ABSTRACT
Dawat took a deep breath and came wondrously alive. His eyes and arms almost danced as he made an impassioned plea for his forest and his people. For nearly an hour the power of the forest spoke through him, and when he ended there was an abrupt silence. For a few moments all of us sat quietly as the jungle sounds of distant birds and drumming cicadas filled the air. Although the details of what he said came only several months later when the interview was translated, we all sensed in our hearts that we had heard something both poetic and profound. (Henley 1990:94)1
In the early 1980s, timber companies in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, began moving into interior upland areas inhabited by various groups of Penan huntergatherers. In 1987 the Penan began actively to resist these incursions by establishing a series of blockades. Since that time the Penan have become the focus of a broad-based international environmental campaign to assert their land rights and preserve the Sarawak rainforest. This campaign has been a very high profile one indeed, covered widely in the media and supported by numerous political figures and celebrities.2 Environmental organizations in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, England, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and elsewhere have been involved in various aspects of the Sarawak campaign. What is perhaps most remarkable about this campaign is that it is not the product of central coordination, but instead developed almost spontaneously as the situation of the Penan became more widely publicized.3 In a series of interviews I conducted with European and American environmentalists, Penan resistance to logging was repeatedly cited as exemplary of how
indigenous peoples can assert control over their own destinies and, in the process, halt the loss of global biodiversity. In short, the Penan have become icons of resistance for environmentalists worldwide.4
