SAVE Rivers :")

I’m surprised at how a simple step in the forest can light up a million more stories. 

I’m walking with my Indigenous friend in the forest. The stories of Sarawak’s Indigenous, the complexities of the issues, are all beginning to unfold layer by layer; they are coming together bits and pieces. 

I feel like a helpless bystander as I learn the whole gamut of sophisticated tactics out there to takeover the land. Companies jump at the opportunity to take over the land during a three-year fallow period. Indigenous leaders may be handpicked (rather than traditionally self-elected by the community) with a preference for those that are more submissive to corporate interests. The colours of the forest are slipping away from our sight so quickly, I wonder about the future of Indigenous stories. 

The destruction of ecosystems doesn’t just have standalone environmental effects. A million other domino, catalytic effects erupt thereafter. Social problems take root, such as inter-tribe conflict. As timber companies log forests that are the only home for the nomadic Penan, they have no choice but to enter other Indigenous lands, clashing with other tribes who view the Penan as trespassers. Similarly, megadam projects can displace and relocate communities against their will, which often leads to more poverty.

‘It’s always important to listen to the local people,’ My friend Beatrice tells me at one point. ‘Researchers, or politicians, they may have high degree, PhD, the head knowledge; but local people have the ground experience… The system today tells you this is what you have to do to be successful: go to school, study hard, go to university, find a good high-paying job in the city.’ Growing up in the city, I’m long used to this narrative, and witnessed the stresses that accompany it. I worry that this narrative looms over the Kampong peoples like a piece of fate. Because the stresses of making money are felt even more acutely by Indigenous peoples whose traditional livelihoods are not based upon extractive concepts that invent money. 

‘Sometimes I daydream,’ she tells me, ‘of how if I want to run away from city life, I can still go back to the forest.” I laughed. It was refreshing to hear her claim power of her heritage, even as the dominant societal narrative now centres around their victimhood.

I feel this same spirit resting alive and well among the kampong people too. I met the people of Long Semiyang, a community whom we were working together with on an agriculture project. In the day, we go out to forage for vegetables and fruits, and in the evening, I play with my little friends. This land bears so many names that city people are struggling to comprehend: how can a single place be a supermarket, a playground and a home all at once?

Threaded together, these experiences provide for me healing from the city culture that has taught me to be always busy and to rush others and punish others and compete with others. In the next phase of life that I have been blessed me with, I want to go about showering the same kampong love, patience and understanding with whoever I meet. Because I have already been gifted with kampong experiences that showed me radical kindness, and proof that life can be lived simply like that.

I will never forget these stories that now form a part of who I am. I will never forget that daily reminder I saw, emblazoned on the organisation’s roll up banner standee. A message from forest-dwelling communities. “The forest is not just your next great adventure. It is our home.”