Garry Lotulung writes:

Deep in the backcountry here, Sumean Gebe, 42, lives with Bede Yuli, 39, and his two children in the forest around Dodaga Village, about four hours by road from the capital of North Maluku Province. Every so often, they’ll move to a different forest.

“We have been like this since we were little,” he said. “Usually we will make a bivouac [a temporary shelter] with a roof of palm leaves and tarpaulin. We are comfortable living there.”

As the head of the family, he spends his days hunting animals in the forest to meet his relatives’ food needs.

“Our food is always taken from the forest,” said Sumean, who hunts wild boar, deer and other game to cook in a temporary kitchen made of bamboo.

While in the forest, he also harvests damar resin, which is used in varnish and as a hardener for bee’s wax, that he can sell in the village.

Sumean and his family are not alone. Beside the Kali Meja River near his latest bivouac, Etus Hurata, 56, and Tatoyo Penes, 64, subsist gathering sago, a starch similar to tapioca extracted from the pith of palm trees. Despite growing more frail with age, their steps are agile when they are on the sago plantation, armed with bamboo sticks and machetes to collect the sago that is processed into the ingredients of their daily diet.

During one of their journeys to harvest sago, they meet Daniel Totabo, 27, who is looking for sogili (eel) in the middle of the fast-flowing river. When the dry season comes, the volume of water drops slightly, allowing him to look for fish further toward the middle of the river, where his quarry is more abundant.

They are all part of the Indigenous O’Hongana Manyawa— “People of the forest” in their language. Often referred to as the Tobelo Dalam, they are one of the last nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribes in Indonesia. Always dependent on the dense forests of Halmahera for their livelihood, the tribe has developed customs that respect the jungle and its contents and protect them from various threatening activities. The flourishing of the people and the forest have been connected for hundreds of years.

According to data from Survival International, 300-500 O’Hongana Manyawa people still reside in the forested interior of the island of Halmahera.

The latest research from the Association of Indigenous Peoples Defenders of Nusantara identified 21 matarumah (lineages) of this tribe, each consisting of four to five heads of families, that inhabit the Halmahera mainland. The tribes have rarely had direct contact with people outside the forest.

But now, huge areas of their territory have been allocated to mining companies, and in some areas, excavators are already at work. Most recently, their relationship with the forest has been disturbed by nickel dredging projects in several corners of Halmahera. Indonesia holds about 42 percent of the world’s total nickel reserves, and it is planning to maximize mining it to meet the steep rise in global demand for the metal critical to the energy transition. But mining Indonesian nickel ore requires felling the forests atop the deposits. [Continue reading…]