A river, a road, an indigenous people and an entangled landscape in Riau, Indonesia

Bibliographic Data

ID2879207
AuthorsNathan Porath (1. [email protected], corresponding author)
Year2002
Volume158
Issue4
Pages769-797
Publication date2002-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueBijdragen tot de taal- land- en volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0006-2294 • E-ISSN: 2213-4379
PublisherWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1163/22134379-90003766
OpenAlexW841225384
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited9

In Riau, connecting the provincial capital Pekanbaru with the small market town of Duri and the coastal town of Dumai is a two-lane high road.1 The road runs through an area that once was dense forest accessible only by river. The road was built during the second half of the twentieth century, following the discovery of oil in the area. Part of the territory the road passes through is the traditional area of an indigenous people officially called Orang Sakai' (Sakai people). The Orang Sakai are a Malay-dialect-speaking forest-dwell ing people. They traditionally practise shifting cultivation of cassava as well as trapping, hunting, and gathering food from the forest and nearby rivers. Many Sakai families today cultivate dry rice. They also collected, and still col lect, forest products. Although today most Sakai are Muslim, they are recent converts to the faith. Their Sakai forebears were non-Muslim people living on the margins of the Siak kingdom (kerajaan Siak). Then as now, they lived in the upstream Mandau (Sungai Mandau Hulu), and its branching minor rivers (Sungai Samsam, Sungai Beringin). The Mandau River is a tributary of the Siak River, which flows by the town of Siak Sri Indrapura, the old king dom's political centre, connecting the hinterland with the Melaka Straits. This article will explore the transformations that an ugly strip of asphalt has wrought on the lives of an indigenous people. The environmental trans formation that the road has brought to the area has occurred within the lifetime of most Sakai. For example, most Sakai families today live in zinc roofed wooden houses surrounded by migrant-owned houses. If I had come to the area in the early 1980s, I would have seen more families inhabiting traditional bark houses, fewer migrants, and more land and forest surround ing them. What I would like to show is that although Sakai were victims of the road and development that came because of the road (Bodley 1990), they

Agroforestry · Cartography · Geography · Habitat · Indigenous · Tributary · Wildlife corridor · Asian Studies and History · Ecology · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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