Gordon Brent Ingram BFA PhD 321 Railway Street #108 Vancouver V6A 1A4 Canada email: [email protected]

Father and son, Mado Bak, Siberut, 13 February, 1989, photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

Matatonan

The island of Siberut lies off of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. Equatorial, fecund, and remote, the island's traditional communities, the Mentawai, have come to be icons for resistance to cultural assimilation, in general, and to the worse excesses of religious missionaries, logging operations, and the often heavy hand of the Indonesian state in particular. Tattooed and with long hair, the remaining traditional Mentawai, live inland away from government outposts.

Mentawai Islands (in the Indian Ocean), Sumatera Barat, Indonesia circa 2009 (from Google Earth)

Matatonan by Gordon Brent Ingram 2

Island of Siberut, Mentawai Islands, Sumatera Barat, Indonesia circa 2009 (Google Earth)

South central Siberut including the villages of Mado Bak, Ugei and Matatonan circa 2009 (Google Earth)

tattooed man smoking in a lodge between Maura Siberut and Mado Bak, Siberut, 7 February, 1989 by Gordon Brent Ingram

Over the last twenty-five years, the Mentawai have been particularly useful for stoking contemporary notions of 'noble savages' and tribal peoples living in supposed harmony in tropical rainforest. But the Mentawai story is diverse and nuanced and forms of cultural resistance and adaptation vary from village to village.

With this heavy burden of European romanticism1 and more recent Javanese and Islamic Sumatran, cultural chauvinism, I found photographing Mentawai communities pressurized and uncomfortable. And in the stifling heat and humidity, camera bodies regularly malfunctioned. This essay was from one of Matatonan by Gordon Brent Ingram 3 my research trips to Siberut as part of my doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley.2 I had one week of photographing the Mentawai, in February of 1989, that was largely on their own terms. Then the shutter of the Pentax 6 X 7 froze after a week.

arrow points in rafters of lodge, Mado Bak, Siberut 13 February 1989 (#1) photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

In my efforts to collect a range of field data, photographic documentation often felt superfluous. There was little time for careful portraiture. Fortunately, more detailed photographic documentation of Mentawai was going on at the time and an Aperture book on the kerei, the traditional shamans of the archipelago, was published a few years later.3 But there were a number of aspects of Mentawai communities that I documented back then that were less romantic but just as fleeting. This unfinished essay is about a series of communities, Matatonan in particular, that were intent on asserting, defending and celebrating all aspects of their culture – even in the face of hostile provincial and national governments.

A number of villages in the southern interior of the island had allied for self- protection against the logging, government intrusions, and pressures to be moved into grim villages near the ocean there were well-supervised by police and military. The most famous of these villages was Sakukei but that community had declared a temporary closure to outsiders. Instead, I worked in Mado Bak, Ugei and Matatonan. Matatonan by Gordon Brent Ingram 4

interior of uma, or lodge, Ugei, Siberut, 8 February 1989 photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

The cultural resistance on Siberut, that continues today, was part of an early wave of a global movement of indigenous and tribal communities to reassert control over their lands, culture, and infrastructure. This area had been heavily influenced by the activist research of Dutch anthropologist Reimer Schefold.4 And I heard his name invoked as 'Reimer' many times. Schefold was remarkably successful at fostering a movement for Mentawai cultural renewal and resistance to cultural chauvinism and outright repression. So the south- central area of Siberut became a kind of experiment, a pressured laboratory, for new forms of resistance – and culture. Throughout the world, native and other kinds of tribal and aboriginal governments have been forming and are often being institutionalized. But in the last decade of Suharto dictatorship, such forms of resistance was risky and heroic.

Bilou, Kloss' gibbon icon, interior of traditional Mentawai lodge near village of Matatonan, Siberut 10 February 1989 by Gordon Brent Ingram

Matatonan by Gordon Brent Ingram 5

In part because of the work of 'Reimer', the Mentawai whom I portrayed were clear and often assertive about when they wanted to be photographed as well as when they would allow aspects of their culture to be documented. This was particularly the case in the village of Matatonan. So these photographs represent a conversation of where and why a traditional society has wished to interact with the wider world visually – in large part in hopes of creating further alliances that might help them protect themselves from a hostile state.

Mentawai traditionalist, Matatonan, Siberut, 10 February 1989, photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

Brother and sister between the villages of Ugei and Matatonan, central Siberut 8 February, 1989 #1 photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

These visual notes of Mentawai communities counter much of landscape photography's preoccupation with panoramas. As the traditional Mentawai have been squeezed into the upper reaches of undulating jungle, these small communities separated by low ridges have been increasingly confined. Landscape for the traditional Mentawai has been increasingly experienced through forest and domestic spaces within the broader context constraint and often enclosure. Matatonan by Gordon Brent Ingram 6

more mature rainforest on the edge of ladang, west of Ugei, central Siberut, 10 February, 1989 photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

ladang, village of Matatonan, Siberut 9 February 1989 photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram

Gordon Brent Ingram, Vancouver, May 2009

A more extensive essay than the one here is posted for 1989 at www.gordonbrentingram.ca/photobased.

A related essay on Siberut is posted for 1989 at www.gordonbrentingram.ca/studiesdesigns and my scholarship and related studies from Siberut are posted at both www.gordonbrentingram.ca/scholarship and www.gordonbrentingram.ca/studiesdesigns.

Notes

1 Two publications on the Mentawai that romanticized their culture (and bodies) excessively were, the 1979, La Vallée des Hommes-Fleurs. by M. Brent (Paris, Librair Artaud) and the article, La festa delle piroghe. by G. L. Borri, in Atlante (Il Mensile Dell'Istituto Geografico de Agostini. December 1986: 110 – 119.)

2 Ingram, Gordon Brent. 1989 Planning district networks of protected habitat for conservation of biological diversity: A manual with applications for marine islands with primary rainforest. Dissertation for a Ph.D. in environmental planning, University of California at Berkeley. Ann Arbor, Michigan, University Microfilms International. Matatonan by Gordon Brent Ingram 7

3 Lindsay, C. 1992 Mentawai Shaman: Keeper of the rain forest. (with historical essay by Reimer Schefold). New York, Aperture. Also see, Ingram, G. B. 1995 - 1996. Review of Mentawai Shaman: Keeper of the rain forest. Photographs and Journals by Charles Lindsay. Historical Essay by Reimar Schefold. New York: Aperture Books. 1992. Pacific Affairs 68(4): 620.

4 Schefold, Reimer. 1972 Divination in Mentawai. Tropical Man III: 10 – 87; Schefold, Reimer. 1973 Religious conceptions of Siberut, Mentawai. Sumatra Research Bulletin 11(2): 12 – 24; and Schefold, Reimer. 1980 Spielzeug für die Seelen. Zurich, Switzerland, Museum Rietberg Zurich.

primate skulls in rafters of lodge, Mado Bak, Siberut, 13 February 1989 photograph by Gordon Brent Ingram