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Akha
Chronicles Summary: Akha culture is
unique in that many of the material things which exist in their world are of
significance in their sense of belonging and culture also. Almost all the things in their possesion
they make themselves. They have a life
often free from buying and owning.
Houses are made to be safe for children and children are the central
theme of any Akha village. Horses Here Little horses
here, for use in the mountains. If they were in
the west they would be headed for the cooker. But in the
mountains they are small on the trails, can go quite well, and are plenty big
enough for the size of the Akha men.
The Chinese sometimes have bigger horses and mules which they sell the
Akha. The horses are seldom shod,
though you can find light iron shoes in the Keng Tung market. The pack saddles are made of wood, baskets
hung on a frame which can be rested on the ground and then that frame is
loaded on the wooden frame on the horses back, fitting properly
together. A tail harness of wooden
rollers fits under the tail to the saddle, the wooden rollers keeping the
horse from being chafed as they move, unlike a strap would do. Wooden pack saddles are surprisingly
inexpensive in the Keng Tung market where you can also buy them, along with
bridles, gun barrels, powder and lead shot. I knew of only
one horse that got sick and looked like it was going to die. Normally don't see that very often. It had fever, no idea what. Sometimes the men
get kicked by the horses, one guy in Pah Nmm Akha got kicked, came home with
stomach pain and died the next day.
Life is very short for these men, and death doesn't give much warning
in order for them to get good medical care, and soon they are gone. The trails are
very steep, and the Akha use the horses to haul seed or any produce, as well
as large volumes of rice, ginger and corn which are heavy. Sometimes they line out five or six horses
and get them all going home to the village, loaded. In one day the men might have to make this
trip four times or more, sometimes the trail to the fields being very long. On days that the
horses don't have to work, the men take them to the fields, tie them on a
stake rope up above the field near the trail, and the men go about their work
in the fields while the horse feeds all day.
Often I would encounter the horses in the tiny roads and have to
untangle their ropes and move them so that I could get the truck by, as there
just wasn't much room to spare. In the rainy
season, which lasts a couple three four months, it isn't so nice for the
villagers because the horses churn the trail to mud and the hoof tracks fill
with sloshing water, making especially the steep sections of the trail very
tough going and dirty, which is why the Akha come back to the village covered
in mud. On the days that
the horses don't go to the village the family makes sure to haul back grass
for the horse to eat. The horses
usually crib under the hut which is on stilts, and the family can tell if it
is having any problem during the night. Most of the
horses are black and brown, but a palamino is a rare treat to see. The men don't
ride the horses all the time, leading them often, even when they have no
pack, but other times when the trail is wide and dry you can see them chasing
each other down the trails on their way back from the fields and working all
day. For a big person, riding these
small horses bareback is not so comfortable as there is not near enough girth
to hold onto. One can cross the ankles
under the horse it would seem. But small or
large, Akha horses add pleasant personality to any village. They buy and sell for $200 and $300
dollars, sometimes more. Akha suitcase Akha have these
baskets with snug fitting covers in their houses which they use for keeping
the rats off clothes and other valuables.
The rats often come to the huts to chew the corn, but Akhas do keep
some cats around too. Rats will even chew off your calluses at night, without
biting you or drawing blood. Carefully
they go around each finger nail, chewing off the old skin. The Akha Spindle Explain this, the
cloth, cotton, thread, weaving, dye. Keng Tung Pah Meeh Akha. The Chili Pestle This is the key
tool in any household without which there is not salt, chili peppers or sah
peeh tauh. Akha ballad recitals and
songs the song board
used at funerals Akha basket for the field,
excellent, wooden yoke, headband akha bird muskets bird traps spindles cooking Akha generals, doctors and lawyers in Akha radio, the crew cut guy Leeh Hai 91.4 am One Akha Gate Had a face carved
on each end of the cross piece of the top of the gate. A full Akha Gate The Akha gate
requires that the village has a Dzoeuh Mah. If it does not
have a Dzoeuh Mah then the village will not have a gate but just a post in
the ground at the same likely location at which they do all gate related
ceremonies to protect the village. Collection of akha gate people of wood guy in bangkok
has a collection of gate people. The Helping each other load up baskets because the
baskets are very heavy, hard to manage. often they
carried umbrellas to help beat the heat of the trail. Meaning of akha embroder and sleave colors? Akha traditionsal women singers old very good, like
the one in Keng Tung Head dresses are for babies Many fancy things
of many colors for the babies to play with, the Akha keenly aware that it
stimulates their minds and hands. Berries, tiny Akha berries, black, taste like water
letting loose in mouth, sensation. Found near Bird
Rock, Pah Nmm These are very
small and black, hanging in long clusters. When you chew on them they pop and
leave in your mouth the feeling of water, like you have drunk something. Yet the berries themselves are very small. Tea Pots The Akha had a
tiny tea pot of clay that had a folded lip, which they left down in the
embers of the fire and brewed their tea in from which they drew for cups, the
leaves soft, not floating any more.
Each fire had a metal fire ring, or some bricks close together or
stones similarly or a couple old knife blades. Horses akha use of small horses, for
packing peanuts and other materials Village products shop A woman sells
village products, down Chiang Saen road, from the main road. Farming The loss of farm land There is no more
crucial aspect to the impoverishment of the Akha people than their forced
relocation and their loss of farm land.
The Thai Army has had an ongoing policy of forced relocation of the
Akha in conjunction with the Thai Forestry department, violating their human
rights to say nothing of the crass imorality of these actions which are
reprehensible in a Buddist society. No Thai
village would ever be subjected to this kind of treatment. "They are
aliens" we can say? So why is the Thai government giving them all ID
cards? And keep in mind these aliens
have prospered the Thai tourism economy very well for years (PHOTOS
DEFINITELY NEEDED HERE) Helping each other in their fields The Akha had a
system by which they shared labor back and forth to meet the manpower
requirements needed on a field all at one time. Twenty people would go and work on one
field, then those people would each put in a day at the other people's
fields, so that they could work as teams together. Rice: Preparing fields 18 May 99, Planting Rice Dear Friends: Well, they
haven’t exactly been coming once a week but here is an update. For the language
project we are in the process of having a binding punch made for sewing
the Akha books together. The machine shop
is pretty backlogged so it is taking some time and some refitting of
another device or two to get the job done. I spend most of
my time in a more remote Thai Akha village in the mountains now, come down to
do email, that and put in work with the Culture Center, which has a lot of
grounds work to finish, plus a very large well to dig for feeding water for
irrigation to the village. Living with an
Akha family, helping them with the mountain farming, gives plenty of new
insights into their lives. These people,
even in the stable villages, would seem to live on nothing and any shred of
new resource seems to disappear like a drop of water on a red hot griddle. Everything
circles around the mountain rice crop and other crops that have to be
planted. Farming mountain land is very
steep, you can hardly stand up, and the
weeds are thick and must be cleared a number of times, finally with a
hoe, just before the traditional planting of the rice. Each family has its own fields and does
weeding and planting plus work on the slope to protect from erosion. If the village is in a stable situation,
terracing will begin to appear at the bottoms of the canyons and work their
way up as the labor is invested. The
older villages generally have more than the newer villages. We just finished
planting rice, and are now planting corn, corn for pigs, corn for
people, melons, peanuts, and a host of vegetables. One couldn’t
ask for a nicer place to work, the wind coming frequently to cool even in the
heat, the view of the mountains below spectacular, and the whole place
above the clouds in the morning as one hikes for an hour or so with hoes,
food, seeds and cooking pots to the mountain field huts to work. The work is back breaking, bamboo feeds
water down for drinking from a
spring in most places and this goes on day in and day out. Several people from one family work on a
mountain slope field, then finish
weeding and planting and move to a different field that is at a different
stage of growth. Snakes are common
visitors as well as every biting and
stinging bug you can imagine, along with no shortage of mosquitos.
Remnants of bamboo that one has to chop out are like trying to dig up a
buried phone cable, no end to it. One begins to
understand how the entire life here surrounds the planting and growing of
the rice, the involvement with the forest, water, rain, and the trails
that are hiked. From mountain to
mountain friends and family are
scattered, toiling away in the fields, singing, the songs long and trailing
out across the ridges folled by the occasional question which
gets past along from ridge to ridge on what we call Akha Telephone. Huts are scattered out, on the slopes and
there we cook the food and sleep
briefly or shade the small children.
The woman on the next hill is
dancing one way, everyone else the other way and it is soon apparent that
they are being chased around the slope by a large bee. Hats and arms swing this way and that in
distant slow motion it looks like they all had too much sun. In the evening
one woman can hardly see out of her completely swollen face. A big black and orange hornet has stung her
under the eye. Snakes are common
visitors which also get dispatched with speed, the warry hand looking for
movement when clearing the piles of brush which are carefully stacked and
burned. Soon the new rice is sprouting
under the cool rains of spring. Looking carefully
at a grain of rice one can see one sprout from the germ heading up, one
heading down, the kernel the battery for the whole thing. Even in the best
village the situation is incredibly tight.
There is no money to spare,
if any at all, resources are scarce and one wonders how these people make it
on their diet and the incredible amount of work they do, getting up early as
4 am and working till late, hiking home to the village. In the mission
village that had the two suicides so far this last year, they just had their
third, a 14 year old girl hung herself some fifty meters from the mission
building. The I am working on
plans for a second video, will take a while, about Akha Indigenous Knowledge
and what is at risk when it is deleted from the lives of the people. Living
in the village it would seem hard that this could ever happen, but it
does. The results are no less than
tragic. Course the people who cause it
to happen don’t stay around for that. Matthew McDaniel Weeding the Rice 1 Dear Friends: Well, after you
plant all that rice and corn there are these funny plants that come up that
don’t look like corn or rice and you have to pull them all out. Weeding sounds less romantic, but also
rather of an understatement for doing several mountain acres of this days on
end. For peanuts one
uses a small hoe called a “Lah Ngurh” to remove the weeds from
between the plants. Despite the fact
that it is blazing hot, the Akha relish going to the fields on this kind of
day because as soon as the weeds are cut out they die in the heat. If it is cool and wet the weeds might
survive and come back in a few days.
All related to getting a good harvest.
I didn’t understand why they enjoyed the hot days so much, nough
to kill one off, but then when I had five pounds of mud stuck on the bigger
hoe for weeding between corn, I was hoping for a scalding day. The bigger hoes are angled just so, such
that when on a mountain side the blade will skim an inch under the surface
and cutt the roots as you strike down, and not dig into the dirt too deep. Typically one
slope has good soil while the other bad, related to the sun I would guess. On damp days it
is nice to go without shoes, the soft moist and cool earth, but on hot days
the smallest twig gets strong as a nail.
Then on rainy days the soil turns into mud and the acid in the soil
eats the skin out between your toes quite nicely. The corn is up
from 8” to a couple of feet in some places. Knee high by the fourth of
July I think. For the rice the
Akha come back and spray a light salt water between the rows. Those who know
weed the rice by hand rather than with the hand hoe. Weeding by hand doesn’t disturb the
soil, the rice stalks remain short and strong. Weeded with a hoe, the soil opens up and
the rice stalks grow tall and when the winds come it blows them over,
damaging much rice. Part way down the
hillsides water run off trenches are dug and in some places another two or
three tiers to the terraces have been added as the terraces slowly grow up
the mountain side. They would all put
in terraces but there is a shortage of labor so it happens over years and
generations as it has happened in Then we got back
to the hillside hut to eat and lo and behold someone forgot the lighter, so
cold food only. Day before someone forgot the food altogether and day before
that someone forgot the cooking pot, so I hiked over to another hill and
borrowed one off another band of rice planters from our village. Then the next day
I went out and they had forgot the food.
The one thought the other had brought it. I got there at two in the afternoon which
no one does and would have brought food had I known. Just never occured to me
that working that hard in the sun anyone would forget food. But that was sort of commentary on the
whole view of life here, not taking the hard too seriously. Anyway, the one
woman said the other woman was mad. I asked why, that
is when I found out they forgot the food. She said that
when you don’t eat you get mad. I guess that
sounds funny as I sit here and type, it sure didn’t look funny the
other day up on the hill. Then you can get
an amazing back ache. I made the
mystake of doing two hours on the hoe before waking up and from my poor
stance I pulled my back quite nicely.
Never drift through this kind of work, you want to hit it really
hard. The Akha say do it really slow,
you won’t get tired. I know, but
I just can’t. I gotta steam my
way to the top of the hill with one swath and then take a break and hit it
again. We were sitting
under this tree drinking spring water telling jokes and I asked about this
one ant. Long ugly thing that looked
like a space ship skeleton, dark red, the Akha woman said it bites you really
nasty, swells you up like a baseball and then you get a real cool fever. But the big fat black one with the fur on
its back doesn’t bite you mean, then there is this shiny black one that
walks around with a hunch back bent on stinging something and that one is
real bad. Seems the uglier the ant is
the more prone it is to bite and sting and hurt. Now coming up the trail I see the ants use
it for a super highway, long lines of different clans and species trooping
along, distinctly keeping clear of each other. There is this one group that cuts a deep
trench where they go. They move so
much dirt out to make this long trench I can only figure they flick it. Then there is this group of cute little fat
burgandy ants that move in real dense columns, don’t look prone on
biting or angry, and they appear to drink nectar or something. The long black ant gathers bugs and bites
nasty. Then there is this one with a
wide set of jaws that look like water buffalo horns till they close on your
skin. And one long red ant has a
chisel like head, really weird. Then
we gathered dried bamboo for cooking wood and some of the bamboo had a hole
in it and out poured all these ants and they were hauling eggs and really mad
and red and they bite real nice too, so you pitch that whole piece back in
the brush. A break in the
day we all eat green mango we dip in salt and chilli pepper. The one old woman
makes a little tea cup out of a piece of bananna leaf and fills it with water
and puts some rice and other stuff in it, starts saying a whole bunch of
stuff, then hops out of the hut and pitches the whole thing up the hill
towards the field. I noticed, and
the other woman told me that the old woman thought I stepped on the grave in
the field. What grave? The Mooser grave. Oh, there is a Lahu buried in your field? I didn’t
step on that I said, I didn’t know what it was but the odd lack of
attention kept me away. The old woman
was then greatly relieved, she thought I had stepped on it and she had gotten
this quick stomach ache so she fed some rice and water to the Mooser and told
them to rest peacefully anyway. She said she
farmed the field for three years before the Moosers told her that someone was
buried there, then she put in a stick, but it was still real bad luck not to
know. I picked up the
water cup, there was this funky red bug on it, stung my hand real bad with
hairs like the black furry catepillars do with the orange eyebrows. I couldn’t
tell what it was because as I picked up the cup it mushed and in its last act
stung me. When you weed the
corn there are these tiny crickets everywhere, then these holes as big as
your thumb and that is where the Jerusalem Crickets live. The Thais like them fried, big and
juicy. Cute too. I don’t think the Akha eat them as
much. There are all kinds of grass
hoppers too. Some are rusty and brown,
wings and long trailing legs, some are green with wings, and then some are
really beautiful and no wings, hop really cool like sports cars with pin
stripes. The wild bees
they are rude. You know, they land on
your skin for a drink, they know that you know they are bees and will give
them a second break over a horse fly because of honey and things like that,
but then when they are done drinking they hunker down and sting you real
good. some thanks. Do it all the time. Really rude. Walking back to
the village the guys on the horses they ride past us as they come down from
the higher ridges. One of the
workers is happy because her boyfriend came over from the other village to
visit. They are getting married soon,
she will be his second wife. No
problem. I keep stopping on
the trail. Funny bugs. There is this
one bug that is really tiny but looks like a big velvet bean bag with antenna
and eyes, but it is really small, crossing the trail. Who said God had to be really big. I stepped around it, no bigger than a pin
head but really red. Then there was
this really long black and yellow pin striped spider over the trail. Almost two inches long. The Akha said that you pop its head off and
pound it into chopped meat, tastes really good. You scrape the bark off one
tree and throw it in too. We got back. I went for a wash. Did it in a hurry because 5 and 6 oclock
must be the changing of the guard and these special mosquitos come out for
about thirty minutes and they are really big, bite you really good and then
they all disappear. Good thing is they
are so big you can feel them land on your skin like a harrier jump jet. After dinner
around the fire, the one Akha woman hunts in a basket that hangs over the
fire, covered in smoke laquer, and fishes out something and offers it to
me. They like to eat it after a good
meal. Looked a whole lot like a clod of dirt, because it was. And then I remembered how I had so often
seen these holes cut in the hillside all over Akha land. That is where they are finding the best
dirt. You eat it like candy after a
meal. Dig in there and get it out
fresh, the good smelling red clods, not those other ones. And then you dig a new hole and start
again. Since it has been there a few
thousand years it is aged really well and no one has disturbed it. They eat a little bit of the best clods,
then rinse their mouth. Say it is
really good for something like heartburn from what I could figure. Well, hey, people
do all kinds of things with Dead Sea Mud so what the hec. And eating
bird’s nests????? Matthew McDaniel The weeding of rice 2 Akha Weekly
Journal Date: Dear Friends: Work on the
writing in this project, the assistance to villages and so forth all rolls
on. Literacy work
continues, medical work continues and so forth. If you have specific
questions about these aspects please inquire, I get to the email at
least once a week. The Weeding of the Rice 3 The Akha have
distinct rituals of their culture that interact with their planting and
maintenance of their rice. Certain
days they do not work with rice out of honor or respect to their traditions
and on those days they may only work with corn or beans in other fields, even
though very close together. It must be
understood about the Akha, and this is very important, that they for the most
part raise completely what it is they need to live on, and the earth is
not taxed beyond that. If the west is
encouraging vast consumption and
these people are being forced into that machine so that it stays fat and
fed, then we have all become fools and there is going to be a dreadful
price to pay, as I was reminded while I was typing this and a friends CNN
show was going, telling all the pulses of the cancer treatment
industry. Ah yes, we have even made
killing ourselves into an art form. About thirty days
after the rice is planted when it is close to a foot tall the Akha turn out
once again to pull the weeds, mostly broadleafed weeds, from between the
rice. One Akha man bemoaned that he
couldn’t see his rice for all the weeds, and true, hillsides in the
same area have different soil characteristics and in some places the weeds
grow really big and fast, in others there are hardly any weeds at all. But when you have to cultivate it all by
hand and pull all the weeds it could discourage you. And you must cultivate a mountainside that
will take a good walk to reach the edge of your field in any direction and
which grows all your rice for you and the family for a year. Besides the broad leafed plants that make most
of the weeds there is a variety of vine that grows rapidly and gets several
meters long with all kinds of runners going everywhere. This one is hard to chop out in the first
place and comes back in the rice usually, wrapping itself around the clusters
of growing rice plants. Course you get
to know all of this because you aren’t on a tractor, you are stooped
over with your face in it all day long. If a family has
money they will buy rock salt and pack it to the field on horses and
then haul water from the springs. With
a light salt mixture in tanks
which they strap on, the Akha spray this mist in the fields during the
heat of the day and the light salt kills the plant leaves quickly
and doesn’t hurt the rice. Then
the plants are gathered up in piles,
clearing around the rice. This is
faster than hand weeding and apparently
doesn’t harm the soil for the next crop. Some fields are
too far for water to be hauled or the family is too poor to buy the salt. Business people
in One might think
that they are living in the mountains and drinking clean water but someone
is farming higher than the water source and if they are using a herbicide it
goes right into that water at the first rain. This time of year
there is a lot of rain so that doesn’t take long. A day or two at
longest. The Akha who know blame this
on many ailments of intestinal
distress and fever. Certainly one can
understand the natural concern of the Akha to live up in the mountain tops. Course, when you
go to the shops, herbicides and pesticides are readily available and most of
the people who use them, if it doesn’t kill them outright, have little
knowledge or concern for what these nicely packaged chemicals can do to
them. Companies like Bayer and Zeneca
and Monsanto are chief offenders, turning dangereous chemicals loose on the
poor for a profit. As we headed out
into the mountains there was this cold chill in the air, the sky was clear as
it ever gets and I was reminded of winters in far off mountain places I once
called home. The road up the
mountains was growing over fast with jungle plants and grasses and the dew
covered leaves slopped all over the sides of the truck and in the
windows. At one place the bamboo thicket
next to this track was so heavy with due that it was bowed over to the
ground, blocking the road, so I had to take time off and chop back this huge
thicket so that I could get the truck through. Roads are just little dirt tracks
suddenly. At the turn in the hill, the
spring pipe had clogged and the spring and rains had been washing the road
and it was now a very tight turn to get passed that in tact. I was tempted to
run up the end of the road to the I had to get out
still today to some other villages while the roads were dry. They were ok for the moment but the steep
red clay could quickly slide a vehicle to the point it could not back up nor
go any further without rock and modifying the road by hand. The corn planted
not much more than a month before it would seem was already three feet or
taller, I was impressed, had been seed I bought locally for sweet corn. The village had
moved to the lower location it was now at by the Thai army and they
wished that they still lived at their more undisturbed higher
location. All that they were promised,
like schools and electric had not paid
off. The children were going to school
as if in anticipation of something while in fact becoming lazy and loosing
much contact with the natural environment they lived in which they needed to
know well if they were going to be living in it and growing their food in
it. But the schools themselves were
like a kiss of death to the indigenous knowledge system of the Akha, and the
difference in useful knowledge of those who went to school and those who
didn’t was quite striking. Also
it appeared that those Akha who had not gone to school had much more pride in
who they were than those who did. In
the end, the electricity did not seem to pay off compared to the erosion of
their culture, the assaults on their culture from missions which was
continuous and the health of their children and farm animals. The lower
environment was poluted with chemicals made in the west and the village animals
which wandered into contact with this died.
And anyone knowing of
the history of the Akha knew that in even recent years they had lived
private undisturbed lives in the mountains.
Now they were pushed about
by the government, told what they could farm and what they could not
under guise of protecting the forest, and treated as aliens in a land
that they had been forced into by war that was also the end of the
mountains for them in their southward march. I was coming up
from the flat lands of and they were
coming to the end of the range and meeting me, telling me about their
lives, from that perspective in their centuries journey from beyond these
mountains, only too much about the problems that had come to them. Their culture was based un centuries of
surviving as a singular
traditional people, living much the same way for the last 1500 years, kin and
kin. One had to have great respect for
a people that had thus made it this
far and also sadness for much of the world that after all the opportunities
to learn from mystakes, still seemed bent on destroying that uniqueness. Despite efforts to portray concern for
these cultures as just talk of the “Noble Savage” the fact
remains that the Akha had a graceful culture and stable life, filled with the
most minute of detail, all written down in their hearts and shared in their
songs and long chants at ceremonies.
But the world had become a place of sameness and a place where
increasingly intolerant peoples were wiping out anything different in their
sight and few were learning to take the time to discover who anyone else is. Listening to the
pulsing chant of a wind harp made of gourd and bamboo tubes which an old man
held to his mouth as he wilted and arose in a dance around a fire I could not
help but feel great amazement and pride in the endless beauty and discovery
that I was so priveledged to be party to in the lives that these people let
me share with them. The Big Dancing Mooser Plants Rice The big tall,
flat faced Mooser, who reminded me of that one tv star that played a cheap
preacher really well, he got out there in the rain, tested his rice plantin
stick, dancing in the wind, like he knew that it was one of his last dances,
tattered pants and bare feet big as mine, hoppin up and down and whoopin,
like he too was gettin a piece of what he could see of life and God
again. Up there on the ridge I could
see it all behind and below him, hey we were at the top of the mountain so
there wasn’t much above but sky, which you couldn’t see because
today it was only rain and wind and clouds.
But that didn’t matter, made it all beautiful, and I always
liked that fellow and the more I found out the more I liked. He used to live
up on the next hill over, had cattle, pigs, you name it, then the Thai army
moved him down and all he had down in the bottoms where they made them all
move to was fever. Course that was
free. You could have as much of that as you wanted, because it was about
stealin the land and fever was free.
Stealin the land, hey, these people were like the white folks, they
thought that you could own the land.
Now that was a joke. Never met
a mooser or Akha yet who thought that you could own the land, you farmed it
and ate the food and felt the big wind and got the big view and the big rain
and the big sun and that was the pay for gettin to do life, and why would you
want to own the land when all you needed to do was farm it because if you
didn’t you wouldn’t eat any rice, remember? Oh yeah, forgot about that part. The Rice Harvest And Rain The rice harvest
of 1999 got hit by a lot of rain in the low lands of the Chiangrai area,
where there were many relocated Akha villages. It even began to
sprout. I didn't hear much about it
after that, though a lot of rice got ruined. Ginger Black Ginger was
very valuable but the Akha were told they couldn't grow it. Regular ginger
was very valuable too, not as much as black ginger, but the Akha grew a lot
of it. Sometimes whole fields were
killed by fungus or "fever" as the Akha called it, the leaves
turning yellow and the roots rotting.
The Akha said you could tranmit it so they did not walk into the bad
ginger and then into the good ginger part of the field. Corn The Akha grew a
lot of corn for seed to sell or to feed their pigs. Weavols ate a lot of their stored corn. Soy Beans From soy beans
the Akha made cakes and paste, often mixed with chili peppers of course. coffee some Akha told me
that the police told them they could not grow coffee in the mountains. I wondered what the deal was, some kind of
protection for the coffee at Doi Tung? Tea Cotton From The Jungle All the plants
and animals. Mushrooms. The medicine nut. The meat pods. Bamboo Shoots. Bamboo Grubs. The big grub. Ant Eggs. The small orange
fruit with leaves like. Figs that grow on
the tree trunk. Purple ants for
lips. There was this
small porcupine, then this big rat like thing that was in the ground, very
stocky, face same as the porcupine but white fur like the creatures in
Washington in the woods. Then large rats. Pangolins Cheeh Hah, the
barking deer. Wild Boars, bad
if they came to the village. Warnings about
danger are reinforced this way. Bamboo Regional Economics I had spent at
least two years of extensive efffort in this one region in and around Pah Nmm
Akha trying to come to an understanding of the regional economics that
effected the Akha. The Akha had lost
major land in forced army relocations.
This destroyed much of their strength but did not seem to end the
concerns the army claimed they had for justifying such drastic action against
the lives of others. In time I came to
discover that ginger crops and tea were what made this land so valuable to
anyone involved. However tea appeared
to be directly behind major mission involvement in the region on the part of
the Taiwan Chinese Baptists. Control the
people, Control the land. I sought to
invest in the people, the land and offer some hope, some alternative. Tea plantings, A
tea factory, all offered incredible incentive for the Akha. Mushrooms ginger Village Life Comparisons of Village Situations Hope for Justice Human, Cultural
and Community Property Rights A Basis For
Social Justice The Akha And How
They Are Effected In Matthew McDaniel Maesai, 1. Justice: A Basis
For Consideration The Human desire
for justice, freedom from oppression, access to what is ours, and means of
appeal for our grievances, is common to all of our lives. We desire to build up some level of
security based in the land, from which we can expect to safely grow food for
our survival and well being. In what
we call “advanced” or “developed” society, the land
and food model is a little more distant, and this can effect policy. However for many societies, especially
indigenous societies, there is little that is more important than their
relationship with the land. We seek justice
on common themes, common to humans. We encounter disputes, we organize bodies
for review and settlement of these disputes, or at least we feel that this
would be ideal. But in reality
much justice is an illusion. As humans we
invent, proclaiming that with our inventions, justice, development and
equality will come. With the advances of technology, we can contact almost
anyone within moments. This gives the
illusion of better and instant communication, the resolution of conflict and
misunderstanding. Yet our technology
would seem to out perform us. On the local and immediate level there is
little form by which we can address our grievances. There are few
greater issues for concern, mediation and appeal than those issues of justice
surrounding the right to land, and to the manner in which one would live on
it, which we call culture. The ease of
access to the system of justice is key to resolving disputes, yet it is
lacking. Artificial barriers to access
are created, classes of society are separated, and the oppression continues. One can not stress enough, that if the
access to justice regarding land and other issues is not the corner stone to
the society, the society will fail to provide the most basic rights to its
inhabitants. Without this firm
foundation in access to justice we can build no model of community property
rights, cultural rights, or human rights.
It is the lack of this access to justice that is most noticeably
overlooked as communities seek to solve conflict. If justice is not
provided on the community level, for community issues, it must be sought
outside the community on the provincial, national or international level. In many cases,
the artificial creation of nation state boundaries has led to many disputes,
which are now swept aside and go unheard because international bodies
consider them to be internal issues to those said states, for purpose of
convenience and denial. If international
appeal, which is the most logical, is not possible, the door remains long
closed on the abuses of human, cultural and community property rights. It does us little
good to understand all the boundaries and defenses of what is
“ours” if when it is taken away by force, or twisting of the law,
or by decreed policy from the top, we have no means to decide the matter. The world society
today is taken up with carefully placing the emphasis on understanding what
our “rights” are, while the manner of seeking justice for these
rights is ignored. The powerful take,
and keep on taking, the gap between rich and poor widens, and the local land
owner becomes a serf for a landlord on land which used to belong to their
family for generations. The fact that
the landlord exploits the land for financial gain, in excess of the need of
the land for food, is ignored. On the
other hand the original farmer, be they Akha or Thai, needs the land
primarily for food for the family and may not even own so much as a motorbike
or car. It is hard to
proceed with concepts of community property rights based on a foundation of
justice, when the trend in property ownership is outside control, established
by “legalized” ownership of land, rich people being able to buy
up large tracts for non food uses, while the poor have not enough to grow
food on. Certainly the
issue of land ownership to those who are present on that land should be given
priority. Priority before disputes of private vs. government control. Consideration must be given to the humans
as part of the habitat in need of protection.
On one hand how can we rule that humans are incompetent to live within
the environment in sustainable ways, while competent to rule it from the
outside? An additional and
enormous complicating factor is that the current international economic model
will continue to demand centralization of resources, and until this is also
addressed, the issues surrounding community property rights may well be
defeated, whether or not the individual farmer owns the land. If the individual farmer owns the land, but
must farm it for product that must flow to centralized markets, for export or
consumption in the cities, the sense of community property rights is defeated
from its intent. So for the moment, while resources dwindle, and local
communities take a larger role in demanding that they have control over what
belongs to their region in the way of land and other resources, the
international economic model may just get around this by continuing to
exploit the resources anyway, no matter who claims to own them. And it is here that the value of the Akha
economic and social model must be considered. Errors in current
international systems can be summarized as this. Lack of local and
regional justice. Lack of
international appeal. Definitions of
justice that allow injustice to continue by only switching the name. Humans being seen
as not part of the environment in which they live. 2. The Akha And Currently in It would appear
that this propaganda is fostered mostly by those who would have something of
shame to hide. For instance it might be in the fact that the Akha, as a
group, provide a fascinating tourist destination in The basis of this
propaganda is that few people know the true history of the hill tribes, and
their presence and use of the land in The Akha are
considered migratory and land squatters.
Historically hill tribes have been known to inhabit the mountain
regions of In the case of
the region of Haen Taek, there was little to no Thai activity in these
regions up until the last few years.
Back ten years ago there was hardly what could even be construed as a
road, and getting to Hua Mae Kom was a major event by motorcycle, let alone
truck. Few Thais lived in the region
and only small groups of Thai soldiers attempted to exercise control over
these areas. So from the aspect of
history of residence, surely it is the Thai that is the newcomer. But even if we
respect what is given as the Thai border lines, there is still dispute. Akha villages have history in these border
regions, all mountains, all in areas Thais did not travel into very often,
for more than 100 years, and before them the Lisaw, Wa, Lahu. Some villages
have been kilometers into Villages were
often within a few hundred meters of what is now considered the border,
making it obvious that they were border villages with their roots in Rather than
admitting to errors in policy, the government and army, which is not
necessarily distinguishable one from the other, put the blame for both alien
citizen status and environmental degradation on the very hill tribe they
forced to move. Akha villages that had
been at their border sites for more than a hundred years, with little dispute
with anyone, now had the problems of others thrust on them and took the blame
for it as well. Being citizens of In addition to
failing to admit to the true legal status of these citizens, that they were
from Burma, were pulled deep into Thailand, yet not afforded refugee status
or citizenship status, little consideration has been given to the impact on
the Akha themselves and their community.
It was either assumed that they would survive, so it did not matter,
or assumed that they would not survive. The Akha as a result suffered years
of abuse having to run a gauntlet of police checkpoints and extortion to
carry on the most basic aspects of
life. In meetings with
numerous government officials in Thailand it was clearly stated that the Akha
were to be continuously displaced from their mountain homes,
“assimilated” and made into a labor class for the convenience of
the Thais. No consideration is given to the legal status or rights of these
Akha people in the international community.
This would not be so tragic if it were not true that a large populations
of Akha now make up labor forces in As to the
survival of the Akha and other relocated hill tribe groups, a careful look
into their locations and communities brings out harsh realities. Once these
villages were located carefully in the mountains, the product of choosing
village sites based on altitude, wind, and the ability to grow food
continuously over many generations. These proud and self sufficient people
were broken up from big villages. Being scattered, they lost their lands in
which they had invested decades of labor, and were moved to areas where they
were given no comparable land. They were pushed into stifling river bottom
locations where the change in altitude and environment brought on illness of
the people and the death of their livestock, a valuable source of protein. One only need to
travel to the old village sites to comprehend the colossal stupidity of
forcing these people to relocate in an age of environmental concern and human
rights. Villages were carefully built
on the top ridges, the land full of tall grasses, wind, water, and gentle
slopes that did not erode easily.
Great forests existed from which small quantities of wood could be
gotten for houses, simple houses, and in which the cattle and pigs could find
cool shelter and feed, raise their young.
Trails and terraces were built, fencing was in place to keep the
cattle out of sensitive farming areas, and water sources were protected. There was no where one could look without
seeing either sunrise or sunset and the mountains below for kilometers. These people did not go down to the valley
asking for trouble, it was the people of the low lands who came up to them
and began to tell them that they were foreigners and that they must do this
and that, and move their villages.
Fruit trees and bushes with berries were common, birds and animals for
hunting plentiful, and crops rotated from one land plot to another. One family, one village, only chose to farm
close to home, only farmed for what they needed, and so the idea that the
forest was continuously cut was more a concept of convenient imagination than
reality. However the Akha
can tell you when the low land people came up and logged all the big trees
off their mountains. These were the
first roads. With the building of bigger roads for a host of reasons, came
policy. And with policy came schools
and stores, and the pressure and requirement to need money. The Akha were ridiculed for who they were,
and so the pressure was also there to look more Thai, to own more, to build
more Thai like houses, more resources needed. The need for all this money
increased the burden on the families to not just grow food but grow crops
that brought in money, be it opium or cabbages. Increasingly Akha
were arrested for this and that offense, offenses that were called on the
bias of an outside referee with no hope that they, the people of the
community, would have any say in it, and so they saw their fathers and
husbands and sons taken down to the jails of the lowlands, not to come back
for years. Heavy fines were extracted,
girls went to town to find jobs that would pay such heavy fines, not good
jobs, not jobs that you or I or other civil people would want their daughters
to do, but all legal here in Even to this day,
the Thai forestry department takes over the new land they were given to farm,
planting pine on all sides, a non native specie pine for a possible
commercial crop, as there is no environmentally sound reason for it. The Chiangrai Forestry Department is chiefly
to blame for this disastrous policy.
Now thousands of rai of land, once carefully managed by Akha villages,
has been totally cut clear, pine has been planted, and below the branches of
the pine no other specie of any kind grows, replacing thousands of rai of
jungle and productive lands with a bio desert. And each time forestry takes new land for
this use, the Akha are pushed deeper into the existing forest to find new
plots to grow food, and once again blamed for cutting trees when ever this
occurs. The lack of
visible and well organized central clearing house for environmental
information in Thailand has made it
possible for this incredible environmental destruction to continue unbeknown
and unseen by the Thai population at large, who might very well choose a
different environmental policy in regards to this land than what Petroleum
Authority of Thailand, which sponsors the plantings, and the Forestry
department envision. So as we see,
community property rights, or human rights, have little meaning besides
discussion, without the means to bring justice to each and every issue. The hand that
does the damage is hidden, while the people who suffer the consequences of
the foolish and greedy policies of others, are made to pay both in public
relations and poverty. Living in
conditions that few would want to live in, with no view of the horizon, and
with little land to farm, communities often resorted to illegal activities
such as drugs. While It is very
difficult not to notice the issue of race and superiority based on presumed
differences between these cultures. The natural
education system of the Akha is scorned and taken away, while decrying their
lack of a Thai style education, which would suggest that the only kind of
education one can or should have must be a Thai school book education. These issues are
at the heart of sovereignty concerns of people who live on the land, farm it
for food, and maintain their cultural and religious beliefs. For after all, if we disrespect or fail to
understand the culture of another, we can hardly suggest that we are willing
to give them control of the land they live on. So in considering
the issue of rights of people, we must look at these rights from the
standpoint of a sphere of rights, not just convenient rights, but all the
rights which cover all the aspects of life of a people. We can not claim to be for human rights
while the clinics turn away those who can not pay, yet millions of baht
squandered by the countries risk taking rich in via bank loans, is absorbed
by the government. All forms of
rights, can only work, when the people own them as defined by their
community. It is not enough, just
because outsiders say they now have enough rights, enough quality of life. It
is enough when the community understands and has say in what effects it, and
is able to call for a halt to actions imposed upon it which are causing it
damage. Community rights
can not occur if government policies of propaganda continue to push an agenda
that brings about disregard for the stated community leading to degradation
and social structure failure. 3. Western Driven
Ideologies Which Effect The Akha Many of the
changes that are imposed from the outside on the Akha community are based on
assumptions which the outside communities make as a result of their
relationship with the western cultures which have co-opted them. On one hand the
British widely traded drugs, opium in particular, in the Asian hemisphere. Yet a few years later, the collective
memory gone to amnesia, the west is the standard barer of drug morality,
imposing its will in both war and policy on the Thai people and inhabitants
along its borders. Under the pretense
of stopping the drug crop of opium, at that time a well established part of
the economy for the hill tribe people, the pressure to burn crops and arrest
growers and users increased. More
roads were built to establish a full drug free zone out to the limit of the
Thai borders and many evils were imposed on these communities in the process.
If one looks at the history of this process over the last ten years, one can
say that it is true, that little to no opium is now grown in this region, but
the region is environmentally unrecognizable compared to what it used to
be. An incredible environmental loss
has occurred, but the national community does not recognize this loss. The west is now
establishing economically throughout the world, what it used to try and
establish by war and colonization.
Central policies are controlled by trade, communications, travel,
patents, banking, loans and trade treaties.
The western economic model is based on the growth of economy and this
economy is based on the increased exploitation of the environment. Selling this policy to countries such as One of the
penalties of this new system is that products that were not popular, were not
considered wise, and were not manufactured in Thailand, began to be imported
into Thailand from western countries and countries set up to manufacture to
the western system. A host of
motorbikes spewing toxic gases, two cycle models, came from But no issue of
development promises to have a longer term impact on the environment than the
increasing introduction of herbicides into this region. No government policy or law has been sited
to stop this disastrous development for both people, land, species and water
systems. Herbicide is now
pushed in all the stores as a quick solution to labor marginalization. Where kids worked in the fields to some
degree with their parents as they grew older, the Thai schools now take them
to “educate” them, and the labor gap is filled with farming
chemicals. One is made to
wonder, when the west complains about the flow of toxic compounds such as
opium and heroin, while they are busy exporting millions of liters of far
more toxic and environmentally unsafe and long lasting chemicals into the
environment of these same countries, where the products are far from the
training and caution that came with them in their invention. Heroin use may have many harmful side
effects to the west, to the users and their society. But herbicides and pesticides have far
greater reaching effects and are used far less discriminatingly throughout
the soil and water community. Yet
little consideration is given to this, and you can legally sell this toxin in
any Thai community, where as opium is forbidden. The Akha were not
the problem, lack of government vision was.
Now herbicides are increasingly being used for the profit of chemical
companies which sell them, and the Akha are spraying them on mountain fields,
damaging soil organisms, and contaminating the workers, finally flowing with
rains into the water shed and contributing to the contamination of regional
waters. In the low lands the Thais had
already been using these products for years, and now these last regions were
being added. Yet in another case of
mugging the facts, the Forestry department came out to say that the reason
the Akha villages must now be moved was due to pollution of the water shed. But the people pushing toxic substances far
in excess what damage the Akha could do, were not sited in these one sided
accounts. The Thai
education system, providing education for adults moving into an industrial
society, was chiefly built on western norms, at the exclusion of all
else. While the Thai system was following
this western method, space for alternatives with much longer histories was
not allowed. So rather than looking
for instance at the environmental wisdom and knowledge of the Akha education
system it was rejected. We can hardly
speak of community rights, while the system, one by one debunks and rejects
all of these rights. Akha children
often come away from Thai schools being made to feel that being Akha is
inferior, as compared to being Thai.
As well, they are displaced from their own educational system, based
on deep knowledge of their food working environment, herbal medicines, soil
protection practices and healthy foods and protein. In contrast to
the old system, little stores come to many villages, as well as schools,
selling a host of chiefly junk food, sugars, coloring and air. One sees more
and more food being imported into the Akha community, much of it with low
nutritional value, white rice as compared to heavy mountain dark rice. So with time, the Akha community moves
further and further away from food security, and more and more of the food
has high trucking miles attached to it. Yet if we compare
the educational norms we can find no reason why the Thai system is
superior. If the Thais choose it, they
should use it, but the Akha model should not be scorned, marginalized or
rejected. In addition, we see few to
no Akha teachers in the schools. This
can hardly be good for Akha children that Akha teachers are not included in
the educational process. If Thailand were
to recognize the benefit of different education models, not just that of the
west, it would also have hope of reviving and preserving its own traditional
knowledge which has been greatly lost in Thai society due to these
compromises and abdications to western thinking as the only good way. 4. Benefits Of The
Akha Model We can hardly |