Poisoning a Mentawai Arrow

Papa Simaanis from the Saibokolo Clan provided a small insight into the traditional hunting methods employed by the Mentawai people on Siberut. He combined the latex sap of the Omai tree (Antiaris toxicaria), an extract of the Tuba shrub (Cocculus) widely used as a fish poison, some tobacco and a couple of crushed lombok or chilies. To poison the arrows, the tips were painted in the thick toxic paste and heated over a small flame. This poison is very durable and effective for years if not heated.

The poison acts in a lethal manner only if applied in a parenteralic manner. Death results from cardiac failure. Intestinal absorbance rarely occurs. Therefore, the meat of bagged game is edible. For safety reasons, a small piece of meat is cut off at the spot where the poison dart hit the animal. Boiling and frying the meat also destroys the poison. Source

Monkeys are traditionally hunted with the poisoned arrows. Charles Lindsay’s book Mentawai Shaman: Keeper of the Rain Forest has some incredible photographs of the ritual.

Mentawai Jackfruit and the Vanishing Shamans

During my stay in the Siberut National Park, I completed a swampy trek between two properties the host family owned. Judging by the holiday house we trekked to, I got the impression that tourism had brought good money to Aman Gresik (I say holiday house because there was no room for pigs underneath).

Disappointingly, the house, although still an uma by concept, had a brand new road running by its front door. There was also a light fixture hooked up on the ceiling, a relic from a production team who had filmed a dance. For umas are the cornerstones of traditional animistic Mentawai culture, a spiritual refuge where young shamans (Sikereis) learn their craft, a place where an entire clan can come together for celebration. It only makes sense to suggest that once the umas disappear, so will the Sikereis and Mentawai culture.

In an effort to subdue the Mentawai and assimilate their culture, the government has been sponsoring a major re-location program for the past three decades. These forced changes, including abandonment of the umas, are destroying the Mentawai social structure and clan ties and threatening their culture, environment, ecosystem and health. Source: Native Planet

We were lead to the holiday house by Mama Gainambuk, who used the opportunity to patrol her land’s boundary and inspect various sago and bamboo plantations along the way. Although liking the slice of soursop I tried the previous day, the sickly sweet jackfruit Mama harvested on the trail didn’t appease me so well. I took it to be polite. She cut open one to share the fleshy yellow seeds with us and put the other in the rotan basket strapped to her back. By the end of the trek Mama had become frustrated with how slow the group was traveling. We were told to wear shoes because the creek beds we walked along had hidden sharpies, we didn’t have leather soles on our feet like the Mentawai. We didn’t have stealthy feline pace and confidence in our stride. Our boots and socks filled with mud and water and the constrictive five foot high tunnel Mama cleared with her parang through the torturous rotan-filled jungle undergrowth was malapropos.

Although it is something I have long understood, the experience was an affirmation that I am not a man of the jungle nor do I belong there. The experience only increased the respect I have for people like the Mentawai, who call the jungle their home and have lived off its offerings sustainably up until this present age. Discussions with my guide, Moly, made it clear that Mentawai culture is extremely vulnerable to pressures of the modern age, particularly deforestation, and as far as he’s concerned it will cease to exist once the medicine men disappear from the jungle.

Mentawai Tattooing

Alex, a.k.a orang belanda gila botak (crazy bald Dutchman – as he’s more affectionately known to Sumatrans), was on his ~20th trip to Indonesia. His grandfather, a Dutch colonialist, was born in Padang in the late 1800s and on this particular trip Alex was searching for the house he grew up in using old photographs. Alex had attempted to visit the Mentawai tribal people a number of times in the past whilst traveling Sumatra, but was forced to abandon the idea due to tropical sickness, earthquakes and eventually a diving accident in Aceh that left him with partial paralysis. With a numbness that comes and goes like the tide, Alex battled the challenging swampy terrain with steely determination to experience Siberut like everyone else – his injury was never to get in the way of his affinity with Sumatra.

As a testament to his perseverance and having a fondness for body art, Alex chose to get a traditional hand-tapped sun tattoo from Aman Gresik of the Saibokolo Clan, the Sikerei (medicine man) we stayed with during the trip. Aman prepared the ink from ashes of the fire and punched it under the skin using a safety pin that had been carried from Padang for the task. Upon completion of the design and with the skin swollen concealing the ink, Aman handed Alex a handful of leaves with antiseptic properties to rub the area. For the Mentawai people, tattoos are made to please the soul and achieve perfect harmony with the spirits of the forest. For Alex, I’m sure the harmony now pleased was entirely within.

Rimming Kerinci

Collected here a some photographs and a short video clip from my ascent of the Kerinci volcano. We trekked for several hours to reach the campsite just below the scree. At 4 am we woke and scrambled upward in darkness to reach the summit for sunrise, which turned out to be one of the most spiritually satisfying experiences Mother Nature has gifted me. However, Rebecca didn’t think too much of the altitude and freezing conditions…(I had to cut deals of time to be spent in spas and massage parlours in Ubud to keep her motivated!)

At 3805 m, Gunung Kerinci is the tallest volcano in Indonesia. The Kerinci-Seblat National Park is one of three included in the UNESCO World Heritage Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra. The descent was made special by seeing Sumatran tiger prints on the muddy trail. Heading upward for a kilometre and nearly reaching the park boundary, they were fresh (they weren’t there the previous day). Our guide for the trek, Pani, currently assists a researcher from San Diego in setting camera traps in other areas of Kerinci-Seblat National Park to monitor the dwindling tiger population.

Unlike the guide we took for Mount Kinabalu, Pani we chocked full of information about the ecosystems we were quickly ascending/descending through. He had also assisted birdwatching, nepenthes and orchid clubs in the past, scouring the jungle for the interesting endemic species.

Although we didn’t get to see a giant flowering Amorphophallus titanum (other areas of the National Park), we did see one of its cousins, Amorphophallus beccarii, and lots of other beauties including flaming red wild gingers, numerous orchids, some nepenthes species, strange fungis and lots of bright fruits that gibbons had dropped from high in the canopy.

There’s some amazing trekking opportunities in Kerinci-Seblat National Park, well, Sumatra in general. I met people in Bukittingi who’d spent three weeks trekking Gunung Leuser National Park. With opportunities like this, Sumatra is definitely somewhere I’d consider returning to.

Samosir and the Lake Toba Batak

The Toba Catastrophe Theory proposes that the mega-colossal eruption of the Toba caldera in Sumatra, Indonesia, ~75,000 years ago nearly drove the human species to extinction. The volcanic winter that followed only enhanced the ice-age and deposited ash up to several metres deep in various locations across Asia.

The volcano ejected an estimated 800 cubic kilometers of ash into the atmosphere, leaving a crater (now the world’s largest volcanic lake) that is 100 kilometers long and 35 kilometers wide. Ash from the event has been found in India, the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. Source: ScienceDaily

The resurgent dome of the supervolcano now forms Samosir, a pseudo-island larger than Singapore, in the centre of the crater lake. Samosir is home to the Toba Batak people whom Marco Polo visited in the late 1200s, writing only of their cannibalistic culture which can be learnt of in Ambarita.

When one of them is ill they send for their sorcerers, and put the question to them, whether the sick man shall recover of his sickness or no. If they say that he will recover, then they let him alone till he gets better. But if the sorcerers foretell that the sick man is to die, the friends send for certain judges of theirs to put to death him who has thus been condemned by the sorcerers to die. These men come, and lay so many clothes upon the sick man’s mouth that they suffocate him. And when he is dead they have him cooked, and gather together all the dead man’s kin, and eat him. And I assure you they do suck the very bones till not a particle of marrow remains in them; for they say that if any nourishment remained in the bones this would breed worms, and then the worms would die for want of food, and the death of those worms would be laid to the charge of the deceased man’s soul. And so they eat him up stump and rump. And when they have thus eaten him they collect his bones and put them in fine chests, and carry them away, and place them in caverns among the mountains where no beast nor other creature can get at them. And you must know also that if they take prisoner a man of another country, and he cannot pay a ransom in coin, they kill him and eat him straightway. Source: The Travels of Marco Polo — Volume 2 (Project Gutenberg)

The Toba Batak retained their animist-spiritualist beliefs until the arrival of the first protestant missionaries from Germany in the mid 1800s. Cannibalism was outlawed as Christianity became a strong element of their cultural identity. However, hints of older tradition present themselves with the ornate tugu (bone houses from reburial ceremonies) that now dot Samosir’s landscape.

Music is fundamental to Batak culture and visitors to the region can sample Batak pop and yodeling, derivatives of traditional songs, most evenings where the food is cooking and on the ferries to Samosir. For the Batak who’ve converted to Christianity or Islam, the religious aspect of music has been shunned, but for the Toba Batak, the gondang still plays an important part in ritual.

Inspired by the music the medium becomes possessed by the spirits of the ancestors who are pleased to have been called and not infrequently ask the medium for their favourite song to be played. Because of the close connection between the music and traditional religion the German missionaries at the beginning of the century forbade the Christian Toba Batak to hold or even attend gondang performances on pain of excommunication. Source: Bataknese

The open air museum in Simanindo presents a demonstration of traditional dance and music for several important occasions and uses a gondang orchestra of drums, gongs and flutes, sitting in the gallery of the largest house. One particularly interesting dance emulates the sacrifice of a buffalo.

In the tot-tor sacrificial dance the datu or priest leads a buffalo to the village square. He binds the animal meant as a sacrifice to a stake decorated with branches of a waringin tree. In real adat festivals the buffalo is killed after a series of ritual dances around the stake. Source: tondibangarna

Horas!