Light at the Edge of the World (13 page)

By tracing kinship through time, anthropologist Jim Yost discovered the extent to which warfare had dominated the lives of the Waorani: over the last five generations, no less than 54 per cent of all the men, and 40 per cent of the women, had died as the result of spearing raids. One in five had been shot or kidnapped by outsiders, the
cowade
,
whom the Waorani believed to be cannibals. Astonishingly, over 5 per cent of the effective mortality was due to individuals fleeing to the lands of the cowade, never to return. Presumably, they felt that life even among cannibals was preferable to the world they knew. Another 5 per cent succumbed to poisonous snakes, the highest rate of such mortality recorded for a human population; 95 per cent of Waorani men had been bitten by a venomous snake, 50 per cent of them more than once. In his seven years with the tribe, Yost heard only of three instances of what he might consider natural death: the Waorani implied that the individuals in question had grown old and passed away. Then, one day, a young Wao inadvertently let slip that one of the men had “died becoming old”; that is, he had grown so old that the people decided to spear him and throw his body into the river.

Forty years after contact, the world that Kowe knew as a young man no longer exists. Spearing raids are a thing of the past and even the missionaries are gone, expelled by the Ecuadorian government. A people who but two generations ago employed stone tools to clear their fields are today participants in an ecotourism industry that each year brings scores of outsiders to their once isolated settlements. Waorani men work for oil companies, while their women barter in sunglasses, T-shirts, radios, baseball hats and
other trade goods. Healers conduct seminars in the forest, while tribal leaders attend conferences around the world, sponsored by multinational organizations. In the remote reaches of their territory, there may still be a small band of uncontacted Waorani, splintered from the majority, running scared in the forest. Whatever their fate, they clearly do not represent the future of the people.

In many ways, the plight of Waorani and their situation today exemplify the contradictions and challenges faced by modern anthropology. It is often said that anthropologists seek to deny indigenous peoples a chance to change, preferring instead to sequester them in static enclaves like some sort of zoological specimen. In truth, no serious anthropologist seeks to freeze a people in time. And no one who understands the life once led by the Waorani would wish it on anyone. Cultural survival is not about preservation. Change itself does not destroy a culture, since all societies are constantly evolving. Indeed, a culture survives, as David Maybury-Lewis has written, when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo. The Waorani did not stop being Waorani when their traditional cycle of self-destructive violence was broken. It was not the medical work of the missionaries, for example, that transformed Waorani life; it was the baggage
that came with it, the imposition of the spiritual worldview of outsiders who believed that they had the monopoly on the route to God. Add to this the industrial exploitation of the Waorani homeland: the roads that pierced the wild, the pools of burning oil that in time would turn the emerald forests into a wasteland. The result is the bewilderment of Kowe, and the loss of another possibility of life.

 

IN 1990, MALAYSIA exported 9.4 billion cubic feet (269 million m
³
) of tropical timber, over 90 per cent as raw logs, cut for the most part on Borneo in the forests of Sarawak, homeland of a dozen indigenous cultures, including the Penan, one of the last nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia. In the early 1980s, when growing international concern focussed the world's attention on the destruction of the Amazon rain forests, Brazil produced less than 3 per cent of global tropical timber exports; Malaysia accounted for 60 per cent. According to the World Bank, trees were being harvested in Sarawak at four times the sustainable rate. Industrial logging in the region has a shallow history, a mere four decades. But by 1993 , in the Baram River drainage alone, more than thirty logging companies, some equipped with as many as twelve hundred bulldozers, were working a million acres (400 000 ha) belonging to the Kayan, Kenyah and Penan. By 1998, over 70 per cent of
Penan territory had been officially designated for commercial exploitation; much of it had already been logged.

As the forests fall, the indigenous cultures suffer the most, the very people who over the course of generations have developed an intimate knowledge of the land, men and women who, lacking the technology to transform the forest, chose instead long ago to understand it. In myth and stories, they celebrate the beauty of a landscape whose biological diversity astounds the scientific world. An entomologist working in Borneo identified some six hundred species of butterflies and caterpillars in a single day. Another reported over a thousand species of cicadas. In a collection of four thousand fungi, a mycologist found that half were unknown species. The floristic diversity surpasses that of the most prolific areas of the Amazon: in a series of forest plots encompassing in total a mere twenty-two acres (9 ha), a botanist counted over seven hundred species of trees, as many as have been recorded for all of North America.

The ultimate fate of these forests remains unknown, but with the value of timber exports from Sarawak alone surpassing a billion dollars a year, the only certainty is that the logging will continue. I first travelled to Borneo and the Penan homeland in 1989 . On my second visit in 1993 , I found that logging roads had reached remote areas that
had seemed impossibly distant from any threat but four years before. One afternoon, a Penan friend took me to a mountaintop where for generations his people had come to pray. From the summit, we looked out over a pristine forest, past the clear headwaters of one of Sarawak's ancient rivers to distant mountains that rose toward the heart of Borneo. There on the horizon, coming over the mountains and through the valleys from seven directions, were the raw scars of advancing logging roads. The nearest was but three miles (5 km) from the encampment where we were staying. When the wind was blowing, we could hear the sound of chain saws, even as the light failed and night came upon us. Five years later, I returned to Sarawak again to assess the situation of the Penan.

 

THE BARAM RIVER is the colour of the earth. To the north, the soils of Sarawak disappear into the South China Sea, and fleets of Japanese freighters hang on the horizon, awaiting the tides and a chance to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forests of Borneo. A hundred miles (160 km) upriver, on the banks of the Tutoh at the Penan settlement of Long Iman, my old friend Mutang was away hunting wild pigs, to be sold to loggers in a nearby camp. His father, Tu‘o, headman of the longhouse, was born in the forest, at a time when nearly all Penan were nomads,
hunters and gatherers moving through the vast and remote forested uplands of northern Borneo.

All of Mutang's life has been marked by the frenzy of logging that has gripped Malaysia over the past four decades. Deprived of their traditional basis for life, the Penan drift toward government settlements built with the intent of drawing the people out of the forests. As a result, no more than three hundred of the roughly seven thousand Penan are today nomadic.

Long Iman is bleak, a wooden longhouse roofed in zinc, with great empty rooms and shuttered windows that keep out the wind. The river is soiled with silt and debris, the water no longer fit to drink. The afternoon rains turn the clearings around the settlement to a mud mire where children play. When I met Tu‘o on the landing by the river, he greeted me warmly, touching my hand and passing his fingers over his heart. I didn't speak his name and he did not say mine. We called each other
padée
, brother, the proper salutation.

In the evening, children gathered around a television and watched as a Malaysian journalist read the news in a language few of them understand. Tu‘o apologized for the spartan fare at dinner: rice and broth, a plate of wild ferns. “How can you feed your guests in a settlement? It's not like the forest, where there is plenty of food. In the forest, I can
give you as much as you want. Here, you just sit and stare at your guests, and you can't offer them anything. This longhouse is well built, and we have mattresses and pillows. But you can't eat a pillow.”

Thirty years ago, government agents induced Tu‘o to settle at Long Iman. Facilities that were promised—schools and clinics—were never built. There are few jobs, mostly menial work in logging camps, and with little experience, the Penan make poor farmers. For Tu‘o, recalling the past is not a matter of mere nostalgia. It is a longing for a time when his children did not have to go to sleep hungry and his people lived by the grace of the forest, unaware of the impending cataclysm.

As we sat in a circle on the wooden slats of the kitchen floor, sharing food, I explained to Tu‘o the purpose of our journey. Our goal was to reach one of the last bands of nomads, a cluster of families from the Ubong River who live for the most part in the remote reaches of Gunung Mulu National Park, a mountainous refuge that rises from the Tutoh River. Only in the confines of the park is the forest pristine and the traditional subsistence base intact. With me was my friend Ian Mackenzie, a Canadian linguist intent on compiling the first Penan grammar and dictionary, a labour of years. This was Ian's tenth sojourn among the Penan.

Asked to form an expedition overnight, Tu‘o was ready by dawn. With six young Penan as our companions and Tu‘o as guide, we left Long Iman in late morning and travelled up the Tutoh by longboat to reach a trail that climbed steeply through gingers and wild durian. Movement toward the ridge was slow and deliberate. For the Penan, even those recently settled, the destination is everywhere and nowhere. The capacity for survival lies all around in the forest.

Approaching the ridgeline, two hours above the Tutoh, we heard the low drone of logging trucks downshifting on the far side of the river. Peering through an opening in the trees across the narrow valley, Yapun, one of the young Penan, said with obvious contempt, “That is the work of Taib.” Having denounced Abdul Taib Mahmud, the government minister responsible for Sarawak's forestry practices, Yapun turned his attention to a parade of insects at his feet. “If only we were as plentiful as these ants, the Malaysians would leave us alone. But it is they who outnumber the ants and make our lives so miserable.”

For two long days, we walked into the forest, following a route that rose and fell with each successive ridge. Delighted to be away from the settlement, the Penan watched the forest for signs, hunting hornbills at dusk, tracking deer and sun bears, gathering the ripe fruits of
feral mango trees. When, on the third morning, our party crested a steep hill and found a message tacked to a tree, we knew the nomads to be near. The note, scratched in broken Malay, said very simply that all the families had gathered to await us at an encampment known as Lamin Sapé.

 

IT WAS JUST after dawn and the sound of gibbons ran across the canopy of the forest. Smoke from cooking fires mingled with the mist. A hunting party returned. Tu‘o bowed his head in morning prayer: “Thank you for the sun rising, for the trees and the forest of abundance, the trees that were not made by man, but by you.”

On this ridge at Lamin Sapé, where generations of Penan have come, four families remained, in flimsy thatch shelters made of poles and rattan perched above the forest. Asik Nyelit is the headman. Ten years ago, I first met him on the banks of the Tutoh, when the river ran clear. He had recently been jailed for participating in the blockades that had shut down logging in much of Sarawak. Begun as a quixotic gesture, blowpipes confronting bulldozers, these protests electrified the international environmental movement, leading then Senator Al Gore to describe the Penan as the frontline troops in the battle to save the Earth. But the logging continued.

“From the time of our origins,” Asik lamented, “we have preserved the trees and animals, every single thing in the
forest. This we know. It is in our legends, our traditions. When we think of the places and our land, our hearts are troubled. Everywhere I go, I feel the need to weep.”

For the Penan, the destruction of their forests represents far more than the loss of subsistence: it implies the death of a people. The forest is their homeland, and all their history is recorded in the landscape. Peter Brosius, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia, lived among the Penan for nearly four years. “The land,” he says, “ is filled with cultural significance. For streams alone, they have over two thousand names, each imbued with its own history. Logging does not merely destroy the trees and the forest, it destroys the things that are iconic of Penan society. Bulldozers and roads obliterate recognizable features. Once the canopy is opened, an impenetrable mass of thorny underbrush makes access and movement impossible. The cultural resonance of the landscape, all the sites with biographical, social and historical significance, are hidden, producing a sort of collective amnesia.”

In the morning, we went with the children to gather fruit in the forest. Pajak, the eldest of the nomads, who vows never to enter a settlement, sent with us two of his daughters, Tudé and Lesevet. The wild tangle of trails and vegetation would have lost us in a moment had we not been able to follow the nimble steps of girls not yet a decade old. They skipped across ravines, slipped laughing past thorn
palms, squealed with delight as they climbed, hand over hand, up lianas that led to branches of white
langsat
fruits, sweet as nectar, which, shaken from the limbs, were gathered from the forest floor and carried back to camp in baskets woven from rattan.

Asik was there to meet us, and we followed him and his wife, Juna, down a steep and slippery slope to a glade in the forest where water runs. With him was his son Péndi, a toddler of two, scampering alongside a pet monkey, a pigtailed macaque that struck away at every opportunity. “Come back, my friend,” Asik cried, “I will protect you.” The monkey returned and leapt onto his shoulder. Though content to kill most anything in the wild, the Penan never harm an animal once it has been brought into the circle of the family. Nothing horrifies them more than the thought of raising domesticated animals for slaughter.