried to save her by taking her on his motorcycle out for help but she died on the way to the hospital. If that community had had decent road access and an effective telecommunications network, her death might have been prevented. The roads are so bad into some villages that even four-wheel-drive trucks cannot make it through. He urged the government to improve the roads into the villages.

And Farez Lalak said that it is often necessary to walk or ride around on a motorcycle holding a phone in the air and watching it to see when or if it is receiving a signal. He too emphasized the poor condition of the roads in the region.

On Saturday evening the Election Commission reported unofficial results of the by-election. The BN candidate, Ramli Mohd Nor, defeated the PH candidate 11,381 to 7,182, with a few hundred votes cast for a couple independent candidates.

The Ju/’hoansi are working with land managers to protect the surrounding Kalahari Desert lands from hot-season fires that threaten their villages and their livelihoods. A news story in the online newspaper Namibia Economist last week reported that seasonal fires, especially in the summer in southern Africa, pose a serious environmental threat. The Ju/’hoansi have been starting controlled burns for a long time and they are now benefiting from the research and advice of land managers in protecting the Kalahari. The news story updates a similar report from two years ago, though it emphasizes somewhat different points.

Burned trees in the Nyae Nyae Conservancy (Photo by David Barrie on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

According to an overview of a 10-year study by the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation (NNDF) of fire in the desert region, 50 percent of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy lands had burned in 2010 and the extent of burned lands was increasing. The NNDF report argued that if that trend were not checked and reversed, the fires “would seriously impact and threaten the survival of the community as well as fauna and flora in the area.”

The NNDF said that land managers, working with the Ju/’hoan villages, decided in 2013 to take a more proactive approach. They increased surveillance of fires and introduced the management of fuel by selectively doing prescribed burns. While the villagers themselves welcomed the proposed management approaches, some people, whom the article did not name, did not. Those opponents advocated more traditional fire-fighting techniques such as fire breaks and firefighting. The foundation argued that in a wild area of 9,000 km², those approaches are mostly ineffective.

A remote San community in the Nyae Nyae (Photo by Jesse Kipp in “How the San of Southern Africa Used Digital Media as Educational and Political Tools” by Philip Kreniske, The Journal of Interactive Technology & Pedagogy, Nov. 30, 2014, Creative Commons license)

The Ju/’hoansi San accepted the seriousness of the situation and agreed with the prescribed burns, particularly since the burns were proposed for the vicinity of their villages in order to protect their communities and for areas where they utilize natural resources. The land managers developed their proposals to match up as much as possible with traditional fire burning practices, for the Ju/’hoansi had been setting controlled burns for a long time.

The strategy of the communities, assisted by the researchers, was to use remote sensing fire maps and a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index in order to locate areas where highly combustible vegetation, such as brush and dry grasses, had built up enough to pose a serious risk of fire. Then those areas would be selectively burned well before the hot season, September through November, began.

Driving past a wildfire in the Kalahari Desert (Photo by Dave Bezaire & Susi Havens-Bezaire on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The communities and the researchers working with them soon realized that when an area had been burned, more burning the following year would probably be unnecessary. Standardized annual fire-burning plans had to be continually modified to meet the actual conditions on the ground. Fire plans had to be prepared each year based on surveillance of existing fuel loads. The 2017 burn map showed only a limited number of spots containing high or very high build-ups of fuel. Prescribed fires were restricted to only those spots. Conditions were worse during 2018. The burn map showed a lot more spots with heavy loads of dry fuel, so more prescribed fires were started.

Over the course of the past decade, the Ju/’hoansi have changed their approaches to fire management. During the first half of the project, from 2009 – 2013, the researchers and managers from NNDF were in a monitoring phase with the villagers. The people still held onto their traditional beliefs about fires, which destroyed about 40 percent of their resources each year. In the second half of the decade, 2014 – 2018, that figure has dropped to about 16 percent of their desert burning each year. In addition, the timing of the human-set fires has changed. Traditionally they were set during the hot season, September to November. They have shifted the prescribed burns to mid-season, June to August.

Two San men in Botswana demonstrate how to start a fire by hand (Photo by Ian Sewell in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The article last week in Namibia Economist unfortunately opens with a couple pejorative paragraphs about the Ju/’hoansi and their fire burning traditions, observations that differ from the news story of February 2017. The reporter last week wrote that the tradition of the people setting their desert into flames was based on superstitions about their rain gods and it was very difficult to convince the local Ju/’hoansi to question those traditions.

The 2017 article, also based mostly on reporting that year by the NNDF, “indicated that this new management approach fits in well with the Ju/’hoansi cultural tradition of selectively burning the desert lands during May through July, the cooler months in southern Africa.” That 2017 piece referred to an article by Hitchcock et al. (1996) that pointed out how the Ju/’hoansi have traditionally used controlled burns in order to manage the resources they take from the desert. The unnamed reporter writing for Namibia Economist does not indicate the sources for the curious statements about the people being hesitant to question their superstitions.

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