Akar Nusa
A river bend in the upper Baram. Two women are cutting a sago palm. A little further on, a man reads the shape of the land: this stream flows into that river, those hills share a watershed. He does not need a map.
The story
The Penan live in the high headwaters of Sarawak's great rivers, among them the Rajang, Baram and Limbang. A recent Sarawak study counts 21,367 people. Scholars divide them into the Eastern Penan, living around Baram, Limbang and Tutoh, and the Western Penan, around Belaga.
Many outsiders once called the Penan aimless wanderers. The anthropologist Peter Brosius, writing in the Sarawak Museum Journal in 1986, called that a misconception. The Penan, he wrote, have a strong sense of place and a history. Almost every river and stream in their territory has a name, and they know which share a watershed and where each flows. Jayl Langub, a Sarawak researcher, writes that rivers are like streets in a town. They hold a person's sense of where they are and where they come from.
Eastern Penan have a phrase for it: oko bu'un, "place of origin". A person can say that the Puak River is their oko bu'un, and this speaks of kin, rights and belonging.
Wild sago (uvut) has long been the main food. It is still the staple for families who settled in the 1970s. The Penan keep a practice called molong. When a person claims a sago clump or rattan, they take what is ripe and protect the rest for the future. It is a way of caring for a resource.
Most Penan lived as nomads until the 1950s. After that, state and missionary programmes helped many to settle in villages. Some bands stayed on the move longer. From the 1960s logging reached Penan lands, and some communities set up blockades, mapped their lands and went to court. That is a matter still before the courts and people, and we do not take sides here.
Where you can still see it today
- Sago: processed with clean running water; Penan say it cannot be done with muddy water.
- River names on the Baram, Tutoh and Seping.
- Villages in Baram and Belaga, where sago has stayed the staple food for families settled since the 1970s.
- Sarawak Museum, which publishes research on the Penan.
What DNA can tell, and what it cannot
We have found no published study of Penan DNA that we could open, so a region estimate for a Penan person is a broad picture, not a finding about the Penan. Scientists link the native peoples of Borneo to Austronesian-speaking ancestors, but for several upriver groups the origins are still unclear.
DNA cannot decide whether someone is Penan, which community they belong to, their religion or any legal status.
