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Akha
Chronicles Once again, I would
like to note that there is much editing and additional information that is
needed below. The Akha Commenting on some definition
of the Akha or what it means to be Akha is no small task. I hardly think that
this chapter comes close to saying it all, but only a few musings about the
Akha. Maybe in this entire book I form some impressions. But much of the
Akha, what it means to be Akha, and Akha life remains to me a mystery, a
beautiful mystery. I much appreciate what I can see. These are the lives of the Akha as I have
come to know them. There is not enough
time to write down all that they know and what is being lost. Land, culture,
language, traditions. There is not enough time to write down all the stories
and memories about the Akha. And there is not enough time to comment on all
the good people who have passed on. But maybe in some small way, all that is
written down here will cause someone to think about how important the Akha
are, and do something to help protect them and their way of life. I in no way
support the US Drug War. I in no way think that missionaries and the
teachings of Jesus Christ are related. Discriptions of things within Akha life, culture and
experience It took me years to get out to all the villages. I would have done it in much less time but
for years I had only a motorbike and that is very tiring. I got to many more villages once I got a
truck. Many more in one day. Fuel was
expensive and then went way up, nearly double in 2000. So it took a bigger part of my budget even
though it was still priority number one. The villages were in
many different locations, very different roads, the other towns close
to the village all having some effecting personality. The geography could be very different, the
Akha used what was close to them, to make their lives as good as
possible. Each was faced with
different difficulties and had come to their current spot for different
reasons, under different conditions.
Many had fled war in They were all related, a very tight network and
though scattered about the mountains they traveled endlessly back and forth
to see each other, to communicate, to go to funerals, weddings, to date women
from the other villages, looking for a wife. The roads were almost always bad, I said that if the
road wasn't horrible it couldn't be an Akha road. In years of late some roads had gotten patches of
concrete on them in the worst locations. The Haen Taek region had gotten the most concrete and
the army said that was because of all the yah bah sales flowing through the
district and into the Ampur's office. True, concrete was not cheap. Because of the Akha style of a gable hut roof with
two crossing rafters on their top end one could pick out their villages from
a long ways away, knowing it wasn't a Lahu or Lisaw village. Many villages now have an ugly grotesque church now
placed in some domineering location in the village. Just by the arrogant placement you could
get the feeling that another village had been steam rolled. If you came in the day time often the village was
very empty, only one person to watch each house and they didn't even appear
if it was hot. Evenings were the best time to visit any village just
before it got dark by about an hour, when everyone came back from the fields,
but of course one couldn't visit all the villages at this time of day. Due to security reasons, the villagers
being afraid or asleep already I seldom went into a village after dark unless
they had asked me to, told me it was alright or needed something
quickly. Many times under such terms I
had ended up in villages around Often I wanted to stay the night and they wanted me
to but I had some other village to be to in the morning so I would leave
anyway to be closer to the other location, sometimes sleeping in the
truck. This was always very hard
because if they knew me they wanted me to stay and talk and share stories as
well as listen to their own. Each village had problems from mild to serious and I
tried to get a grip on what these problems were and what caused them, how
they could be resolved. There were
problems with police, forestry, army, Thai business men, drug runners, unpaid
wages, failed crops, not enough land to farm, water rights, herbicides, a
large number of illnesses, shortage of food, vaccine damaged children and the
list went on. I did my best to listen, to spread a little cheer and
hope as I went and find whatever resources I could find to come back and
help. It all told me the story about a people and the very
hard life they faced, not because they were poor or lived in the mountains or
were mostly farmers, but because of the situations that were not natural,
that other people insisted on exploiting them with. There were common small problems of their
own making, such as family problems, but this was another matter by comparison. Many many of the villages had been split by Christian
missioaries bent on a very western kind of prosyletizing. Since villages were just large family
units, many brothers and uncles, this was splitting up family units, rather
laughable when you think of how much Christians in The Akha A Note Many times it feels rather difficult to talk about the
Akha to westerners, because when we work with the Akha we feel that culture
is important, that it has great value and worth to the individual, the
village, that it is very understandable and working together for the benefit
of all. Culture is something that
makes sense and you do your best to protect it. Some people fail and their cultures are not
around any more. But to most
westerners culture is some kind of non sense that you take pictures of. Being western is considered to be the
highest point of education and advancement and therefore it renders all other
lesser cultures quite pointless. A
westerner might seldom admit that not having a similar culture to that of the
Akha is of any loss at all. So from
this standpoint, it only makes the look into the society of the people a
curiosity. An assumption is made
affore hand that their culture, their knowledge, their view of the world, as
not being western is useless. This is
reinforced by consumer tourism and people like Lonely Planet. On the other
hand Maybe we will
have to bring up at some point what the Akha say about westerners. It is not
too flattering. “Westerners don’t bathe. They have sex in other
people’s houses. They eat more than their share of food at the table.
They think THEIR money is way important. They kiss and fondle each other in
public. They take pictures without permission.” Who are the Akha? By Mooh Jurh. Occasionally we may see the Akha people in their
colorful dress appearing in tourist guide booklets and sometimes we may see
them on national tv programmes. If we
travel onlong the mountain ranges of Chiangrai province in Who are these people and from where do they come? If we try to trace back in their history based on
their oral traditions their native place is If we look at their geneological charts we can say
that their civilization appears to have started later than the Chinese because
there are about 150 generations in the Chinese charts while only about 70
generations in the Akha geneological charts.
From these charts we can tell that the Akha civilization started some
1500 years ago at a minimum. According to the oral traditons the first 11
ancestors or generations belonged to the spirit world when in the old days
the spirits and human beings stayed under the same roof, born from the same
parents. Later due to some
disagreement between spirit and human being they parted company and the
spirits agreed that they would stay in the forest and the humans would live
in villages. The humans would work in
the day time and the spirits would work at night. Although the spirits could see the human
beings the humans could not see the spirits any more except certain
individuals with the power to do so. Some people call these myths, and others say
not. Certainly similar situations can
be found in traditional western religious texts highly subscribed to by many
people today. Later some of the Akha migrated into Some people claim that the Hani are related to the
Akha because they share some of the same language but many Akha declare not,
that they are distinct groups, for which there is quite some amount of
evidence. The Akha people are a simple living and quiet people
by nature and would like to stay peacefully without mixing in with other
tribes. They are seldom found by the
governor of a place to involve themselves in rioting or revolting over land
rights or anything else. But today the Akha are being blamed by higher
authorities for trading drugs and making use of them in some countries. In some places they are being threatened
not to be granted with a national identity card unless they can prove that
they have totally withdrawn from their linking with drugs. It is true that they are to blame to some
degree but not all the Akhas are doing in this fashion and as well many other
tribes and races have even greater and higher organization in the drug
trafficing business. Some Akha's smoke opium as a mountain pharmaceutical,
but when you see their very hard mountain life style you may understand why
it is a pain killer for the very hard work they do and the very hard
difficulties they live under. Crop
substitution programs, initiated and insisted on by the west where drug
consumption is very high, didn't really substitute anything. Impoverished families now send their
daughters to town where they may become prostitutes to help pay for food,
land is increasingly being taken away not for reforestation but for villas,
and rather than the slow process of smoking opium where one might get caught
many people have opted to smoke heroin and inject it as well, increasing the
transmission of disease. It is highly
unlikely that the American Super Cops thought of this one, nor care, just as
long as opium is not cultivated.
Similar policies have met with disastrous failure in places like Although you can find the DEA in In some countries the Akha have no level of
security. Border guards, police and
army rape Akha girls at their convenience. Rather than helping the villagers government and
insurgent troops enter the villages and steal the domestic animals, rice and
take men for porters. The raping of
Akha women is quite easy to document.
People who resist are killed in many cases depending on what country
it may occur in. So the Akha are left
not knowing who to approach for their security. In some countries the missionaries take
wholesale advantage of these extreme conditions, teach the Akha that all they
are, know and do is evil and that only when they will become like white
evangelicals or white catholics can they become free from "darkness and
bondage". These people behave
worse than criminal ambulance chasers, imposing big churches on villages,
forbidding the culture, the
dance the songs and the traditions, splitting villages of large extended
families with religious disinformation that their home churches would be
shocked to see. Those of the Akha who
help in this practice are handsomely rewarded by these missionaries for
helping to do these evil events which further fragment and marginalize a
culture that needs friends, not opportunistic predators in the name of the
"gospel". (for more documentation and information on these human
rights abuses by missionaries go to our page on this subject) Huge sums of
money are spent on church buildings to claim a village for this or that
denomination in the same competitive fashion as churches are built in the
west and the villages still remain impoverished. Money that could have been used to buy them farming
tools, farming land, seeds, build a clinic and so forth is spent to meet the
western agenda of these mission people instead. To the Akha this is not the "good
news". How could it be? The Akha seek to get a secure life without
interference from the outside world.
Running and hiding, dodging immigration, the police, insurgent groups
and so forth much of thier life is spent in a kind of hiding from the world that
they are not asking for. For those who have ended up in town and have gotten a
better life by some definitions, they are always craving to share equally in
the life that they see around them.
Some of them have sent their children to University and hopefully some
of these people can gain a better life and help their own people with
security. Due to modernization many defects are popping up. One
defect is prostitution. Many of our
Akha girls are earning their income through this way of business and it is a
great injury for our people, especially to those who are trying to settle
down in the town. At the beginning
when they could not match their life with the expenses of town's life they
are forced to end up in such a way to solve the daily problems. This is one of the chief problems that the
Akha would like to solve. At this time we need help with Identity card rights,
with assistance in farming and feeding our families and protecting the land
we do have use of. Many people think
that because we are not a major race and have migrated to many areas due to
war that we have no right to land. But
we are people too and at one time or another everyone migrated. We seek justice, not wealth, just room to
live. We do not burn up the worlds
environment as fast as western cultures do which are far removed from the
resource sources they use and can not see the results. Many people blame us for shifting agriculture but in
fact our village sites are very stable.
We rotate crops in regions but are often pushed off one land and given
another. The old land is not replanted
into jungle but into a tree farm or a resort and then we are blamed for the
deforestation that occured. Particularly in Roads which were pushed into isolated areas in the
name of helping us were actually environmental disasters. Huge quantities of erosion followed these
projects. As well electricity and
schools that were brought in were said to be for our good but now as we see
the nationals taking control of more and more of the land and pushing us down
to nothing it appears that helping us was not the long term goal at all. Many of the villagers are being asked to
leave the mountains and go down to the town with nothing and be a slave
class. Any inspection of these lower
villages will prove this out. Tiny
huts, no land to farm, slave wages for daily labor with hazardous chemicals
and construction. Many times our
babies are turned away from the hospitals in conditions that they die from
because of uncaring selfish and racist doctors who don't like hill tribe
people and won't help people who don't have much money. We take our babies home. They die.
Sometimes they die while we are still in the waiting room. Many women are sterilized while they are
delivering a baby and are not told.
The nurses are very aggressive in asking a pregnant woman how many
babies she has already had. We do not
think this is fair. Population
development really means population control, our population. Population suppression when you add it all
up, population decline. And the missionaries tell us that all this has
happened to us because we are not American Baptist or this or that and that
we are under the power of "darkness and bondage". These carpetbaggers should learn it is not
our darkness that has put us in bondage but the darkness of other people who
they don't mind being friends with at all because those people have money. Other NGO programs also get and spend huge amounts of
money for projects to help us but we usually don't see much of it at all and
then the intended or stated goal is usually not met so in the end we were not
helped much at all. We need land, ID cards, clean water and a say in our
future. We may not be a nation state
and we may not have many laws which protect us from the exploitation of
tourism and prostitution of our young people but we are people as good and as
deserving as anyone else. Where they live - Map The Akha, considered of Mongolian decent, through It is said that the Akha migrated so as not to give
up their culture. The Hani chose to stay, and kept the land but lost much of
their culture. At any rate, subsequent wars right to recent years,
with the Japanese invasion, the Burmese army invasion of Shan state, Chiang
Kai Shek (sp?), the KMT and now the Shan and Wa border wars with the Burmese
army have been forces that repeatedly caused the Akha to migrate away from
their villages, often after their villages were burned. This migration from war brought them into Their lifestyle The Akha are farmers. They have a close relationship
with the land for all their food and medicine needs. Forced relocations make this relationship
difficult, much labor being lost which they invested in the land. Their supply of food and medicinal plants
can end up not being adequate. Traditional Akha Spirituality What the Akha have is a very close spiritual
connection to the earth. I am not sure that Christians understand their own
beliefs as well. One of the problems
with Christians is that they have fallen to only believing in dogma which
removes the necessity for having to think. Mass money making religion. In the belief of that rhetoric, there is no
need to really learn anything. And certainly in a great aspect there is an
actual denial of the spiritual quality of man because the rhetoric and dogma
relieves all need for that . To me that spiritual
is that part of man that is spiritual and seeks to understand his place in
the world and in the afterworld. There is a need to understand what is really
going on around him and what about that is important. So how do you study the spiritual and how do you mesh
what another people know and have learned over thousands of years and combine
that to improve your own life? Now there is a
pop commercialism being sold to everyone, so the time for culture and
individuality is short. I can see the
fact that the world will not much longer be fit to live in. That everything
good is snuffed out and that evil and evil people and evil ways and evil
systems will destroy all that we see before us that is good and in the end
men will still not give God credit for being the creator, but will be
worshiping the ability of machines such as this one for what they can do, for
collective human thought. My mother would say, “ Well folks, I think
its time to close up shop!” What
a glorious God we have! The question that I am asking is whether or not
modern day Christians are part of the solution or part of the problem? Now with the Akha, I like to say that they are
invisible. Meaning, that if you take a culture and put it on a two
dimensional plane, most cultures register above a median line as visible,
with only a very little not spoken of or spiritual or below the median line
out of sight, but in the Akha culture the vast majority of who they are is
not visisble, it is not above the line and I am not sure that they talk about
it or that they put it in words. One of the tradgedies of the Akha and their
confrontation with christianity is that they never really come to understand
who Jesus was or what he emphasized from anything they see from the
missionaries. So the converted Akha become bankrupt, leaving behind what they
did understand for what they know nothing of and what ends up being hollow
shell in many regards. I don’t
think that many Christians understand their faith, let alone the people they
preach it to. I always found as I grew up that adults didn’t have the
answers and weren’t interested in talking about it. There was always this great assumption that
it was just understood. What, I don’t know, but it was. Pull out any
theme in the Bible and all they will give you for the most part is
established pat answers but there is no real independent thought on it from
their part. Knowledge System This seems to be collected best in Akha songs and
“heart books”. It would appear that the Akha are much more quick witted
because of the fact that their knowledge is completely relied upon from the
heart. They have many stories and songs so interwoven into
their lives, to say nothing of the huge collection of knowledge of their
environment and the people who live in it.
This appears to be in a fashion that gives everything meaning and
describes their human existence. Songs, stories, ballads, rymes, expressions and
ceremonies. All guided by the
elders, Peeh Mah's, the Boeuh Maw, Gneeh Pah's, the Dzoeuh Mah, Booh Seh and
the village Bah Jeeh. In the end we are as advocates, trying to understand
their system so that we can represent it to the outside world as something
that the outside world should stop destroying. The Akha Belief And Life System In the west we often say a single word to streamline
an entire event or collection of events or ideas. However much can be lost in this process,
much can be assumed as known and taken for granted by the speaker when it is
not. Culture and Relgion are such
terms. As soon as we use such terms,
and have taken the quick judgements to label events under one or the other,
we also quickly jump to the pronouncement as to wether they are good or bad. There is not much way in which a person could quickly
have a clue as to the complexity and detail, the subtle tones of meaning,
that the culture of another people have. The culture of the Akha People has often been
dismissed by those who don’t understand it and would redily replace it
with their own alternative. The chief problem with this, is that it is the
culture, the way in which a people live their collective lives, which gives
them strength, and to come and tell them that all which they are and know is
wrong, and must be abandoned, is to destroy them. This is true in any instance, but particularly true
whe speaking of people already greatly marginalized for numerous reasons. The Akha find themselves in such a situation. The lives of the Akha people are settled in mountain
jungles, a progression over many centuries that has not moved very far
geographically. They are erroneously
considered nomadic and migratory by some, yet the distance total is no more
than what a person could do in a few hours by car over many hundreds of
years. The jungle and mountains bring the Akha life, life up
and out of the earth, the elevation brings fog and rain, growing all that
they need abundantly, including their farming. The hunt from the jungle, collect many
items of food and shelter, as well as till mountain side fields. The Akha are maligned as slash and burn migratory
farmers. This is not true. Stable village sites are many years at the
same location, the land being farmed in a circle around the village for years
and years on end, rice terraces slowly creeping up from the bottoms of the
watershed. Forced relocations and wars
have resulted in the Akha villages being relocated over and over, leaving
them no option but to cut and farm in the new location. Distant relatives of the Akha, the Hani, in
But it is more than farming, and it is more than the
misperceptions of the Akha that make their lives go on, carrying out the annual
cycles for centuries. This is the Akha life, not something you can so much
name, or seperate into parts, not even name it as of them as compared to
their environment, because they are not so seperable from it. Their lives are built in a unique relationship,
interweaving with the land, the soil, the water, mountains, jungle and fields
around them. Both with the plants,
animals and people. They have
continued on in an environment of geological isolation that has only known
wars and forced moves. Amidst this
careful interweaving with their environment, they have built over an
incredible history of time, a lineage, that has carried them on better than a
thousand years from anywhere anyone can identify. They have their own language, and the names
of their fathers and fathers and fathers going back so much further than
that. All passed down till now,
knowledge, careful rules for living safely together and getting on with life,
and carrying themselves into the future.
Part of it is a law, but it seems so much fuller than that, than a
law, as in western terms, it is a carefully orchestrated piece of music, each
note in its right place, all done up at once, every instrument going, as
Handel’s Messiah would require. The Akha have a couple of items not native to them
which they trade for. Salt, iron and
silver. The salt for food, the iron
for blades and axe heads, the silver for ornament. It may vary from village to village, but
these are the intrinsic things that the Akha don’t produce themselves
in their villages. All the rest of
their lives is going on by themselves, the mountains and jungles, and the
plants, animals and bugs that grow all about them. Best descriptions of the Akha, still dwarf who they
really are, what they really know. The Akha have a collective mind. To say that you know something, does not
mean that you have those informations in your head, but that it exists in the
Akha mind, and that possibly you need to go down to that hut there on the left
to talk to the woman who can speak it out of the collective mind and into
your ear. Do Akha songs and recitals carry forward what they
know? I don’t think so, no more than sheets of music make an
orchestra. The songs, in part or
completeness here and there, made up as they go along, or well known
traditional songs sung by different peoples during different times in the
village gives only hint to what resides within them as a group. Akha Zauh, it is the law, but their villages and life
are made up of so much more than that.
The law is just like tally marks on a map, which are cause for pause
or turning here or there, which is located at the places of chafe or
rememberance which they take note of. This law would appear to be no more than the
framework on which all the rest of their knowledge and interactions are
reflected to. The law is the top
points of collective memory that help remind each person of things to
remember to do or not to do, or the settling of disputes, marking of times
for harvest and so forth. Long
experience in the same family has taught these people, that if you do like
this, you get a problem, but do like that and you avoid it. So they make each such item which is
crucial to remember to avoid injury, insult or pain, as an event. Some people call this culture. A small spoon for such an event. Fighters, bombers and missles have computer
memories. Culture is the collective
memory of already charted waters that a people have lived upon for many
hundreds of years. It becomes
automatic. You remember your parents,
your mother, your father, your grandmother and grandfather and how they lived
life such that carefully you got this far, because, unbeknownst to outsiders,
a whole lot of people didn’t.
They died. Early. And so the memory is an ongoing
thanksgiving to doing it right, surviving, living on to be old, to have lived
to the end of life, after which of course there is nothing else to do for the
moment. And the cloth of Akha life gives testament to this,
the Law, the Zauh, the songs, the dances, the festivals, all the goings on,
to how people should live their lives by the day, in all the available events
which can occur to them. A wild boar runs through the village. Well, that isn’t suppose to happen,
and it isn’t normal, don’t tell me why, but villagers know that boars
are not safe, they have long tusks, are generally quite nervous, and can hurt
you and don’t belong rousting around in the village. And I suppose there is much more to it than
that, but they stop the village for a day in the case of this rare event and
do a purification ceremony for the village. Now on a particular day, an old woman in the village
gets sick. You don’t have to be
appointed an elder to be an elder, you get old and you are an elder, they are
one and the same. So on this
particular day, the village elders take counsel, and in order to cause the
illness of the Akha woman to leave, the elders order that today when everyone
goes to the fields, no one will work on any soil that has rice planted on it,
or is prepared for rice, but can only work on other soil, such as bean fields
or corn fields. Not to minimize it,
but not a bad show of support. And
once again I am sure that there is much more involved. The point being made is that these people live
carefully, not adjancent to the earth, the soil, but within it. Relying on all of it for what they need,
what grows up by the year, and what is more complex in making and getting
than that is not needed it would appear.
There is this identity, this keen understanding of
how the people and the earth best work together. Some of the Akha migrate or are forced into the
cities, but there is some understanding that as poets of the earth, they
would prefer to stay in the mountain, listen to and write more poetry. Not all that the Akha do has a detail to it, but the
Akha are quick to tell you what is related to the law or a special order and
what is not. Generally they say about
something that it is tied up in Akha Zauh.
So on this day we have a ceremony to this, this is the order. Then when you go into the forest to look for
Zah Mah, the mother pig of yours that ran to the forest to have her litter,
you take a knife. It is illegal, or
against the law to go looking up the trails for you pig without a knife, like
a machette. No one bucks the law, or
questions why something should be a part of it, just understands that it is
part of the formula for knowing and doing carefully all that you need to know
and do. Cause when you find that pig,
it will have made a great nest of sticks and leavers like a great bundle, and
inside you must look for how many pigs were born, and then later load them
into your basket and carry them back to the hut where the mother will return
and care for them, but you mustn’t look into that nest with your hands,
you must cut a bamboo stick, with a hook on it, and use that hook to pull
aside the nest and look inside. There is no part of Akha life that is not carefully
guided by these traditions and ceremonies of time. They lived
completely till now by their use, harming no one, no apparent need to abandon
them now. In any village environment, some people are more
wealthy than others, some have better luck with a crop at a season than an
other has, one’s pigs do better than anothers, and in the end, one
family may not have near as much meat as other families, thus suffering from
less protein in the diet. One can not
say this is the sole reason, but certainly bares logic, that many of the
ceremonies requiring the sharing of meat, relate to this. If you build a new house, you have a new
house ceremony, carefully done, more than another people, and the meat is
shared. The poorer in the village get
to eat alike. The richer you are, the
more meat you will take down, the poor are fed. Mother in laws.
Some people fight with them. The Akha end sentences with certain words that
ascribe specific feeling about the event.
“I won’t do that to avoid being illegal” or “I
won’t do that due to fear of the consequences, physical fear” not
because it is wrong or illegal. In the
case of a new bride, there may be many cases when it is illegal for her to
return to her mothers house, and the groom seldom will, married, she moves to
her groom’s village and the families are seperate, life goes on. There are many laws among the Akha
regarding the relationships between the relatives of married people and also
the different clans among the Akha, family names. All order, to carry on life peacefully, know where
and who you are. The Akha have great
emphasis on relationship. We
occasionally say, our uncle, our aunt, our cousin or our friend. In the case of the Akha they speak of
people who are related to them by marriage in a host of names for relative
position by age and marriage to another person. And each position has a name. Among the Akha names are not much used, as
ones name given at birth or family name, but names of position in
relationship are used instead. Ah
Meeh, one doesn’t call her, instead they use the name for what one
calls their brother’s wife’s younger sister, and so forth. When you harvest rice, and watch the Akha do it with
such fine grace, carefully set amongst just how hard it is on a lean stomach
in the heat, on the steep hillside, well, you take a bunch of rice in your
left hand, many stalks, grabbing them low, cut them off with a cycle, and take a few stalks and
twist and wind them to hold the bundle, then you let it set back gently on
the top of the ends of the remaining stubble where it will be allowed to dry
for a few more days. But you
don’t justset it anywhere, you set it with the cut end towards the rice
hut and harvest threshing point of the field.
Why? Because it is the law.
Sure, there is a reason, but it is also now part of the law to do
that. You don’t do anything
carelessly if you live in the earth. The law, much different than we hear of the history
of Jewish law or Christian law, was not about being wrong, or getting
punished as much as it was about keeping yourself in a good position with the
world of life around you, the elements that produced your food, and that
could also leave you with nothing to eat.
A code of survival. You
don’t do it not because you don’t want to get punished but
because, why would you want to do something that is bad for you to do? Do you know more than all those who lived
before you in combination? So will you
change the law? Just for today? Just for you? And all throughout the life of the Akha they adhere
carefully to these known ways of doing things in what is for them a well
known and finite environment of plants, animals, people, soil, water, rain, and
win. They believe in Spirits. There are some good spirits, but also many
bad ones who are accountable for the bad things which occur. Sounds reasonable enough. And the careless actions of humans can
increase the damage that these bad spirits can do. So even when you are in the jungle, you
must be careful, yes, there are guidelines for it all, such that neither you
or anyone else get messed up. In the west, most people not being able to name their
great great great grandfather, we often mock or minimalize these sorts of
things. But in this order and
understanding of their lives the Akha, as a single race for hundreds of
years, have preserved and carried forward their collective knowledge and
caution about living long in the jungle and upon the earth, baring children
who live and carry forward their people into the future in this way,
believing in things which to those who don’t know about them or their
true meanings and implications, mock them as foolish superstitions or down
right evil. Yet in travels about the world, seldom will you find
such a careful people about how they live their lives. Through this careful life, they live their
lives through many eyes, each giving light and focus to each event. Carefully the Akha are wrapped up in the
arms of this collective mind and cradle that brings them forward, like the
new bark on a tree, their life soon to become the wood, straight and strong,
going on, the rings never disappearing, one link of time, in a not so long
total history of time for humans, not such an insignificant part of the
whole, each and every one of them. To be Akha is to be a way of being, a way of being
alive, not just living, but it is the very definition of life, to have more
than one eye, to have many eyes, to have many ears, always one heart. You are not seperate from anything or anyone, in one
way, yet you part down slightly different roads by marriage, the younger
sisters wailing as they see their older sisters leaving the village to become
a bride, their dearest friend, leaving from beside them, to take that
slightly one over road, from theirs. Sitting next to fires, looking at the light in the
old woman’s face, trying to figure out what it is, within the context
of the obvious temporary status of
life for all, not shrouded or masked in Akha life. To die. Carefully she has
walked all the trails, farmed every clod of soil, sat beneath every tree,
picked one of every leaf, eaten one of every fruit, like she has been so
carefully laughing and joking, manicuring the face of the earth for so many
years her time on it. You say there is
more down off the mountain, different, better? How could she possibly care,
she is where and who she is and has done it all, how else can you be old but
to have done and seen it all? Someone
else has done more, different, not hardly, think they have, maybe done a
whole lot less. She threshed the rice and ate on it for the whole next year,
fed it like manna to her children, and gave the seeds back to the soil to
give her the next batch also. Events came
and went, the law carefully guided her to remember the unseen old couple who
live in the rice field and take care of it when she is not there. Enough to make you sing a song, if you can figure out
all the lines. These Other Guys We Don't Know I remember going to this spirit woman with a friend
because her friend was going to sort out why her husband had up and jumped
and run down the road of the village like a crazy man a couple times
now. So while the spirit woman was
working, she was thinking and talking and telling this story about (as in
around) herself and she said that considering this incident, God was very
important. Apoeuh Meeh Yeh, they call
God, and she said it like this. We don’t know what this is (the crazy
man running), cause Budha come, and Jesus come, and a whole lot of other ones
come, and we don't know who they all are but we still know there is only one
God. Now this was all quite
understandable when one looked at how
the opposing groups had sawn back and forth through the Akha community. I always sort of wonder why western people
who support these white religions, can never really comprehend the result of
their own actions on the communities of cultures so different from their own
which they target? The Akha 1 At this time in The Akha, they live in our world, the true world, of
true events, however poorly documented. Though it may take time, you can
travel immediately from the land of the Akha to a great hotel in Or we can come the other way, like so many western
tourists and climb from our waiting van and peer through the video lenses at
these curious little people. In reality the story of the Akha is the story of a
proud people with long traditions of sustainable farming while under seige by
wars around them. They have been the
battered prey of missions for going on near a century now. Don’t give a damn what the pope says,
the church is unrepentant. Taking
children, totally attacking and destroying the culture, demanding it as their
right to have a piece of each village, their voice heard, even though it is
uninvited, unwanted, and splits the village. Missionaries are great proof that justice will never
come from religion. And coming from
chiefly western countries they seem to be greater proof that these countries
“Just don’t get it!” In addition to the massive mission onslaught against
the Akha there are many government attitudes towards the Akha and policies
which adversely effect them without considering that they are humans at all. We don’t need a bill of rights, the UN or
anyone else to tell us what is right.
We know inherantly that people should be treated justly, with respect,
with due consideration and process.
Those who do otherwise make themselves the animals in the picture. There is much discussion of drugs, the need for
controlling, stopping the flow. Yet
from a logical standpoint, no effort has been made to alter the situations
which bring about the movement of drugs through the villages, and opium. When issues of human dignity and human rights go
unaddressed in the villages it is rather surprising that anyone thinks that
they will make much progress on the other fronts. Yet the construction of a large prison in
Chiangrai, now complete, shows that Akha 2 Most of the time that I spent outside Maesai was to
the south and west. Often I took a
motorcycle to the Akha villages, once to Mae Hon Son and occasionally to
Chiang Saen. The Akha villages in the hills are where I went most
often. The story was always the same,
dirty, muddy roads and lots of rain or dust.
The motorbikes were of poor repair and so there were often problems
with them like flat tires, sticking throttle, poor brakes and bald
tires. Add to this poor trails and the
job of just keeping the motorcylcle upright could be a large one. The villages were much the same to an untrained eye,
although some were more industrious than others. The poverty was ever present, even if I
didn't not understand the factors that caused it at the time. The factors were there, I was trying to
learn the language and find out what they were. In traditional villages, with their fields properly
arranged, there were plenty of vegetables, in more distraught villages the
vegetable production methods needed to be improved. Some villages fenced their pigs and chickens, others
did not, and nothing grew. Water sources varied by villages, some very well
cared fore, others not, the village children and adults sick as a result. Economically it is very unlikely that the Akha
villages would have survived to date on what they produce without being in
the drug business and without the sale of their girls into prostitution. True they don’t consume much
otherwise, but even their low level of existence would not survive without
exploiting their offspring to the maximum. (and what do you think about this
now?) Shortsightedness was not an uncommon trait in Thais come to the village and set up gambling to take
the money out of the village which they do. Other Thais steal
with their hand in the village and get the shit kicked out of them. One stealing, one relieving fools of their
money. Akha 3 I had my own personal feelings about the Akha. This even included grievances. But they were
limited and actually I was surprised that I the Akha were not an obnoxious
people considering how they are treated. Overall I found them open, warm and trusting,
certainly the former. People would
mystake agreement for yes, when “no” was intended. One had to have ways to check on an answer before coming
to a sure conclusion, sure as that could be. They lived in a
beautiful mountain place, an uncluttered life, and certainly they based much
of their knowledge be it plants or songs on “heart books” rather
than the conventional western standards. People had a
right to live like this, I was glad that some still did. This took no tree paper pulp, made no
waste, and was in fact probably more firmly known, committed to heart. I attributed the stresses that the Akha lived under
to many of the problems they had with things like diet. When you checked on how long a village had
been in its current place it was seldom over ten years. How could they eat fruit from trees they
planted if they were forced to move and abandon them? Even infant
mortality rates could be contributed to this, if one thought about it. Villages were fragmented, were unable to
get all their traditional leaders, and so it went. According to the Akha it took fifty years
to build a stable village. On the missionary front I was at odds. Whatever needed
to be done, if one dared say this, certainly wasn’t written in stone.
It seemed that people should have been taking more time to separate out Jesus
from culture, their own, and teach just the one if at all. They came, they were not invited, they
gave little thought to how well they performed or how they were
perceived. They came until their money
ran out, then they left. This was in
fact not the case. One would think that missionaries would want to know
what kind of effect they would have if they brought any teaching into the
village. Let alone have a policy that the villages had to change. It is so funny how accepting they are of their own
culture but would readily deny the Akha their much older one. Akha geneologies easily carry them back
1,000 to 1500 years. People know their
geneologies, their reason for being here and live by it. Akha culture is a fine balance of keeping
the village, the life, the nature around them going. I have heard the Akha give many reasons
for moving a village. One that the rice didn’t grow any
more wasn’t one of them. I see
ample evidence that they rotate a slope and with time build terraces starting
at the bottom. This is logical enough
since the sister group to the Akha are the Hani, the terrace builders who
have farmed the same land for centuries up in Where ever villages are stable, these rice terraces
continue to accumulate. I think that the Akha need agricultural aid for the
obvious. Fruit trees, tea, coffee, more gardens, seeds, irrigation systems,
terrace work, tree planting and so forth.
One consideration would be if the Akha had control of all the tourism
to their own locations, bringing all the revenue from that directly to
themselves rather than it being a big Thai run business, making money off
them with little going to them. There are possible solutions, but there are also many
things working daily actively against the Akha on a structural level that
make it unbelieveably difficult for them, or anyone else, to implement good
solutions. The Akha 4 Defence of them as a people and their basic rights. I think that the basis of my work with the Akha is
that they don’t have basic rights, and that they are preyed apon by so
many groups including governments and missionaries. However, it would seem that there is no threat as
significant and organized as the missions, which can take effective advantage
of the few rights that the Akha have in order to colonize them into
evangelical clones or whatever will be the net result of an attempt to do so. At any rate, what culture they have will be
destroyed in this process and the attrition rate of the Akha increased. The missions like to point out to how many
Akha made it better because of what they did, but care not to mention all
those who didn’t make it at all. Even so, a people should not be denied what is
theirs, their culture, their uniqueness.
In view of mission activity one can not help but come to the
conclusion that the missions are political movements going for political
control, rather than there to just offer aid to people. I don’t think they make much effort
to conceal this, but their inability to point to any effort to assist the
culture gives them dead away. Much of mission
work appears to be western white race based, and one can find little proof to
the contrary of this either. Furthermore, the stated mission of these people,
conversion, not giving up till it is done, would suggest that they can not be
open to anything else. It is a close
minded game. In many cases I have personally tried to communicate
about problems like these with the missions but they were so closed off to it
that I got no where. Doing it for God
seems to be the only cover story that you need in the mission business. But I would guess that the missions are a crucial
part of western foreign policy, certainly help its agenda. In the golden triangle part of the world
this connection was often suspected of being much more direct. It all plays down to the strong and the weak, the
rich and the powerful, and who is taken prisoner of the mission. Alternative options have always been there and one
wonders why they are not used, unless of course the missions have no
intention to use them, which I think is the case. The mission agenda would not allow the
mission to act on the best faith for people. Here in lies the problem and there isn’t much
one can do to alter attitudes in a case by case basis because of this. If they are to be affected, they must be
confronted widely accross the board until the entire machine grinds to a halt
and people are forced to reconsider, because living in denial is no longer
possible. Akha Knowledge: Characteristics of an indigenous knowledge system. One of the first
problems that I encountered in my work with the Akha was the limitation of time. There was just not enough time to get to
know all the people, hear all the stories and learn enough of the language
fast enough so that I could catch more of what was going on as it went by. This was
particularly true when it came to grasping the meanings of their folklore,
songs, and ceremonies. The Akha knew
that I wanted to understand it and they could readily explain it but I was
missing a lot, the little nuance, the things which linked it all together. This was crucial
for the following reason. I had the theory that western systems and missions
come in and they villainize and displace as much of the traditional culture
as they can in a method of denial. In
otherwords they say they are doing what they are doing because they are
teaching people about Jesus. In
reality they are doing what they are doing because they don’t
understand the culture of the Akha, don’t want to take time at
understanding it, and would just rather make people like themselves. The Akha don’t understand the
intricacies of this and the missionaries themselves don’t care. Yet they wrap it all up in nice words about
Jesus. The ultimate intellectual
laziness if you ask me. My theory goes that when you start intentionally
knocking down this wall and that wall of the knowledge system and support
structure of a people that eventually you will cause them to collapse as a
people and all your help systems in the world will not be able to halt or
make up for the process that you have initiated and accelerated. The need becomes too great in
collapse. Like breaking a dam to get a
bucket of water, one will see it all come to nothing faster than any part of
it can be saved. In many of the Akha villages I have seen almost every
part of their culture villified at one time or another. Swings and gates are burned, anything that
can be construed as a fetish,
etc. In the meanwhile the Akha loose a
carefully put together system of environmental and life knowledge that has
carried them forward over the centuries. Different Clans of Akha In In Leadership: There is need among the Akha for leadershipn which is
geared towards an increasingly aggressive outside world that is coming to the
village to extract its local resources. Current Thai Forestry practices were
just one case in point. The Royal Project that took the land from all the
villages of Hooh Yoh is another case.
This kind of leadership is something they have not needed so much in
the past, each village had its own leaders, and that was enough, but now the
attack on the Akha is collective and there is need for some collective
leadership, although it should not supercede the village but be complimentary
to it. As a part of this coopeartive leadership, there would
be many things that the Akha could identify which effect them all, and which
they could compare solutions for in order to protect their villages. This is
particularly true in dealing with land rights and mission intrusion
situations. The Forestry department and
Army and missions depend on the isolated nature of the villages and quietly
try to disrupt one village at a time.
The next village over may have no such problem, so may not notice to
join hands in aid to the first village.
Missions more than any other group make use of this situation, splitting
and overtaking villages, the weaker ones in particular, with the aid of any
dissenter whom they can find in the village.
The village does not convert and decide to all suddenly become
Christian, because it is such a better way of life, rather the missions work
very hard with money and other incentives to first anchor a pastor (the
dissenter) promise him rewards for each house he can add to his new
group. Thus there is rapid conflict in
the village as he attempts to split the village into his new power
system. The traditional leadership is
just busy living and is not paid to hold the village together, as the
dissenter is paid to tear it apart.
The evidence of this is very true in the villages despite the fact
that the missions deny that this is how they operate. As more and more pressure is put on the land around
the Akha and on which they depend, the more need there is for multiple
villages to address this issue in order to hang onto all the farm ground they
can. The pressure to take the land is
greater on some villages than others, and the knowledge and committment to
holding onto the land differs by village headmen as well. Some villages have been left with no land
to farm at all. The Forestry
department and the Army pretend not to notice that this would effect the
lives of the Akha, or outright deny they have left them with little to no
land to farm. Though tourism in Only in recent years are the Thais trying to take and
make use of the mountains for themselves. It can be hoped that the more the Akha invest in the
land the harder it will be to take it away from them. Knowledge of The Akha The amount of knowledge that the Akha have of where
and why they live, and their daily lives is a major collection. How can you record a culture? You would
have to plug everyone’s brain in at once and record the knowledge of it
all. Westerners make assumptions about culture, but it is
always sort of with the belief that theirs will remain and survive and that
of others won’t. This may be in
fact the case to some point, but it does not demand that we be silent in our
opposition to it. Here is an intellectual problem, because with some
perception of the hand of fate, that things are getting worse, it is often
easier to give in, to admit that all is lost, or soon will be, than to fight
for each foot of the wall. Yet somehow I think that a new manner must be found,
one that justifies fighting on in the face of overwhelming odds to the
contrary that evil will prevail, that much or most good will come to an end,
as I think it will. I believe most good will come to an end. Good is more powerful than evil or the bad,
but there is more of the latter and it is more persistent. Good is supported by people who are often
only half awake and not at all keen to the price that it requires. I go on. Once I decided to keep on working with the Akha I
continued to tackle the obvious problems, things like clean water, but at the
same time try to find what were the pivotal problems that were shaking them
most to the pillars. This had to do with strategy. It rapdily became apparent that the biggest most
persistent threat was missions. Their
policies would leave no room for the Akha to be the Akha in any quarter. The
Thai and Burmese governments had policies but they were ineffectively
enforced which was fortunate for the Akha, and as well, there was some
limited friendship between the Thai and Burmese cultures while none between
the western agenda church cultures, scorched earth policy that they had. From the hub of several major different problems the
Akha faced, spokes could be seen to go out to lesser, yet important problems. For instance,
lack of land rights or collective representation, led to poor economic
rights, and this led to things like drug running to keep up with their own
needs. People condemned them for
running and using drugs, but if one were to look at the careful definitions
the powers that be dealt in, this was easier to understand. Here was an example.
The west accused people of the golden triangle and The main problem the Akha faced was defending their
villages, land rights, economic rights, ID card rights. ID card rights was a big issue, because the
Thais really didn’t care to recognize the Akha. That was a western gig, not an Akha gig.
Yet by defining this as an important issue the major powers forced the Akha
to play their game, and at a disadvantage, because the Akha had no nation, no
state, no official lands or resources.
As soon as they had something good it was taken away. One can not imagine working from this
perspective but surely many if not most of the indigenous have to. It is also very odd that the western powers give only
lip service to this. Apparently and to
my belief, it would contradict their agenda to listen to it. Lets just imagine for instance that the Akha had
nuclear weapons. They insisted that
Indigenous peoples made up nations, races, groups that had the right to
protect their racial identity and that as such they had the right to land, to
ask certain people to leave town, to demand attention to grievances and so
forth. Imagine how much would
change. They could then control any
source of resources that they had access to such that they had a base to pay
for the services that they needed. Instead we see only predatory treatment of the Akha
because they have no power that they are allowed to harness. One case of this
is how tour operators make a fortune off the Akha while the Akha, if they get
anything from this at all, surely get it last and not on their terms. Tourists go into Akha villages at will, think nothing
of pointing and shooting pictures and so forth, yet there may be children
dying in that same village that they have no knowledge of nor could care
to. It would seem obvious that one would
note the poverty and wonder. It is not. It is odd that the people from the most materialistic
society with so many unresolved problems of its own, including its own church
and families, would come here to the mountain top so sure of themselves to
push spirituality on a people they see as backward, dirty, inferior to
themselves and certainly would not want to share in the hardness of their
lives far away from the safe and comfortable mission compounds. And it is these
people who are vilifying the Akha culture and demanding its abandonment. So often missions
have all their strings attatched. An ugly faith. 'Strings attatched' help. Akha "Neh" "Neh" is usually used in conjunction with
refering to something bad or something that someone has done bad, that the
"Spirit Fear" will come upon them. The Akha get accused of worshipping spirits called
"Neh", of offering them sacrifices and all sorts of things. I guess that has
more to do with the mentality of their accusers than anything else. The Akha believe
there are good and evil spirits, and that evil spirits make people sick, and
that you must ask good spirits what to do to cure the person who is ill. I don’t know if they see spirits or not. They say they see
spirits, living and dead people sometimes. Sometimes they see them in a dancing ceremony and
sometimes in their fields or on the trail. Who can prove them right or wrong? But it seems that what they say they do in regards to
healing and life are pretty resonable. They try to move the illness that they
have identified, into a piece of meat to be discarded or eaten. They also believe that spirits are active
for good and bad, effecting the lives of people in bad ways and good
ways. The mention of spirits is often
used for something sensed but which has no proof in the common ways but
contains suspicion. It can also be
used to mark a situation or item for caution for people later on. For instance a Nyeeh Pah (spirit woman)
commented that a boy found two birds which fell in front of him out of the
sky, which he did not shoot or kill and he picked them up and took them home
where his father ate them up. Later
the man got a bad leg, and the Nyeeh Pah said it was because of this, which
he had done. So the events and discription
of them seem to play into the idea of identifying things that it is not good
to do, and potential ramifications, nothing more, nothing less. In this case, as any hunter would know, it
is not good to eat birds you did not just then kill as you do not know how
old they are, what they were killed with, or if they were ill or diseased. The Akha would just say that the evil
spirits did something to those birds. Probably right. In one way or another. In all observations of the Akha relating to spirits,
it all has to do with the prevention of bad things from occuring to the community. It is wound up in traditions of what is
already known, that you stay away from.
It is sensible and wise, and is based on their need for solutions
apart from outside assistance or judgement. In order for other religions to convert the Akha to their
manner of mental organization and thinking, they must villify what they do
not understand of the Akha to justify this forced effort. The Akha would appear to give much more credit to the
teachings of the Bible than christians would as well. The Akha truly believe
in spirits, it is sort of a beauty in their world of beliefs, their closeness
to the unseen and the nature around them.
Western christianity talks of spirits, assumes that they are all evil,
against the very text they hold dear, and then for the most part really
doesn't believe in their daily workings.
Yet they are very ready to discredit the Akha who appear to have a
superior sense of faith. The Akha also have spirits or people who live in
their fields and other places. These
are good people, like a grandmother and grandfather, and much respect is
given to them that they will watch over the fields on days the family does
not come and at night, that the rice harvest is good. This respect is protected and repaired when
damaged, a special meal being eaten in the field to set things straight again
if the Akha family perceived that they have made an error. I perceived among the Akha that their consideration
of spirits was a sort of collective community and accountability, identifying
evils but also giving all a say in how evil effected them, so that the entire
community stayed healthy and in balance.
Commenting on "neh" was a way for Akha to give caution to
someone about what they were doing, about to do or the direction they were
headed in. For those people who did
something bad, they said that the fear of the evil spirits was on them who
would come and collect for the evil that they had done, and was a warning to
that person to make their deeds right and correct for what they had done, and
the Akha have ceremonies for that as well.
This keeps the village in harmony, as well as relationships between
villages. One has to be remember that the Akha have preserved
themselves as a culture, beyond what any other tribe in the area has been
able to do, and they have done it in recent years against the hundreds of
thousands of dollars that the missions and others have spent trying to take
their culture away from them. Missions try to portray that the Akha are involved in
devil worship and the use of spirits to do evil things, which is not at all
the case, but this is the tradition of deception and dishonesty of the
missions from the west who are generally against any culture which is
different than their own and attempt to villify it at every opportunity to
justify forcing change on the people who did not invite them. Problems The Akha Face War Village Burnings Village Raids Border Shootings Land Rights Forestry and Pine Shifting Land
Theft and existing Forests |