In my 17 years in Thailand, I have worked with, befriended, partnered and supported 4 indigenous tribes: the Black Lahu people, the Lisu tribe, the Hmong and the greater Karen people, who are actually a community of many smaller and individuated tribes. My former Thai husband - the father of my daughter - is married to a Hmong woman now. And our cousin-uncle Ed, is married to her Hmong 'sister' from the same village.
A much younger me, with my then toddler daughter and our friend, Daa, in his Akha village.
Hanging with extended Lisu and Lahu family at the Lisu New Year celebrations in Mimi's village.
My daughter with her father and half-Hmong younger brother in traditional Hmong clothes for Hmong New Year in what is now our extended family's village in the mountains near Chom Thong. No, mountain people can't afford great phones.
It's fair to say we have more than our fair share of interaction with indigenous people, both privately through friends and family, and through our business partnerships, where we teach the growing of organic mountain herbs and buy them back to make our herbal products at Pure Thai Natural Co Ltd - basically a fair trade, organic, sustainable-livelihood project for indigenous people.
Me showing planting techniques in the Black Lahu villages a few years ago.
And how that same herb, a traditional herb, Wan Sao Long, looked a few months later after the rains. Grown on the Black Lahu lands at Doi Modt near Chiang Rai, for Pure Thai Naturals.
I have observed the passion so many people have to connect and engage with the real "untouched" culture, and I can honestly tell you this: most of what you see when you visit an indigenous community is no longer authentic. It's softened, adjusted and presented to suit a western audience.
Occasionally, at private gatherings, I stumble into raw indigenous culture and I'm shocked. If you've been on Hive longer than I have (2 yrs, 6 mths) you may remember one of my early posts, about the tribal wedding and the selling of the woman. We (and she) were literally sent out of the village immediately after the bride price had been paid! Your can read it here: I Heard Myself Defending The Bride Price.
Our own Thai wedding in the small family rice farm in Thung Saliam, Sukothai, almost didn't happen. On the 4th night of the 5 day wedding, my almost-husband casually dropped something in conversation about the ritual killing of the pig at the entrance to the house. And how we would have to eat the warm pigs entrails mixed into a raw laab (with chili and spices for flavour!) after the mor duu (village fortune teller) had read our marital fortune. 😵 Needless to say, we had a huge fight, I didn't partake, the pig was butchered elsewhere and our doomed marriage proceeded. We divorced 5 years later, amid much tut-tutting and nodding from the village elders who KNEW that was coming! Butchering and eating raw pig guts is nothing I have ever seen in an Amazing Thailand Tourism Authority advertisement, but Thai people always laugh a lot when I tell them that story. Because they know too, that the Thai culture sold to eager westerners is a pretty facade.
What I have learned about westerners is that we seek a purity of existence, and tend to glorify indigenous cultures while we neglect our own. Yes, I have danced in the Lisu village circle for New Year and made the traditional spirit offerings for health, good crops and good seasons.
What has always been important is to go in tiny numbers - not more than 4-6 persons - otherwise the culture is polluted and destroyed very rapidly. We often engage with our Lisu and Lahu friends through the notable and delightful old half-Dutch half-Japanese anthropologist, Otome Klein-Hutheesing, who has lived and worked with these tribes for 60 years. We come as guests and friends of her Lisu and Lahu families.
Otome, hanging with Mimi's mom, after I brought her home from the hospital.
And taking my turn at Otome's bedside - it's expected of extended family.
Today, on The International Day of the World's Indigenous People, I would like to suggest that our collective, endless quest to find purity, spirituality, sanctity, sacred medicine and "real culture" in remote indigenous communities is misguided, at best. We have all that we need inside ourselves.
So why did I personally become involved in the indigenous cultures here (apart from that minor detail of my ex husband marrying into it?)
Because they asked for help. Because people are dying - starving, living rough in the jungles, pushed to places where they are either a tourist attraction, cheap exploited labour for brothels, farms or your iphone factory, or they are treated as criminals. The Karen people, in particular, have invited me to work with them on the herbal project because they have food security issues, no papers and no way to survive in the jungles after some 62 years of civil war, which continues today. The lands they are allowed to struggle for survival on remain one of the most heavily landmined stretches on earth. Next time you see me post about Thai herbs that staunch blood flow, you might understand it a little differently.
We are working to keep tourists OUT of these indigenous areas! To be as non-intrusive as possible. People ask me all the time if they can come and volunteer in the villages, travel with me and the answer is usually no. These people are not a sideshow, and they are intimidated by western people. If the village is installing toilets, electric and water to make the tourists more comfortable, it's already over.
One of my favourite images, snapped very recently on my phone at the opening of the field hospital inside Karen State in Burma, is of a young Karen woman - one of the very first patients to use the outpatient pharmacy for her sick baby. She walked a whole day to reach the clinic and walked away with not only free medicine, but some warm baby clothes (FREEZING up there in the mountains in Dec-Jan!) that had been donated by friends in Chiang Mai.
What it says to me is that SHE needs to choose what's best for her, and her child. If she chooses pink western baby clothes (cos they're warm!) and chooses a life away from her indigenous settlement (bamboo huts hanging off the edge of a mountain) it is HER CHOICE. My need for her to retain her cultural identity is irrelevant. And I need to find my own spirituality, sanctity, purity and connection to Mother Earth where I am. I can't get it through her..
Next year this young woman is likely to be one of the indigenous interns in our new herbal project, based in Hpa-An, Karen State in Burma and in Mae Sariang and Mae Salit in Mae Hong Son, Western Thailand. Our goal is to enable her to make cash money in an organic & sustainable way locally, so she does not NEED to leave her village, her community, her culture if she doesn't want to. In the future, when there is solar electric supply, crypto may enable her to stay in her village and find a future as one of the world's unbankable people. Cos you need citizenship somewhere to have a bank account.
How many Karen people are living in Karen State and across the Thai border areas with a fragile identity, wobbly food supply and few options? Over 5 million people. With one hospital and no legally recognized national identity.
The International Day of the World's Indigenous People is a good day to reflect on what OUR OWN CULTURE is, why we neglect it and seek to live vicariously through others. If you DO choose to travel and visit indigenous tribes for "an experience", please do so only in SMALL groups (not more than 4-6), always as a guest and a personally invited visitor, and NEVER as a paying tourist.
Their culture depends on you not destroying it.
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