Peaceful Societies

The Mbuti are suffering more than ever from rampaging armies, constant attacks on their villages, and incessant warfare in the forests of the northeastern DR Congo where they live. Or used to live. A news report posted on August 24 on the website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees describes the depredations the Mbuti villagers have been suffering this year and their needs as refugees. It’s a depressing story.

A wall of hope in the Beni Territory expressing the desire for peace and an end to violence against civilians (All photos by MONUSCO, the United Nations peacekeeping force in the D.R Congo in Flickr, Creative Commons licenses)

The UNHCR reporter, Natalia Micevic, describes some of her interviews with Mbuti refugees at a makeshift camp in Beni, a small city and a territory in the North Kivu province of the DRC. She speaks with a woman named Priscilla, who is holding her 7-month old son Josua, both of whom are pictured in the news story. Priscilla explains how assailants carrying machetes and guns swept into her village one night hacking up the people. She grabbed her baby and ran for the forest.

“They cut my parents’ throats and killed them because they were too old to run,” says the 48-year-old woman. “We hid in the bush for three days, almost naked, with barely anything on our back,” she adds.

Another refugee named Charlotte, 60, lost several family members—two nieces and a nephew—on the night of the killings. She says that when they heard the gunshots, they fled into the forest to spend the night. When they returned to the village later, they found that their house had been burned down. She added that the villagers had all fled as a result of that killing spree.

Women flee fighting in the Beni region, carrying their belongings past a soldier and an abandoned house

Ms. Micevic speaks with Emeria, who fled from Makembi after it was attacked by armed thugs. She is surviving in precarious conditions and speaks fondly of their earlier lives in the forest. “We were never hungry, we could eat anything we wanted and we had our fields,” she said. “But now we don’t dare return, it is too dangerous. The enemy is living there.”

Gabriel, 43, has moved with his wife and children twice and is now living in Beni itself, in the Madiabuana area of the city. His major challenge is obtaining food for himself and his family. He ventures out of the city to forage for food every day, but the violence in the countryside often drives him back in. During the morning that the reporter speaks with him, he says, he was out in the country foraging but the sounds of gunshots forced him to flee back into the relative safety of Beni.

A MONUSCO officer listens to the concerns of over 50 local women in Eringeti, the Beni Territory, about local attacks

The reporter indicates that hundreds of Mbuti families in the volatile area north of the city of Goma, along the border with Uganda, have been forced to move away from their traditional forest lands where they have subsisted on hunting and gathering for a long time. Many are sleeping on the bare ground in makeshift shelters around the towns of Mavivi, Oicha and Eringeti. Since there are no nearby forests, they cannot go hunting for monkeys, antelopes and pigs as they have done until recently. The forests they used to inhabit are now the domain of the armed marauders.

The UNHCR indicates that the violence has increased significantly over the past year, since September 2017, and it estimates that a half million people have been forced to flee from their homes since January this year.

The article closes with a plea for funding support for the refugee relief agency.

The U.S. government prevented two celebrated Zapotec artists from attending the closing reception last week for their murals, displayed for a year in the central rotunda of the Los Angeles Public Library. The Los Angeles Times reported last Wednesday that artists Dario Canul and Cosijoesa Cernas, from the Zapotec street art collective Tlacolulokos, were not allowed to return to the U.S., despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that their murals had been quite popular, attracting almost 100,000 visitors over the course of the year that they were on display.

The Zapotec artists Dario Canul and Cosijoesa Cernas standing in front of their murals (Screenshot from the video “Visualizing Language: Oaxaca in L.A.” by the Library Foundation of LA on Vimeo, Creative Commons license)

The eight murals by the two artists, in a show entitled “Visualizing Language,” represented the large Zapotec community in Los Angeles and the intersections of cultures between the U.S. metropolis and the smaller communities where they live in southern Mexico. The works of art were installed in the central library’s rotunda directly beneath a 1933 mural by artist Dean Cornwell, which depicts the early history of California in terms of Native Americans bowing to colonialists from Europe. The Tlacolulokos works carry a contradictory message of vibrant pride, yet a sense of change and variety. An article about the exhibit published in January 2018 erroneously stated that it would close at the end of that month.

The thrust of the newspaper report last week was an attempt to make sense about the denials of visas for the two artists. Apparently Canul and Cernas had flown into the San Francisco International Airport on January 8 to investigate the possibility of a creative project there but, on arrival, immigration officials confiscated their tourist visas, held them in detention overnight, and put them on a plane back to Mexico in the morning. They were banned from returning to the U.S. for five more years. “La banda estaba sacada de onda [We were freaked out],” Canul told L.A. Taco, a website reporting on the incident.

The Los Angeles Public Library (Photo by Sheila Thomson on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Despite the efforts of the LA Times reporter to get out the facts in the case, a lot remains murky. The reporter went to the Los Angeles Public Library for comment and received only silence. Oddly, the two officials at the library responsible for putting on the exhibit had both left their positions on Wednesday the 29th, the day the newspaper was investigating the story. Louise Steinman, the director of the library’s ALOUD series of cultural events and Maureen Moore, her associate director, had both left that day. Steinman was a key person in promoting the “Visualizing Language” exhibit and Moore was its producer.

The newspaper spoke with Carlos Rogel, the interim executive director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC), a Los Angles arts nonprofit organization. He said that artistic exchanges have been very important in LA, especially to the arts institutions, but this sort of thing, with international artists being denied their visas, has happened before. It’s “a way of censoring their work here,” he said.

According to the L.A. Taco website, Xochitl Flores-Marcial, who is a professor at Cal State Northridge, had indicated that the library had contacted immigration attorneys earlier this year about Canul and Cernas but it was already too late by the time they inquired.

The newspaper spoke with Jesse Lerner, a curator who has organized numerous arts projects between Los Angles and Latin America, about the denial of the visas for the two Zapotec artists. He said that their rights to free speech, such as having conversations with art galleries, even discussing commissions, would not have violated their tourist visas. He added, “everything’s gotten harder for artists because of a racist, xenophobic administration in Washington.”

The murals are headed for Lille, France, where they will be part of a celebration of Mexican culture in that city. Then they will come back to California where they will be part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. Through a spokesperson, the president of that museum, Lourdes Ramos, expressed her regrets that the two artists were prevented from coming to the closing event on the 26th. She said she was confident that the visa issue could be resolved so they could continue to serve “as cultural ambassadors of the Mexican artistic tradition.”

The environment and conservation website Mongabay.com posted a news story last week on the threats that feral dogs are posing to the survival of black-necked cranes. The reporter, Athar Parvaiz, discusses the damage that wild dogs do to the crane eggs and the chicks in the nests, as well as to other wildlife in the high mountains of Ladakh.

A pair of black-necked cranes at Tsokar-Changthang in Ladakh (Photo by Narendra Patil on Mongabay.com, Creative Commons license)

The crane is the official bird of the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir, of which Ladakh is a part. It nests in the the Changthang region of Ladakh, the plateau near the border with Tibet. It is a significant symbol to many Ladakhi communities since it has become a spiritually and culturally important icon. The Ladakhi revere the bird, featuring it in every festival and program in the region. Even the monasteries have paintings of the cranes along with images of other spiritual subjects. Sighting the big birds brings good luck.

According to Jigmat Takpa, a forest conservator of Ladakh, a dance performed by the birds, called the Chartses, “is performed by Ladakhis in every cultural event and festival.” He added that the bird is considered to be auspicious—a symbol of the unique ecology of Ladakh. “Ladakhis feel proud about the fact that its only breeding ground in India is in Ladakh,” Mr. Takpa said.

Street dogs near a home in Leh (Photo by Athar Parvaiz on Mongabay.com, Creative Commons license)

But dogs, particularly feral ones, are threatening the cranes. According to the World Wildlife Fund India, dogs damage the nests and eggs of the huge birds. The WWF points out that dogs are owned by the local nomads in the Changthang as well as by armed forces personnel in the region. The IUCN classifies the black-necked crane as a vulnerable species because of its small, and declining, population. Another threat to the cranes, in addition to feral dogs, is the degradation of their habitat—the loss of wetlands and changing agricultural practices.

Mr. Takpa went on to say that dogs are not only a threat to the cranes, they are also becoming dangerous to people. He wondered how the big birds can continue to escape the depredations of the feral animals. According to wildlife officials in Leh, dogs pose a threat to other wildlife as well, including even snow leopards. The regional wildlife warden for Ladakh, Sajid Sultan, shows the journalist some photos of feral dogs in the Changthang region attacking wildlife, including cranes and leopards.

Mr. Sultan was asked about the measures his department is taking to protect the animals. He replied that the department is working with the Snow Leopard Conservation India Trust, the Wildlife Conservation and Bird Club of Ladakh, and the Nature Conservancy Foundation to survey the population of dogs in the Changthang. They came up with an estimate of 3,500. Out of that, 1,200 dogs live within a 10 km radius of 13 crane breeding areas.

Livestock, such as Pashmina goats, pastured by nomadic herders in the Changthang region of Ladakh (Photo by Athar Parvaiz on Mongabay.com, Creative Commons license)

Narendra Patil, a researcher who participated in the survey, told the reporter that in a few cases humans have been attacked, mauled, and even devoured by feral dogs. Their attacks on wild animals have been reported widely. The researchers interviewed people in 40 Changthang villages and, Patil noted, “dogs are very unambiguously perceived as a threat to people, livestock and wildlife.” He added that virtually everyone the team interviewed said that the number of freely-roaming dogs needs to be controlled. They believe that the dogs feed on the food waste produced at tourist camps and military installations.

Mr. Patil said that the breeding success rate of the cranes in Ladakh has been declining sharply, from a 60 percent success rate in 1995 to less than half of that, 29 percent, in 2016—all due to dog predation on the nests and eggs of the birds. He supplied additional figures. The total population of black-necked cranes in Ladakh in 2014 was down to 112 birds, of which there were only 17 breeding pairs.

In volume 4/5 of the series Proceedings of the International Colloquia on Ladakh—standard reference sources for this peaceful society, by the way—Mallon and Prodon argue that prohibitions by Buddhism against killing may have an effect on controlling the numbers of active hunters in Ladakh. This control may have helped preserve the numbers of wildlife, such as the black-necked cranes. Furthermore, restrictions on hunting have been enforced, though some illegal hunting undoubtedly does go on. But it is pursued on a limited scale and Ladakh has not experienced the whole scale slaughter of wildlife that has plagued other areas in the Himalayas, though there are exceptions.

A fairly young Batek widow has found comfort from the loss of her husband by caring for a huge tropical forest bird, a wreathed hornbill. Several Malaysian newspapers, including the New Straits Times and The Star, published articles about the human/avian friendship last week.

A wreathed hornbill juvenile male at a zoo in Rotterdam (Photo by JarOd on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The 37-year-old Batek woman, named Umi, lost her husband a year ago due to a high fever but three months ago her cousin was out hunting in the forest when he encountered a young hornbill. It had probably fallen out of its nest according to the news stories, though since the female birds are known to seal their nesting cavities from the inside, except for feeding holes, before they lay their eggs, it is not clear how the baby could have fallen out of its nest. Whatever, the cousin brought it back for Umi to care for. She quickly found solace from her troubles in caring for the baby bird and named it To’ek. To judge by the photos that accompany the New Straits Times article, To’ek is a young male.

She treats the young hornbill like an adopted child. “To’ek is my companion,” Umi tells one of the reporters. “I got it when it was still small and had no feathers… I took care of it. What I eat, To’ek eats.” The wreathed hornbill is a tropical bird that lives in forests from the northeast corner of India east and southeast through Southeast Asia as far as part of Indonesia. It can soar as high as 1830 meters though it can be difficult to locate. It is a protected species by the Malaysian Wildlife and National Parks Department. It is found in the Taman Negara National Park, near Umi’s home.

A Batek woman (Photo by Heng Fu Ming on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The Batek woman understands that her To’ek is a bird of the forest, to which it will return. She leaves it free to fly off whenever it wants to go, but when the bird is hungry it returns to her for food handouts. “If I don’t feed it, To’ek might be hungry,” she adds. Referring to the bird as her “loyal companion,” she says that To’ek makes a begging sound when it wants to be fed, so she feeds it bananas and rice.

“Let it return to the forest when it’s fully grown, that’s its home. I’m taking care of it now as it is still young,” Umi concludes to one of the newspapers.

In her wonderful book Changing Pathways (2004), Lye Tuck-Po writes that the dense forest vegetation in which the Batek live prompts them to listen carefully for the sounds that birds and animals make. The people rely on those noises for information about forest conditions, much more than they do on the sense of sight. Hence, birds are very important to the Batek, particularly the ones that are noisy. The people rely on communications from birds to mark the onset or the passing of forest seasons or events. For instance, Lye writes (page 152) that the appearance of one species of bird is associated with the onset of a thunderstorm.

But more to the point of last week’s news reports, while Lye does not have the data to make firm conclusions, she nonetheless suspects that the Batek name the birds of their forests onomatopoeically for the sounds they make. It is reasonable to suppose that Umi listened to her baby hornbill and heard it say something close to “to’ek.”

As a way of observing the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples on August 9, the Telegraph sent one of its reporters into the village of Chalkari, in Jharkhand, to speak with the Birhor people. One of their major difficulties, they told him, was that they are having problems with burying their dead during the monsoon rains.

Birhor woman with children (Screen capture from the video “Birhor—a Tribe Displaced for Nothing” by VideoVolunteers on YouTube, Creative Commons license)

Bara Sukar Birhor, the 65-year old head of the village of 47 families, located in the Topchanchi Block of the Dhanbad District in Jharkhand, told the reporter that the ground is swampy and digging a grave is difficult during the monsoon season. He elaborated for the Telegraph about the other issues they face in the community. Their government-built houses leak when it rains. Surviving on the government’s allocation of 35 kg of rice per month is difficult, particularly since they don’t have land to grow their own food.

Dal and vegetables, staples in the diets of many Indians, are luxuries for the Birhor of Chalkari. Mr. Birhor hopes that his four grandchildren will not have to live as poorly as he has. No one in the village has gotten schooling beyond Class VIII and he hopes his grandchildren will be able to do better.

A Birhor man making a rope (Screen capture from the video “Birhor—A tribe displaced for nothing,” by VideoVolunteers on YouTube, Creative Commons license)

Some of the young people in the village have taken construction jobs or work on farms. Others, according to Dinesh Birhor, a 22-year-old, have jobs laying railroad tracks in Ranchi, the capital city of the state of Jharkhand. Some women continue making ropes for sale. But the problems of poverty are paramount: alcoholism, illiteracy, unemployment.

However, there have been at least some improvements in Chalkari during the lifetime of the elderly village leader. A ration shop has opened as well as a primary-care health center. It is staffed by a doctor, two nurses, and a pharmacist. Patients with serious issues are referred to the medical facilities in Topchanchi, a nearby town of 6,000 people. The health officials recently handed out mosquito nets to the members of all the families in Chalkari.

The forests of Jharkhand (Photo by Kaurun in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Vijay Kumar, the Block Development Officer for the Topchanchi Block, told the newspaper that the Public Distribution System shop in Chalkari is run by a Birhor women’s self-help group. Asked about the lack of a proper burial ground for the village, he replied that it is an issue he is concerned about. Providing the Chalkari residents sufficient land needs to be addressed, he admitted. Most Birhor have leases within the forests of Jharkhand, but his administration is trying to work out a community lease for the people of the village. He is hoping to be able to send a proposal to the District Collector of the Dhanbad District, a higher level official, about the issue of providing a burial ground.

Ashutosh Mairh, who made a documentary in 2006 about the Birhor, told the reporter that they have been forest gatherers for centuries and the changes they are now facing are hard for them to adjust to. But asked to identify possible solutions, he said that the NGOs and the government agencies ought to try and build on the traditional strengths of particularly vulnerable tribes such as the Birhor. “For instance, Birhors have lived in forests and know about medicinal plants. This can be leveraged as a skill,” he suggested.

A news story posted in March 2017 described a report from the Hindustan Times in which Birhor from a different district in Jharkhand were complaining about not having the land to bury their dead. Birhor burial customs, described in some detail in that Peaceful Societies piece, need not be repeated here. Suffice it to suggest that the lack of burial plots for the landless Birhor appears to be a widespread problem throughout the state.

Judge Thomas Masuku of the High Court of Namibia in Windhoek has ordered Herero farmers to remove their livestock from Ju/’hoansi communal lands near Tsumkwe. The judge issued his order on Friday, August 10, and it was released, according to a news report in The Namibian, on August 15.

Ancient San rock art depicting cattle, located at Twyfelfontein, Namibia (photo by Hans Hillewaert in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The news story describes the background briefly. In April 2009, the original four non-San farmers from Gam, a community to the south of the lands of the Nyae Nyae Conservancy, staged an invasion with their livestock of the Ju/’hoansi territory. Others soon followed. According to Ju/’hoansi chief Tsamkxao #Oma, the grazing lands that the farmers occupied were carefully maintained, with the cooperation of local Ju/’hoan, in order to mitigate the effects of overgrazing and to ensure the sustainable uses of the land.

Having the local farmers—all Herero according to news reports from 2009—occupying their lands without their permission has posed a serious problem for the San people, according to Chief #Oma. He said, “Controlled grazing areas are rotated and properly managed to ensure sustainable viable grazing for the benefit of the local community’s livestock and to avoid the deterioration and loss of topsoil through erosion and encroachment by opportunistic plant species.”

The chief stated that the original four invaders were followed by others with their livestock, none of whom are members of the Ju/’hoansi community and are thus not entitled to the benefits of the community forest which they had illegally occupied. Last week’s news report names the original four men and the additional three who were also identified in the lawsuit. They had about 270 head of cattle and some other livestock on the Ju/’hoansi lands.

Sebastian Ndeitunga, the Inspector General of the Namibia Police Force (Photo by U.S. Embassy Namibia on Flickr, Creative Commons license

Chief #Oma continued the story. In December 2013, Ju/’hoan leaders sent a letter to Sebastian Ndeitunga, Namibian Police Inspector General, asking him to enforce the law by removing the invaders. Nothing happened. The leaders next sent a letter to the Office of the Prosecutor General in February 2017 asking for assistance but again nothing happened as a result.

So they sought the assistance of lawyer Willem Odendaal from the Legal Assistance Centre who filed an application in the High Court on March 22 this year. Patrick Kauta, the lawyer for the defendants, notified the court that they would be opposing the Ju/’hoansi application. However, they took no further steps so Judge Masuku acted. The judge ordered the Inspector General of the Namibian Police to investigate the possibility of issuing criminal charges against the farmers based on the provisions of Namibian laws: the Forestry Act and the Communal Land Reform Act.

He also ordered officials in the Ministry of Agriculture, Water, and Forestry—the director of forestry and the officer responsible for the Nyae Nyae communal forest—to use the authority they have under the Forestry Act to detain the animals that are grazing unlawfully on the Ju/’hoansi lands. Since 2009, this website has been following the story of this invasion, the reasons for it, and the responses taken by the Ju/’hoansi. Hopefully, the officials will follow the laws as the judge has ordered.

A 23-year old Semai graphic designer has written and illustrated a children’s book that shares a folk tale he first heard as a child. He hopes it will help preserve the traditions of his people. The book, written by Saluji Yeok So Alu in Malay and translated into Mandarin, was officially launched at the Selangor International Indigenous Arts Festival 2018 on August 4. News stories on August 3 and August 5 described the author and his reasons for producing the book.

The cover of Nenek Dengan Yeok Luat by Saluji Yeok So Alu

The book by Bah Saluji, titled Nenek Dengan Yeok Luat, focuses on Semai traditions and the ways the lives of the people are influenced by nature. The stories are about the life of Yeok Luat, a nine-year old Semai boy, his dog Cooq Leek, and his grandmother as they collect honey, eat lizards, and have other such adventures in the Malaysian forests. They are stories he first heard his father and his uncle tell in Semai which he then wrote down as a child in Malay. He was determined to preserve the oral traditions in written form.

He also started painting the illustrations for the stories with watercolors. His mother kept them and subsequently showed them to a care worker who was visiting the village. She translated the stories into Mandarin and introduced the talented young man to his publisher, Bridge Communication. Saluji hopes to follow up his first success with additional books featuring Semai folk themes.

Kampung Bersih, an Orang Asli village along the Slim River (Photo by Oxbold Sports on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Saluji told one of the journalists that he began drawing with colored pencils at age eight. He had a friend in their village, located on the Slim River in Perak, who also liked to draw and he remembers sitting and quietly drawing with the individual. They would share comics and books in school and then go home to draw the pictures. When he grew older, he started painting with watercolors and oil paints.

As he became obsessed with developing his work into a book, some of his friends in the kampung (village) were less than encouraging. They would stop by his house, see him working on the book, and make disparaging comments about the likelihood of it being published. But he persevered, determined to use his talents to preserve the Semai culture.

It took Saluji over a year to complete the book and he admits he is busily planning a sequel. “There are many more stories about adventures in the forest,” he says. He also has a scholarship at the IACT College Training Academy for Professionals where he is studying graphic design.

For the Yanadi, gaining full titles to lands they have cultivated in Andhra Pradesh for many years can be a breakthrough event. But while they have suffered injustices from higher caste Indians for generations, they have also been attaining their rights, such as their land titles, ever so slowly, according to a perceptive analysis published by the Inter Press Service (IPS) last week.

Yanadi women who still forage in the forest (Photo by the International Institute for Environment and Development on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The journalist, Stella Paul, opens her report by recounting the joy that about 36 Yanadi women express when they enter fields in the village of Nacharwari Pallem, in the Nellore District of Andhra Pradesh, to claim their newly-titled rice fields. With the reporter witnessing the scene, the women dismount from a tractor they have been riding out into the fields. Clutching pink pieces of paper in their hands, they stand together in a circle in the fields, laughing and clapping. They have finally gotten their land titles.

About 20 years ago, each Yanadi family in the village received title to a half-acre under the aegis of a program run by the Integrated Tribal Development Agency, a government body authorized to help the tribal peoples. But the land the Yanadi supposedly owned was firmly controlled by the village elites and it took five years for the Association for the Rural Development (ARD), a group that works for Yanadi development and land rights, to convince the people to start claiming what was theirs by law.

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

The IPS article reviews the occupations of the Yanadi, all of which are at the very bottom of Indian society. Many of them, labeled as Challa Yanadi, work as menial laborers, including scavenging, and are paid only with leftover foods. Some work for the Reddys, the upper class people of the state, while others, called the Kappalla Yanadi, catch frogs and fish for their sustenance. And there are still some, referred to as the Adavi Yanadi, who live as gatherers and hunters in the woodlands. Although they live in different areas of Andhra Pradesh, they all share a state of deprivation and extreme poverty.

Only 14 percent of the Yanadi are literate; 60 percent live in thatched huts as their ancestors did. They are not represented in either the national parliament or the state assembly. Only about two or three percent of them actually own their land. According to Sheikh Basheer, the head of the ARD, their landlessness is the result of their semi-nomadic lifestyle.

Yanadi straw huts in Andhra Padesh (Photo by the International Institute for Environment and Development in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Basheer tells the reporter that upper-class people employed entire Yanadi families, including the children, as laboring units but paid just one of them, in foods rather than in cash. Their employment would continue for generations and the entire family was obligated to remain with their employers. The Yanadis lived under those conditions of virtual slavery without any knowledge of their rights under the laws of India. Basheer and his organization has helped free more than 700 people from such enslavement.

The IPS also spoke with Gandala Sriramalu, a Yanadi elder who did get an education. He is now retired from a government job so he takes the time to visit Yanadi and tell them about the opportunities that are available to them, such as a free education. He tells the reporter that one of the problems with the Yanadi is that they have never learned to act or think on their own. He argues that as a result they are unable to take advantage of opportunities that government agencies or NGOs provide. A good example is the distribution of rights to the land: the Yanadi don’t take advantage of what is available. Instead, their employers often seize those rights.

“The employer uses the Yanadi as a puppet, cultivating the land and consuming the produce. The Yanadi does not speak because he is either scared of losing his job or of being beaten up,” he says.

Chinni Hemalatha, a 32-year-old woman, tells the IPS that her family delayed for a number of years before claiming their land, even after they had been granted full ownership. She expresses pleasure that, as of this coming January when the rains start, she is planning to sow some rice. Another woman, Malli Pramila, has not as yet claimed her plot of land but she is glad that others in her community have their new properties.

One of the hopeful signs is that in dozens of villages in Nellore, the Yanadi are starting to join a network called Yanadi Samakhya created by Sriramalu, the educated elder, with help from the ARD. The new network has investigated such issues as unpaid labor, education, and land rights for the Yanadi and, the reporter writes, they have won some minor battles such as the rights to the minerals on their lands. The network has about 12,000 members now.

Three Yanadi men (Photo from Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, vol. 7, following page 422. In the public domain)

Ankaiya Rao is pleased that he has been able to mine quartz stone on the three acres he owns and to sell it to traders. He is able to sell a ton of the mineral for 80,000 rupees ($US 1,200). He has dreams of being able to afford more for his two kids than he was raised with. Others in the village are also starting to mine quartz, though not as much as he does.

Mr. Rao adds that the rich and powerful local elites are becoming envious of the small-scale successes of the Yanadi. They are eyeing the land with envy, planning, he suspects, to try and cheat them out of their properties. “Once that happens, the entire community will eventually lose as landgrab is a common occurrence here,” he cautions.

Sriramalu, predictably, argues that the best way for the Yanadi to protect their lands is by standing united and vigilant against land grabs. “Standing together can be the best way to overcome them all,” he says.

The Hindustan Times reported last week that the second year of kung fu self-defense training for Ladakhi girls and young women has just concluded at the Hemis Monastery near Leh. The news story, and the reports on Facebook by the organizer of the event, Live to Love India, provided information about the purposes of kung fu training for Ladakhi females.

Kung Fu nuns of the Drukpa Order (Photo by Drukpa Publications Pvt. Ltd. in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Not much has changed from the event held a year ago, at least so far as can be determined by comparing the current story with the news report from last year. The training session by the kung fu nuns of the Drukpa Order during the first week of August in 2017 was a five-day program held for about 100 girls; the current session was expanded to seven days, from July 25 – 31, and it was conducted for 40 girls.

The goals and procedures at the training workshops both years seemed, from the different accounts, to be virtually the same. Ms. Rigzin Angmo, the program executive for Live to Love India, told the Hindustan Times last week the same things as were reported last year: that incidents of harassment and violence against women and girls in Ladakh were increasing. The kung fu training program in self-defense is a good way for people to learn how to protect themselves.

“Since many years, we have seen an influx of tourists in Ladakh. Ladakh is not a peaceful and safe area anymore,” said Ms. Angmo. She went on to tell the newspaper that violent crimes and sexual molestations are increasing daily. She argued that when females know how to properly defend themselves, they can do better to confront unpleasant situations. “At least, girls can feel safer in our homeland,” she concluded.

A Ladakhi girl from the Zanskar Valley (Photo by sandeepachetan.com travel photography on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

At the opening ceremony, Ms. Avny Layasa, Deputy Commissioner for Leh, spoke to the participants about the importance of Ladakhi girls maintaining their self-respect and self-esteem. On the last day of the workshop, Ms. Sargun Shukla, the Senior Superintendent for Police for Leh, inspired the participants as she interacted with them. She emphasized the importance of good mental health for girls and urged them to curb self-inflicted acts of violence. She said that if anyone acts against them and they allow that to happen, it shows their weakness. She also suggested the importance of being careful of one’s speech and conduct. Both Ms. Layasa and Ms. Shukla are becoming widely known in the Leh District as important young community leaders.

The girls who participated in the self-defense workshop happily admitted they were pleased to participate—the workshop has helped boost their feelings of self-worth. One of the participants, Padma Youron, told the newspaper that since their society is no longer safe for girls, the boost in self-confidence that she has gained from the kung fu training will help her cope if difficult situations arise. “We were taught a lot of techniques to tackle social miscreants,” she said, so her “confidence level has increased.”

The Live to Love India Facebook page features an album that includes scores of photos taken during the workshop.

Peter Gardner describes the ways the Paliyans employ “a tranquilizer,” a flower that angry individuals crush and press to their foreheads to dissipate anger. In a 1966 journal article, the anthropologist, reviewing several approaches they use for social control, mentions that they use the flowers of sirupani pu, or “laughing flower,” for help in preserving the peace. He notes that sirupani pu has not been identified botanically (at least as of 50 years ago). Gardner argues that the use of that flower is one factor that exemplifies their ideal which, “for Paliyans is that overt aggression or gross disrespect of any other kind will not occur (p.396).”

The neelakurinji (Strobilanthes kunthiana), a shrub growing in the Western Ghats that blooms once every 12 years (Photo by Aruna Radhakrishnan on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

It is certainly to be expected that flowers would play an important role in the lives of a forest-based society such as the Paliyan. A newspaper article published last week in the Deccan Chronicle describes another traditional use of a flower by the Paliyans. It is a travel piece about the hills around Kodaikanal focusing on the blooming of neelakurinji that is occurring this summer. The spectacle of the hills in bloom attracts tourists.

If the use of a flower for conflict abatement is unusual, neelakurinji is equally strange because it only blooms once every 12 years. The brief travel article in the newspaper states that the hills in the Western Ghats region of India last displayed the blue flowers of the neelakurinji in 2006 and they will next cover the landscape with their patches of color in 2030.

The article indicates that the Paliyan traditionally used the blooming cycles of the plant to calculate their ages. It has been easy for them to figure out how old they are by counting the number of blooming cycles that they have lived through. Each time another cycle would transform the landscape, they would realize they were 12 years older.

In his book Bicultural Versatility as a Frontier Adaptation among Paliyan Foragers of South India, Gardner mentions other uses of flowers by the Paliyans. For example, in the heat of April and May when the bees are collecting nectar from flowers, the people offer to a caami named Raakkaacci some honey and five different species of flowers, part of a ritual they perform (p.135).

He mentions that kurinca puu, the flower of a digging stick (Strobilanthus kunthianus) and tiru kaLLi puu, the flower of a milk hedge cactus (Euphorbia tirucalli), are offered to the caamis during the honey rituals. The caamis are protective gods or spirits for the Paliyans.

The magnolia Michelia champaca is noted on a signboard in Sim’s Park, a nature preserve in Coonoor, the Western Ghats of Tamil Nadu (Photo by Gauri Wur Sem in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The book describes (p. 237) the different flowers and plants that the Paliyans use for adornment. As examples, Gardner cites the magnolia blossoms, cenpaka puu (Michelia champaca), and a flower from an oleander called araLi (Neriium odorum) which the people wear in their hair.

But the obvious question is, how much do flowers really mean to Paliyans today? A post dated February 20, 2012, by Mr. A. Muthuvezhappan in his blog about the Paliyan society provides some good clues. In one of the paragraphs following the headline “Life Style,” the blogger writes, “Their life style is very simple and sacrosanct. They love to live with nature.”

He describes some of the Paliyan marriage customs and he concludes the paragraph by writing, “The young couple had to … start the new life in the forest. They used Tharanipoo and perandipoo during the marriage feast and the young woman put the Tharanippu garland as a token of love and affection and a symbol of marriage.” It is clear from these sentences that flowers are not only valuable for dating their lives, they also can have symbolic meanings, particularly for love and affection, to at least some of the Paliyans.

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