There have been three forestry revolutions in modern Kalimantan – logging in the 1970s, the development of the plywood industry in the 1980s, and cash-crop plantation in the ‘90s and onward.

Incursions into the Dayaks’ ancestral homelands by big business have arguably done nothing but harm to Dayak culture. There is a strong need for land rights reform if the Dayaks are going to overcome the economic prerogatives of loggers, plantations, colonists and transmigrant settlers.

It should be understood that as the traditional custodians of Kalimantan, the Dayak people possess inherent rights to continue dwelling in their ancestral lands and to carry out their culture as they have done for millennia. That said, there is also a great deal of traditional knowledge, language, culture and music yet to be documented by anthropologists and shared worldwide. Indigenous knowledge of ethnozoology and ethnobotany might prove crucial to the development of new medicines (for example, the use of bintangor plants in treating AIDS) or new food or fuel sources. The loss of such knowledge due to the marginalisation of the Dayak people would be a great tragedy.

Dayakology is a site run by Dayaks http://www.dayakology.com/

WALHI, the Indonesian Forum for the Environment, is helping to protect Dayak rights in Borneo.

You can read about them here: http://www.eng.walhi.or.id