Self-narratives about home (“ruma”) and land (“bawang”): The stories of Len Lakong and Pelura Sinau, the indigenous Lundayeh women of Long Pasia, Sabah, Malaysia
This SEALIVES project brought together the researcher and two Lundayeh women—Len Lakong and Pelura Sinau—from a subsistent farming family in the remote highland location of Long Pasia, Sabah, Malaysia, for a dialogue session where, through a three-way interaction, the oral histories of these multi-generational women was audio-visually recorded. The finding gathered during the interview sessions held at different time period throughout year 2024 in varying locations of the village according to the cultivation cycle is as following: (i) deforestation activities have become so normalized that the women do not view deforestation as an invasive practice ; (ii) the women have resorted to using non-traditional habits in their farming activities such as using pesticide to clear the land for planting, and even getting the assistance from the timber companies’ heavy machinery to build their wooden huts. In addition to this, these women, just like the other villagers from Long Pasia, want the village to embrace modernization and in doing so, create a new image, which, to them, will realign their position from a remote community to a developed one. Nonetheless, between Pelura, the mother, and Len, the daughter, a stronger sense of land-oriented identity was observable in the latter. The lack of resistance in the case of Pelura is traceable to the semi-nomadic lifestyle that the Lundayehs had in the past up until Pelura’s generation where identity was a fluid notion, This may also be the reason why Pelura seemingly integrated well with the surrounding changes because a settled form of living only started occurring in the late 1960s after the British retreated, and Sabah and Sarawak formed the Federation to become Malaysia. Len—on the other hand—largely accepted, like the other villagers in Long Pasia, that she was unable to resist the fast-encroaching changes, yet she wanted to make full use of that invasion to create a win-win situation.
Description of Materials
- Transcript of interviews with Len Lakong and Pelura Sinau, Parts 1-4.
- Film: Indigenous Women in Long Pasia
Grantee Bio
Dr Kavitha Ganesan is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for the Promotion of Knowledge and Language Learning, Universiti Malaysia Sabah. Primarily trained in English Literature, Kavitha’s journey with the indigenous Lundayehs began ten years ago through her broader work in the field of gender and postcolonial studies. She has spent time in the native village of Long Pasia studying the changes to the Lundayeh diet due to the influence brought by modernization and encroaching deforestation activities which had far reaching consequences to the gender complementarity that existed among the Lundayeh male and female. Her article on the shifting food systems has been published in James Cook University’s in-house journal, eTropic (“Environmental Challenges and Traditional Food Practices: The Indigenous Lundayeh of Long Pasia, Sabah, Borneo”, Vol. 19, No.1, 2020). It is while collecting the data for her research on the food systems that she secured a grant (FRGS/1/2018/WAB06/UMS/02/1) from the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education to document the oral tradition of the indigenous Lundayehs thus beginning her journey in the oral histories of the community. Her chapter, “Headhunting and Native Agency in Lundayeh Oral Literature” has been published in The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature (2022) edited by Michael Bryson. She recently won the microgrant for Environmental Humanities Month from the University of Helsinki for her work on the Tengayen Snack, which is a crisp form innovated by her research team from the traditional Lundayeh soup, biter. Kavitha currently serves as the Deputy Dean of Research, Innovation, and Community Services at the centre where she has been working for the past twenty years.
Questions? Get in touch with Dr. Ganesan: kavitha@ums.edu.my