CIFOR Forest, Resources and People in Bulungan Elements for a History of Settlement, Trade, and Social Dynamics in Borneo, 1880-2000 Bernard Sellato Forest, Resources and People in Bulungan Elements for a History of Settlement, Trade and Social Dynamics in Borneo, 1880-2000 Bernard Sellato Cover Photo: Hornbill carving in gate to Kenyah village, East Kalimantan by Christophe Kuhn © 2001 by Center for International Forestry Research All rights reserved. Published in 2001 Printed by SMK Grafika Desa Putera, Indonesia ISBN 979-8764-76-5 Published by Center for International Forestry Research Mailing address: P.O. Box 6596 JKPWB, Jakarta 10065, Indonesia Office address: Jl. CIFOR, Situ Gede, Sindang Barang, Bogor Barat 16680, Indonesia Tel.: +62 (251) 622622; Fax: +62 (251) 622100 E-mail: [email protected] Web site: http://www.cifor.cgiar.org Contents Acknowledgements vi Foreword vii 1. Introduction 1 2. Environment and Population 5 2.1 One Forested Domain 5 2.2 Two River Basins 7 2.3 Population 9 Long Pujungan District 9 Malinau District 12 Comments 13 3. Tribes and States in Northern East Borneo 15 3.1 The Coastal Polities 16 Bulungan 17 Tidung Sesayap 19 Sembawang24 3.2 The Stratified Groups 27 The Merap 28 The Kenyah 30 3.3 The Punan Groups 32 Minor Punan Groups 32 The Punan of the Tubu and Malinau 33 3.4 One Regional History 37 CONTENTS 4. Territory, Resources and Land Use43 4.1 Forest and Resources 44 Among Coastal Polities 44 Among Stratified Tribal Groups 46 Among Non-Stratified Tribal Groups 49 Among Punan Groups 50 4.2 Agricultural Patterns 52 Rice Agriculture 53 Cash Crops 59 Recent Trends 62 5. Forest Products and Trade 65 5.1 NTFPs Traded 67 Exudates (Resins, Latexes and Gums) 67 Rattans 69 Other Vegetable Products 70 Animal Products 72 5.2 History of Trade 73 Exudates (Resins, Latexes and Gums) 74 Rattans 77 Other Vegetable Products 78 Animal Products 80 Comments 82 5.3 Histories of Trading85 The RPK Affair 85 The Kenyah 89 The Arabs 90 The Chinese 92 The Malinau-Tubu Tengkulak 96 The Punan 98 Comments 100 iv CONTENTS 6. Being Administered and Its Consequences 103 6.1 Administrations: The Legacy of the Past 103 Opening and Controlling the Hinterland 104 Adat, Then and Now 108 Religions 112 6.2 Education, Health and Socio-economic Assistance 114 6.3 Outsiders 119 Companies and Local Communities 120 Vicinity and Conflict 122 Collective and Individual Control of the Land 125 Transmigration and Other Outsiders 127 6.4 Concluding Remarks 132 References 137 Annex 1. Basic Goods, Prices and Subsidies 181 Tables: Table 1. Paddy in Long Pujungan District: Area and Production 55 Table 2. Cash Crop Production in Long Pujungan District (tonnes) 60 Figures: Figure 1. Northern East Kalimantan Coastal Polities 20 Figure 2. The Tidung Sesayap Kingdom 22 Figure 3. The Sembawang Kingdom 25 Figure 4. Progress of the Extraction Front 41 Figure 5. Forest Product Trade in Bulungan, 1850-2000 84 Figure 6. Administrative Divisions 105 v Acknowledgements I wish to especially thank Jenny Turnbull, Gideon Suharyanto, Dina Hubudin and Eko Prianto for their roles in editing and layout of the publication. Eva Wollenberg initiated and helped designed the original field study, arranged the necessary funding from USAID, ITTO and CIFOR and coordinated the research of documents in Indonesia; at a later stage, she coordinated the review and editing and enthusiastically pushed for what was a mere field report to be revised into a book. This book is hers as much as the mine. May she find here the expression of my deep appreciation and of my friendship. Foreword The text below is a revised version of a report submitted to CIFOR, the output of a study entitled Social and economic history of Bulungan. It is based mainly on a survey in Bulungan1 conducted during a three-week trip to the Tarakan, Sesayap, Malinau, Tanjung Palas, and Long Peso districts in October and November 1998. Drs. Dollop Mamung, whose kind and efficient assistance I wish to acknowledge here, accompanied me in this survey. More than forty people were interviewed in over fifteen locations. I had previously conducted very brief surveys in the lower Kayan area (1991) and in Malinau (1993) and have also spent several long periods in Long Pujungan District between 1991 and 1995. In 1998 Carin Van Empel, a Dutch graduate student, carried out research in the Dutch archives. She explored collections in the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague and the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen in Amsterdam and selected relevant Memories van Overgave (handover reports), Mailrapporten (mail reports) and Verbalen (records) for the period 1877-1937. A further selection of the documents located was photocopied, and Van Empel translated fragments of the copied documents into English. These I later edited. Also in 1998, Dra. Erna Rositah gathered documents from various government agencies in Jakarta, Samarinda, and Tanjung Selor. These FOREWORD documents are primarily statistics, dealing with provincial, regency, and district levels. (On Dutch archives in Jakarta concerning Kalimantan, see Knapen 1997b.) A very large body of literature with relevance to the history of Bulungan is available, in Indonesian, Dutch, English, and even French, and over 350 titles (not including government statistics or archival documents) were reviewed, although not all were actually used. Apart from published books and articles, these sources include scores of unpublished documents and reports. The Dutch archive documents (except for some important Memories van Overgave) and Indonesian government reports and statistics have not been listed in the bibliography. As the original text of the present volume was written as a consultancy report, meant for project planners and fieldworkers, precise bibliographic references were not included. Its conversion into an academic text for publication, that is, with academically defensible standards, particularly with regard to bibliographic references, proved too formidable a task, given the time constraints. Therefore, for each section of the text, the most important references have been grouped in notes (see References). Most useful to this study was the work, often unpublished, of other scholars, such as Rajindra Puri and Lars Kaskija, to whom I extend my heartfelt thanks. Earlier reports by the Kayan Mentarang project of WWF (particularly Culture and Conservation, a research programme) and a number of reports by CIFORs BRF personnel, some based on studies made at later dates than my survey, were also very useful (see References). I am also indebted to the reviewers of the original report and a few other readers (Patrice Levang, Reed Wadley, Lini Wollenberg, Lars Kaskija, and Godwin Limberg) for their valuable feedback, comments, corrections, and additional data, and to Dr. Rajindra Puri for identification of some forest products. viii FOREWORD At CIFORs request, I held in Samarinda a two-day workshop entitled Metoda Penggalian Sejarah Sosial Ekonomi dan Hukum di Pedalaman Kalimantan (Methods for Investigation into Social, Economic, and Legal History in Interior Borneo; 11-12 November 1998). This workshop in Indonesian, attended by some thirty participants (research staff, faculty, students, NGOs), was jointly organised by the Center for Social Forestry (CSF) of Mulawarman University, Samarinda, and the Institute for Research on Southeast Asia of CNRS, France, and benefited from the participation of Drs. G. Simon Devung. I wish to thank Drs. Devung, Dr. Ir. Apriadi D. Gani of CSF, and the Rector of Mulawarman University. Finally, a note of warning: this text is not a comprehensive All about Bulungan, but serves as an introduction to the Bulungan region. Furthermore, it still very much reveals its origins. Rather than attempt to produce an all-encompassing but necessarily shallow picture of the whole of Bulungan in historical perspective, I had chosen, in the field study and in the original report, to focus on the areas of immediate interest to CIFOR and on those themes of direct relevance to CIFORs BRF. This is still apparent in the present text. Considering the size and complexity of the region, the depth of the historical scope, the range of issues surveyed, as well as the sheer volume of literature and documentation examined, it is a basic digest, with a few topics emphasised due to the circumstances of the original study. It is hoped that, impressionistic as it may be, the present text conveys the right information and a few sound ideas. All its biases and shortcomings are my sole responsibility. 1 In this report, Bulungan refers to the original regency (kabupaten) established by the government of Indonesia in 1959. In late 1999 this district was divided into three regencies, Malinau, Nunukan and a smaller Bulungan. The area was still one regency at the time the material for this volume was prepared. ix 1. Introduction The region under consideration is Bulungan Regency, the northern part of the province of East Kalimantan. Although certain parts of Bulungan have long been well known and studied (e.g., Apo Kayan), others, such as Long Pujungan and Malinau districts, virtually remained terrae incognitae to scholars until after 1990, when massive research programmes (e.g., WWFs Culture and Conservation in Long Pujungan and later, CIFORs BRF project in Malinau) or individual researchers (L. Kaskija, R. Puri) started activity. The historical scope extends from about 1880 to present. Geographically, in connection with the BRF location, the primary focus is on the two districts of Long Pujungan and Malinau; thematically, it is on institutions and land and forest use patterns, and their recent changes. A secondary focus is on the downstream regions (Bulungan and Sesayap), insofar as their very existence and history have shaped the present situation upstream. The studys overall methodology was to extract as much useful information as possible from all types of available sources and bring together the data across disciplines to produce a general, intelligible picture of the regions history, with emphasis on social and economic features.