The turtle shell calendar showing today’s date, April 12th, 2024. Based on the teachings of the Oneida and the Mohawk*, the April-May moon is either the Spirit Moon or the Planting Moon, among numerous other possible names.
Across Central and North America, the turtle is at the crux of multiple Indigenous cosmologies. Due to the potency of related teachings, tribes and bands often refer to the continent as Turtle Island. In Ontario, Canada, the popular creation stories that I am familiar with involve Sky Woman, who falls from above and is lowered safely onto the carapace of Grandmother Turtle, floating in the ocean (Watts, V. 2013). Her carapace is made into the world. From the Mayans to the Anasazi to present-day Ojibwe bands in Anishinaabewaki, the turtle shell has also been used as a bone-keratin lunar calendar, marking off 28 days and 13 moons with a numerological precision that dares to be called coincidental. The following is a deep-dive into the teachings of the turtle, contrasting colonial time, including time-space compression (Harvey, 1989; May & Thrift 2003, 6), and Indigenous “event-based time,” (Evans-Pritchard) as deferential to land and seasonality, consubstantial of lifecycles, ceremonies, work, and long winters of storytelling. I will also propose a ‘geography of time’ (Glennie & Thrift, 1996: 280; May & Thrift 2003, 3) wherein the turtle calendar is playfully mapped over the downtown core of the City of Toronto as a means of engagement and resurgence. Exploring the Pagan and Christian underpinnings of apocalyptic notions of European calendar-time in contrast with Archaeoastronomy of urban planning in abandoned settlements such as Chaco Canyon, I will also expand on the ways in which all time is co-created and participatory, and how reckoning-time, or the automated clock, has the psychological effect of making people feel unneeded in the project of time-creation. In the following paper I will explore the teachings of the lunar calendar on the turtle’s back through reimagining downtown Toronto as a carapace, which is both an act of cartographic anarchy and a gesture of allyship.
Turtles in the Northeast
All across Anishinaabewaki, from Ontario to Alberta, the lunar calendar (Gookomisinaan bibik-giizisomazina’igan) is still being followed on the (empty) backs of turtles. In Anishinaabemowin, the turtle is called Ookomisan, meaning Grandmother. This relates to the moon being the coordinator of female menstrual cycles. This variant of the 13-moon calendar could be Ookomisan calendar, or Grandmother calendar (Zhaawano 2023), in Anishinaabemowin.
The carapace of Chrysemys picta, the common Painted turtle found around North America, has 13 large sections called scutes (Zhaawano 2023) in the center, with 28 smaller segments rimming the carapace like the brim of a hat. Multiplying 28 x 13, the carapace gracefully accounts for 364 days across 13 moons, or ‘months’, each with many names significant to the idea of time as participatory.
In Anishinaabemowin, the 13 moons are often named after climatic events, such as Hard Crust on the Snow Moon (January-February), or the springtime appearance of plants or animals, such as Showing Buds Moon (March-April) or Blueberry Moon (June-July). Other titles recommend practical, communal labor, such as Sugar Making Moon (February-March), or Planting Moon (April-May). The technology of the calendar is a loose fit, and its teachings have grown to take account of diverse seasons, landscapes, and languages, from Ontario to Alberta, within Anishinaabewaki (Zhaawano 2023). In the USA, the Cherokee (“Cherokee Calendar” 2023) and Hopi also use the turtle’s shell, as do some Indigenous Mayans. For the Anishinaabe alone, December has 8 possible names — including post-contact titles like Big Church Days Moon, Feast Abundantly Days Moon. January may sometimes be called Welcoming Each Other Moon as an observance of how Settlers rang in a new year (Zhaawano 2023).
While others count days from new moon to new moon, Anishinaabe count from full moon to full moon, with each ‘year’ beginning in the springtime. A new ‘year’ or ‘cycle’ is the full moon that sets the maple syrup flowing (Zhaawano 2023).
How people tell time, whether as indicative-time, using seasonal events as measure but also relying on a knowledge-keeper to declare the moons, or as reckoning-time, which is inflexible and, in the case of clocks, automated — these are considerations within the ‘social theory of time’ (May & Thrift 2003, 2). The role of knowledge-keepers in selectively imparting teachings to other members, or opting out through the ethnographic refusal, is socio-cultural, possibly kinship-related, more than it is entirely concerned with time, in a strict sense. According to Elsie Clews Parsons, Southeastern Indigenous communities, it is the responsibility of certain individuals to watch both the sun and the moon carefully (Walton 2012, 341).
Anecdotally, as one who keeps track of Grandmother calendar myself, I worry that I am doing it wrong — and undoubtedly in some ways I have been. However, every graphic representation of Grandmother calendar seems different than the one before, and names for moons are endlessly creative, even within Toronto alone. A degree of intercalation, or subjective recalculation, is common. Not random, intercalation is typically the duty of one person or group of people declaring how many moons in a ‘year’, and when ‘days off’ might fall. Also, in the case where salmon are still arriving long after the Salmon Moon, a time-keeper should declare that the Salmon Moon has been extended (Iwaniszewski 2012, 317). The work of intercalation is not for the flippant though, as one could be blamed for crop failures or worse (Walton 2012, 341).
As for Grandmother calendar’s value for resurgence, switching over to lunar could be compared to dancing to a new beat. As with dance, poetry, or song, such new syncopations require the simulated death of a previous rhythm and way of being, the tyrannical Gregorian calendar and the clock. These lunar rhythms are felt as a challenge to “a male philosophy based on activity,” (May & Thrift 2003, 37).
As Marx predicted, technology, but especially transportation, will turn location into abstraction (May & Thrift 2003, 7), as was observed when trains first began to crisscross Turtle Island. In contrast, the moon foregrounds a feminine passivity that is a different and more valuable form of inaction, concerned with enriching “scenes of now” (Conley, 1944: xiii; May & Thrift 2003, 37). If time and the Gregorian calendar are seen as automated, objective, or at least contra-subjective – only ebbing slightly to encompass the shift of daylight hours once a year — then the Gregorian calendar time and clock time do not need human beings. In denial of the co-constitutive nature of modern temporalities, humanity emerges as great nonparticipants without a cosmic duty to perform (Weinberg, 1988:154; Loy 2000, 276).
Click here to access the first draft Google Maps map.
The 13 Moon Lunar Calendar & Climate Change
Sometimes the story of Sky Woman is embellished with a cautionary tale wherein the great turtle threatens to slip into the ocean if we do not treat the turtle (Earth) with respect. The waters will rise. The turtle is climate-aware. Likewise, the lunar cycle that used to fall between April and May has long been called the Broken Snowshoe Moon, cautioning people who wish to go out on the land as the snow and the ice have begun to recede. In recent years, Broken Showshoe Moon (Bebookwedaagime-giizis/Pokwaagami-giizis) (Zhaawano 2023) has become synonymous with climate change and has come to overlap or even usurp the place of neighboring moons entirely.
Amitav Ghosh’s (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable is one man’s search for signs of awareness of a slow-paced threat, a climatic ‘villain’, in the collective imagination — across fiction, folklore, and myth. Ghosh concludes that there are not any noteworthy examples. However, Ghosh may have overlooked the Anishinaabe pre-contact story about the wiindigoog, often transliterated as “wendigo.” In one pre-contact tale, Wendigo created the winter, the glaciers, polar caps, and the seasons, setting in motion the calendar of Anishinaabewaki. Such stories participate, through relationality, to color Grandmother calendar with awareness of the fragility and importance of the long-term threat of climate change, and its effects on generations to come (Zhaawano 2023).
Proposal
As a Settler in Toronto, I should acknowledge the keepers of this knowledge. For the Greater Toronto (Treaty 13) Area, these bands are the Mississaugas, the Wendake-Nionwentsïo, the Anishinaabe or Anishinaabewaki, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Temprano 2024).
Presenting Toronto’s downtown core as a turtle-shaped calendar is foremost a mnemonic device, but also the action of making-living timespace (May & Thrift 2003, 4), a geography of time (Glennie & Thrift 1996, 280; May & Thrift 2003, 3), and an imagining of one’s way into the continent (Sheridan & Longboat 2006). The austere geometry of a shell laid out across a city would entice the foreigner to learn more, and for the more knowledgeable, would foster a sense of grounded-normativity – to borrow a term also useful in the allied project of queering (Colthard; Simpson 2017).
Above ground, the main streets of Bloor, Wellesley, College, Dundas, Queen, King, and Front, running from East to West, act as the main sutures between the scutes of the shell. With some imagination, the outer edge of the shell aligns with the rounded yellow line of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). Taking this idea further, Union Station is where full moons could be celebrated, and the northern Bay Station is where crescent moons could be recognized.
At the end of one moon and the start of the other, followers of Grandmother calendar could ride the TTC in a counterclockwise orbit around the downtown, as I have before — merely to connect to the cyclicality of lunar rhythms, and to understand the calendar-city hybrid. To bring this idea into the public, custom posters could be placed at each station to explain the concept, and one’s position in the calendar-city. I have already presented the idea in a series of Tiktok videos that have been well-received by people around Turtle Island, and it was welcomed by multiple Indigenous Tiktokkers, some as far away as Alberta. The next step is for me to pilgrimage to these stations on appropriate days to take short videos explaining the concept. Perhaps in participation with platforms like First Story Toronto (“First Story Toronto”), stories of the Indigenous significance of an area would add value to the concept too.
The more objective time is for us, the more subjective (alienated) is the sense of self … which therefore uses time in order to try to gain something from it … [and] the greater, too, is one’s awareness of the end of one’s own time. Our own sense of separation from time motivates us to try to secure ourselves within it … the only satisfying solution is the essentially religious realization that we are not other than it (Loy 2000, 278).
May & Thrift (2003) suggest that mind is the creator of time, and that time is only concerned with duration. To measure time is therefore to describe one’s own being on an otherwise timeless-land (Antliff, 1999: 188; May & Thrift 2003, 30). To answer to this, Australian Aborigines chose sound, or songlines, sung at the tempo of their step (May & Thrift 2003, 33), transforming the outback into a geography of time, or a mandala, to borrow a Pan-Asiatic concept. On the other hand, Europe drew on knowledge of space and the heliocentric solar system to create the clock, round as the face of the sun, wherein the minutes orbit the hours, transmuting time into a materiality (May & Thrift 2003, 30).
While Antliff (1999) in May & Thrift (2003) were trying to decolonize time, their observations reveal an inherent bias against animism. The idea of time relying on mind and duration (lifespan) is both ego- and bio- centric and at odds with the traditionally Indigenous notion that even a stone or a river has a spirit. Prior to Sky Woman’s descent, prior to Grandmother Turtle and the other animals, was there no time?
To synthesize Indigenous notions of animism together with scientism and the idea of mind as time — it is also believed that color could have been the first indication of time on the planet – sunset colors, red leaves, darkening skies, white snow, or perhaps the chemical process of cooling magma fading from neon orange to blood red, then black. Others prefer to focus on rhythm (Antliff, 1999: 188; May & Thrift 2003, 30), dripping water, spring thunder, and after the arrival of animal life, the polyphony of corporeality, wherein the heart is fast, the breath is slower, and walking pace falls in between.
According to Durkheim (1915), “the calendar first traces then shapes” that which it is timing — like the clock, which shifted from time-indication to time-reckoning long ago (May & Thrift 2003, 4). The need for an alternative calendar emerges from the irreconcilability of time-indication, such as the first thunderclap of spring, spring peepers, the first red leaves on a tree, or a waxing gibbous moon — and time-reckoning, which is durative, numerical, aided by guide-marks or divide-marks, or perhaps the reign of a certain president. According to Hallpike and Lucas, clocks were likely mere time-indications to start with (Iwaniszewski 2012, 312) — as I would say they still are in parts of the world spared from colonialism. Apart from these oasis, however, clocks have risen to have tyrannical power.
Paganism and Apocalypse in European Time
In his study of apocalyptic time, Thompson (1996) writes that the Anglo-Saxon understanding of time includes an attempt to reckon with the inevitability of death (the end of duration and time), though it also favors fantasies about a destiny outside of mortality, outside of time (Loy 2000, 332). How concrete is a sense of time that also seeks to escape itself?
The belief that mankind has reached the crucial moment in its history reflects an unwillingness to come to terms with the transience of human life and achievements. Our urge to celebrate the passing of time fails to conceal an even deeper urge to escape from it (Thompson 1996; Loy 2000, 332)
Traditional Christian temporalities relate to what Thompson (1996) calls apocalyptic time, anticipating both the End of Times and the return of Christ (Loy 2000, 264) – or perhaps the fever dream of Revelations. Westward expansionism, manifest destiny, the frontier, wilderness – these act as a synecdoche for progress (May & Thrift 2003, 40) – as the arrow of time. Along these lines, Bergson claims that ‘real time’ is a privileged dimension of the new, of a continual expansion, of an opening up (May & Thrift 2003, 22).
Many early American Churches were built so that, to face the altar from the nave, one stood in the East and faced the crucifix in the direction of one’s manifest destiny in the West. Praying towards the West is a Pagan tradition from “sun worship buried deep in our past” (Aveni, 1995: 263-4; Loy 2000, 268). Ironically, as Settlers moved West, Paganism was both temporally and spatially left behind in the “Old World,” as if Settlers expected to fall off the edge of the world. Settler colonialism still marches forward in what Clark (1973) refers to as the “‘moving ego’ (ME) metaphor,” in which a holiday is said to be ‘coming up’ on a person, or the summer ‘passed you by’ (Sinha & Bernárdez 2014, 315).
Finally, the Enlightenment challenged strict Biblical inerrancy, resulting in grandiose schemes to both improve and conquer, or save, new environments and cultures. As though undermined by its past apocalyptic underpinnings, however, the gross failure of Western stewardship has led only to crises, ecological and otherwise (Loy 2000, 264). Thompson (1996) notes the trend to see progressive, New Testament ideas as antithetical to old notions of an angry God threatening apocalypse (p. 57; Loy 2000, 271). However, according to Christopher Hill, Protestant reforms only resulted in postponing the golden age. With perpetual deferral, the present becomes a massive make-work project of continuous reforms, heavily reliant on the scientific optimism of Bacon and others (Hill, 1980: 58; Loy 2000, 271) to bring about the golden age. Techno-optimism and other delusions only encourage people to accept an increasingly dissatisfactory present-as-project. What has now become sadly idiomatic, that it is easier to imagine the apocalypse than the end of capitalism, is in itself a description of a temporality of perpetual deferral and perpetual work that values delayed satisfaction over everything else.
To finish this account of Western time, it is necessary to address the illusion of time-space compression often associated with late-stage capitalism. While the worker may feel bound to a faster tempo, it is not always the case that they can afford the faster means of transportation required to compress space, however. Workers often suffer from a classist absence of the right kind of time-space compression, from time to time (May & Thrift 2003, 14). Shields (1992), writes that what is felt as time-space compression arises from the effects of being alienated from place-time (May & Thrift 2003, 9), perhaps due to busy schedules, hypnotic technologies, the magic of the moving picture, and faster transportation, where affordable, as well. In relation to the general theory of relativity, time-space compression is happening for some but not others. It is subjective, as space-time is, and depends on one’s own person (Sinha & Bernárdez 2014, 12) — but also one’s culture and one’s calendar.
Broad History & Archaeoastronomy
The oldest found object rendering the lunar count is an incision on a bone plaque, an archaeological ‘polisher’ from the site of Blanchard (Dordogne, France) dated around 29,000 – 28,000 BCE (Iwaniszewski 2012, 314). Not only ancient, calendrical-thinking is widespread. In Patagonia, a 13-moon calendar (whether it utilizes the turtle’s shell would require more research) has been adapted to inverted seasons (Iwaniszewski 2012, 325). As for agricultural practices, by and large, a waxing moon is associated with crop growth, and harvest waits for the moon to wane (Iwaniszewski 2012, 325)
According to Zhaawano (2023), the turtle calendar is only one of three ways that Anishinaabe keep track of time. Others are the oondaadesewin giizhigadoo-mazina’igan (“Generations Calendar”) or mashkiki dibik-giiziso-mazina’igan (“Medicine Lunar Calendar”). Zhaawano notes a speculation among the followers of these other calendars that the turtle calendar is the latest mode of telling time (before the Gregorian calendar). Zhaawano notes that the turtle calendar may not have been around before 900 CE, coinciding with the first arrival of the Norseman. These intriguing speculations also require more research.
While some researchers insist that the lunar turtle shell calendar hatched in the American Southwest, others claim it was disseminated from Mesoamerica northwards (Iwaniszewski 2012, 321). I personally see no reason that these monogenetic explanations have to be mutually exclusive, seeing as cultural flow from Mesoamerica could have been mediated through hubs like Chaco Canyon, then disseminated en masse after its collapse. After the great fire, the Anasazi merged with Hopi and Puebloan tribes, among others. The Hopi’s lunar calendar likely still carries the teachings of Chacoans (Walton 2012, 340). In the Southwest, however, perhaps as there are a lack of severe winters, solstices and constellations are relied on much more than moons (Iwaniszewski 2012, 319).
In modern Mesoamerican languages, the words “moon” and “month” are the same, but according to some researchers, there is no evidence that a lunar calendar was ever used in Central America (Iwaniszewski 2012, 320). According to José & Lloydine Argüelles (2023) in their self-published book, Thirteen Moons in Motion: A Dreamspell Primer, however, the 13 moon turtle shell calendar was commonly used alongside the more popular solar calendar of the Mayan civilization. José & Lloydine Argüelles recount a playful myth that was used to calibrate the lunar calendar and the solar calendar to compensate for inevitable drift – the likes of which I have not read anywhere else.
Turtle Island gauges its direction by two spins. The 365-day solar spin measured by the thirteen moons goes one direction. Another spin of 260 days goes the other direction. It is the 260-day counter-spin that is the measure of the thirteen moons.
The 260 day count is the tzolkin or sacred count of the ancient Indigenous Maya. The 365-day spin anchors Turtle Island to the sun. The 260 day counter spin anchors Turtle Island to the galaxy and cosmic time. The 260 day-count is the galactic standard of time. The calendar of colonialism could know nothing of the galactic standard because it is based on twelve months and not thirteen moons. (Argüelles 2023)
Wherever these teachings began, and however they spread, space and distance were not the only variables. Coming together under one calendrical system would also require cosmological similarities, linguistic similarities, and even kinship systems (Sinha & Bernárdez 2014, 321). Where a calendar originated could be less important than how it was adapted, how the names of the moons were changed, and its embellished significance in different hands, at different latitudes.
Archaeoastrological Geographies of Time & Calendar-Mandalas
From the Incan Empire, the Temple of the Sun in Cusco, Peru, is the earliest known example of a large-scale geography of time. Forty-one straight lines, called ceques, radiate out from the temple and towards the horizon (Iwaniszewski 2012, 324). Due to their resemblance to quipus, a tallying system not unlike beaded wampum in the Northeast, these geoglyphic lines were a tally too (Iwaniszewski 2012, 324) — but of what? The number of days in an Incan year was once 328. Divided by 41 lines, 328 yields 8, or the number of days in an Andean week. Furthermore, 328 days would also have accurately measured a full cycle of 12 lunar sidereal months (Iwaniszewski 2012, 324).
As for the city of Chaco Canyon, this was clearly a lunar-oriented locale. Its lunar-oriented architectural trends are perpetuated in Puebloan cultures, focusing on the crescent moon’s significance in agriculture (Walton 2012, 331). Chaco’s Chimney Rock Great House has two spires between which an event known as the ‘lunar standstill’ occurs every 18.1 years – as does the Cottonwood Falls Great House in Utah, where the same lunar standstill was incorporated into the architecture (Walton 2012, 335).
To remediate systemic issues within clock-time and the Gregorian calendar, Latour suggests the notion of ‘historicity’ instead of mere time. Historicity, to Latour, incorporates the element of space, or ‘spacificity’ (May & Thrift 2003, 28). Such ideas may be useful in the activity of making-living timespace (May & Thrift 2003, 4). The key to this is recognizing that we are all agentive and culpable in creating a sense of time, but that this involves more than rearranging one’s schedule.
The Gregorian calendar is a hypnotic spell which holds all the unresolvable issues of history hidden in its illogical sequence of days, weeks, months, and years. Following this calendar can only lead to the place where we find ourselves today: a season of apocalypses, where disaster, ignorance, and error perpetuate themselves in grinding mindlessness.
… In this lies the rise of the gargantuan, many-headed hydra of materialism which reduces humans to enslavement to a material technology and degrades the planetary environment without hope of any other economic lifestyle options.
Turtle says: Turtle Island is now passing out of the Dreamspell of colonialism into the Dreamspell of galactic time, the source of all indigenous wisdom and knowing. A Dreamspell is what we create together in time. Colonialism was one Dreamspell. The way of the thirteen moons is another Dreamspell (Argüelles 2023).
Resources
pimaki.ca an elegant and interactive 13 moon turtle shell calendar from the Ojibwe Nations of Manitoba.
The Gregorian Calendar Unmasked presents segments from José & Lloydine Argüelles’s fascinating book Thirteen Moons in Motion: A Dreamspell Primer, which is both an account of the significance of the 13 moon lunar calendar to the Mayans and a call to return to the teachings of the turtle.
Ontario Parks: The Lunar Calendar on a Turtle’s Back Ontario Park’s simplified presentation of the Grandmother calendar mentions the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe, but is nevertheless cited in the Wikipedia page for “Cherokee Calendar,” below.
Cherokee Calendar Wikipedia the Cherokee lunar calendar Wikipedia complete with moon names and citing the Ontario Parks blog article, which indicates the lack of online resources concerning this teaching.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Loy, David R. “Saving time: a Buddhist perspective on the end.” Contemporary Buddhism 1.1 (2000): 35-51.
May, Jon, and Nigel Thrift, eds. Timespace: geographies of temporality. Vol. 13. Routledge, 2003.
Sheridan, J., & Longboat, D. (2006). The Haudenosaunee Imagination and the Ecology of the Sacred. Space and Culture, 9(4), 365–381.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: Chapter 8 “Indigenous Queer Normativity”, pp. 119-144.
Sinha, Chris, and Enrique Bernárdez. “Space, time, and space–time: metaphors, maps, and fusions.” The Routledge handbook of language and culture. Routledge, 2014. 309-324.
Walton, James. “Lunar Ceremonial Planning in the Ancient American Southwest.” Living the Lunar Calendar. Oxford: Oxbow Books (2012).
Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), 20-34.
Zhaawano, Giizhik. “Dance of the 13 Moons: An Introduction to the Lunar Calendar of the Anishinaabe Peoples.” ZhaawanArt, 15 May 2023, www.zhaawanart.com/post/dance-of-the-13-moons.
The following paper proposes minor improvements in the discourse about aging and longevity as it often reflects both an ageist and ableist culture. To highlight the divide between signs of aging and senescence and accompanying socio-reproductive meanings, this argument finds support from Pandhi and Khanna, who call for the differentiation between premature canities, or graying of the hair, and canities as a result of senescence. This paper proposes that, by and large, signs of aging have been subjected to Peircean semiotic drift, wherein the ancestral meaning of these markers have become lost to mainstream and / or Western, or Westernized culture(s), becoming assumed senescence. To remediate this, from the emergence of an individual’s first signs of aging, a person could be said to be hitting “senescolescence,” if not another and simpler term. Senescolescence accounts for non-senescent markers that are semiotically conflated with senescence in mainstream / Western, or Westernized culture(s). First off, it is necessary to refer to the K-Pg extinction event to understand the trade-offs that shaped early mammalian lifeforms and the foundations of mammalian aging. Then, considering the possible embellishment of aging for its cultural significance, aging is considered as a function within chimpanzee, gorilla, and speculative Australopith socio-reproductive orders. The second concept to stand trial is that of the reorientation of the pressures of sexual selection after the introduction of menopause in the genus Homo, and how this reversal may have shaped the mosaic of preferences for ancestral (aged) and derived (neotenous) traits in preferences for a mate. It is important to note that such speculations only stand in the absence of other explanations, such as convergent evolution or otherwise. Finally, regarding longevity research, the paper concludes with an advocation for a long-game strategy focused on the value of ecological services and centering the function of grandmothering and healthspan. On the other hand, the short-game is the desired maximization of lifespan potentially at the expense of the very systems that have conditionally supported the evolution of all life on the planet for 3.8 billion years, and could potentially further marginalize the importance of grandmothering too.
The literature on aging in the phenotype, whether greying hair or balding or otherwise, is both substantial and rife with calls for further study.[1] As noticeable in Pandhi and Khanna (2013), traits of aging have become the atomized focus of detailed analyses of narrow sense heritability. Such admirable, exacting specifics suggest that perhaps broad sense heritability remains speculative. To suggest broad and novel directions for future study, however, sexual selection could be considered in relation to the total genotype through a heuristic methodology,[2] such as the backtracking of quantitative genetics. This speculative ground is especially fitting within longevity research that itself is not on solid footings – especially regarding the normative cultural misunderstandings concerning aging that will be touched on. One example of this comes far from any academic context and involves the peculiar ability for most zoo patrons to recognize the greying hair of a silverback gorilla as firstly a marker of a differentiated socio-reproductive role, and less importantly, as a marker of aging. Meanwhile, caninities in humans can often be read like a biological clock, denoting senescence in a manner that dwarfs most other considerations. Yet another observational example comes from dimorphic balding spots assumed to be age-related despite their being primarily the burden of men, and therefore arbitrary, though alternate functions will be touched on. This disconnect that reifies early-onslaught senescence bespeaks semiotic drift, or a shift in meaning. Just as balding seems to mimic thinning of the hair in seniors, premature greying is distinct from senescent greying, which is “not common till old age” and should “be differentiated from white hair.”[3] In the following, I will be looking at the traits of aging as both epigenetic, as potentially reversable expressions (or perhaps the expression of lack of expression), or comorbidities of underlying hallmarks of aging (senescence). The case for the distinction between signs of aging and aging will be compounded vis-à-vis the longevity bottleneck hypothesis,[4] integral for understanding the pleiotropic nature of the trade-offs that the K-Pg extinction brought about in the differentiation of mammalian life and aging patterns. The role of premature signs of aging will be considered in relation to chimpanzees, gorillas, and what can be deduced about hominins, namely Australopithecus afarensis.[5] As for menopause in Homo, this would have reversed the directional pressures of sexual selection,[6] and therefore it may be useful to speculate as to what premature markers of aging may have meant in ancestral socio-reproductive hierarchies in the hominin lineage. These topics will be touched on in chronological order before being synthesized in support of the idea of renaming young-adult-to-mid-life as a transitional period of “senescolescence,” wherein appearances of aging do not always correlate with less disputable hallmarks of aging. In this proposed secondary liminal stage, the appearance of aging, such as grey hair and balding, among others, may be articulated as separate from senescence to build a healthy discourse around healthspan through recognizing both senescolescence and senescence for their potential functions rather than presumptuously allowing for other more harmful and trite assumptions to propagate due to semiotic drift.
The Longevity Bottleneck Hypothesis
On average, reptiles live 18.3 years longer than mammals of a similar body size[7] and are also capable of regenerating and repairing genes.[8] Amniotes enjoy a longer lifespan with lower-level metabolism, which they reduce during cold periods.[9] Some 300-250 million years ago (mya), the earliest mammals emerged through a common ancestor with reptile-like synapsids. For 100 million years, mammals were prey.[10] João Pedro Magalhães (2024) faults R-strategy breeding for the gradual erosion of longevity in mammals but predicted that further research into evolutionary genomics will illuminate how these losses took place. On the contrary, more recent studies point to the effects of long-term predation as resulting in more of a trade-off than an outright loss of the traits of longevity and healthspan. Tolerance of varying temperatures seems to have been the primary motivation. At least in the worm C. elegans, research shows that genes related to increased lifespan also function to regulate oxidative and heat stress.[11] Mammalian resilience may have been enabled by endothermy (homeothermy), allowing for faster locomotion and sustained activity across all seasons.[12] As it potentially bespeaks increased cognitive function, the first steep differentiation of the allometry of brain size and body mass in mammals seems to have occurred around ~66 million years ago, between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods, allowing for the diversification inherent to Kingdom Mammalia.[13]
In hominins, gains in thermoregulation were re-traded for a different change — not for restored longevity, but an increase in brain size.[14] As per the information theory of aging, the possibility of longer lifespans was never lost, however, and therefore R-strategy breeding is not as culpable as the role of predation itself in selecting for thermoregulation, speed, and intelligence. There may never have been any true “loss” to speak of, just a trade-off. The cost of the trade-off for mammalian survival, however, was the introduction or intensification of the nine hallmarks of aging, such as genomic instability, telomeric attrition, epigenetic alterations, loss of proteostasis, deregulated nutrient sensing, mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, stem cell exhaustion, and altered intercellular communication – all under the umbrella of epigenetics. These detrimental effects are not the result of stochastic errors alone, however.[15] Indeed grey hair does accompany some or all of these hallmarks of aging, but Pandhi and Khanna (2013) also stress that these changes in the phenotype often appear prematurely. Grey hair, being less dimorphic than balding, should appear with more predictability in both sexes, as per the beats of the passage of time, but it does not always do so.
Aging and Sexual Selection in Chimpanzees
Lacking menopause, chimpanzees produce offspring right up to the end. Increased periods of reproductive availability is a trade-off for lifespan, however, as it affects their basal metabolic rate (BMR). As it relates to longevity, it is interesting to note that continual gestation decreases the occurrence of cancers in Pan females as mitosis occurs in utero and embryonically rather than in cancer cells.[16] As there is no menopause in chimps, males have a better chance at producing offspring if they are attracted to older females.[17] Male chimps could therefore be either indifferent or attracted to grey hair and darkening skin, as it blackens with age, in females. There is less of a reason for signs of aging to be selected against, at least. To go a step further, grey hair in chimps may even be like a trait of secondary sexual selection within a suis generis socio-reproductive order that male chimps seek as it hybridizes archetypes of the grandmother, the comforts of altricality, but also courtship. Furthermore, when themselves greying, Pan males could be attracted to the same phenotypical expression in females, as assortative mating. If this directional pressure of sexual selection favored premature greying in Pan females and males, then unless the same two-staged pattern of greying periods evolved convergently in hominins, then premature greying in humans has been subjected to semiotic drift in favor of assumed senescence.
Australopithecus afarensis
In “The evolution of human bipedality: ecology and functional morphology,” Kevin Hunt (1994) presents convincing speculations on the socio-reproductive patterns of Australopithecus afarensis, 3.7-3 mya. Hunt bases his observations on the wide hips that were adequate for standing but not for upright locomotion.[18] Furthermore, tensions between adaptations for climbing, such as dorsally oriented shoulders and bipedalism in the hips, were upheld simultaneously. Hunt heuristically seeks an explanation through positing a vertical dynamic where large males ate low-hanging fruit while smaller females were forced to climb to higher canopies because climbing was easier for their smaller build.[19] Hunt’s model leaves additional room for speculations into the role of elders, who may have led the slow move to life on the forest floor as they became less able to climb, evoking sympathy and defensive support. To its furthest extent, this trend, as a move towards the forest floor and selection for intimidating size and strength can be seen in gorillas,[20] wherein the language grey hair has not been forgotten. When considering that a movement to the ground may have followed the lead of both aging populations and larger males, it is useful to note that genes themselves may be followers and not leaders.[21] As seen by degree in the bond between chimp infants and mothers, hominin cultures likely had a degree of reverence for elders too. Socially, there was likely to be some yielding to strong bonds between offspring and matriarchs. These bonds could have shaped peculiar and potentially incestuous cross-over between grandmothers’ grey hair, dark skin, and sunspots and what young males found desirable in partners, speculatively. Furthermore, the role of a specific nuance of cunning often associated with seniors may have been taught and passed on through these relationships as they began to unfold on the forest floor. The behavioral trait of the passing down of knowledge may be considered as part of senescolescence. The cunning of seniors may have contributed to a cumulative culture in this way, as was necessary for survival on the forest floor.
Menopause and Grandmothering
The emergence of menopause is sufficiently explained by the grandmothering hypothesis wherein post-menopausal females play a greater indirect role in reproduction than they would have if still capable of producing offspring. What is more, social cognition, delayed independence, and delayed maturity would also have been favored by ancestral grandmothering, resulting in increased longevity.[22] As grandmothering resulted in an increased number of descendants surviving to reproductive age, rates of aging slowed.[23] As parents’ and maternal grandmothers’ longevity increased, so did the resilience of subsequent generations.[24] The mother to daughter line especially is remarkably correlative in terms of influence on mortality across observed ages and independent of fathers’ ages-at-death.[25] As older women cannot give birth, however, human males are attracted to younger females as odds of having healthy children increase in this direction. Menopause may have caused a partial inversion of the directionally selective pressures of sexual selection.[26] The inversion was only partial, however, as selection for reduced body hair could be explained by the derived turn towards neotenous traits, but selection for darker skin and the production of melanin may (speculatively) have been an ancestral call-back to the meaning of darker skin in Pan and hominins. Like grey hair, dark skin could be a symbol with a meaning that has been lost in the shuffle, an utterance from a forgotten language. How these traits express themselves is co-constitutive in terms of semiotics. For example, Marks (2015) writes that as chimp skin blackens with age, there is no discrimination between the differently hued members of a group.[27] In the ancestral culture where these traits could be traced back to, these traits had greater significance and function.
Of greater likelihood than the deliberate selection for black skin, however, is that lighter-skinned females enjoyed greater reproduction success, as this trait tends to be selected for, until selection was balanced out by natural selection for darker individuals of either sex[28] to contend with tropical conditions. This latter theory is problematic only in that skin cancer would not have often interfered in reproductive success.[29] Therefore, a less competitive milieu with weaker sexual selection towards women could also explain darker skin in highly polygynous populations.[30]
Oddly, the trait of freckles marks a strange exception for the otherwise stringent pressure for clear skin in mates, whether male or female. Heuristically speaking, one could also seek the origins of freckles as mimicry of sunspots that are found in older hominids, likely early hominins too, which may have been their own language, especially for males with strong attachments to grandmothers, wherein courtship afforded them a period of extended altricality. Speculation aside, in conclusion, grandmothering, and therefore menopause, is widely believed to be the foundation for the genus Homo.[31]
Senescence, Epigenetics, Senescolescence
The epigenetic profile resembles a series of presets. Known as the predictive adaptive response (PAR) (Bateson et al. 2014) the foundations begin forming in the first 1000 days of life.[32] The epigenetic clock is faster in the first 18 years of life and then gradually slows.[33] As in the inversion of sexually selective preferences after the introduction of menopause and the carry-over of ancestral preference, Ashapkin et al. (2017) write that many changes in gene expression that should occur during aging initiate well before adulthood as apparent reversals or extensions of developmental programs.[34] Stochastic factors may trigger an epigenetic adaptation resulting in balding, which benefits individuals suffering from headlice, or helps to regulate temperature. Nevertheless, the PAR schedule is preset and therefore could be seen as arbitrary and reversable, or draw on past socio-reproductive milieus, similar to those of A. afarensis, for some of its presets. Subjected to semiotic drift, these archaic traits are likely to be dismissed as stochastic or unaccounted for, and therefore senescent in nature.
The difference between premature grey hair and age-related greying aligns with a cell’s inability to replicate after approximately 50 divisions,[35] wherein the function of senescence takes over. While one of the main advantages of senescence and the shortening of the telomere is that the slowed division of cells decreases chances of tumor growth,[36] there have also been cases where senescence has inadvertently turned off tumor suppressants. Senescence also functions in wound healing, embryonic development, tissue regenerations, and the promotion of insulin secretion, among others.[37] Non-senescent graying of hair is considered premature before the age of 20 in Whites, before 25 in Asians, and before 30 years in Africans.[38] According to Pandhi and Khanna(2013), premature canities may appear without underlying pathologies as an autosomal dominant condition. Though there are many other anomalous contributing factors that need to be considered as well, Ashapkin et al. (2017) upholds two categories, namely premature differentiation as separate from senescence.[39]
Discussion
In relation to the longevity bottleneck hypothesis and reptiles, Mayr (1983) notes that adaptation never favors perfection of the organism as a whole. No, for every win, for every gain in one trait or another, there is an accompanying, potentially pleiotropic loss, at times to the detriment of the organism or lineage.[40] It is important to note that adaptations defy human intuition, bespeaking the importance of evolutionary anthropology in the field of medicine and health. As such, thermoregulation was likely key in enabling survival of early mammals across 100 million years of predation, but this adaptation came at the expense of the longevity and eased aging we observe in reptiles, and the introduction or intensification of the nine hallmarks of aging in mammals and genus Homo. Furthermore, the ability to thermoregulate was then downgraded to compensate for the increased energy requirements of the human brain.[41]
The descent of A. afarensis and Gorrilini to the forest floor could have followed the lead of the elderly, the knowledgeable, the experienced, the cunning, and in honor of parental bonds built through play and shared intentionality as observable in chimps. Past discourses have speculated about the dynamic between the innovators and the aggressors, the brain and the brawn, as a form of diversified male-male competition, to speculate on the origins of cumulative culture. Incapable of sustained or rapid bipedal locomotion, and with elders spending increasingly more time on the forest floor, A. afarensis may have drawn from a sense cunning that is often associated with seniors, and indeed accounts for why older humans maintain high scores on videogames while lacking the reflexes of competing youth. Horizontal or forest-floor cunning may have played a role in terms of inventiveness, survival, and even the transference necessary for a gradually more cumulative culture.
Across the many characteristics of hominins, it should be considered that certain traits may be ancestral to socio-reproductive modes of the past. Take the example of the neutral permissibility or attractiveness of freckles on otherwise clean skin. Freckles may or may not bespeak an ancestral sexually selective preference for sunspots, as a clear example of cross-over between old and new directional pressures of selection that arose due to menopause. Larger and varied preferences may emerge from a collage of likes and dislikes that may contain remnants of hominin or even hominid preferences. To run with this idea, slowed motions, caution, and teaching may also be traits of senescolescence. The function of these characteristics, like gray hair or balding, may also serve to even performatively highlight the fitness of one’s offsprings’ genes over one’s own. This “highlighting theory” is corroborated by Ashapkin, et al. (2017) in observing that the female breasts are subjected to exceptionally rapid epigenetic aging, while the male testes and spermatozoa are subjected to exceptionally slowed epigenetic aging pressures.[42] Especially in, European populations, hair colors are diverse, either to invite pair-bonding or polygyny or a mixture of both. In such a context, grey hair and balding is a notably homogenizing and conforming look. However, drawing on the potential meaning of these traits from previous modes of socio-reproduction, signs of aging may also coincide with one’s willingness to settle down and participate in allometric parenting, among other potential speculative meanings. In short, pre-menopausal, ancestral socio-reproductive semiotics should be explored, albeit not reductively so.
Epigenomic changes are not merely correlative with aging, rather the epigenome is integral within the mechanism of aging itself.[43] Especially common in the information theory of aging, the restoration of cellular differentiation is now commonplace in laboratory tests, and usually using rodents. According to Ashapkin, et al. (2017), the successes of the repression of NF-kB, causes 54% of age-dependent genes in epidermal skin cells to return to “young” levels in mice.[44] While these trials are swiftly moving forwards to application on humans, if evolution has curtailed animal lifespans wherever these may negatively affect the health of offspring or reproductive success,[45] then certainly this same consideration should be reproduced as the bottom line of longevity research or transhumanism. Another approach may involve playing the long game and working with what is understood about epigenetics, wherein longevity through grandmothering, eusocial protection, and niche construction are already empirically known to increase longevity, and in offspring too.[46]
Conclusion
In conclusion, as Mayr (1983) writes, “the student of adaptation has to sail a perilous course between a pseudo-explanatory reductionist atomism and stultifying nonexplanatory holism.”[47] This paper, an exploration of the aging phenotype across hominids and hominins, certainly has not veered off course in avoidance of the speculative and pseudo-explanatory. At most, this broad-sense exploration points to potentiality for new ways of speaking and thinking about aging and senescolescence. If premature signs of aging have a function, then the understated and underacknowledged function of senescence and even death are not far behind, and should by any means be semiotically reinstated. This paper aims to strengthen a conviction that the essential step towards increasing healthspan is realizing the functions of aging one trait at a time, and its multiple speculations are a call for further research. As this paper’s proposals are not disproven in the literature that was referenced here, these ideas have withstood some loose testing, and are therefore promising for further exploration.
In closing, the holistic long-game for increasing healthspan for future generations as previously detailed may in some ways conflict with short-game, so-called “biohacking.” In the latter, it is as though Hermes wishes to join Apollo and the other Gods. Hermes’s does this with a smug confidence and non-chalance that presumes that there has been an oversight or a loophole built into the organism, and that no trade-off would be required. As has been discussed in relation to the longevity bottleneck hypothesis, the short-game may involve revoking one’s ability to thermoregulate, for example, or perhaps diverting substantial funds away from preserving the ecological services that have, for around 210 million years, been selectively supportive of mammalian life and only very recently, the genus Homo.
References
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Calcagno, James M., and Agustín Fuentes. “What makes us human? Answers from evolutionary anthropology.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 21, no. 5 (2012): 188-189.
Childs, Bennett G., Martina Gluscevic, Darren J. Baker, Remi-Martin Laberge, Dan Marquess, Jamie Dananberg, and Jan M. Van Deursen. “Senescent cells: an emerging target for diseases of ageing.” Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 16, no. 10 (2017): 718-735.
De Magalhães, João Pedro. “The longevity bottleneck hypothesis: Could dinosaurs have shaped ageing in present‐day mammals?” BioEssays 46, no. 1 (2024): 1-2, article 2300098.
Frost, Peter. “Sexual selection and human geographic variation.” Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 2, no. 4 (2008): 169.
Hawkes, Kristen. “Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity.” American Journal of Human Biology 15, no. 3 (2003): 202-300.
Hunt, Kevin D. “The evolution of human bipedality: ecology and functional morphology.” Journal of Human Evolution 26, no. 3 (1994): 183-198.
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Mayr, Ernst. “How to carry out the adaptationist program?” The American Naturalist 121, no. 3 (1983): 324-334.
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Stearns, Stephen C., Randolph M. Nesse, and David Haig. “Introducing evolutionary thinking for medicine.” In Evolution in Health and Disease. 2008, 4.
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[1]Pandhi, Deepika, and Deepshikha Khanna, “Premature graying of hair.” Indian journal of dermatology, venereology and leprology 79 (2013): 641-653.
[2] Mayr, Ernst, “How to carry out the adaptationist program?.” The American Naturalist 121, no. 3 (1983): 324-334.
[3] Pandhi and Khanna, “Premature graying of hair,” 647.
[4] de Magalhães, João Pedro, “The longevity bottleneck hypothesis: Could dinosaurs have shaped ageing in present‐day mammals?” BioEssays 46, no. 1 (2024): 2300098.
[5] Hunt, Kevin D., “The evolution of human bipedality: ecology and functional morphology.” Journal of human evolution 26, no. 3 (1994): 183-202.
[6] Hawkes, Kristen, “Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity.” American journal of human biology 15, no. 3 (2003): 380-400.
[7] Shilovsky, Gregory A., Tatyana S. Putyatina, and Alexander V. Markov, “Evolution of longevity as a species-specific trait in mammals.” Biochemistry (Moscow) 87, no. 12 (2022): 1590.
[8] de Magalhães, “The longevity bottleneck hypothesis: Could dinosaurs have shaped ageing in present‐day mammals?” 1.
[9] Shilovsky, et al. “Evolution of longevity as a species-specific trait in mammals.” 1589.
[10] de Magalhães, “The longevity bottleneck hypothesis: Could dinosaurs have shaped ageing in present‐day mammals?” 2.
[11] Ashapkin, Vasily V., Lyudmila I. Kutueva, and Boris F. Vanyushin, “Aging as an epigenetic phenomenon.” Current genomics 18, no. 5 (2017): 398.
[12] Shilovsky et al., “Evolution of longevity as a species-specific trait in mammals,” 1591.
[13] Shilovsky et al., “Evolution of longevity as a species-specific trait in mammals,” 1588.
[14] Hawkes, Kristen, “Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity.” American journal of human biology 15, no. 3 (2003): 202.
[15] Ashapkin et al., “Aging as an epigenetic phenomenon.” Current genomics 18, no. 5 (2017): 385-386.
[16] Stearns, Stephen C., Randolph M. Nesse, and David Haig, “Introducing evolutionary thinking for medicine.” Evolution in health and disease (2008): 4.
[17] Hawkes, Kristen, “Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity,” 300.
[18] Hunt, Kevin D., “The evolution of human bipedality: ecology and functional morphology,” 194.
[19] Hunt, Kevin D., “The evolution of human bipedality: ecology and functional morphology,” 196.
[20] Hunt, Kevin D., “The evolution of human bipedality: ecology and functional morphology,” 198.
[21] Pigliucci, Massimo, “An extended synthesis for evolutionary biology.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1168, no. 1 (2009): 218-228.
[22] Calcagno, James M., and Agustín Fuentes, “What makes us human? Answers from evolutionary anthropology.” Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 21, no. 5 (2012): 188.
[23] Calcagno & Fuentes, “What makes us human? Answers from evolutionary anthropology,” 189.
[24] Vågerö, Denny, Vanda Aronsson, and Bitte Modin, “Why is parental lifespan linked to children’s chances of reaching a high age? A transgenerational hypothesis.” SSM-population health 4 (2018): 245.
[25] Vågerö et al., “Why is parental lifespan linked to children’s chances of reaching a high age? A transgenerational hypothesis,” 253.
[26] Hawkes, Kristen, “Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity,” 296.
[27] Marks, Jonathan, “The Biological Myth of Human Evolution.” in Biologising the Social Sciences (Routledge, 2015), 151.
[28] Frost, Peter, “Sexual selection and human geographic variation.” Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology 2, no. 4 (2008): 169.
[29] Jablonski, Nina G., and George Chaplin, “The colours of humanity: the evolution of pigmentation in the human lineage.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 372, no. 1724 (2017): 20160349. 2.
[30] Jablonski & Chaplin, “The colours of humanity: the evolution of pigmentation in the human lineage.”
[31] Hawkes, Kristen, “Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity,” 297.
[32] Vaiserman, Alexander, and Oleh Lushchak. “Early-Life Adjustment of Epigenetic Aging Clock.” Early Life Origins of Ageing and Longevity (2019): 271.
[33] Ashapkin et al., “Aging as an epigenetic phenomenon,” 389.
[34] Ashapkin et al., “Aging as an epigenetic phenomenon,” 401.
[35] Childs, Bennett G., Martina Gluscevic, Darren J. Baker, Remi-Martin Laberge, Dan Marquess, Jamie Dananberg, and Jan M. Van Deursen. “Senescent cells: an emerging target for diseases of ageing.” Nature reviews Drug discovery 16, no. 10 (2017): 718-735.
[36] Childs et al., “Senescent cells: an emerging target for diseases of ageing.”
[37] Childs et al., “Senescent cells: an emerging target for diseases of ageing,” 719.
[38] Pandhi and Khanna, “Premature graying of hair,” 645.
[39] Ashapkin et al., “Aging as an epigenetic phenomenon,”400.
[40] Mayr, Ernst, “How to carry out the adaptationist program?” 331.
[41] Hawkes, Kristen, “Grandmothers and the evolution of human longevity,” 202.
[42] Ashapkin et al., “Aging as an epigenetic phenomenon,” 389.
[43] Ashapkin et al., “Aging as an epigenetic phenomenon,”404.
[44] Ashapkin et al., “Aging as an epigenetic phenomenon,”403.
[45] Shilovsky et al., “Evolution of longevity as a species-specific trait in mammals,” 1580.
[46] Shilovsky et al., “Evolution of longevity as a species-specific trait in mammals,” 1584.
[47] Mayr, Ernst, “How to carry out the adaptationist program?” 329.
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy in present-day North America is the longest thriving democratic alliance in the world (Mann, C.C. 2005). The Confederacy’s six Indigenous bands remain at relative peace by continually confirming agreement between one another through call-out and call-back repetition of basic principles or natural laws. The spirit of calling out can also be seen in the loose strings that dangle from the ends of beaded wampum belts, like pictographic treaties, and in the two truncated lines on the Confederacy’s purple flag, reaching out for allies. In the following, I will be looking at how Indigenous activism, specifically the Standing Rock protest of 2016, acted as both call-back and call-out too. To do this, I will trace Standing Rock’s effects through call-backs that came in from the island of Kalimantan, Indonesia. The process of identizing (Melucci; Kavada 2015 p. 875) to perform these call-backs can require significant self-mutilation, both drawing from and contributing to a body of fuzzy archetypes online, which can be traced through use of hashtags. Paradoxically, in a call for land tenure, rights and freedoms, call-backs usually end up appropriating other rigid structures that involve the shadow state, International Organizations (IOs) and Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (E-NGOs), reproducing institutional isomorphism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Schiller 1996 p. 413) within the process of retribalization (Cohen 1969; Schiller 2007 p. 85). My argument is that, within so-called Indigenous activism in Kalimantan, principles that are held in common with Pan-Indigeneity, vis-à-vis Standing Rock and the No Dakota Access Pipeline (#NoDAPL) protests as exemplary, are referred to less pragmatically and more authentically in so-far as these principles can be salvaged, while these call-backs reach farther and last longer if strategically allied with real and imaginary notions of Pan-Indigeneity. Two movements that are successful in very different ways, Ranu Welum and Save Meratus, will be defined through an analogy to the movement of art styles around the world, and in contrast to two cautionary tales of a growing marketing mentality – one from Canada’s Almaguin Highlands and the Lok Baintan floating market of South Kalimantan.
In the 1980s, when lumber from the forests of the Philippines and Indonesia was sent to North America by way of Japan, this supply incidentally held space for populist environmental movements and national parks to emerge in the USA, Canada, and Japan (Tsing 2015 p. 210). Without a steady supply of inexpensive timber from Southeast Asia (SEA), North American forests would likely have been deregulated and conservation forests would have changed for conversion-production. I see no way that this could have transpired without oppressive measures against free speech and activism. Take for example the 2011-2015 protests against the defunding of the environmental sector and consequent deregulation under Canada’s former Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Dillon, L., et al., p. 5). By degree, the freedom of speech that allowed for environmental movements to exist in North America had a co-constitutive relationship with oppression and deregulation in distant places in the way that one cannot dig a hole without making a mess elsewhere. The upholding of freedom of speech even revolved around old-growth forests in The Battle of Seattle in 1999, which was redeemed in being a call-back to the Zapatista’s movement against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (Morris, H. E. 2024). However, the Battle of Seatle was also the flipside of devastation of SEA’s high-carbon forests and government oppression abroad.
The Global North is on a unique platform, a Hollywood set where protests can exasperate the problem being addressed. For example, blockades can force corporations to accept better offers from the developing world, where they can operate without red tape and regulations. Such corporate counteractions, doubling down in unregulated zones, does not undermine the spirit and reason of Indigenous activism and solidarity movements, however. The likelihood that corporations will exploit deregulation is known as the flying goose model, and to modify Plato’s terms, these geese put ‘appetite’ before ‘spirit’ and ‘reason’ (Plato; Brown, W. 2015 pp. 21-22). This behavior says nothing of Indigenous stewardship, however, which calls for appetite to become contingent on reason and spirit, instead. In this account, the dynamic of call-outs and call-backs play an essential role in introducing checks in and around the resource frontiers of the world.
Colonially known as “Borneo,” Kalimantan is the third largest island in the world. Rising from equatorial forests, smoke from swidden agriculture chokes the island each year between August and September as it has for at least the past 6,000 years – or since the practice first came ashore. Finally, in 1997, industrial fires joined this smoke to produce a domain of incalculability (Li & Semedi p. 17) through co-opting adat / “Indigenous” practices, even having plantation workers wear adat costumes while facilitating a burn. To combat this corporate presence, adat communities came together in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, in 1999. These communities had thrived for millennia by being wary but were compelled by globalization to unite in the emergent, fuzzy notion of an island-wide, Pan-Dayak organization, one step closer to the global Pan-Indigeneity (Schiller 2007). Anne Schiller (2007) describes the moment when these communities-cum-subtribes selected animals to represent their respective communities and territories (p. 91) in the way that mascots might be selected by sports teams.
A brief description of the conjuncture in Kalimantan is necessary for an understanding of the Ranu Welum Foundation and founder Emmanuela Shinta’s call-backs, in the lingo of Standing Rock, in response to the catastrophic fires of 2015-2016. In the adat “Dayak” majority province of Central Kalimantan, Tjilik Riwut began the bureaucratic process of trying to create a new religion out of the varied traditions, tales, songs, and knowledge from around his large island. The Kaharingan religion took shape through revisions requested by the Kementrian Agama (Ministry of Religion), in Jakarta (Baier 2007 p. 567). The institutional involvement in the process of identizing came to be reflected in a manner that Schiller describes as institutional isomorphism (1996 p. 413). Despite having compiled a holy book, a volume of songs and prayers, designed and built unique houses of worship, recruited a large following, and agreed on a singular Godhead (Baier 2007 p. 567), Kaharingan was not recognized as a religion based on the value judgement from the Ministry that it does not encourage peradaban (civility) among members (Buana p. 4). The Ministry offers no further explanation, only a compromise — the state would recognize the Dayak religion as hyphenated Hindu-Kaharingan. Though predominantly Christian, the adat individuals already challenged with identifying as both Dayak and Indigenous either accepted that they are now also part Hindu, ignored the imposition, or left the hybrid religion behind.
Two Presidential Terms in Contradiction: The election of former President Jokowi starts with the first green spike, and his re-election four years later is marked by the second green spike. In the first period, Google searches for ‘human rights’ (blue) and the ‘environment’ (red) peaked together during the burning months of August-September. Interest in ‘fire’ (purple) was high during the first period, waning in the second due to a moratorium on burning (and European sanctions). What is interesting here is the democratic party’s dramatic pivot in the second term, where fires mostly stopped, ‘climate change’ (yellow) and ‘environment’ (red) became party buzzwords, justifying a switch to nickel mining in Halmahera, and the construction of a new capital city in Kalimantan — both to avoid rising sea levels in the future and to assert administrative control (Google LLC. 2024).
The oppressive burning that marked Jokowi’s first period was the ideal backdrop for Ranu Welum Foundation and founder, Emmanuela Shinta. It was a dangerous time for Indonesians to speak out, so Shinta became Dayak Ngaju and Indigenous, instead. In her TedTalk and in videos made in association with E-NGOs, Shinta switches back and forth between two languages — a Ngaju customary language, not understood by a vast majority of Indonesians, and English (TedExKassel 2020). By excluding the national language of Bahasa Indonesia, and roughly 275 million speakers, Shinta’s speeches are a call-back directed outwards to Indigenous people and their English-speaking allies, IOs and E-NGOs, also to growing sympathies fostered by Standing Rock and #NoDAPL, and later, through Truth and Reconciliation’s reforms emphasizing Indigenous curriculums in Canada (Brown 2019 p. 10).
Shinta is both adat and Indigenous, Hindu-Kaharingan and Christian, but as per Ranu Welum’s Youtube account, also wears a hijab when tutoring a general audience of local women on how to approach online activism (Shinta, E. 2015). Due to the population of adat communities and orang utan (orangutan), there are many E-NGOs in Shinta’s home province of Central Kalimantan. The influence of these E-NGOs can be seen in Shinta’s well-curated words and hashtags. Through curation and careful timing, Shinta’s voice reached beyond this circle of E-NGOs, and beyond what some might call administration by the shadow state. Shinta’s powerful speeches are affect-laden, strong but vulnerable, seeking contact with Pan-Indigenous affiliations and global allyship.
Indignant in the face of neoliberal reforms and structural adjustment programs, the Global South can download identities, or formats of dissent, from both Western contemporary art and archives of Indigeneity. On the island of Bali, the city of Ubud has a community of contemporary painters inspired by expressionistic Western art styles, such as Mas Fajar, who is the island’s Jean-Michel Basquiat. There are also multiple Jackson Pollocks. These men have no interest in creating reproductions or knockoffs, however, but rather their work is their authentic and fiery response to neoliberal reform and oppressive, authoritarian politics in a format of dissent that speaks to them on an individual level. Unlike some Westerners painting in Asian styles, it must be considered that inspiration in Indonesia is not always appropriation – less pragmatic, more authentic. Like the process of indigenizing, Bali’s Picassos and Duchamps are themselves call-backs to an original format of dissent that can only be explained as “the heart’s yearning for grace” (Hakim Bey).
If marketing mentality were a washing machine, it would whiten colors instead of coloring whites. Returning to North America, in Ontario, I recently attended a meeting that proposed the renaming of the Almaguin Highlands district to achieve a better Search Engine Optimization (SEO) score and boost tourism to the area. The name “Almaguin” combines Algonquin, Magnetawan, and Seguin, and was created by a settler woman who thought it sounded Indian. To boost the area’s SEO score, however, the region may soon be renamed “West Algonquin” instead. When I asked if there might be room to consider an Indigenous title, I was reminded that “Algonquin” is an Indigenous word. I kept it to myself that Algonquin Park is also the site of the largest land claim dispute in Canada. Like the protagonist in the movie The Fly, fragmented notions of persons, place, and history enter the media only to reemerge as something uncanny and alien, interbred with institutionalism, and a fragmented corporate personhood. Sometimes this blanching process can have a positive effect, however, as deeper notions of identity become shallow enough to be downloadable in low-bandwidth areas, much like Kalimantan. In the 1960s, President Soeharto ordered John Wayne’s movies to be played frequently on Indonesian television stations, encouraging generations of cowboys and frontiersmen, but also hundreds of adat communities too to identify with portrayals of Plains Indians.
The many adat cultures that outsiders and tourists often refer to as ‘Dayak’ migrated down the Mekong and across to the island of Kalimantan starting around 40,000 years ago. They left behind a trail of tattoos and floating markets, among other unique kearifan (wisdom-traits) (Hose, C., & McDougall, W. 1912). In the southern city of Banjarmasin, Lok Baintan was, until recently, the oldest unchanging floating market worldwide. I once lived nearby and compared all known floating markets online. Somehow this gathering of hundreds of women in small jukung (unique wooden boats) had survived the New Order’s culling of more than a million supposed communists, or non-capitalists, in the 1960s (Li & Semedi 2021 p. 186). As of 2019, however, under the province’s tourism board, the bartering community has been roped in, and Lok Baintan has become Instagrammable. The fate of the floating market was decided vis-à-vis a tourism board, the city, social media, and SEO. Without a charismatic leader like Shinta, Lok Baintan is exemplary of how administration by the shadow state, can de-indigenize the nature of the relationships that were supposed to be capitalized on (Elyachar 2015 p. 30). Lacking even Pan-Dayak affiliations, in order to remain among the deserving poor (Redden 2011 p. 820), the women of Lok Baintan have become the mutilated selves the public needs them to be. Sellers now wear hijabs and adhere to workdays set by the tourism board. They row into festivals with the same, sun-burned, stoic expressions, wielding hand-carved paddles, choreographing the bows of their jukung together to create flower patterns for the drones overhead. The role of bartering has finally been brought under control, and a majority of the fruits and vegetables in their boats are just props now, while hot coffee, cakes, durian, and even trafficked animals, such as leopard cat kittens, de-venomed slow lorises, birds, and macaques, for sale as short-term playthings, are prioritized by the larger neoliberal market that this market is now enmeshed within. The cautionary tale of Lok Baintan is exemplary of the transition from gift to commodity, and the neoliberal mode of “salvage accumulation” (Tsing A.L. 2015 p. 52) — or “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003; Elyachar 2005 p. 27).
Rivers used to go to the sea. Sellers and buyers used to go to the market only when they needed to. Now, however, the sea is rising, and salt-water seeps inland. Social media reels show a stingray swimming in downtown Banjarmasin, a green sea turtle in downtown Denpasar, Bali. If the market is everywhere, the sea goes to the rivers, people can stay in one place, and all that is asked is that we should be our true selves for other people, without contradictions. At the end of the day, the women of Lok Baintan toss out their for-display bananas and purchase rice, eggs, fish, and instant noodles. They go home to humble wooden assemblages on stilts above the river, with or without electricity, and start a wood fire (they are still wary of the government’s subsidized gas canisters). They have no access to the internet, but it all around them, like salt water. They do not know what it is yet, but they must have some idea that they are at the center of it — sometimes getting a cameo under the hashtag #SaveMeratus.
The Save Meratus movement also draws on the lingo of retribalization (Schiller 2007 p. 85) vis-à-vis E-NGOs, such as the proximate WALHI Kalsel (“The Indonesian Forum for the Living Environment”). The Save Meratus movement extends to the offline mountainous regions, like South- / Central- Hulu Sungai, where both signal and technologies are sparse. The hashtag #SaveMeratus embellishes Meratus adat communities with associations that are both Pan-Dayak and Pan-Indigenous, often mentioning the Kaharingan religion. Meanwhile, many of the people at the imaginary center have not had the chance to make an informed decision as to whether they wish to be members of anything outside of a bounded constellation of villages. Members of the WALHI, such as Mas Kis, are also key figures in the Save Meratus community.
Mas Kis is invited to attend the Aruh festivals in Meratus longhouses. Sitting next to the communities’ Big Man figure, the Balian of Sungai Amandit, who facilitates the Aruh rituality, long-haired Mas Kis is a fly in his ear. The Balian listens with hands full of ringgitan floral offerings that he shakes to the beat of the drums of the umbun matriarchs. In a brief window, Mas Kis repeats a streamlined version of the call-out. Mas Kis emphasizes that mining and palm oil plantations offer easy money but long-term loss, both environmentally and socially. Appetite needs to be kept under control, because the Aruh festival and the ritual-based understanding of time (Evans-Pritchard 1956) in the Meratus Mountains are upheld by only so many. The Balian’s response is a brief call-back, reluctant, dismissive, but affirmative nonetheless. In this way, the Meratus people are loosely and consensually confined to the community of the new commons (McMichael, P. 2000), wherein people may unknowingly be healthier and happier than the more affluent consumers that they seek to emulate. I recently followed up with journalist Budi K., asking if the agreement between the E-NGOs and the Meratus communities is still in place? Budi responded, “Yes, both sides are in agreement, according to WALHI.” His jocular reply indicates the level of discontent and perhaps some subversion of the principles that are strongly and persistently recommended by the surrounding shadow state, also endorsed by the Save Meratus movement itself.
Not only because she is in a different province and speaking for the Ngaju subtribe, Shinta has very little association with Save Meratus. The superficiality of Pan-Dayak and Pan-Indigenous identities is rendered clear in the lack of interest between initiatives with similar goals, affiliations, and somewhat Indigenous principles. At the same time as Ranu Welum was releasing its coverage of the 2015-2016 burning season under “When Women Fight,” (Shinta E. 2015) students from South Kalimantan’s Lambung Mangkurat University (ULM) were protesting the haze, carrying signs reading “Save Meratus,” but acknowledgement between the two was minimal. Student protestors in the movement graffitied the Cree proverb, “Only after the last tree has been cut down […] you will realize that you cannot eat money,” (translated) on the side of a bridge where it remains in place until today, underscored by the hashtag, spraypainted in faded purple, #SAVEMERATUS.
Every few months, rumours circulate that key figures of Save Meratus are agents of multinational corporations, such as Adaro Energy, or the Samling Group. This chilling effect of compromise lasts only a few days, however. When the movement is threatened by structural hierarchy, the offline members return to the center. Sometimes images of the women of Lok Baintan are used for their overlapping associations. As phrased by Benedict Anderson (2020), there is no imagined community, and therefore Save Meratus is as though directed at the forest itself, with people and the Aruh rituality as dependents and occasional stewards. What Ranu Welum has in terms of reach and verticality, Save Meratus makes up for in localized scale, but at the cost of structure, ability to organize, and frequent infighting.
“Menggali lubang, tutup lubang,” an idiom meaning, “dig a hole, fill a hole” — begins to describe the affect of the flip-siding of deregulation and environmentalism, the “conversion from political to economic semantic order” (Brown W. p. 41) on a global scale. Digging a hole, filling a hole — describes Eastern palm oil and Western slacktivism (Brown W. pp. 21-22); the dynamic between nickel mining in Sulawesi and EVCs in Oslo; the factory farm and the gentle animal lover who eats meat; the flying goose model, free speech, and activism. Between 1997-2019, remaining forests in Kalimantan had to be burned so that the Plantationocene (Demos T.J. pp. 93-94) could further subsidize life in the Global North and around the world. Just as industrial workers in the United Kingdom once thrived on sugar and the products of slavery from the Caribbean to keep the factories going, the products of what Saidiya Hartman (2007) calls the afterlife of slavery now fill the caloric needs of people of all different classes on all continents. The idiom of digging and filling in is synonymous with senselessly making work. It is as though the dynamic of protests, like Standing Rock, where previously unrelated Indigenous bands all became friends on Facebook (Brown A. 2019 p. 13), and the ripple effect that this has had around the world, slip this trap.
Jokowi’s pivotal re-election in 2018 was marked by a sudden shift in affect. The political capital is now moving to East Kalimantan. Jokowi often narrates a story wherein climate change is the main motivator, though the problem is over-use of ground water causing a sinking effect. There are suspicions that the move is enforce administrative control over largely adat communities / subtribes. The move of the political capital could also be to secure control over E-NGOs and the shadow state that buzzes like a fly in the ear of adat communities. Climate change is still a relatively new buzzword to the broader public, and it has not yet reached many in the Meratus Mountains. The belated emergence of this keyword is directly related to hilirisasi (downstreaming), such as nickel mining in Halmahera, as an informal process of extraction through outsourcing with no regulations to speak of. To justify digging these new holes, climate change must be emphasized, working towards the transisi energi bersih (clean energy transition), which is well underway in the West. Highlighted by filmmaker journalist Dandy Laksono, as an aspect of the bad Anthropocene (Demos T.J. 2017 pp. 53-54), downstreaming seems to be provoking louder protests than decades of coal mining and burning ever did. As for the plantation zone, it has been certified sustainable by means of a collective amnesia. The state amended statistics to include monocrops in the same category as rainforests that are over one million years old and the problem of deforestation disappeared. This allows for certificate programs, like the Round Table of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the sponsor of the orang utan enclosure in the Toronto Zoo (where the animals are safest at the moment), supported by World Wildlife Fund, to claim say that palm oil has suddenly become sustainable (Li & Semedi 2021 pp. 171-173).
While no two Indigenous communities are the same, they often share overlapping principles (Piccolo 2023 p. 2). Besides the protection of water by women and strong connections to land, both emphasized at Standing Rock, I have also observed an added level of meaning-making beyond obvious cause and effect (Evans-Pritchard 1956). In facing the wicked problem of climate change, such hermeneutics are useful for understanding the tragic but informative poetry of the poetic justice that is all around us, these days. Social media and the language of memes is one way that these connections can be reified and shared. Another potential feature of Pan-Indigeneity is a temporality that doubles back, that does not see pipelines or plantations as inevitable, a worldview that is somehow located within a revisionist history that is future-oriented. You could call this nostalgia for the future. This nostalgia might be likened to the seven fires teaching, wherein a fire snuffed out by settler colonialism and the industrial revolution must be rekindled through Indigenous collaboration and decolonization, backtracking to the very first fire, the first call-out, perhaps also the beginnings of the Confederacy, to return and rekindle a sense of futurity in a seventh fire (Kimmerer 2011 p. 259).
The settler project to rename the Almaguin Highlands does not hear the call-out. Save Meratus rejects institutionality but does not see itself as more Indigenous than obstinately adat, instead. Ranu Welum, while elastically pragmatic, might completely overlook the context of Indonesia, but rises above the E-NGOs, IOs, the state and its shadow. Ranu Welum completed a call-back to Indigenous principles and protests with clarity and a decisiveness that surprised Indonesians and foreigners alike. After Standing Rock and #NoDAPL, Shinta had a well-deserved moment of fame. The liberal- and technological- optimism that frames even the burning of the rainforests — plantations the size of Kansas state in 2016 (Mongaby 2018), the fastest rate of extinction in the world, child labour, and pipelines — as bumps in the road to progress is now being challenged by inspired voices of resistance around the world required to keep the flying goose in check. The new fire that is spreading looks to be both swidden, ancient, and something new.
References
Anderson, B. (2020). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. In The new social theory reader (pp. 282-288). Routledge.
Baier, M. (2007). The Development of the Hindu Kaharingan Religion: A New Dayak Religion in Central Kalimantan. Anthropos, (102), 566-570.
Brown, A. (2019). A Lakota Historian on What Climate Organizers Can Learn from Two Centuries of Indigenous Resistance. The Intercept.
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing democracy: neoliberalism’s remaking of state and subject. Undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution, 17-45.
Buana, M. S. Relasi’Agama’Dayak Kaharingan dengan Islam dan Hak Berkeyakinan Masyarakat Adat di Kalimantan Selatan. LKiS.
Dillon, L., Walker, D., Shapiro, N., Underhill, V., Martenyi, M., Wylie, S., … & Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. (2017). Environmental data justice and the Trump administration: Reflections from the environmental data and governance initiative.
Environmental Justice, 10(6).
Elyachar, J. (2005). Markets of dispossession: NGOs, economic development, and the state in Cairo. Duke University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1956). Nuer religion. Oxford University Press.
Hartman, S. (2008). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York Farrar, Straus And Giroux.
Hose, C., & McDougall, W. (1912). The pagan tribes of Borneo. London, England.
Kavada, A. (2015). Creating the collective: social media, the Occupy Movement and its constitution as a collective actor. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 872-886.
Kimmerer, R. (2011). Restoration and reciprocity: the contributions of traditional ecological knowledge. Human dimensions of ecological restoration: Integrating science, nature, and culture, 257-276.
Li, T. M., & Semedi, P. (2021). Plantation life: Corporate occupation in Indonesia’s oil palm zone. Duke University Press.
Mann, C. C. (2005). 1491: New revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Knopf.
McMichael, P. (2000). The power of food. Agriculture and human values, 17, 21-33.
Morris, H. E. (2024, February 9). Lecture 5 (Post-Great Recession Movements for Democracy).
In Unit 2: Social Media and Pro-Democracy Movements of the 2010s.
Piccolo, S. (2023). Indigenous Sovereignty, Common Law, and Natural Law. American Journal of Political Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12762
Redden, J. (2011). Poverty in the news: A framing analysis of coverage in Canada and the United Kingdom. Information, Communication & Society, 14(6), 820-849.
Indigenous botanist Robin Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass, describes how a meadow of wild sweetgrass, having offered itself to the Mohawk people for centuries, was slowly taken over by European weeds — like quackgrass, timothy, clover, daisies, and purple loosestrife (510). For Kimmerer, this was indicative of how settler colonialism had treated her land, her language, her culture, and the Indigenous people of North America. To build on Kimmerer’s comparison — if planting an invasive species is like positive eugenics, then would not negative eugenics involve symbolically tearing a native plant out by the roots?
In the early 1900’s, Canada was involved in a variety of multifaceted eugenics movements. While the government never called for it, through financial support and failure to condemn the procedure, Indigenous Canadian women became overrepresented as victims of Western medicine’s cold attention (Stote 126). Aboriginal peoples were targeted, and Inuit women were operated on without consent – not required if the patient were diagnosed ‘mentally defective’ (Stote 120, 127). While one would hope that these practices are a thing of the past, and though the government has since offered its belated apologies, in other places in the world similar practices are revived and imitated — poetically reflected in metaphors concerning local and foreign plant life.
In the rainforested interiors of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, Indigenous Dayak voice complaints about two problems still plaguing them in 2021. There are not enough hospitals for them and ‘birth control safari’ boats come to their villages far too often. In Kalimantan, family planning is being encouraged at the same time as foreign, Javanese transmigrants are being gifted packets of farmland with simple houses (Schiller 77). These newcomers condemn Indigenous practices of swidden agriculture while also blaming them for starting the massive fires needed to expand foreign mono-crops. For thousands of years, the Indigenous have been leaving trails of seeds along walking paths through the rainforest, marking the way while feeding travellers, and the ecosystem itself. Nowadays vast rubber and palm oil plantations have nearly taken over.
The yellow bur-head, known as gendjer-gendjer, is an invasive aquatic weed that came to Southeast Asia via South America. Indonesians liked to joke, calling this weed an exotic, imported delicacy from a far-off country. During the Japanese occupation this plant became the subject of a song written to console locals during times of such austerity. The message is that, come what may, the people can always enjoy a feast on this soggy green delicacy. Like money, the weed had arrived from elsewhere. Unlike the dollar or the rupiah, however, the weed was abundant, therefore celebrating the weed is a sly undervaluation of the monetary system. The lyrics describe a woman selling these worthless weeds at the market, perhaps suggesting that the value of money itself is arbitrary. The US-backed Suharto government immediately banned all mention of the plant. Steaming plates of the weed were taken out of the display cabinets of rural eateries around the country.
Throughout the 1960’s and for the following 32 years, singers of the gendjer-gendjer were put to death. It is estimated that one million supposed ‘commies’ were killed in a largely unknown massacre that should be internationally recognized as a genocide not unlike the holocaust (Simangan, et al. 221). In the regime’s later years, Leftist poet-activist Widji Thukul wrote of the president’s soldiers being like ‘green beans,’ while comparing the government itself to a cement wall. In keeping with the plant motif, Thukul wrote that ordinary people are like seeds that were scattered in the wet cement before it dried, “at one time in the future, all together, we shall grow — certain that you must crumble.” After many years spent in hiding, Thukul visited his wife one last time before finally disappearing for good in the late 1990’s.
In December of 2018, Philippine President Duterte set out to follow in Suharto’s footsteps, ordering the Armed Forces to destroy and kill ‘the Left’ of his country (Simangan, et al. 214). Like Suharto, his strategy also involves ‘hamletting’ Indigenous groups. People are told not to leave the slum-like hamlets lest they wish to be confused with ‘the enemy’ (Simangan, et al. 219,218). Like the G30S massacre in Indonesia, this is happening under the guise of isolating individuals from the virus of communism. But what else is going on here?
Where real and imagined Cold War politics overlap with what Canada called ‘the Indian problem’ there is a common enemy — common to both capitalism and communism. There is subsistence, sustainability, self-sufficiency, barter economies, collectivism, subjective and qualitative valuation, autonomy, perhaps a vision of the future unburdened by insatiability or the insecurity of illusory ownership rights. Could it be said that Indigenous communities have always been the third party under siege in a never-ending Cold War?
Newcomers to North America are streamlined into a paradigm of exponential growth. The housing market epitomizes this. Citizens accept that if property taxes are not paid, even a house built by someone’s great-grandfather becomes government property and is then likely resold. Even dream houses are built to bland government specifications to aid resale. When someone is sick, aging, or falls on hard times, they should start to worry about being homeless as well. To any Indigenous culture this must seem quite absurd. This lack of inalienable ownership rights fosters a feeling of uprootedness, restless industriousness (Protestantism), dehumanization, and encourages short-term planning. It also aids in the state-directed settlement of even more Indigenous territory by design. This could be the ulterior motive of Duterte’s hamletting of the Indigenous people of the Philippines — revoking the right to four walls and a roof.
In the mid-2000’s, a band known as Filastine took to a stage in Jakarta, Indonesia. A track of female backup singers fades in somewhat dreamily. Vocalist Mbak Nova steps towards the mic and, for the first time in nearly half a century, an old farmer’s song is picked up — about a weed that still grows on the bottom of storm drains and ponds. At the very least, this yellow bur-head, like the seeds of maple trees, sumac, chokecherries, in North America, will always be there for the people as they strive for a way of being that feels right on every level.
“Gendjer Gendjer” by Filastine (Nova Ruth & Grey Filastine)
Works Cited
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. First Paperback, Milkweed Editions, 2015.
Stote, Karen. “The Coercive Sterilization of Aboriginal Women in Canada.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, vol. 36, no. 3, 2012. doi:10.17953/aicr.36.3.7280728r6479j650.
Schiller, Anne. “Activism and Identities in an East Kalimantan Dayak Organization.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 66, no. 1, 2007. doi:10.1017/s002191180700006x.
Simangan, Dahlia, and Jess Melvin. “Destroy and Kill “the Left”: Duterte on Communist Insurgency in the Philippines with a Reflection on the Case of Suharto’s Indonesia.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 21, no. 2, 2019, pp. 214–26. doi:10.1080/14623528.2019.1599515.
Indians are the people of India. Indonesians are the people of the East Indies. American Indians were once discovered in the West Indies. All of these misnomers attempt to reference the Indus river of present-day Pakistan. It is as if the word “Indian” became confused with the Latin word “indigena” – meaning “to spring from the earth.” Or had it come to overlap with “independent,” from French – meaning “not hanging on anything”? Either that, or perhaps there was once a long-term plan to have these diverse groups conform to identifying as Hindus – like some Indians of India, and like the Hindus of the Indus river.
Many structures of the contemporary [Indonesian] state bear a strong resemblance to the institutions which took shape in the final century of colonial rule.
(Robert Cribb as qtd. in “Relocating development” 180)
Creating an Ancient Religion: Kaharingan and Red Tape
Numerous regimes have used different strategies to attempt to bring a great diversity of Indigenous cultures together as citizens of the country of Indonesia. The current strategy involves considerable coercion, leading to the eradication of Indigenous belief and culture. Pragmatic in navigating this increasingly rigid maze of bureaucracy, the country’s many Dayak sub-tribes are divided into two factions in their approach to the problem. The first concerns itself with identification, and the second seeks to construct identity. The former faction, exemplified by the devotees of the Kaharingan religion, are battling the red tape in hopes of legitimizing their ancestral beliefs through writing down oral teachings and petitioning endlessly. The other, lesser-known groups reach out to the broader world of international Indigenous organizations for affirmation, constructing a broader identity, while dismissing any hopes of being accepted as themselves within their own nation. Thanks to their efforts, the Kaharingan approach has won them both recognition, their own province, and greater autonomy. Though neither faction has gained much more independence and freedom, thanks to the efforts of Tjilik Riwut and the Council of Kaharingan Dayak of Indonesia, the Kaharingan have better safeguarded the core teachings of their peoples for the unforeseeable future by organizing their teachings in the form of a religion that stands its ground against more renowned world religions.
The third largest island in the world, Kalimantan, commonly known as Borneo, became part of the Netherlands East Indies in the 1800s. For the next century, contact with the Dutch was limited to Indigenous leaders who remained autonomous in handling their own affairs. Protestant missionaries began arriving in 1835, and perhaps in competition, Muslim persuasion also grew. The Sultan of Banjarmasin erected mosques while the Dutch built churches nearby. As it is forbidden by the Quran, Muslims did not attempt to convert Christians, who refrained from converting the Muslims too. Instead, the two groups focused on winning over the local Indigenous populations, the Dayak subtribes of Borneo (Chalmers 3; Baier 412).
In 1906, on the island of Bali, the Balinese claimed a Dutch shipwreck – including crew members – as their own property. In retaliation, Dutch soldiers rode through southern Bali on horseback dressed in their finest regalia, before opening fire on unarmed Balinese. The Balinese showed up in their finest clothes and headdresses. The tragic event is known as puputan, a Balinese tactic of winning by demonstrating fearlessness in the face of death. The Balinese walked, and even danced, into the gunfire. In part due to international reportage of this event, the Dutch packed up and left prior to the main decolonization movements of Asia and Africa. Indonesia announced its independence in 1942, only one year before Japan took over. Unlike regimes of past and present, colonial Japan actively encouraged tribal groups to abandon Abrahamic monotheisms and return to their native, animistic practices.
When things had finally returned to normal, in 1949, the country welcomed its first official leader, Indonesian President Soekarno, who memorably said that he would remain president of the archipelago forever. The child of an inter-faith marriage between a Muslim schoolteacher and a Balinese-Hindu woman, Soekarno was well-educated and cultured (Buana, “Relasi” 7). As president he often set aside the traditional parliament of the nation in favor of “guided democracy” in which he could make the decisions. In his attempts to have isolated tribal groups conform and accept governance,Soekarno mandated belief in what he called a “cultured God” (Tuhan yang Berbudaya). This single entity could be Buddha to the Buddhists, Allah to the Muslims, God to the Christians, and Siva, or one of many others, to the Hindus. So long as there was a singular concept of supreme figure, no matter how different conceptions were, believers could see eye-to-eye. Paradoxically, this monotheistic concept would aid polytheisms, such as Balinese Hinduism, and perhaps Indigenous beliefs, in achieving equal standing with monotheisms — all the while preserving their respective pantheons of other figures important to those faiths. The idea of a cultured God may have come from Soekarno’s Hindu mother, Ida Ayu Nyoman Rai, and emerged from Soekarno’s experiences of her culture, on the island of Bali.
As it had been a Muslim president who mandated belief in one God, the benchmark could be assumed to be Allah. One account tells of the Balinese who, in communication with missionaries, asked the Christians to try and recognize that their singular God has thousands, if not millions, of voices and incarnations, which perfectly describes the vastness of the Hindu religion’s many deities. Nevertheless, the Balinese felt compelled to create Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa, as “the one of many identities,” who many suspect to be Shiva, to appease the government and encroaching monotheisms. Currently, each day at 6 PM, prayers to this God figure air over Balinese television stations. In attempting to impose a stable, concrete structure and please everybody, Soekarno had imposed an idea that forced his mother’s own people to change and become increasingly fluid. In part to appease factions pushing for a Muslim-only state, Soekarno created the Ministry of Religion in 1946. The ministry now recognizes Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism as six legitimate religions, while Indigenous beliefs remain disenfranchised (Schiller “An “Old” Religion” 410). The cultured God idea is still the motto of the nation, “Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa,” one of the five pillars that creates this unique theistic-secular democratic state (Buana, “Pengakuan” 8).
In a gesture of inclusivity extended to the Dayak people of Borneo, Soekarno reworded the notion of a cultured God to include “hidup dalam Roh” (Buana, “Relasi” 7) — meaning “life under Roh.” Roh is a concept of an immaterial energy that governs relations between people, nature, and the unseen, on the island of Borneo. It could be thought of as similar to the North American Indigenous concept of relationality. Roh is present in the shape of the hornbill’s beak that harvests the fruits from the trees. It also describes the shape of Dayak mandau blades, which can harvest fruits or be used as a weapon. For a period of Borneo’s history Roh was believed to be found in the skulls of the enemies of the Dayak, resulting in periods of headhunting as sub-tribes tried to harvest as much of it as they could.The practice became so entrenched that Dayak women would not accept a man if he did not bear the tattoos that signified his having harvested Roh. This period of mengayu headhunting came to an end in 1894 with the Tumbang Anoi agreement, which applied to the entire island of Borneo (Buana, “Relasi” 13). The belief in a benevolent yet fiercely protective Roh remains strong, however, re-emerging whenever transmigrants, extractive industries, and government agencies push its boundaries.
According to statistics, there are currently 405 Dayak sub-tribes on the island of Borneo today (Buana, “Relasi” 9). At the start of the twentieth century, they were still characterized as nomadic hunters, though the practice of swidden agriculture was also common and is still practiced today (Buana, “Relasi” 10). Known as protectors of their 140-million-year-old rainforests, in their traditions, Dayak peoples cannot chop down a tree without a good reason and without permission from an Indigenous leader (Buana, “Relasi” 11). These leaders, known as balian, would invite comparisons to shamans, chosen because of their fluency in esoteric languages required for ceremonies, and to speak with the world of Roh — in forests, rocks, trees — and people under possession (Chalmers 5).
In Indonesia, there is an idiom that commands the recognition of older, regional adat laws and customs, wherever one happens to be, “Di mana bumi dipajak, di situ langit dijujung” (Chalmers 20) – or, “Wherever the ground is trodden there is the sky upheld.” Though similar to “When in Rome do as the Romans do,” this saying puts added stress on the autonomy in the active upholding, or stewardship, of the surrounding environment — through local, traditional governance. Perhaps in recognition of such firm proclamations, the national constitution states openly that Indigenous forests are not the property of the government (Buana, “Pengakuan” 3). The constitution also recognizes that the Indigenous are land-based minorities whose existence cannot be separated from their lands (Buana, “Relasi” 3). Indigenous beliefs are also constitutionally protected (Buana, “Pengakuan” 13). Unfortunately, the people who make or interpret the rules also know their way around them quite well. Until present day, all 250+ million Indonesians must choose one of the six, non-native religions endorsed by the Ministry of Religion to appear on their identity cards (Schiller, “An “Old” Religion” 409). As hundreds of Indigenous beliefs are not recognized by law or governance (Buana, “Relasi” 2), some feel coerced into choosing Islam. In this way, the country seems to have the largest Muslim population in the world while in actuality it is wildly heterogeneous (Schiller, “An “Old” Religion” 409).
To deal with disproportionate representation in the government, between 1919 and 1926, a group of Ngaju-Dayak businessmen formed an organization, the “Dayak Agreement” (Pakat Dayak). Christian missions joined the cause and sent delegations to present-day Jakarta to demand that not only the popular Muslim-Dayak Banjarese receive political acknowledgement. Non-Muslim Dayak sub-tribes wanted to be recognized too. Christianity became more popular around Borneo as a result of this collaboration, even though some sermons continued to speak out against Indigenous traditions (Chalmers 5; Buana, “Pengakuan 22). Before the coup d’état and President Suharto’s New Order regime, these were the complaints of some Dayak sub-tribes.
With ties to the USA, Suharto’s New Order regime made its entrance by initiating “internal colonialism,” starting extraction processes on distant islands and ramping up the resettlement program that the Dutch had started in the pre-independence period. By 1990, over 3.5 million mostly Javanese people were sent abroad to promote industry, spread their culture and their religion (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 73). In his heavy-handed approach to unification, Suharto grafted systems and communities from the central island of Java outwards (Hoshour 196), and Javanization and Islamization now run hand-in-hand. Remote communities were forced to relocate, losing their lands and forests (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 79). Children were forced to attend schools far from their homes and families. Soon, negative stereotypes of Dayak tribes emerged, and the words “ndayak” or “kedayak-dayakan” were used pejoratively (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 73). These insults were also used to subtitle US Cowboy Western films that frequented television sets around the country. The regime funded its own productions, imitating popular Westerns shot-for-shot. Some of these films put Muslim heroes up against the savage head-hunters of Borneo. Tropes from distant places were taking hold.
The New Order government further dichotomized religion and belief (Buana, “Relasi” 7). As they were forced into choosing a world religion, however, many Indonesians did not take this seriously. People did not feel obliged to change their practices or beliefs — only their official title. Even if they did entertain new ideas, they did not feel it was required to mix the old and the new. Both a person’s Indigenous beliefs (adat),and the religion (agama) on their identifications, could continue in parallel. To many, it seemed that the Ministry of Religion was only asking for pragmatism for the sake of development, and superficial unification (Buana, “Relasi” 15).
During the Japanese occupation of his country (1943-1945), Dayak priests had been encouraged to return to their Indigenous roots. When Dayak folk-hero Tjilik Riwut took up his ancestral beliefs with fervor, the Japanese asked him to give these practices a name. Riwut called them Kaharingan, from the root-word “haring” – meaning “without foreign influence,” or independent (Baier 567). Under the Old Order regime, however, Riwut was quick to identify what separated Kaharingan from the big, world religions. His peoples’ beliefs did not fulfill the one-God criteria of the Ministry of Religion (Baier 567). Kaharingan would also require a holy book, a prophet, membership in an international community, and be proven to encourage improvement (kemajuan) (Buana, “Relasi” 2).
In the 1950s, a group of Dayak formed the “Union of Dayak Kaharingan of Indonesia” (Serikat Dayak Kaharingan Indonesia) and began a back-and-forth with the Ministry of Religion with the goal of officiating Kaharingan as its own religion (Baier 567). Riwut, as a former soldier, now fighting together with the Dayak union, also petitioned for autonomy from the Muslim-dominated government of South Kalimantan. There were various political actions, congresses, even bush-fighting. To appease the union, the government divided South Kalimantan into two provinces, creating Central Kalimantan, in 1957. Sub-tribes such as the Ngaju would have more autonomy within this province, however, their religious freedoms remained the same (Baier 413).
Prior to the creation of the Kaharingan’s Panatura holy book, Dayak peoples could be made to feel inferior by the holy books of others. Other Dayak saw books and writing as unnecessary, however. The head of a Meratus Dayak group once claimed, “Kitab ku sudah kutaguk” – joking that he had already swallowed his holy book (Buana, “Relasi” 11). Dayak beliefs are to be passed down through an oral tradition and internalized — not read from a book that exists externally and independent of social relations. It was not necessary for Dayak to read that people are a part of the natural cosmos and the powers of Roh. Nevertheless, their Panatura holy book is precious to them. Inside, there are core teachings, and newer verses serving to institutionalize the contents of the Panatura (Buana, “Relasi” 11). One such example is the repeated mention of a figure known as Ranying Hatalla Langit. Ranying occupies the highest heavenly sphere with angel-like “dewas” and “Sangiang” — like Allah to Islam, Buddha to Buddhism, God to Christianity, and Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa to the Balinese. Ranying is a God without a family, wife, or children, and as in Hinduism, when lifting this figure to a higher level, older powers were moved down to lower tiers (Baier 567). In 2021, the Kaharingan still recognize this supreme figure. They have the Panatura holy book. They have places of worship, and even a set number of yearly feasts (Baier 567). They have a collection of songs known as Kandayu. And as they always have, they recognize the ancient forests of Tantan Sama Tuan Mountain and Bukit Raya as holy lands. Most importantly of all, however, is that the Pranatura teaches readers morality (Buana, “Pengakuan” 16).
In 1980, as a result of more than thirty years of effort, the ministry finally declared Kaharingan a religion. It did not become the country’s seventh religion, however, but was officially declared to be a form of Hinduism (Baier 413, 568). The decision was not as random and uninformed as it seems, however. Borneo had frequent exposure to Hindu ideas during the Majapahit Kingdom (1293-1597), a Hindu-Buddhist kingdom radiating outwards from its seat in Central Java. For this reason, many Dayak sub-tribes identify the upper-world as “Mahatara,” derived from the name “Batara Guru,” one of the many names of Lord Siva (Chalmers 6). Aside from a few words with Sanskrit origins, however, the only similarity between the two systems would be their animistic traditions, which are only similar in that they are both variants of animism. What’s more, animism is not a part of Hinduism but is rather practiced in syncretism with it. To suggest that these beliefs are the same is to disregard the entire Dayak cosmology, their unique order of the animals that deifies endemic fauna, like hornbills, the concept of Roh, and approximately 40 thousand years of divergent but overlapping histories.
In the 1980s, Dayak Ngaju now found themselves in a milieu influenced by three primary religions, which were Christianity, Islam, and Hindu Kaharingan (Baier 412). The easiest way to become Hindu Kaharingan is to marry into it. It is then required that you take a vow, recite five tenets, and take a dip in coconut water (Buana, “Pengakuan” 14). At the start of the twenty-first century, Hindu Kaharingan was Indonesia’s largest tribal-religion-cum-monotheism with over 200,000 members (Baier 569). They were now entitled to construct places of worship, employ the symbols of their faith, and to write the words “Hindu Kaharingan” on official paperwork (Buana, “Pengakuan” 1).
Over time, Suharto’s New Order regime began to force the Kaharingan to become more Hindu (Buana, “Pengakuan” 1). The Ministry of Religion saw Palangkaraya’s “Hindu-Kaharingan School” (Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Hindu-Kaharingan) changed to the “Hindu Religious Institute” (Insitut Agama Hindu). Here, teachers were mostly Hindu and taught students that all Dayak peoples are too. Faculty claimed to teach students only Hinduism, but with the values of Kaharingan (Buana, “Pengakuan” 17). As for devotees themselves, due to the idyllic pluralism and flexibility of belief that they were used to, many of them were pleased to become entirely Hindu (Buana, “Pengakuan” 17). If anyone complained of Hinduization in the Kaharingan religion, others complained about Dayakization in the Hindu religion (Buana, “Pengakuan” 19). Another approach was to ignore the Hindu prefix and live in a state of nostalgia for when all they were not on the government’s radar (Buana, “Pengakuan” 17). Optimists see the situation as a pragmatic, temporary step towards independence and a means to preserve a few core ideas and ideals of their ancestral teachings (Buana, “Penagkuan” 16) – though this step has now lasted more than forty years. Other, more stubborn devotees are openly discontent and see the compromise for what it is. These unwilling Hindus began fighting back in the 1980s and are still strategically making their case today (Buana, “Pengakuan” 2). As for those wishing to leave Hinduism and return to being unrecognized Kaharingan, people do so to their detriment (Buana, “Pengakuan” 19). The Ministry of Religion inputs such people into the system as “pemeluk agama-agama lain,” or “miscellaneous religion,” which, in Indonesia, could draw associations to atheism or even communism. Only after much protest was their status, as Hindu Kaharingan, restored to them (Buana, “Pengakuan” 22).
Government representatives of the Hindu religion remain reluctant to reverse the decision to Hinduize the Kaharingan (Buana, “Pengakuan” 17). It is suspected that they have economic and political reasons to refrain from doing so. Another possibility is that the Kaharingan have been usurped in order to eventually eradicate their status as land-based, Indigenous peoples, freeing up their lands, the forests of the orangutan, for industrial conversion. As for official statements from the Ministry of Religion, the definitive claim is that Kaharingan does not foster safety and order (“keamanan dan ketertiban”) among its followers (Buana, “Relasi” 4). This bottleneck of the peoples’ struggles leads to a dead end as there is no objective barometer by which to measure these qualities (Buana, “Relasi” 5), and as there is no evidence behind these claims, it should be recognized as a value judgement – official name-calling by a ministry of the government.
For those wishing to be unmixed Kaharingan there is no legal route through which they might argue their case. They cannot be both Kaharingan and expect legal representation at the same time (Buana, “Relasi” 7). Furthermore, there are no legal grounds for a case against the Ministry of Religion as universal human rights have not been violated (Buana, “Pengakuan” 9). According to these rights, all “ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities [must not be denied the right] in community with other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language” (qtd. in “Relasi” 5). The dependent clause “in community with other members of their group” prevents the broader application of this rule. Furthermore, under Indonesia’s own interpretation of human rights, it is required that all cultural rights are respected so long as they are in keeping with societal development, the spirit of the age, and civility (“perkembangan masyarakat, zaman dan peradaban”) (Buana, “Relasi” 4). Once again, subjective value judgements prevail as the obstacle for achieving protection or respect. Lastly, it is also stated that, “[The] freedom to hold beliefs is far-reaching and profound; it encompasses freedom of thought on all matters…The terms ‘belief’ and ‘religion’ are to be broadly construed” (qtd. in “Relasi” 7). While these rights seem to clash with the Indonesian government, and the idea of a cultured God, they do so too broadly to assist the Kaharingan in any legal matters.
When Christianity came to Borneo, Islam identified as resistance against westernization. Islam is also the pragmatic choice as the business world is primarily Muslim (Chalmers 9). As the Ministry of Religion continues to pressure Indigenous groups, quite often they come to view official recognition as meaningless paperwork. Like the Balinese Hindus, the more that structure tries to confine them, the more fluid and creative they become. As such, it is common for Dayak people to convert to Islam without any stigma from their communities, all the while, in some cases, appearing to remain fully Dayak (Chalmers 20). This combination of their traditional beliefs and Islam is less likely to be syncretic and more likely to be dissimulative, however, with the older beliefs making room for the new ones (Buana, “Relasi” 16).
Nowadays, adherents of Kaharingan make pilgrimages around their lands, directing prayers to “mid-range” deities, perhaps to the guardian of a village (“patahu”), or the “sangiang” beings of their upperworld, Mahatara. Often only lay believers mention Ranying Hattala Langit as the one and the highest (Baier 412), because adherents who came into the religion through oral teachings would not have learned to revere this character over others. Kaharingan’s followers, of the more fluid and pluralistic persuasion, have taken to calling this figure by their middle name alone, “Hattala,” because it sounds like Allah (Baier 566). To elders of these communities, both of these newer developments might signal a losing battle.
While the Kaharingan continue their back-and-forth with the Ministry of Religion and President Jokowi himself, an alternative approach to identity has been emerging since before the new millennium. Rather than placing importance on what is written on their identity cards, the second approach seeks affirmation in membership with pan-Dayak organizations in which their official, national religions are irrelevant. These congresses boast ties to national Indigenous organizations, which fit into international ones and Non-Government Organizations too. While the Kaharingan are members, not all members wish to be Kaharingan — perhaps as traditions in their communities are quite different from those in the Panatura holy book and are still spoken and flexible, instead of written and fixed. As these largely isolated sub-tribes attempt to come together, however, they find that there is nothing more between them than stereotypes and tropes of what it means to be Indigenous, land-based, and their predisposition to the rhetoric and the symbols of resistance.
Throughout Borneo’s history, the most damaging and powerful forces of marginalization were the proselytizing efforts of both Muslims and Christians, who characterized the Indigenous as backwards and unsophisticated (Chalmers 19). Through the imposition of divisive tropes, such as savagery and primitivity, including those from Western Cowboy films, and because many institutions in Indonesia still resemble ones put into place prior to their independence (Hoshour 180), nuances of style, speech, and iconography that surround certain events bespeak the transmission of these regrettable tropes onto the peoples of Indonesia.
In 1998, during the monetary crisis, riots burned across Indonesia and President Suharto was forced to step down. In the economic dip that followed, people took up shovels and picks and began to dig for precious minerals on the frontiers. The headline in the Los Angeles Times was “Indonesian Miners Revive Gold Rush Spirit of 49ers.” To American Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, interactions on this “resource frontier” seemed shaped or modeled after the “wild” times of distant places, such as the Wild West (3). Also similar are what some believe to be practices of negative eugenics that still intrude on Indigenous communities as “birth control safari” boats are sent into Borneo’s interiors to slow Indigenous population growth. At the same time, the Dutch transmigration program still offers land and houses to foreign, Javanese farmers who want to bring their families and settle in on Indigenous lands (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 77). In a spectacle eerily reminiscent of real or imagined Indigenous standoffs with settlers in North America, the Dayak pushed back against transmigration at an anti-Madurese riot in 2001 (Chalmers 19). Starting in Sampit and spreading to other areas, Dayak took to the streets in ceremonial, adat attire, which could have included clothes made of tree bark and headdresses of peacock feathers, carrying large Mandau blades.
In the distorted lens of international journalism, one might imagine the scene as the return of the US Wild West – in its Hollywood version – with Dayaks as blood-thirsty savages scalping encroaching but civilized settlers. This is a ridiculous parody; the clashes have their own political and cultural histories. Yet the emerging frontier is a place for the historical repetition of reimagined savagery. Sometimes the army stages it; sometimes young men find themselves in its wild tropes.
(Tsing 7)
When Tsing returned to America she wrote of the star of many famous Cowboy Westerns, John Wayne. Though he had not done military service, Wayne received the congressional medal of honour for being “the embodiment of American military heroism” (Tsing 8). Just as the convictions, costumes, horse-riding, and cross-burning of the Ku Klux Klan emerged entirely from D.W. Griffith’s fictional film “The Birth of a Nation,” these cowboy and Indian tropes are also embodiable.
Starting in the 1990s, pan-Dayak group awareness engulfed West, Central, and East Kalimantan (Chalmers 19). With these expanding networks would have come increased transference of foreign tropes. In 1999, Anne Schiller attended a “watershed conference” where the East Kalimantan Dayak Association brought communities together to carefully approach the notion of Indigenous solidarity (“Activism and Identities” 63). Among them were activists who worked with NGOs to teach villagers about land rights and belonged to a pan-national Indigenous rights organization (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 65). Elsewhere on the spectrum there were people who still struggled to call themselves Dayak, preferring to use the names of their sub-tribes instead (Schiller, “Activism and Identities 87). Unification efforts evoked the concept of “retribalization” from anthropological literature (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 85). Tropes came to the surface in conversations between populations that had been world-wary and isolated since long before colonization. The endeavor came to show “continuities with aboriginal cultures,” while also creating promise that negative aspects of the obtuse dominant culture might be reversed (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 89). Attendees agreed to search forge a few new and meaningful symbols from the natural world in order to convey a sense of oneness (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 65). The role of these symbols would be as weapons in their struggle against encroaching threats to their identities (Schiller, “Activism and Identities” 85). After much discussion, it was agreed that the traditional longhouse is a symbol that people can identify with (Schiller “Activism and Identities” 71) – after which an elderly man inquired, “Would it be a Kenyah or a Tunjung one?” (Schiller “Activism and Identities” 88). The work of redefinition continues.
While this second approach to being Dayak identity has its merits, outside of such forums, one’s official, documented religion is very important in ever-day life. There are hotels that would refuse to accommodate a couple if their marriage had not been under a certain religion. There are schools that would not accept a person based on their religious affiliation. Being forced to continually assert one’s membership in a religion that one does not identify with is a tiresome conceit to live with. And though some of these sub-tribes may see the Kaharingan approach to identification as compromised, the Kaharingan themselves may also view their own holy book as merely written words, a utility to allow them to practice spoken traditions in the same way other sub-tribes have done for millennia. Newer stories, including token references to Hinduism and introduced hierarchies, much like their official, government status as Hindus, exist only on paper. More so than the pan-Dayak organizations, Kaharingan’s obstinate lack of resignation has been noticed internationally. As of 2021, Kaharingan delegations continue to meet with President Jokowi, and they still seem on the verge of beating the bureaucracy at its own game. The true benefits of being officially Kaharingan remain in the works with no end in sight, however.
Works Cited
Buana, Mirza Satria. “Relasi ‘Agama’ Dayak Kaharingan dengan Islam dan Hak Berkeyakinan Masyarakat Adat di Kalimantan Selatan: Tinjauan Socio-Legal [Relations between the Dayak Kaharingan ‘Religion’ and Islam and the Religious Freedoms of the Indigenous Peoples of South Kalimantan: A Social-Legal Overview].” Lambung Mangkurat University, 2017.
Buana, Mirza Satria. “Pengakuan Negara atas ‘Agama’ Kaharingan dan Kontestasi Kebebasan Beragama dan Berkeyakinan di Kalimantan Tengah [National Statements on the ‘Religion’ of Kaharingan and the Contestation of Religions and Beliefs in Central Kalimantan].” Lambung Mangkurat University, 2015.
Baier, Martin. “The Development of the Hindu Kaharingan Religion A New Dayak Religion in Central Kalimantan.” Berichte und Kommentare, Anthropos, 2007.
Chalmers, Ian. “The Dynamics of Conversion: the Islamisation of the Dayak peoples of Central Kalimantan.” Curtin University of Technology, 2006.
Hoshour, Cathy. Relocating Development in Indonesia : A Look at the Logic and Contradictions of State-Directed Resettlement. Harvard University, 2000.
Schiller, Anne. “An “Old” Religion in “New Order” Indonesia: Notes on Ethnicity and Religious Affiliation.” Sociology of religion, vol. 57, no. 4, 1996, pp. 409-417.
Schiller, Anne. “Activism and Identities in an East Kalimantan Dayak Organization.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 66, no. 1, 2007, pp. 63–95.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “Natural Resources and Capitalist Frontiers.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38, no. 48, 2003, pp. 5100–06.
“The real comes from the unreal.” ~Paprika (paraphrased)
Q: Why do strong and defiant chiefdoms buckle and submit to the organized religions of colonizers?
A) Efek Sinetron: The Soap Opera Effect
The forests of Borneo feel like the benevolent grandparents of the world. Yet even in the remote reaches of North Kalimantan Province, Sinetron Soap Operas rattle on through hot afternoons — beneath a wash of cicada song, and the hooting of gibbons. The visual target is driven home: Rich youth in the suburbs of the capital city live in luxury, with romance and drama, driving fancy cars and going to parties. And it looks pretty good.
The image is inlayed in the metaphysical; the youth are sold on it, predisposed to the language and religion of those they view as advanced and privileged – not realizing these teenagers on screen are as disappointing as plastic fruit.
B) Hydraulic Civilization Theory: Water!
Historically, water often handles conversions for a colonizing power, inadvertently or with deliberation.
Picture animals at a waterhole: Predators and prey pause the game to have a drink together. Around this metaphorical waterhole, humananimal minority groups stop asserting their differences – in order to blend in.
In more direct examples, rivers are dammed, villages flooded, and people with different ways and different beliefs are forced to move into cities — for water. Sometimes it’s the promise of hydroelectricity, the shame of raising children without electric light, which causes parents to uproot and attempt to camouflage in with a larger group.
C) Beware the Japanese Graves!
Religious powers are often evoked when mining or palm-oil companies need to get their hands on land that is not their own. Religious figures, such as Imam, are hired to head into the interiors of Borneo (Kalimantan), and to transplant certain, toxic mythologies there, defiling whichever animistic variant is native to that area. After gaining the villagers’ respect, they often tell a story of a fierce battle transpiring on the land; they evoke an image of cursed cemeteries that often nobody can find.
While the story may involve graves of the Dutch, extinct tribes, the gerombolan, or communists (PKI), nothing clears a village faster than a well-told story of Japanese graves. They were supposedly the worst thing to happen to the country in recent memory, it’s said.
Effective grafting of these myths may involve having a person on the inside, a person in whom historian is synonymous with paranormal. Their role is to repeat the story long after the respected, religious authority has travelled on — until it takes root.
Soon villagers will blame crop failure, or water shortages, on a falsified history recently buried in the collective imagination.
I would not doubt that these disasters, such as droughts and crop failure, could be caused by the same multinational companies who are after the land.
D) Ancestry Hacking: Slipping the Trap of Lineage
Like animals at a waterhole, the fewer differences between individuals sharing the same land, the less chance of altercations. And for this reason, Imam are sometimes sent to villages to hack history.
Across this island chain, and even on Bali, animism overlaps with ancestor worship: Trees and stones are personified as deities; a tribe’s ancestors are said to dwell inside of natural objects and rivers that command respect. An effective Imam changes all of this simply by revising history.
The common story told is that of a mystical cemetery. It can be seen by some people, sometimes. Often it glows in the night, and it is filled with the corpses of royalty: The Banjarese Muslim Kings and Queens who died defending this region from greedy, foreign colonizers. Not only royals though, these graves contain the descendants of Prophet Muhammad himself. The story goes, this is their ancestral land. From the Imams, word travels to the paranormals, who tell the headmasters; headmasters tell teachers; teachers tell students, and so on.
In the end, when iterating their factual history – as noble, awesome tribespeople of the greatest rainforests in the world – a look of confusion and stress comes over them as they try to reconcile this story with the one in which they are direct descendants of The Prophet himself.
E) Zaman Gerombolan: The Time of the Gangs
In their battle for independence, many Indonesian men vowed to fight to the death. Then in 1945 their rivals, the Dutch, packed up and went home, leaving veterans with nothing – not even a common enemy. Without money to return to their hometowns, these mobs (gerombolan) ambled around the streets terrorizing Borneo (Kalimantan) more than the communists (PKI), or even the government-backed anti-communists, would.
I personally heard stories of these veterans robbing, burning entire villages down, and lopping off tattooed limbs with mandau or parang blades. I heard an old woman tell me that they’d attack you just for making a noise. I heard stories of pierced ears being hacked off and left dangling, and neck rings taken off, killing the wearers. And if you identified as Dayak you disappeared, I was told.
*Stories of these forced conversions surround you when in the interiors of Borneo; however, they have not yet been recorded or officiated anywhere else that I have looked (and I have looked in many places!). For all I know, the above two paragraphs are the only record of this event.
Meditating monks disappear into the forest, becoming plant life.
“If you cut a vine, their blood will come pouring out!” warns the medicine woman of Apuai.
An elderly woman in Rantau Balai tells stories of crying ironwood trees, of tears rolling out of eye sockets on their trunks, begging not to be felled.
Another story of hers tells of a baby born with a tremendous appetite. He ate his way through the vegetables and livestock of entire villages, and was finally buried in the ground on top of Pahayangan Mountain in an attempt to pacify him. Every year people must come to make an offering to him, an also an offering of 41 different kinds of wadai cookies. The land must be appeased – as it is in the village of Pa’au.
“If that mountain is ever dug away or split, the entire world will end. It will be the end of days,” she adds.
A feature of local syncretism, the ‘Roh’ energy concentrated in Borneo (Kalimantan) is still greatly respected — though it has no foothold in Abrahamic religions. It used to be found around the trophy skulls of the headhunters, now it has moved on to gather in great forests, around great mountains – and on the island of Sumber Gelap. Oftentimes mythology and criminal mafias overlap in their control, and in the fearful reputation consecrating the area, advertently kept natural.
For more Resistance Mythology, here are a few from the archives:
In certain nations with lower GDP, people enjoy a ‘freedom to’: Freedom to have loud parties, parades, and cultural events. They can set fireworks off wherever they please. Traffic regulations hardly exist. Law is enacted lightly and arbitrarily.
If you live in a developed country, picture the streets of the place where everybody goes for holidays. That’s what I’m talking about.
In well-run, organized, developed countries, people savor their ‘freedom from’: Freedom from loud parties in the street, for example. Freedom from corruption. Freedom from the grid-lock of total bureaucracy.
An experience of both is crucial (picture Australian frat boys descending on Bangkok for the first time). Meanwhile, my friends in developing countries do not have the privilege to travel – but they have more than we all may realize.
House Ownership is for Poor People
If the majority of a town’s population cannot afford property tax, or refuses to pay, then they chance achieving actual, indisputable ownership of their homes.
I’ve lived in these villages myself, where ethnic identity is strong, where no official would dare to tax or evict anyone.
Because Property Tax is Rent
There is a direct relationship between poverty and religiosity, because the poor have nearly no ‘freedom from’ religious pressure. Freedom from conformity is something people enjoy in developed countries.
But when people struggle enough, slipping the trap and escaping off to a wealthier country, many of them will have to accept that their God of Old is now The Government.
The Muslim men who immigrated to Canada and then were criticized for not standing for The National Anthem had plateaued – with no wish to adapt. However, deep down, in their seated bodies, they do receive the benefits of living in a nation where Gov. is taken somewhat seriously.
Because freedom from corruption, pollution, treatable diseases, overpopulation, gangs, and war, requires Government with a capital G. Belief in the system must be strong enough to convince you to pay the Government from your own paycheck – at the altar of the ATM.
Faith in Governance must be so strong that you will give up your rights to own the house that you built with your own hands – just for the greater good; just throw it in the national pool. The corpse of the cow you sacrificed for Idul Adha back in your home town here becomes an estate, taxes, and your life without subsidies. You will agree to pay taxes or face homelessness – the sad state of ownership in most developed countries, and especially in the supposed new world. Here The Pioneer Spirit is forced to emerge from the settlers’ sense of having been uprooted and kept uprooted – in part due to total lack of meaningful ownership rights.
Anyway, can you imagine how fast the workforce would shrink if we actually owned our homes?
A severed limb of sustainability has been buried in this small and overlooked detail. Sadly, the only way we can think to defeat absurdity is to label it under the euphemism of normality, in this way shaping one of the most affronting paradoxes of our lives: The crazier we are the saner we appear.
McCarthy’s Other Target
We thought that Cold War politics was a clash of two ideologies: Capitalism and Communism. The reality was even colder though. We have yet to account for just how much was lost to McCarthyism, when too much of this tiny world was made into a blank slate, where entire tribes awoke in parking lots and shuffled off to go shopping – like zombies.
Called the ‘resistance’, enclaves of sustainability were the actual targets, and even peaceful old women bartering vegetables were not safe.
For decades, Indonesians could have been killed for singing a simple song, the Gendjer-Gendjer(the Indonesian name for aquatic weed limnocharis flava from South and Central America). I encourage you to click here and listen as you continue reading (it is not likely to get you killed anymore).
During Japan’s occupation of Indonesia, Javanese Songwriter M. Arief wrote this song that, both in its cheery-but-snide melody and its lyrics, dared to express contentedness – in the face of ridiculous power.
And it goes a little something like this:
“Weeds are scattered in the field. A woman harvests them. She has a basket full, going home. At dawn, the weeds are taken to the market. Neatly tied in a bunch and then were offered. Mother Jebeng buys plenty. Now the weeds are ready to be cooked.”
What was this simple song saying? Why the hell did its singers deserve to die?
Gendjer Gendjer was an odd assurance to the powerless:No matter how bad it gets, there would always be an invasive, freshwater weed growing at the bottom of their ponds for them to eat. Mother Jebeng pays money for the weeds, reflecting how little the locals valued money – enough to assign it a rate of conversion: “How much is 1,000 Rupiah in aquatic weeds?” No, they dismissed money in a wonderfully jocular way, because they had weeds to eat, and more importantly, strength in solidarity between farmers as between singers.
Then in 65 The US toppled Indo’s first ruler and put Their Man in power and a bloody anti-communist movement began to sweep the islands. As the massacre was largely swept under the rug I highly recommend watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s masterpiece Documentary The Act of Killing to see what the media were trying to hide from us (for more on this, see my previous post, Hadda be Played on the Layar Tancap).
And in this new and terrifying context, ‘the weeds song’came into new meaning. It was now less about struggle and survival, but resounded with anti-capitalist undertones, which hurt the President’s sensitive little ears. He reminded them: in death the weeds eat us.
“There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry.” ~Slavoj Zizek
While Indonesia’s previous President, Sukarno, had been obsessed with female nudes, at least The USA’s man also took art seriously – not only forbidding this song for 32 years of terror, but sending his men on a nationwide manhunt for the oddest reason. They searched everywhere formalnourished poet and stowaway Wiji Thukul – one of Indo’s brilliant Resistance Poets (please watch the beautiful 2017 film ‘Solo Solitude‘ following the fugitive through West Borneo).
Poetry, such as the following translation of Wiji’s Bunga dan Tembok,must have really infuriated Suharto:
“If we were flowers, we’d be the ones you don’t want to grow. If we were flowers, we’d be the ones you don’t want. You prefer building houses, destroying lands. You prefer building great roads, Putting up a metal fence […] But if we were flowers, you’d be a cement wall in which our seeds have already been scattered. And one day, we’ll grow all together, knowing: You must break. You must break. You must break.”
Sumbawa Aside
In 2013 I had a motorcycle accidentwhile crossing the island of Sumbawa (following Google Maps from Bali to West Papua to live out a delusion a crazy Polish man would nearly succeed in doing just a few years later). It took two weeks of hobbling back and forth on a skinless leg before I dared ride again; during this time I was forced to slow down. I had no income, but this didn’t matter – not when you can rent a simple room with a mattress and a television for $10 a week. I was happy with my weeds at the bottom of the pond.
And in this reprieve, in this hollow of days, there was space for me tomeet some simple people whom wouldillustrate the spectrum for me, and sort of decolonize my mind.
One day, just before noon, I sat near the beach among goats, chickens, and cows. I listened intently as a Javanese trans–migrant attempted to justify (to himself) having moved to an island that was not his own to sell fruit salad (rujak). He told me that the Sumbawans don’t want to work, because they don’t feel that it’s necessary. What they require now are uprooted people accustomed to working for more than they actually need, with an understanding of supplying – even just fruit salad – to come and set an example for commerce.
Many locals still live in traditional homes, have chickens, cows, and small farms. They don’t believe they need anything else. How can they be convinced otherwise, asks the state? Just send more transmigrants!
I mentioned to him the many empty wooden storefronts I spotted along the single road that crosses the island. The small, mustached man laughed with a mixture of frustration and understanding. When a Sumbawan becomes sick or needs money for a ceremony, it’s fairly common for them to receive small business grants from the local government – whom are desperate to create economy. They usually open warung eateries, but as soon as they have enough money for treatment, or to buy something –off they walk back into the hills, leaving their businesses behind, he explained.
“They don’t see the point. Their mentality is still like that,” said the Muslim man. “Still primitive.”
There were very few places to eat around town. Young children rode large horses along the beach to school. I ate fruit salad every day.
And in this flawed but peaceful hollow, withoutany frenzied, chaotic doing, I healed well and quickly.
If Sustainability Ends then what is Sustainability?
Filipino President Duterte has recently arranged a death squad to eliminate communism – and at this point readers should know what that actually means. Remember that bartering communities contribute nothing to a country’s GDP.
Sustainability was our security. It was our peace of mind. And we must always be forcefully weaned from it. Because it is sanity.
Sustainability – students will go into debt studying it without any irony; capital ‘G’ Governments will pretend it is their aim and the solution, though it islong behind us now.
The developed world now suffers a ‘freedom from’ sustainability in which we also police ourselves and our neighbors. It is there in the disdain towards hitchhiking and towards the neighbor whom doesn’t cut their lawn. It is there in the popularity of Air BnB over the free alternative, Couch Surfing. It is there in the locked dumpsters behind the supermarket. It’s in the vitriolic protest against so-called ‘beg-packers,’ and especially in the anti-immigrant conviction of the right.
Meanwhile, on the frontiers, what is being erased and forgotten is the ancient, platonic idea of what sustainability even is. I have watched it slipping into the past with my own eyes: The skies there are no fences facing.
That is what I have tried to define here – for posterity.
IGNEOUS BOMB IGNEOUS BOMB 