THE AKHA HILL TRIBE

MATTHEW MCDANIEL
MAESAI, THAILAND 1994

Since becoming involved with the Akha Hill Tribe people of the Golden Quadrangle in Northern Thailand in 1991 I have continually worked with the difficulty of communicating their needs to my friends in the west. For one thing, the oriental approach to life is different than our western approach and once again there are many differences between individual cultures within the orient itself.

However, one of the biggest differences can be found in the realities imposed by economic conditions. As observers we may be of the opinion that much of the Orient is well enough off but within that larger society there is a great difference between the very rich and the very poor.

And among the very poor we can find the Akha Hill Tribe.

Imagine if you will, a mountain people who have lived off the jungle for centuries but can also flag down a motorcycle taxi and catch a ride to town where they haggle in the market for a better price on a hoe. Next door another person is surfing the internet. The Akha returns to the mountain, walks from the road to the village however far and eats dinner around a fire in a bamboo hut, lit up by small oil lamps made of cans. Not a bad life one might feel. But nothing is static in this world. The actual reality in the village is that there is more pressure from without to take the land away from the Akha, to force them to disappear from the jungle, where they are the smallest consumers, and make them disappear in the mass of the concrete cities springing up in every nook and cranny of the orient.

The cities , well they are just following the consumption standards revered in the west and maybe they are even more efficient at it.

Everything changes we say, from the comfort of our seat in front of CNN, coffee brewing in the kitchen. But this is not change without a face.

As the new economic order accelerates into the corners of the world whole villages are broken up.

When I first visited Akha villages in Thailand in 1991 there was a major road building program moving right through many of the villages putting them on display for tourists as so many curiosities. Western Tourists, many probably going to church and claiming to be Christian, who always demand some new secret, some place unseen by any other tourist. Always wanting something different than what they are sick of at home, something less complicated but soon wanting to make it an exact copy of what they left behind. Unfortunately they donít realize that it is their western economic system that has no more place for the Akha and their life of very little consumption than it does for the needs of the Bengal Tiger.

The question is what about the price paid by these people while everything changes and what is our connection to it? This is what I try to communicate to my friends in the west.

Has not the western economic model broken everything down into its salable value in the very smallest lot? Is not profit from the exchange of these commodities the bottom line? The Akha live on beautiful land, lots of it. They donít consume much and donít burden anybody else but somebody needs that land. Following our western example and the need to compete somebody just keeps taking it.

As the need to take the land out from under the people who could continue living on it for centuries continues the human tragedy grows. (But maybe this just makes bigger heroes and bigger budgets in missionary circles without ever addressing the injustice.)

Not enough land to farm? The daughter takes a job in a coffee shop that ends up being a brothel. Ten men a day. Three years. Aids, oh well, everything changes.

Another son goes to the city and takes a job throwing bricks up to the man above him on the construction site where they are building a hotel for tourists. He canít afford to provide security for a wife, the supports of the village are gone,, so he goes to the brothel where he meets the girl from the next village over. Fast food sex. Are we surprised? Can we expect any other consequence while in the west we whip the economic machine into a frenzy?

Live simply so that others may simply live is more than a bumper sticker, it is about the girls in brothels, the boys with swollen ankles from carrying too much weight on the job, the kids in the street with no food and no place to go, the police running them off, the heroin used to strip the sorrow away, the aids spreading through the villages.

The girl serving noodles? The mammasan will sell her to you for a few bucks and if not she will sell herself. An independent entrepreneur.

The villagers are lured away from the village with promise of all the toys that materialism offers from the big city. But the real point is the land. Why must they live according to someone elseís rules?

Assimilation. Not likely. No more than the American Indian assimilated.

This is something that the westerner cannot understand, that it just might not be possible for the indigenous person to assimilate, that in reality they might just go into extinction as so many of the indigenous tribes are doing these days. And if that is really the case, does the westerner care? Is the westerner about to let go of their high consumption life style and care for the beleaguered? I think not but maybe a few will continue to heed the call knowing that the next day their neglect of the oppressed led off to die may very well be their own children. Or youth with no time for the inconvenience of the elderly, to be herded like Cherokees. Duty to die. No matter they are the same race and religion. What becomes when our own national and racial agenda is turned against us, no longer a respecter of our distinction and rights within a race. This knife begins to cut the other way.

Thy neighbor - thy self.

As my friend comes back from the mountain side where he is planting rice, his eyes dry from dust, they are unable to hide the sadness settled so deeply there. I wonder how he could live on less, as his wife hammers steamed rice into a sticky paste to make into thick rice patties. I wonder how anything is going to be fixed by his having to move into town where he is expected to consume more non food items. How can this be true? He wonít have more, he will have less.

As a person who is far less religious than some people would have me be I am further saddened by the fact that the missionaries from the west have so long had a presence in the villages. Forty years and more. And the missionaries are saying today that the village is finished. It doesnít sound sincere. Was it finished forty years ago as well? What if more had been done for the village rather than for the slide show back home? Does a village that doesnít have a clinic need a $7,000 church dominating the center of the pristine bamboo village? They tell me they are there to save their souls. They will even pay for a few. A pig, a well, a blanket. The Akha are not stupid. Maybe there was nothing wrong with that but then the competition showed up. No, weíre sorry but you werenít baptized right. Do you need any rice? See, this is what happens to you when you are in bondage and engage in Satan worship. So the different denominations haggle for each and every village staking their claim with the fanciest church they can put up. The Baptists disgusted with the Pentecostals, the American Baptists blaming the Independent Baptists, the Independent Baptists blaming the Presbyterians, and not a clue to the violations of the Indigenous Human Right to self determination on the part of the Akha people whom they are trampling under foot in the name of Jesus. Yes we will help you, our kind of Jesus is the price you must pay.

Missionaries teaching the villagers that western dress is more godly while selling head dress collections back home to people in their church. Missionaries pushing tribal women into sterilization programs, the women unaware of the overall implication of this event. Missionaries taking children out of villages for indoctrination. Good intent some might say, but no village in the end.

I really donít have anything against missionaries except that they never answer the question "What are you doing to help save the culture and the language?"

And to that I have heard some reply, "Jesus is the end of Culture." Which is blatantly a lie, as they most certainly bring their culture from the west.

Very few of them have even learned the language. That doesnít slow them down any though. They still come into the villages on their missions. Worse yet, with a supply of money they hire an ambitious Akha to help them do it, which he will as long as the money is good, and thus the divisions are sown.

I guess it is about respect. About assumption that all that the westerners have is better. The great white race, the white manís burden.

If I am going to tell anybody about my Jesus I think it will only be after they pick it out of the fabric of my life, do as I do, not as I say.

Good people support the missionaries, but in my work with the Akhas I know that these western people must have little knowledge of the price the Akha pay so that there can be a success story. I see the cutting edge. The teachings of Jesus Christ will never hurt a villager. The culture, or lack there of, in which it is wrapped and delivered most certainly will.

And in hoping that I have communicated that to you, maybe you can see how difficult it is to tell people about what is really going on without them thinking one bears some kind of grudge against the church. But these problems are really going on for people who have no church parking lot to say nothing of the wealth parked in them.

The Thai government?
Policies of the Thai government have caused problems for the Akha, but also within that same government very good people work to save these villagers. One might be reminded that the Thai government to date has allowed the Akha people to survive far more intact than our American way of doing things did for the American Indian. Maybe now the role of the American missionary becomes more clear as compared to what their sponsors hoped it was all about.

There needs to be a separation between the teachings of Jesus Christ and culture, ours and theirs. Separation. Not destruction.

One woman told me that they had to teach the Akha how to be clean. I asked her who was going to pay for the soap. A little thing one might say but not so in what is often a cashless society.

In the end, it is quite difficult for westerners to leave all their baggage of expectation home and just find out who a people are. They are so bent on the concept that they have the only good and must give it to others be it by religion or whatever means that it eliminates the possibility of a respectful learning relationship. At best they are just in a holding pattern till the moment they can be the true deliverers of the best way, their way. Doesnít this render the message of Jesus christ somewhat sterile and void?

The Akha people for one have a lot more to teach than that. After all, using America as only one example since I come from there, it was only a few years ago that churches in America approved of B-52 bombers taking off from northern Thailand and dumping world record numbers of bombs, napalm and agent orange on people just a few kilometers away in the name of being so right. They still have not returned to pay for the uninvited damage done to millions of people, to remove the bombs or mines which they left behind which kill every day of the year. These same Americans while only a fraction of the world population consume far more than their share of world resources which they can afford to waste because they are cheap for them. And how do they get them so cheap when others can not afford them at all? Is not this immoral? Unjust? Unfair? And these people are the purveyors of righteousness? I think not. I think Jesus Christ had something else on his mind entirely.

So I can hardly justify directing a people into a religious life style that brings with it a mentality that is quite divorced from morality save the good old "donít drink, donít smoke and donít dance" variety.

One may not be against the religious but I fail to see willingness on their part to address these questions which contradict much of what they say they stand for. Sure they will give lip service but in the end it is the same old game. There is a greater need for honest dialogue on these issues and steps taken to correct some of the contradictions. But in six years in Thailand I have not seen many willing to be that honest about it.