As a guest, I can only protect your home with love

In the interior of Baram in Sarawak, Malaysia, about a six- or seven-hour drive from Miri, the state's second-largest city, the only road out is the "logging road" that timber traders cut to haul out logs.

In March 2014, Qiuyun1 joined a study tour organized by the local media outlet "Today's Baram" and visited Blockade Kilometer 15 (KM15), a protest stronghold 15 km from the planned dam site. Local people all call KM15 the "main base," which sounds grand, but it is really just a few temporary bamboo huts, with roadblocks set up and the words Amai Manuk Dam (No Dam) painted in big letters. She described the slightly sticky air, supersaturated with sweat, and the darkness beyond what a few lamps could reach, where people exchanged anxiety or outrage in various languages - because the state government, in order to develop hydropower, had expropriated Indigenous ancestral spirit lands to build a dam without consent, and at least 26 tribes would be submerged.

Before the road was formally blockaded in October 2013, tribes including the Iban, Penan, Kayan, and Bidayuh had several rounds of negotiations with the government, none of which received a good-faith response. The timber traders came quickly, peeling back a layer of green skin from the rainforest in a roundabout way and exposing the old flesh beneath. Every time the wind rose and sent up waves of yellow sand, it sounded like spirits being stripped away with the wind.

Externally, the protest groups kept organizing public actions to negotiate with the government and win international support; internally, they held lectures, trying to tell "the people inside" the true face of the dam development project. "The people inside" refers to other tribes in the interior. Qiuyun explained: "After all, some people have been hoping for this road for decades."

 

Although the logging road is bumpy, and small cars get stuck in the mud when it rains, it is, after all, a route to civilization. Before that, coming and going depended on waterways. Indigenous people poled longboats about 5 m long and one person's shoulder wide back and forth along rainforest rivers, often spending several days. "If you hit a shoal, you even have to unload the goods, jump into the river and push the boat, and it is very hard not to get wet when riding a longboat. In the dry season the water-level difference is even greater, and it takes more than a dozen men from the village to help lift the longboat from low water to high water." She usually could not help; the longboat was too heavy.

Where there is no river, people can only travel on foot, and the journey may take more than ten days, or even a month; when it gets dark, they camp in the forest. The road to the city may be like this: first walk for dozens of days carrying a heavy pack, transfer to a longboat for several hours, walk for a few more days after reaching the edge of the rainforest, and then take a vehicle - and do not forget, the return trip has to be done all over again, and this time it is upstream. Many people who leave the tribe may feel homesick, but it is hard to bear such a long journey again; one parting can be for a lifetime.

But some people think that is exactly how it should be. Only pristine rainforest is rainforest. Indigenous people should remain isolated from the world, carry out old beliefs, and be frozen in the past.

"Frankly speaking, seeing tribal children each holding an iPhone or iPad really makes me disappointed."

Qiuyun laughed awkwardly, as if she had said something disrespectful. What she expected was pottery bearing ancient totems, tattoos commemorating life, and weaving that lets dreams descend.

On the night after arriving at KM15, the Indigenous people, mainly Iban, welcomed the visitors from afar with traditional dance. The men performed a war dance welcoming warriors' triumphant return, inspired by the tribe's sacred bird - the hornbill. This bird has a huge horn-like beak, is regarded as an incarnation of the gods, and also symbolizes invincibility; the women's welcome dance imitates the blue luan, emphasizing grace and gentleness, and each time they lightly turn their wrists and swing their arms, the metal coins on their clothes make sounds, like clear rain.

"Their dance is beautiful, only the rhythm is slower, and some local people feel the atmosphere should be livelier. To use our way of saying it: it should be a bit more High."

So after the performance ended, the Indigenous people decided to take the guests into the forest to dance Disco. The loudspeakers blasted revelry at full power, and everywhere were passionately swaying bodies; the freedom and abandon of Disco clearly suited local tastes. Qiuyun had never even been to a pub in Taiwan, and she had never imagined that in the Baram interior tens of thousands of kilometers away she would be pulled by Indigenous people to dance Disco. By comparison, 3C products and imported snacks no longer surprised her so much.

"Who taught them Disco?"

"Just like all Indigenous tribes, the outflow of population there is also severe. Maybe some young person fell in love with Disco in the city. When those people return home, they all bring back quite a few 'souvenirs.'"

Every Indigenous person goes to the city for different reasons - more convenient transportation, better education, better economic conditions, or more entertainment. When the state government held out these "welfare benefits" in exchange for development rights to the rainforest, many people agreed.

 

But development is not the true word of progress. Indigenous people who previously accepted government subsidies and land swaps under the Bakun Dam and Murum Dam development projects and moved to the urban fringe did not live ideally. Accustomed to taking what they need from mountains and rivers, after leaving the rainforest they were effectively stripped of their survival abilities and found it very hard to get work; the government also provided no employment counseling, leaving people desolate. With the past sunk beneath the water, what was summoned was not a brand-new life, but the suffering of large-scale slums.

"So, this time many people firmly oppose it."

Baram Indigenous people drove off the timber traders who had penetrated deep into the rainforest, dug a huge pit on the necessary road to block engineering vehicles, and continued traveling among tribes, calling on more people to stand up.

Six days later, Qiuyun left KM15. Later, she read online about how the state government pinned charges on the rioters, how environmental organizations condemned it, and how activists called for international attention. The roadblock was dismantled and rebuilt, and rebuilt and dismantled, as many as fourteen times. In February 2016, the state government finally agreed to cancel the dam plan and return the land to the Indigenous people;

Before there was time to celebrate, in May of the same year, Chief Minister Adenan Satem instead put forward timber tycoon Huang Tiong Sii as a candidate in the state assembly election2 - he was the boss of the timber company MM Golden (M) Sdn Bhd, had illegally entered Baram to log at the time, and clashed with local residents many times. The entire protest movement had by then lasted more than two years, and if the unknown days are counted too, the people of Baram had already struggled for four or five years, yet the story had still not reached its end.

In fact, it is not only Malaysia; rainforests around the world face similar crises. Besides hydropower resources, some enterprises have their eyes on timber, rare earths, or land fertility, and rainforest residents also cooperate with capitalists in slash-and-burn (forest burning) to switch to planting oil palms, pepper, coffee, or cacao.

 

"For local people, the rainforest is the source of livelihood and the economy, so..." Qiuyun did not continue.

In countless field surveys, she saw much illegal logging, with trees more than 5 m in diameter falling, the sound very heavy, announcing the end of long years; she also saw baby pangolins lured and captured, and that is a Class I protected animal banned by legislation. She watched people gradually move out of traditional longhouses, and watched weaving skills decline day by day.

"What we can do is very limited. No matter how much we love that land, in the end we are only guests of the rainforest. To the local Indigenous people, we are people who can disappear with a single turn."

Qiuyun could not bring herself to speak up and tell them not to burn their own trees or sell their own resources. She had to respect the cultural subjecthood of the tribes.

Then, the only thing to do was bring more people into the rainforest. She joined the NGO "Heart of the Rainforest," led ecotourism groups and academic research groups, and trained a group of rainforest interpreters, with footprints across Sarawak, Java, and Sumatra. They learned sap dyeing, used plaster to make casts and collect animal tracks, followed hunters up the mountains to look for wild boar, and watched mayflies erupt in vast numbers over the river3.

 

Qiuyun smiled shyly, "I can only keep telling those Indigenous people over and over how much I envy them, how much I like this rainforest." As soon as she finished, she immediately mocked herself that this was a bit Ah Q.

"In short, such exquisite culture, such a great environment, should be preserved forever."

I asked, then what do you do when you are not in the rainforest? Qiuyun answered that actually the rainforest is everywhere, and there are many ways to participate even while in Taiwan.

She gave an example: in the 1980s Taiwan was crazy about keeping baby orangutans, leading to massive poaching in Sarawak and the smuggling of nearly a thousand infant orangutans, yet no more than one tenth survived past age ten. Because of the notorious reputation, next to the donation box at Monkey World in London there is still a signboard that reads: "We also need to save our friends dying gradually in Taiwan."

She also mentioned that Taiwan is Malaysia's third-largest timber export destination, and nearly 30 percent of the 5.268 million cubic meters of timber imported in 2011 was illegal, equivalent to indirectly supporting illegal logging. When Sarawak NGO worker Huang Mengzuo came to Taiwan to give a lecture, he once said publicly: "Do not destroy other people's forests to protect your own (forests)."

For this reason, Qiuyun and a group of friends launched a timber reading group and held many nature exploration activities in Taiwan, including a mountain-sea journey in cooperation with an ocean outreach center - from the sea, neither mountain nor sea, to the mountains, to satoyama and satoumi.

She explained, "People will not have a heart for the rainforest and care about the rainforest only after they arrive in the rainforest; it has to be cultivated in ordinary life."

Every rainforest conservation group has its own set of practical methods, whether economic, cultural, or artistic, and what does not change is that there is no quick success. Cutting dry rice for farmers, waiting two weeks for a single phoenix tail feather, walking a stretch of road with an old grandmother carrying water, or dancing Disco in the forest with young people, all bring the rainforest a little closer to sustainability.

Slow, but necessary.

-

1 About Qiuyun: a Chinese Malaysian, who as a university student studied whales and dolphins under Professor Zhou Lianxiang of National Taiwan University, and after graduation returned to Malaysia to teach for four years. Now she has come to Taiwan again and is studying in the master's program in the Department of Environmental and Cultural Resources at National Hsinchu University of Education, researching Indigenous culture and ecological conservation. She says she is searching for "problems."

2 In Malaysia's general election, Huang Tiong Sii this time ran as a Barisan Nasional candidate for state assemblyman in the Repok constituency of Sarawak (similar to the concept of Taipei City Council District 01). Barisan Nasional is the ruling coalition that has governed for more than 50 years (you can compare it to the wealthy, business-linked KMT), and it is basically a political enemy of the Pakatan Rakyat, which advocates democratic reform (you can compare it to the early DPP).
Reference sources:BN’s Timber Tycoon Candidate For Repok Illegally Plundered Baram – EXPOSE, Adenan drops the reformist mask, state coalition sends timber giant into battle

3 Mayfly eruption refers to the brief-lived aquatic creature the "mayfly" emerging in huge numbers in spring and summer and flying all over the sky, for a time creating a spectacle that can cover the river surface. From emergence, courtship, to death, this phenomenon lasts only about 1-2 hours. Video reference

 

Original text here
Text by Liu Yanchen
Edited by Jessica