The Wayfinders (17 page)

This legacy of dispossession, in what Eduardo
Galeano called “the century of the wind,” reminds us that these fateful
events happened not in the distant past but in the lifetimes of our own
grandparents, and they continue to this day. Genocide, the physical
extermination of a people, is universally condemned. Ethnocide, the
destruction of a people’s way of life, is in many quarters sanctioned and
endorsed as appropriate development policy. Modernity provides the rationale
for disenfranchisement, with the real goal too often being the extraction of
natural resources on an industrial scale from territories occupied for
generations by indigenous peoples whose ongoing presence on the land proves
to be an inconvenience.

THE MOUTH OF THE BARAM RIVER
in Borneo is the colour of the earth. To the
north, the soils of Sarawak disappear into the South China Sea and fleets of
empty 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.
The river settlements are settings of opportunity and despair — muddy
logging camps and clusters of shanties, their leprous facades patched with
sheets of metal, plastic, and scavenged boards. Children by the river’s edge
dump barrels of garbage, which drifts back to shore in the wake of each
passing log barge. For kilometres the river is choked with debris and silt,
and along its banks lie thousands of logs stacked thirty deep, some awaiting
shipment, some slowly rotting in the tropical heat.

Some 150 kilometres upriver is another world, a
varied and magical landscape of forest and soaring mountains, dissected by
crystalline rivers and impregnated by the world’s most extensive network of
caves and underground passages. This is the traditional territory of the
Penan, a culture of hunters and gatherers often said to be among the last
nomadic peoples of Southeast Asia. In myth and in daily life they celebrate
the bounty of a forest whose biological richness and diversity surpasses
that of even the most prolific regions of the Amazon. In a series of plots
comprising a total area of but a single square kilometre of Borneo woodland,
less than a fortieth the area of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, have been found
as many species of trees as exist in all of North America.

The term
nomadic
is somewhat misleading, implying a life of
constant movement and with it perhaps a dearth of fidelity to place. In
fact, the Penan passage through the forest is cyclical and resource
dependent, with the same sites being occupied time and again over the
lifetime of an individual. Thus the forest is for them a series of
neighbourhoods, wild and potentially dangerous in certain ways, but
fundamentally domesticated by generations of human presence and interaction.
Every feature of the landscape resonates with a story. Every point along a
trail, every boulder and cave, each one of the more than two thousand
streams that run through their lands has a name. A sense of stewardship
permeates Penan society, dictating consistently the manner in which the
people utilize and apportion the environment. Individual resources, a clump
of sago, fruit trees, dart-poison trees, fishing sites, medicinal plants are
affiliated with individual kin groups, and these familial rights
acknowledged by all pass down through the generations. “From the forest,”
they say very simply, “we get our life.”

What most impressed me when I first visited the
Penan in 1989 was a certain quality of being, an essential humanity that was
less innate than a consequence of the manner in which they had chosen to
live their lives. They had little sense of time, save for the rhythms of the
natural world, the fruiting seasons of plants, the passage of the sun and
moon, the sweat bees that emerge two hours before dusk, the black cicadas
that electrify the forest at precisely six every evening. They had no notion
of paid employment, of work as burden, as opposed to leisure as recreation.
For them, there was only life, the daily round. Children learned not in
school but through experience, often at the side of their parents. With
families and individuals often widely dispersed, self-sufficiency was the
norm, with everyone capable of doing every necessary task. So there was very
little sense of hierarchy.

How do you measure wealth in a society in which
there are no specialists, in which everyone can make everything from raw
materials readily found in the forest, a society in which there is no
incentive to accumulate material possessions because everything has to be
carried on the back? The Penan explicitly perceive wealth as the strength of
social relations among people, for should these relationships weaken or
fray, all will suffer. Should conflict lead to a schism and families go
their separate ways for prolonged periods, both groups may starve for want
of sufficient hunters. Thus, as in many hunting and gathering societies,
direct criticism of another is frowned upon. The priority is always the
solidarity of the group. Confrontation and displays of anger are exceedingly
rare. Civility and humour are the norm.

There is no word for “thank you” in their
language because sharing is an obligation. One never knows who will be the
next to bring food to the fire. I once gave a cigarette to an elderly woman
and watched as she tore it apart to distribute equitably the individual
strands of tobacco to each shelter in the encampment, rendering the product
useless but honouring her duty to share. When, some time after my first
visit, a number of Penan came to Canada to campaign for the protection of
their forests, nothing impressed them more than homelessness. They could not
understand how in a place as wealthy as Vancouver such a thing could exist.
A Canadian or American grows up believing that homelessness is a regrettable
but inevitable feature of life. The Penan live by the adage that a poor man
shames us all. Indeed, the greatest transgression in their culture is
sihun
, a concept that essentially means a failure to share.

The Penan lacked the written word; the total
vocabulary of the language at any point in time was always the knowledge of
the best storyteller. This too had consequences. Writing, while clearly an
extraordinary innovation in human history, is by definition brilliant
shorthand that permits and even encourages the numbing of memory. Oral
traditions sharpen recollection, even as they seem to open a certain
mysterious dialogue with the natural world. Just as we can hear the voices
of characters when we read a novel, the Penan perceive the voices of animals
in the forest. Every forest sound is an element of a language of the spirit.
Trees bloom when they hear the lovely song of the bare-throated krankaputt.
Birds heard from a certain direction bear good tidings; the same sounds
heard from a different direction may be a harbinger of ill. Entire hunting
parties may be turned back to camp by the call of a banded kingfisher, the
cry of a bat hawk. Other birds, like the spiderhunter, guide the Penan to a
kill. Before embarking on a long journey they must see a white-headed hawk
and hear the call of the crested rainbird and the doglike sound of the
barking deer.

This remarkable dialogue informs Penan life in
ways that few outsiders can be expected to understand. But one who did was
Bruno Manser, a Swiss activist who lived among the Penan for six years, and
later returned to their homeland where he died in mysterious circumstances.
“Every morning at dawn,” Bruno wrote, “gibbons howl and their voices carry
for great distances, riding the thermal boundary created by the cool of the
forest and the warm air above as the sun strikes the canopy. Penan never eat
the eyes of gibbons. They are afraid of losing themselves in the horizon.
They lack an inner horizon. They don’t separate dreams from reality. If
someone dreams that a tree limb falls on the camp, they will move with the
dawn.”

Tragically, by the time Bruno disappeared in
2000, his fate uncertain, the sounds of the forest had become the sounds of
machinery. Throughout the 1980s, as the plight of the Amazon rainforest
captured the attention of the world, Brazil produced less than 3 percent of
tropical timber exports. Malaysia accounted for nearly 60 percent of
production, much of it from Sarawak and the homeland of the Penan. The
commercial harvesting of timber along the northern coast of Borneo only
began, and on a small scale, after the Second World War. By 1971 Sarawak was
exporting 4.2 million cubic metres of wood annually, much of it from the
upland forests of the hinterland. In 1990 the annual cut had escalated to
18.8 million cubic metres. In 1993, when I returned for a second visit to
the Penan, there were thirty logging companies operating in the Baram River
drainage alone, some equipped with as many as twelve hundred bulldozers,
working on over a million acres of forested land traditionally belonging to
the Penan and their immediate neighbours. Fully 70 percent of Penan lands
were formally designated by the government to be logged. Illegal operations
threatened much of the rest.

Within a single generation the Penan world was
turned upside down. Women raised in the forest found themselves working as
servants or prostitutes in logging camps that muddied the rivers with debris
and silt, making fishing impossible. Children in government settlement camps
who had never suffered the diseases of civilization succumbed to measles and
influenza. The Penan elected to resist, blockading the logging roads with
rattan barricades. It was a brave yet quixotic gesture, blowpipes against
bulldozers, and ultimately no match for the power of the Malaysian state.

The government’s position was unequivocal. “It is
our policy,” noted Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, “to eventually bring
all jungle dwellers into the mainstream. There is nothing romantic about
these helpless, half-starved disease-ridden people.” James Wong, then
Sarawak’s minister for housing and public health, added: “We don’t want them
running around like animals. No one has the ethical right to deprive the
Penan of the right to assimilation into Malaysian society.”

This was the essence of the government’s
position. Nomadic people were an embarrassment to the nation-state. In order
to emancipate the Penan from their backwardness, the government had to free
them from who they actually were. Indigenous peoples like the Penan are said
to stand in the way of development, which becomes grounds for dispossessing
them and destroying their way of life. Their disappearance is then described
as inevitable, as such archaic folk cannot be expected to survive in the
twenty-first century.

“Is it right to deny them the advancement of the
modern world?” asked an exasperated Lim Keng Yaik, Malaysian minister for
primary commodities. “Let them choose to live the way they want to. Let them
stay at the Waldorf Astoria in New York for two years with the amenities of
Cadillacs, air conditioners, and beautiful juicy steaks at their table every
day. Then when they come back, let them make the choice whether they want to
live in the style of New Yorkers or as natural Penan in the tropical rain
forests.”

In 1992 a Penan delegation did in fact travel to
New York, though it did not, as I recall, stay at the Waldorf. On December
10, Anderson Mutang Urud addressed the UN General Assembly. “The
government,” he began, “says that it is bringing us development. But the
only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps.
For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence,
helplessness, the destruction of our culture, and the demoralization of our
people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. Why do we
need jobs? My father and grandfather did not have to ask the government for
jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the
forest. It was a good life. We were never hungry or in need. These logging
jobs will disappear with the forest. In ten years all the jobs will be gone
and the forest that has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone
with them.”

As recently as 1960, seven years after I was
born, the vast majority of the Penan lived as nomads. When I returned in
1998 for a third visit perhaps a hundred families still lived exclusively in
the forest. Only a year ago I received a note from Ian Mackenzie, a Canadian
linguist who has dedicated his academic life to the study of the Penan
language. Ian confirmed that the very last of the families had settled. The
basis of the existence of one of the most extraordinary nomadic cultures in
the world had been destroyed. Throughout the traditional homeland of the
Penan, the sago and rattan, the palms, lianas, and fruit trees lie crushed
on the forest floor. The hornbill has fled with the pheasants, and as the
trees continue to fall, a unique way of life, morally inspired, inherently
right, and effortlessly pursued for centuries, has collapsed in a single
generation.

THE FIRST TIME I VISITED
the Khmer temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia I
met an elderly Buddhist nun whose feet and hands had been severed from her
body during the era of Pol Pot and the killing fields. Her crime had been
her faith, and her punishment the barbaric response of a regime and an
ideology that denied all nuances of spiritual belief and indeed the very
notion of ethnicity and culture. Reducing the infinite permutations of human
society and consciousness to a simple opposition of owners and workers,
capitalist and proletariat, Marxism, formulated by a German philosopher in
the Reading Room of the British Library, was in a sense the perfect triumph
of the mechanistic view of existence inspired by Descartes. Society itself
was a machine that could be engineered for the betterment of all. This was
precisely what Pol Pot, Brother Number One, had in mind. He thought he was
helping, moving history forward, even if it meant the death of 3 million.
The attempt of revolutionary cadre in scores of nations to impose Marxist
thought, this European idea, on peoples as diverse as the Nenets reindeer
herders of Siberia, the Dogon living beneath the burial caves of their
ancestors in the cliffs of Mali, the Mongolian descendants of Genghis Khan,
the Laotians and Vietnamese, the Bantu, Bambara, and Fulani would appear
almost laughably naive had not the consequences proved so disastrous for so
much of humanity. “Anyone who thinks they alone can change the world,” Peter
Matthiessen once wrote, “is both wrong and dangerous.” Surely he had in mind
men such as Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong.