Word: penan
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Along with Christianity have come axes, cooking pots, clothing and bedding, but nomadic Penans insist that modern goods do not threaten their way of life. Most Penan hunters still prefer blowpipes to guns, and a group of headmen insists that if Western goods disappeared, their longhouses could get along just fine so long as the forest remained. This is why after years of arrests, imprisonment and fruitless legal efforts to halt the logging, the Penans continue to blockade the timber roads. "If we die," says Nyelik, "we die in the forest. There is no other place...
...pace of change is startling. According to Harrison Ngau, a member of the Malaysian Parliament concerned with the rights of tribes on the island of Borneo, as many as 10,000 members of the Penan tribe still led the seminomadic life of hunting and gathering at the beginning of the 1980s. But the logging industry has been destroying their woodlands, and the Malaysian government has encouraged them to move to villages. Now fewer than 500 Penans live in the forest. When they settle into towns, their expertise in the ways of the forest slips away. Villagers know that their elders...
When timber interests first came to Ngau's area in the state of Sarawak in 1977, several thousand natives lived entirely off the forests. But logging and settlement plans have reduced that number to fewer than 500 Penan tribesmen, who still cling to nomadic ways. Even these remaining nomadic clans are threatened by a powerful alliance of Japanese trading companies, merchants and local politicians, who continue to push logging operations ever deeper into the interior...