ARTICULOS TRANSITORIOS

Among the earliest meaningful interactions were some with my longhouse parents and their family. My host was initially a carpenter, who returned after some time working at construction sites in Kuching, and his wife was a daughter of the dayong (Bungan priest), and is one of the first university graduates of the longhouse. When I arrived, she was teaching Bahasa Malaysia and English at the primary school at Uma Sambop, and was soon promoted to be vice-principal. Due to her position within the civil service hierarchy, she has an above-average salary and is able to support the family while her husband, who has high school qualifications, tries to make a career for himself. The carpentry was not working out well due to the distance from his family and dangers of the job, and the wages did not make up for these. He returned to the Balui and did various jobs, from

101 logging to farming and fishing, and he and his wife are quite well known and respected among the longhouse communities. He was a signatory on the committee for compensation funds at Uma Juman, and community church leader at Uma Belor. Both husband and wife also held executive positions in the Uma Belor leadership committee. He also claimed to have been involved in the consultative work to design the new longhouses.

Despite significant success at a community leadership level, my host felt that he needed to find work that paid better than what he had up on the Balui – he very quickly realised that they were now in a different economy. He took up pepper farming, and got the support of the political leaders, and even got himself sent to Johor to observe large commercial pepper plantations, and obtained a grant for high-tech watering systems. He claims to have been reasonably successful as a pepper farmer until he had another idea: tourism. His tourism business was started with help from his wife’s family who live in Kapit and Miri. They combined the doors of the city dwellers to form a larger area that houses 10 rooms at the longhouse. Using his savings, he also built a relatively comfortable floating chalet at Sungai Belanum, an Uma Belor NCR area that still retained its old hunters’ trails and, more importantly, has a waterfall. Sarawak tourism ran a feature on it on their website as well. It was through this list that I arrived at the BRS with accommodation for my reconnaissance trip. After I had settled into my room at the homestay, I explained my purpose for future plans at Bakun and the BRS. He then proceeded to tell me how much the Kayan people love the bearded pigs as a protein source and how, after the Bakun dam was built, it became harder to hunt for them, and that the pigs seem to be much thinner than before. He claimed that they used to regularly see pigs weighing 120kg, with the fat layer on their backs being as thick as the width of his palm, but the pigs that they hunt down now seem to be weighing around 80kg.

Over the course of the fieldwork, many hunters also talked about the difficulty of hunting after the construction of the Bakun Dam. One man from Uma Bakah who now makes a living by fishing recalled that when he was a boy they knew of a particular location near Long Bulan where they were sure there would be at least a pig to shoot after waiting for a couple of hours. Hunters said that, before the inundation of the Balui, they knew where pigs were moving and they knew where the seasonal migration routes

102 were. The headman of Uma Juman said that during migration season, hunters would sit on the veranda of the longhouse and simply shoot at the migrating herd. This knowledge was made obsolete after the construction of the dam, causing hunters to be disempowered. Hunting became more by chance encounters and hoping that dogs pick up scent, than by knowledge of the land and migration patterns.

One Kenyah hunter says that many of them feel desperate for kills, as this has become more difficult in the lower reaches of the dam. Hunters used to hunt for subsistence; now they have to hunt for money. This particular hunter hunts for high-value species such as pangolins (Manis javanicus), which are valued (erroneously) by the Chinese as medicines while their meat is considered a delicacy locally as well as overseas. The international trading of pangolins is illegal, yet demand is high; as a result, there is a large and lucrative black market for these animals. When I spoke to this him, he had just returned from selling a pangolin for RM1,200 and was sitting outside a shop with some beer. He hunts with a friend, a dog and a chainsaw. When pangolins are threatened, they burrow, climb a tree or curl up into a ball. If the animal burrows into the ground, they would wait from a safe distance for the animal to re-emerge. If the animal curls up into a ball when the dog reaches it, they could simply pick it up. The chainsaw is used if the pangolin tries to climb up a tree or is found in one; the tree is cut down and the pangolin is picked up. For him, as long as he caught one pangolin in a month he makes more than his younger relatives in the city working at fast food outlets for RM800 a month. Other hunters, however, noted that this was an extremely unreliable way of making an income as the pangolin is expensive because of its rarity. For them, they would prefer traditional targets such bearded pigs, deer, mousedeer or monitor lizards.

Similar stories were shared by fishermen of their issues with finding catch. Their old fishing areas and spawning areas have disappeared. As is with hunting pigs, there is a yearly bonanza when catfish Wallago leerii, locally known as tapah, head up tributary streams and rivers to spawn. Also, like the pigs, fishermen complain that catch sizes are smaller, as the fish is a large species and have been known to weigh up to 30kg; but no one has seen any individuals landed of that size since the dam was completed. My host is also a fisherman, although he does not fish for sale as he believes that the income is unreliable and that too much work is involved for a one-man business to be economically viable. He does, however, catch fish for the extended family’s

103 consumption, and to bring to friends elsewhere in the country. The most common catches are the tevengalan (also called tengalan; Puntioplitesbulu) and baong (various catfish species).

Some of the more expensive fish such as tengadak (Barbonymusschwanenfeldii), semah (Tor tambra/ Tor duoronensis)and adong (Hampalamacrilepidota)can still be found in some areas as well. The famous Empurau (Tor tambroides) that can sell for over RM1,000 per kilogramme during the Chinese New Yearstill exists, but only in the very far areas of the lake, such as the rivers around the NCR of Uma Kulit. The expensive species of fish are priced highly, partly because of their rarity. Most of the fish sold in the markets are the various catfish species. Apart from the large Tapah, the other catfish are all called Baong and they generally form the bulk of the catch. In the last large biological survey of the Rajang River freshwater fish, it was found that species like Semah and Empurau were found only above Belaga (Parenti and Lim, 2005).

In much of the conversations with the longhouse folk, most of the unhappiness with the resettlement tended to be economic. Many felt that the government agencies involved in the compensation process had been dishonest, that they were given land that was deficient in terms of area, access and fertility, that they had to fork out their own funds to repair deficiencies in the new longhouses, that they were not taught to handle the large compensation amounts that were handed to them, and that they had to pay for the electricity that was the reason they were resettled. Many people thought that the government had rushed them into moving, and then forgot about them once the resettlement process was complete.