Peaceful Societies

Christmas is a special time of year for the Semai of Kampung Janggap, though the isolated community in Malaysia’s Pahang state lacks some trappings of the holiday found in other countries. An article in the Malay Mail Online on December 24 described the enthusiasm of the Semai, in that one village at least, for celebrating the holiday in their own way.

The town of Raub is fairly near Kampung Tual — The town of Raub is fairly near Kampung Janggap (Photo by tian yake on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The reporter traveled to the Semai village, located near the town of Raub in Pahang, by four-wheel drive on the Saturday before Christmas, December 23, to be part of the celebration. Families gathered together to feast and to socialize with one another. The church in the community is run by a missionary group, the Gospel to the Poor; it is one of 37 churches that they run for the Semai and the Temiar, a neighboring Orang Asli (Original People) society.

The service was held in a simple church hall that displayed a mural and a Christmas tree on the stage. The Semai from Kampung Janggap prayed together in Bahasa Malaysia and sang Christmas songs in the same language, led by one of the villagers. People played electric guitars, drums, and a tambourine. Pastor James Lee, a locally-born individual who has volunteered with GTTP for more than 10 years, recited the Christmas story.

Cooking with bamboo (Photo by Tatoli Ba Kulltura in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

After receiving communion, everyone shared a Christmas feast consisting of beef, fish, rice, chicken and a traditional dish called lemang, a glutinous rice cooked in bamboo. (An October news story pointed out that cooking in bamboo is an Orang Asli tradition.) The charity distributed six kilograms worth of gifts to each of the 100 people living in the village. Each person in a family received two kilograms of rice, two tins of condensed milk, sardines, a pack of sugar, and a package of oil.

The reporter spoke with a several villagers. Masani, 27, said that Christmas is a joyful time of year to share with family and friends. Da, 41, said that his two favorite songs are (with titles translated into English) “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and “The Lord Hangs on a Cross.” He said that the villagers also celebrate Easter but they only receive the gifts in December. Another person indicated that the Semai do not give each other presents, but they do appreciate the gifts from GTTP.

Orang Asli in Lata Jarum, Raub, Pahang (Photo by Abd. Raai Osman on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Pastor Moses Soo, the head of GTTP, told the Malay Mail Online that the organization has seven pastors, four from the Orang Asli communities and three from the local Chinese population; they take turns providing services at the churches they run. The services are held daily in different communities but they have a service at least once a week in each church. After each church service, they provide a meal with foods such as meat, fish and sardines.

The reporter mentioned a few of the other Semai communities that have Christian churches run by the GTTP, including Kampung Tual, the largest, with a membership of about 500. The people of that village had already hunted successfully for wild boar two days before and they were preparing a feast to follow their Christmas Eve church service at 2:00 pm on the 24th.

The mention of Kampung Tual as having the largest Christian church among all 37 served by the evangelical group is interesting because the same community was featured in a late November 2017 news report for its innovative community center, the point of which is to preserve intact the Semai language, stories, and traditions among the young people. The point of the evangelists is to substitute their beliefs for the traditional ones held by the villagers.

Colin Nicholas and two of his colleagues argued in the 2003 book Orang Asli Women and the Forest (also published in 2010) that Malaysia has a policy of bringing the Semai and the other Orang Asli societies into the mainstream of Malay culture by converting them to Islam. People and communities that convert can expect some financial benefits from the state, but at the expense of their aboriginal culture, which they relinquish in the process. Similar results can be expected, they wrote, from conversion to Christianity, though without the benefits of state financial support.

The Malaysian government’s attempts to convert the Semai and the other Orang Asli to Islam have been covered by various news stories, such as a review of an article by Kirk Endicott and Robert Knox Dentan in 2005 that described in detail the reasons the government is so keen on converting the people. The Christian evangelists are not out to add numbers to the roles of Malay citizens, as Endicott and Dentan argue about the Muslin missionaries.

A book by Dentan and three co-authors, Malaysia and the Original People (1997), mentioned that out of an estimated 80,000 aboriginal people in 1993, about 8,000 had converted to Islam. However, a 1984 estimate of the number of Christian conversions was much smaller—about 1,500, primarily Semai in Perak state. It is clear from the Christmas Eve news story that those figures are now out of date.

But whatever the real figures might be in 2018, the analysis by Dentan et al. (1997) remains quite important. The four authors argued that the primary reason the Orang Asli resist converting to Islam is that they do not want to become Malays—they want to retain their own customs, languages, beliefs, and gods. The authors suggested in addition that some Orang Asli have converted to Christianity in part to escape the pressures from missionaries for Islam, who are supported by the state and who can be aggressive in their proselyting. The government of Malaysia tries to restrict access of Christian missionaries to the Orang Asli communities, they wrote. It is clear from the recent news story that those restrictions are no longer enforced.

The manager of a store on a Saskatchewan Hutterite colony pleaded guilty recently to violating Canadian law by selling the meat from wild geese. The story was picked up by a news service in Prince Albert, a city located in the center of the province.

Geese migrating through Saskatchewan (Photo by Chris Pawluk on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

David Tschetter admitted in a provincial court that he had been selling the goose meat at the Star City Colony, which violates Canada’s Migratory Birds Convention Act. The colony is a few miles outside the small town of Star City, which is about 60 miles east southeast of Prince Albert, the third largest city in Saskatchewan. During the court hearing, Mr. Tschetter said he had been selling both goose sausage and jerky. He pleaded guilty to five violations of the law.

Rich Hildebrand, a conservation officer, told the news service that the investigation of the sale of goose meat dated back to 2014. During that three-year period, conservation officers acting undercover had visited the colony shop on several occasions and each time Mr. Tschetter had told them that he knew the sale of the goose meat was illegal, but he sold the meat anyway—even after the agents had given him verbal and written warnings.

Hutterites at a farmers market in Saskatchewan — Hutterites at a farm market in Saskatchewan (Photo by Peter Merholz on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The court imposed stiff financial penalties on the colony. Mr. Tschetter received a fine of $500 for each of three counts, and $5,000 for each of two other counts. In addition, the court required the colony to take 350 pounds of goose meat that the Ministry of Environment would provide, process it, and then donate it to local food banks. The geese had been collected by the ministry during a different incident.

Mr. Hildebrand told the reporter that the fines were substantial, but appropriate. He hoped that “the message gets out that this isn’t taken lightly.”

A search of a shelf of books on Hutterite life turns up numerous references to the importance of barnyard animals such as geese—as well as turkeys, chickens, ducks, etc.—in the Hutterite agricultural economy. One mentions Hutterites interacting with wild geese. Lisa Marie Stahl wrote in her book My Hutterite Life (2003) that she likes to watch the wild Canada geese that nest every year on old bales of straw around the colony. “Out of respect for nature,” she wrote (p.119) “the guys work around certain bales, leaving them undisturbed where protective mothers sit and guard their eggs.”

While Ms. Stahl wrote that the geese she enjoys watching were Canada geese, it is not clear which species of goose the Star City colony has been abusing. The news report just referred to the meat as wild goose. It is clear from the maps in Edward S. Brinkley’s book National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Birds of North America that the meat sold might also have been from two other species of geese that occur in, or migrate through, central Saskatchewan, the Ross’s goose or the snow goose.

Violence in the home is a worldwide issue, especially for people concerned about developing more peaceful societies. Thus, a report last week on the rise of domestic abuse among the Tahitians suggests the value of a review of the history and cultural values which inhibit such violence. Or at least, which used to inhibit it.

Levy’s essay “Tahitian Gentleness and Redundant Controls” appears in the 1978 edition of this book.

According to an insightful article by Levy (1978) entitled “Tahitian Gentleness and Redundant Controls,” Western visitors to Tahiti in the 18th and 19th centuries reported that the Tahitians were gentle and peaceable to one another. The exception occurred during the early 19th century, about 1810-1820, when there were reports of heavy drinking and violence, which were evidently caused by the recent arrival of Protestant missionaries and the stresses of a transition to new, Western-influenced social patterns. Changes were hard to adjust to. Things soon returned to the old, gentle ways, however.

In that article, Levy went on to describe the conditions of violence prevailing in Tahiti while he was there doing his fieldwork, from 1961 – 1964. Careful observations at two Tahitian communities during that period showed that they had few problems with hostility. People displayed very little anxiety, stress, or physical or muscular strain. They had few psychological problems such as self-punitive depression, hypochondriasis, or fantasies of destructiveness. The author concluded that the Tahitian people dealt with hostility without it becoming a problem, since it was not manifest at the visceral-autonomic, voluntary muscular, or psychological levels.

The physical environment of the Tahitians in Faanui, a village on Bora Bora in the Society Islands (Photo by Makemake in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The physical and cultural environment on Tahiti had a lot of influence on the gentleness of the Tahitians, the anthropologist argued. Adaptations in the villages to the natural environment minimized external frustrations—food and other needs were plentiful and easily available. Their culture also served to reduce frustrations. For instance, they did not believe that they had any control over nature or over the behavior of other people; in fact, they thought that trying to change the nature of reality inevitably causes a rebound that destroys the initiator. The people were optimistic but passive, a condition produced by socialization and reinforced by other practices and values in their society. Their universe was less frustrating cognitively than one where individuals are conceived of as able to change things.

A number of factors in Tahitian culture affected the socialization and informal education which produced gentleness in the people, Levy (1978) wrote. Marriage relationships were relatively free of anxiety. In his major book on the people, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands, Levy (1973) wrote that he was aware of very little violence occurring while he was there. He observed that there was little even when people were drunk. “With the exception of a few incidents … people are as unhostile drunk as sober,” he wrote (p.284).

A Tahitian beverage (Photo by Adam Reeder on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

There was, however, somewhat more violence in domestic settings, where alcohol was involved. Men did sometimes return to their homes drunk and begin arguments that occasionally led them to hit their spouses or their children. But Levy (1973) did cite statistics of murders and of total crimes committed in French Polynesia during selected years from 1900 through 1959: for several of the dates, there were few if any figures in either column.

However, the situation changed dramatically by the turn of the century. A study by Jaspard, Brown and Pourette (2004) was based on a survey which discussed the issue of intimate partner violence in French Polynesia in culturally specific terms involving such issues as the role of alcohol, the economic relationships of men and women, and the presence of other family members. The report by the three authors pointed out that violence within the family in French Polynesia had become a major social concern.

And that’s the substance of the news story last week—domestic violence among the Tahitians has become even worse. It is now widespread in the overseas territories of France, especially in French Polynesia. The rates of abuse in Tahiti far exceed those of France itself, according to a government report given to the ministry of the overseas territories on Tuesday last week. The study, commissioned in 2016, found that one of the major causes of domestic violence in Tahiti has been the loss of employment among men. This fact was repeatedly cited by interviewees as an important factor in the rise of violence against women.

A sign for the police on Bora Bora, though the photographer notes, “You don’t see many of these in Polynesia” (Photo by sofakingevil on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The authorities in French Polynesia have been trying to help stem the violence through such means as producing video clips and television spots, holding forums, printing posters and the like. They have also organized meetings aimed at preventing violence and assisting victims.

Furthermore, legal protections are being implemented in the territory. As of 2012, women who are in danger of abuse can apply in a family court for a protection order from a judge. In 2015, 14 requests for protection orders were made; in 2016, the number had jumped to 38. Court orders to expel a violent person from a household can also be requested, though the Multipurpose Association for Legal Action indicates that this measure—evicting a violent spouse—is not requested very often in Tahiti.

It is sobering to reflect on the fact that a society which experienced only occasional episodes of domestic abuse barely 50 years ago could have changed so dramatically and so quickly.

An anti-Amish ordinance failed to pass in Wisconsin last Tuesday, in large part due to the vociferous, pro-Amish objections raised by local voters.

Hemlock Creek Amish farm in Wood County, Wisconsin (Photo by William Garrett on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The daily newspaper for the town of Wisconsin Rapids explained the controversial proposal several days before it was due to be brought up for a vote by the Wood County Board of Supervisors. Bill Winch, a member of the board, explained to the newspaper that he had helped draft the measure because he was concerned about the high number of fatal crashes on county roads involving Amish buggies. Nine people have been killed in crashes with horse-drawn vehicles since 2009. He believed his measure would better regulate the Amish and their buggies to cut down the rate of accidents. Fundamentally, the proposed ordinance would have treated the operators of horse-drawn buggies and wagons exactly like the drivers of motor vehicles.

On the surface it all sounded reasonable, but the proposal generated controversy because of the numerous regulations that the Amish would have been required to follow. Buggy operators would have been required to be at least 16 years of age and to get driver’s licenses from the state division of motor vehicles, the same as motorists. Obtaining the licenses would have required them to take a written test showing good knowledge of the motor vehicle laws. The proposed ordinance would have required the Amish to purchase vehicle liability insurance, wear seat belts in their buggies, install windshields and side windows, add rear-view mirrors, put in child safety seats, and so on.

Amish buggy driven beside the road on U.S. highway 61 in Grant County, Wisconsin — Amish buggy driven beside a road on U.S. highway 61 in Grant County, Wisconsin (Photo by Corey Coyle in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Prof. Mark Louden, a specialist in Amish culture and religion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the paper that if the measure were to be passed and the Amish started being ticketed by the police for not obeying it, they would doubtless move out of the county en masse. They would strongly object to the purchase of insurance and to obtaining a driver’s license—those requirements would violate their beliefs. After reading the proposed ordinance, he said, “All I can think of is if they pass this, they don’t want the Amish in Wood County.”

Lance Pliml, Chairman of the Board, said the ordinance was originally intended to address the perceived need for proper lighting on Amish buggies, and to require that buggy operators have some sort of safety education. He said that Amish children under 10 years of age have operated them and have failed to understand even what a stop sign at a highway intersection means. He did express the opinion that the ordinance had grown beyond that—into a “tough sell,” he admitted.

Amish buggy driven along the road on a bitterly cold January morning near St. Anna, Wisconsin — Amish buggy driven along a road on a bitterly cold January morning near St. Anna, Wisconsin (Photo by Royal Broil on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

At the board meeting on Tuesday, December 19, citizens spoke out strongly in opposition to the proposed measure, according to a news story about the meeting. One resident threatened to contact the American Civil Liberties Union and to sue the board if it passed the bill. Others called the proposal “stupid,” “invasive,” “far-fetched,” and the result of bigotry and prejudice. After board member Winch made a motion to vote on his proposed ordinance, none of the other 18 board members would even second it, so it died on the spot.

“I didn’t mean to cause all of this controversy,” Mr. Winch said. “I do not dislike the Amish.”

Since the Piaroa believed that the sun plus Wahari, one of their mythic figures, were born at the Atures Rapids of the Orinoco River, it isn’t surprising that their ancestors carved large petroglyphs there. A news report last week described the setting and the scientific work by archaeologists to photograph and describe the huge engravings, many of which were carved on exposed rock faces in the middle of the river.

The Atures rapids, the Raudal de Atures, of the Orinoco River (Photo by Luis Alejandro Bernal Romer on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Philip Riris, an archaeologist from University College London, used camera-equipped drones to photograph and study the engravings on the rocks, which are surrounded by the rapids. They are among the largest petroglyphs anywhere in the world. One engraving portrays a horned snake that is 98 feet long; a panel, which is over 3,200 square feet in size, has 93 petroglyphs. The scientist studied eight groups of engravings on the boulders and the exposed bedrock of five different islands in the river.

Riris wrote in his report on the investigation that at least some of the petroglyphs depict events that occurred in Piaroa myths. The enormous horned snake may represent a myth about Wahari, the Piaroa creator deity, slaying a monstrous serpent. He said that other petroglyphs showing human figures surrounding a flute player may have depicted a renewal ritual that coincided with the seasonal emergence of the rocks when the river levels dropped and the islands were easier to reach.

Petroglyphs found close to the west bank of the Orinoco near Caicara, Venezuela (Photo by T.A. Bendrat published in the American Journal of Archaeology 1912, v.16(4) p.519; in Wikimedia in the public domain)

The importance of the findings, the archaeologist said, was what they reveal about the ancient cultures of the local indigenous people. “These engravings are embedded in the everyday—how people lived and traveled in the region, the importance of aquatic resources and the seasonal rhythmic rising and falling of the water,” he said. Some of the petroglyphs are believed to be 2,000 years old.

A press release from the university indicated that the petroglyphs have been studied before, but never in as much detail. It quoted the principal investigator of the project, Dr. José Oliver at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, as saying that the Atures Rapids was a trading center in pre-Columbian South America. “Archaeological evidence suggests that traders from diverse and distant regions interacted in this area over the course of two millennia before European colonization” he said. The purpose of the project is to investigate those cultural interactions. Alexander von Humboldt studied the petroglyphs when he traveled along the river in 1800, as have several archaeologists over the past half-century.

On Tuesday last week, a research institute in Kerala released the results of a study that demonstrated how much the Malapandaram, and other tribal societies, are losing their traditional knowledge. The results of the study were summarized by The Hindu and numerous other news sources in India.

A tribal family at Attathode, probably Malapandaram (Photo by jaya8022 in Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license)

The study of eight different tribal societies living in the Western Ghats of Kerala, including the Malapandaram, was conducted by the C.V. Raman Laboratory of Ecological Informatics, which is affiliated with the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala. The questionnaires the researchers administered were grouped by the ages of the respondents into people ages 10 – 25, 25 – 50, and over 50. Not surprisingly, the younger respondents retained less knowledge of traditional subjects.

The point of the study was to determine in numerical terms how much traditional knowledge the eight tribal societies had lost. The losses ranged, according to the analyses by the authors, from 33 percent for the Malapandaram up to over 50 percent for other groups. However, the news reports indicated that out of the eight societies, the Malapandaram preserve the least amount of their own indigenous knowledge.

The study was conducted among the tribal groups of the Western Ghats because the mountain range has been designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. That designation is significant. According to the lead scholar, Jaishankar R. Nair, Head of the C.V. Raman Laboratory, “The shrinkage in [the] traditional knowledge base is detrimental to the existence of geo-heritage sites. The study highlights the need for preserving the traditional knowledge at any cost,” he said.

The news stories about the study reviewed several of the traditional practices of the eight societies, but the first one they mentioned, collecting honey, was clearly the purview of the Malapandaram. Honey collecting was cited in several works by the British anthropologist Brian Morris as one of the foundations of their culture. In his major book, Forest Traders: A Socio-Economic Study of the Hill Pandaram, Morris wrote, “The most important single economic activity of the Hill Pandaram is the collection of honey (Morris 1982a, p.84).” He also described the importance of honey gathering to their forest-based economy in a 1977 journal article.

The giant honey bee, Apis dorsata, a species that forms its large combs in open, but inaccessible, spots (Photo by Malcolm Manners on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

In his book, Morris described in detail the three different species of bees which produce honey gathered by the Malapandaram. The biggest and most spectacular of the three is the giant honey bee (Apis dorsata), which forms its combs on inaccessible cliff faces or hanging from the tip ends of the limbs of huge trees. Morris goes on for pages describing the daring-do of the Malapandaram in getting out to the large combs, plus the occasional accidents, falls, and deaths they endured in order to gather the honey (pages 84 – 87).

In that book and in his 1977 journal article, the anthropologist summarized the forest-based economy of the people in terms of their honey gathering. He explained that a careful look at the historical evidence would show that although the Malapandaram lived in the forested mountains of Kerala, they had maintained extensive contacts with the traders of the plains for at least 200 years and possibly for several thousand years. The trading has significantly influenced their society and economy, he argued.

The Malapandaram, at least in the 1970s, were paid only nominal prices for the so-called minor forest products that they gathered—honey, beeswax, etc. Although some Malapandaram were active collectors while Morris was doing his fieldwork among them, others were in contact with the outside world only intermittently. The items that the Malapandaram traded for their forest products were largely luxuries—tobacco, chewing items, and beverages—and only small amounts of the trade goods they received consisted of what could be considered staples. So the goods they received for their trades of honey and other forest products represented mostly supplements rather than essentials.

A group of Malapandarams engaged in polishing precious stones (Image in L.K. Anantha Krishna Iyer *Cochin Tribes and Castes* (1909) v.2 p.396: in the public domain)

Morris added that the forest contractors employed agents who frequently patrolled their territories and attempted to cajole, sometimes to coerce, and at times in the past, to physically assault the Malapandaram to induce them to gather more honey and other minor forest products for them. Those experiences with the outside agents taught the forest people to be timid and shy and they still hid in Morris’s time from the agents when they were roaming about in the neighborhood. The individualistic, peaceful nature of their culture, the scholar concluded, is largely a result of their being bound, at least to a degree, to the trading system of the larger society.

Unfortunately, the news accounts last week about the current study of the Kerala tribal societies do not tell us how much the more settled Malapandaram of today rely on bartering forest honey for outside consumer goods. They just tell us that their traditional knowledge of gathering, using, and trading honey is being lost.

The Times of India last Tuesday published a story about some Birhor people that was straight out of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, arguably one of the greatest novels of western literature. Like Jean Valjean, the major character in the novel, five Birhor men are facing lengthy prison sentences for the crime of petty theft. Valjean stole some loaves of bread; the Birhor men stole some cloth and a few other items. The crime of all of them was dealing with their poverty.

A group of Adivasi (tribal) women dancing at a festival in Jharkhand state (Photo by Tuhin Paul in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Some Birhor—one of the prominent Adivasi peoples of northern India—who worked at a brick kiln in the Palamu District of India’s Jharkhand state, broke into several homes in October and November. They stole a mobile phone battery, four mobile phones, an emergency light, a rechargeable flashlight, and nine meters of cloth. Police also charge them with stealing some cash, though they did not have enough money to get any clothing made out of the cloth they’d taken.

The newspaper interviewed the Superintendent of Police for the district, Indrajeet Mahatha. He explained that if four or fewer people had been involved in the burglaries, they would have just been charged with robbery. But with five or more people involved, it must be considered by law to have been dacoity—a major crime. When three different homes were raided in just one November night, local people raised an uproar, which included blocking a road, to get the police to do something.

Heeralall Yadav, the Deputy Superintendent of Police, quickly solved the case by tracking the locations of the mobile phones that had been stolen to the Birhor workers at the brick kiln. There, the police found the stolen cloth as well. Superintendent Mahatha said that seven people had been in the Birhor group committing the crimes, but only five were present at the brick kiln when the police arrived to arrest them.

The mahua tree (Madhuca longifolia) (Photo by J. M. Garg in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

In his article about Birhor living in the same district more than 64 years ago, Bhattacharyya (1953) made a number of interesting points. “The Birhor [of this district] are peace-loving and honest people. As far as the police report goes they are never involved in any crime,” he wrote (p. 10). They rarely fought with one another; in order to avoid getting into disputes with permanent dwellers of the plains, they avoided gathering mahua (Madhuca longifolia), a very popular tree that produces seeds which are still widely used by many for the production of vegetable butter, soap, detergents, and other products.

How much they have changed in the intervening 64 years since Bhattacharyya visited this particular Birhor community can be judged by the ways their needs have changed. In March – April 1953 when he visited them, the author noticed that the Birhor lived a hand-to-mouth existence. They ate what they could find or went without food. They did not save anything to eat the next day, and many would refuse to work at such jobs as repairing roads. Some would rather starve than work for pay, though others did do contract day-laboring on farms. “The Birhor generally hate to do other’s work,” he wrote (p. 9). In essence, they really disliked giving up their forest-based gathering lifestyle.

A Birhor man (Screen capture from the video “Birhor—a Tribe Displaced for Nothing” by Video Volunteers on YouTube, Creative Commons license)

Now some of them have become so modernized that they are seeking the pleasures of smart phones, though presumably they were unaware that the stolen goods might be traced by GPS systems. Victor Hugo’s story changed from a tale of a man serving an unjust prison sentence into someone, a thousand pages later, who symbolized the figure of Christ. The story of the five Birhor men is less complex. They are just characters in a hostile world that is changing—one that they are having a hard time coping with.

The sustainable harvesting of roots from the devil’s claw plants growing in the Kalahari Desert, and their careful marketing to international herbal medicine buyers, are returning increasing profits to the Ju/’hoansi. Two different reports last week, from the Namibia Economist and the New Era newspapers, carried complementary stories about the good economic news from the Nyae Nyae Conservancy of the Ju/’hoansi and the neighboring N#a Jaqna Conservancy of the !Kung.

Chopped up and dried roots of the devil’s claw, Harpagophytum procumbens — Chopped up and dried roots of the devil’s claw, *Harpagophytum procumbens* (Photo by H. Zell in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The reports explained that plentiful rains in 2017 and rising prices for the herbal medicines made from the devil’s claw roots have boosted the harvesting and sales of the plant products. For centuries, according to an earlier report, the Ju/’hoansi have been carefully harvesting some of the roots of the unobtrusive plants for their medicinal properties, in the process carefully protecting them so they will still be flourishing the next time the people want to gather them. During this past year, nearly 200 Ju/’hoansi harvested and sold about 18.7 tons of the tubers, earning the people nearly N$1 million (US$73,690). The conservancy will earn about N$1.4 million. The neighboring !Kung harvested somewhat more on the lands of their conservancy.

Other than the well-documented health benefits of the tubers, part of the appeal of the products is that they are harvested and sold on a strictly sustainable basis—a strategy which melds with the traditional approaches of the Ju/’hoansi anyway and adapts their traditions into a modern market economy. The Nyae Nyae Conservancy has particularly benefited because it has agreed to an arrangement with the buyer, EcoSo Dynamics, a local exporting firm, to a written contract that has formed a type of fair trade marketing system.

The fruit of a devil’s claw in the Kalahari Desert hooked fiendishly into someone’s left foot (Photo by Tee La Rosa in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The fair trade agreement, called Fair for Life Certification, is based on the concept that local, indigenous people can take charge of their own development. The parties to the contract agree that both the harvesters and the company handling the products will work together and form respectful relationships, the reports said. Fair working conditions are essential, as is respect for the environment in every phase of the supply chain. Buyers can then read on the products they purchase the conditions under which the herbal medicines were harvested, processed and sold.

Mr. Gero Diekmann, Managing Director of EcoSo Dynamics, said that the partnership between his company and the Ju/’hoansi harvesters has grown on a basis of mutual trust over the past 10 years. In cooperation with the conservancies, they have developed a system whereby each bag of roots can be traced back not only to the individual who gathered it but to the actual place where it was harvested.

The stable system, composed of a reliable local buyer and harvesters who are quite comfortable with the need for careful, consistent, system-wide requirements and record keeping, fosters the sale of products that are certified as both organic and fair trade. The two conservancies earn about 75 percent of their income from their devil’s claw businesses.

A report prepared by some tribal activists accuses the government of Kerala of undermining the rights of the scheduled tribes living in the state. To judge by an article published last week in the Deccan Chronicle, a major South Indian newspaper, the report appears to have focused on two of the highly peaceful societies in the state, the Kadar and the Malapandaram. The report was released at a conference held in Kochi, a city on the coast of Kerala.

Tribal girls, probably Kadar, photographed in a Kadar area near Kochi, Kerala (Photo by Eileen Delhi on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A prominent tribal rights activist, Mr. M. Geethanandan, discussed the accusations made by the report and their implications with the newspaper. He said the state has violated the human rights of the Kadar and the Malapandaram people by the way it has treated them. Specifically, he charged that state authorities had deliberately avoided following the provisions of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) of India, a major piece of legislation aimed, when it was passed in 2006, at protecting the 100 million Adivasi, the tribal people in India. Many Adivasi live in or near forests and are dependent on the resources they obtain from them.

Mr. Geethanandan said that the state will have a long way to go to rectify its lack of concerns for its tribal people and its lack of adherence to the provisions of the 2006 law. The report claims that the government has managed to correctly follow the provisions of the law requiring the protection of the Kadar villages in the Thrissur District, but other Kadar living in the Palakkad District are not being protected. The latter group includes Kadar who subsist in the area near the Parambikulam Tiger Reserve.

A Kadar woman with two children (Photo by Dpradeepkumar in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Tribal activists such as Ms. K. Geetha, the chief of the Vazhachal Kadar Gram Sabha, had complained to the Scheduled Tribes Commission that the authorities had misrepresented the facts regarding the government’s proposal to build a big power project near the Kadar village. The first environmental impact assessment (EIA) prepared by the Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute reported incorrectly that the Kadar village is 5 km away from the dam site. The second EIA prepared by a group called WAPCOS, the Water and Power Consultancy Services, did not even mention the existence of the village.

The recent report charges that the government agencies are ignoring the rights of the tribal people in violation of the FRA. In contrast, the Scheduled Tribes Commission reported, correctly, that the proposed Athirapilly dam site is really only 400 m. from the village and it will definitely affect the Kadar community. The report also mentions that the Malapandaram in the Pathanamthitta and Idukki districts are not even being given consideration for their community forest rights as provided by the 2006 law.

In 2006, the Lepchas of Sikkim became alarmed about proposals to build dams in the Teesta River basin, including ones in their Dzongu Reserve. Their protests, and their other responses to the dam-builders, form the subject of an article in Live History India, a digital platform that launched in 2017 to examine and reveal the rich cultural experiences of the subcontinent. Even though many of the events described by the late-November article were covered in the “News and Reviews” feature of this website, the careful review provided by Live History India is worthwhile.

The Dzongu Reserve of the Lepcha in North Sikkim (Photo by buddhatripper on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The basis of Lepcha concerns about hydroelectric dams has been their feeling that they would irreparably harm the ecosystem. As protests gained steam in 2006 and 2007, the people widely supported roadblocks and hunger strikes protesting the proposals. The protests were quite effective and led to the state government cancelling four out of the six projects in the Dzongu. The two remaining ones are still under construction on the Rongyong River, a Teesta tributary.

The authors write that the uncaring dam-builders and the popular protests awakened in the Lepcha the need to do more than demonstrate. A new organization established to fight the destruction of the sacred land, called “Affected Citizens of Teesta,” focused on forming sustainable alternatives to power dams on sacred rivers. Why not play to the strengths of the Lepcha themselves? They are a unique indigenous community living in a spectacular landscape at the base of the world’s third highest peak, Mt. Kanchenjunga—an area ripe for more tourism, they felt.

A Lepcha man and woman shown in an 1872 engraving (Image from Dalton’s Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal in Wikimedia, in the Public Domain)

Late in 2008, college graduates Gyatso Lepcha, Kachyo Lepcha, Tenzing Lepcha, and Dupden Lepcha began a project of encouraging local homeowners in the Dzongu to open their homes to home-stays. They said that their plan would increase employment and provide a boost to the local economy—other than by building big dams. The initiation of the home-stay movement fostered pride among the residents of the reserve and it led to a revival of the traditional Lepcha cuisine—tubers, roots, and buckwheat pancakes—not only for tourists but also for members of the younger generation.

The advent of home-stays and the tourists they attracted helped promote ancillary businesses such as car rentals, tour operators, guides, and of course local shops. In 2010, the crown prince of Norway and his family visited the Dzongu and stayed in one of the new tourist facilities. The state government saw the value of the tourists and became quite interested in helping to promote their visiting. The government now helps sponsor the ancient Lepcha festival Tendong Lho Rum Faat every August as part of its tourist initiative.

Mt. Kanchenjunga from Sandakphu (Photo by Anirban Biswas in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

The designation of the Kanchenjunga National Park as a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 2016 acknowledged the extraordinary importance of the Dzongu and the traditional Lepcha presence in Sikkim. As the writers put it, the designation “acknowledged [the] sacred meanings, stories and practices [of the Lepcha] as an integral part of Sikkimese identity.”

The article concluded that the protest movement beginning in 2006 was not so much formed in opposition to economic development as it was started in order to preserve the ties between Lepcha culture and the spectacular natural environment they live in. The 7000 Lepcha living in the region still cherish those ties.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Christmas in a Semai Community

Selling Wild Geese

The Rise of Domestic Abuse in French Polynesia

Anti-Amish Ordinance Fails in Wisconsin

Piaroa Petroglyphs

The Loss of Traditional Knowledge

Petty Theft by Some Birhor

Taking Money from the Devil’s Claws

Kerala Fails to Protect Tribal Societies

Protecting the Dzongu: A Recent History

Subscribe to our weekly digest

Subject Listing

Previous News and Reviews