Mondulkiri, one of the two provinces, holds the ancestral homelands of the Bunong people.
The Bunong people consider themselves forest dwellers. They traditionally lived in small villages of extended families, spread out across the forested hills. The thick highland forest has provided the foods they hunt and gather, as well as being the home of their spirits and the place where they bury their dead. Resin trees are traditionally an important resource, used by a single family for generations, and harvested seasonally.
The Bunong are swidden cultivators, growing upland rice on small plots cleared by fire in the forests.
Their plots use mixed cropping, and maize, pumpkin, beans and cassava. All crops are sown, weeded and harvested by hand because of the steep terrain, and must be guarded from wild boars and flocks of parrots. Swidden farming involves rotating between plots, and the Bunong do this rotation after 3-4 years when the soil is depleted. Families have a series of plots in the hills surrounding their villages, and unused plots, fallows, are left to regrow ground cover while others are in use.
First forcibly 'pacified' by the French colonizers at the beginning of the 2oth century, the Bunong have faced pressure to settle down and modernize under every respective government since. Long isolated from the Khmer Buddhist culture of the lowlands, in the last two decades enormous pressures have arisen over the land and the forests of the highlands. Powerful individuals and companies, both national and international, have begun taking large swathes of land, often directly out from under the indigenous communities who consider these forests home. As land access shrinks in the rice padi lowlands, there has also been a massive increase in lowlanders migrating to the highlands and claiming land for homes and farms. The Bunong traditionally hold land in common and do not use private land titles, and this has been used as an excuse to classify their traditional lands as unoccupied and free for the taking.
Lisa took Clemens to meet her dear friend Rome, a Bunong woman who stands in both worlds.
She was raised in the forests farming and foraging with her father and their hunting dogs. Trained as a community development worker by foreigners, she has spent years attempting to assist her people to become literate to better access state resources. She watched in dismay as companies were granted economic land concessions closer and closer to the edges of her village's traditional lands. Others in her village said nothing. Threats from corrupt authorities and cultural discrimination have resulted in many Bunong people being afraid and reluctant to protest land grabbing.
One day, Rome returned from a trip to find that over 300 resin trees on her ancestral land had been illegally logged. Since that day, she has been an environmental activist. She has been fighting for compensation in court for years, despite strong resistance from the provincial governor and death threats. And she has joined the networks of other brave Bunong people protesting the seizures of their land. She has mobilized members of her village and others nearby, and her people now maintain a constant presence in their communities' forest to prevent the chainsaws and bulldozers of companies waiting to encroach upon their boundaries.
