The Vanishing Batak Tribe

“What do you do with your dead?” I asked Elicio.

“We bury them in a coffin.”

Once again, the Christian answer was given. In reality, tribal people usually have a number of superstitions and rituals associated with death. Some tribes actually relocate the entire village if one person dies. According to Dr. Fernandez, the Batak would burn the house where the dead person had lived, and no one would live in that house again. This superstition had the practical function of preventing the spread of communicable diseases. Now that they lived in pre-fab houses bought in the city, I wondered how quick they would be to burn them. And would not burning the home of the deceased result in more deaths?

The part of his story that was believable was that the pastor hadn’t been to the village in ages. This was so common and frustrating among tribal people. Missionaries convert them, destroy the culture, and then leave.

Elisio told me that the church also served as a school for the Batak children. The teacher only came on Mondays and Tuesdays and taught first and second grade. As a result, although the church/school had been there for ten years, nearly everyone was still illiterate.

In most tribes babies are delivered at home, by midwives. As is the custom of the Batak. In many tribes it is customary to cut the umbilical cord with bamboo, a practice which leads to infection and threatens the life of the mother and infant. When I asked Elicio about this, he answered.

“The midwife uses scissors and she boils them for thirty minutes to sterilize them first.”

This was one more answered that had been programmed into him by the missionaries. And of course, it turned out not to be true. In questioning Batak women in another village, I found out that they use bamboo to cut the umbilical cord.

According to Elicio there were 33 families, 140 people living in the village. Dr. Fernandez explained that the political organization of the Batak was very lose, much simpler than the organization of say the Native Americans. Native Americans had chiefs and councils. They had political units and sub units. But with the Batak there isn’t even a chief, just a village headman, who is consulted and whose opinion weighs more than that of the others, but he is not the boss. This type of structure can only work for about 90 people. Native Americans, on the other hand, were able to organize thousands and even tens of thousands of members in their nations. For the Batak, when the limit, of about 90, is reached, they would split off and form a new village.

According to this information, Elicio’s village was way past being due for a split. Once again, this was putting unusual pressure on the forest resources to sustain this unnaturally large group of people.

Elicio was wearing basketball shorts and a T-shirt. Only the very old men seemed to be wearing a loin cloth. Many of the adolescents and even up to their thirties were wearing jeans. I asked if the missionaries had introduced the wearing of clothes. But Elicio answered, “No, we want to look like city people.” Whether this was the case of not, the tribal culture was clearly dying out.

“Do you still hunt in the jungle with bows and arrows?” I asked.

Elicio assured me that they did. Always interested in primitive weaponry I asked to see them. Elicio turned to Lorenzo and, ostensibly, asked in Batak language, for the bows.

“Our bows are already at the museum,” answered Lorenzo.

Elicio said the tribe ate a diet of fruits, vegetables, and meat they hunted. The lack of bows suggested they weren’t doing any hunting. And fruits and vegetables don’t grow so readily in the wild. Even if they did, they would be depleted by the tribe’s lack of mobility. I would later find out that the Batak ate a diet which consisted almost exclusively of a tuber called kudot. It looks like a white root, which is so tough that it should be inedible. But the Batak would pound it and boil it for hours, till it had a consistency of mashed-potatoes mixed with saw dust. The resultant goo was absolutely tasteless, which was probably a good thing. If there was any nutritional value at all in kudot, it was most likely a source of carbohydrates but nothing else.

While Elicio and I did our interview on the porch of the main house, the elders sat inside talking. Across the way, a group of women huddled around a fire, with a number of children clinging to their bodies. All of them, the men, women, and children looked extremely unhealthy. And they looked unbelievably poor.

I didn’t believe a word that Elicio was telling me, but his presence, his attitude, the presence of the church, and the artificiality of the whole situation signaled that this was the end of the Batak. Or even more accurately, the end of the Batak had come and gone. I was looking at the last few hold outs. And what was it exactly they were holding out for? Were they trying to preserve their culture? Their culture was already gone. The language was all that remained. Do you doom yourself and your children to lives of abject poverty, ridden with disease and living with hunger on a daily basis just to preserve a language?

Catching a moment alone with Lorenzo, I asked him what the worst problem was that tribe was facing. “The worst problem is that we get sick and there is no doctor. And sometimes we don’t have food.” He smiled and added, “But that is why foreigners are fat. You have a lot of food, so your bodies are good.”

Three Filipino teenagers entered the village with sports bags full of digital watches. “We trade watches to the Batak for chickens,” Explained one of the boys.

Why did the Batak need watches? They had no concept of time? Time was measured by seasons, each associated with a particular activity. For example, Tagpulot (honey season) is the time when they gather honey.

Besides not understanding hours and minutes, it isn’t like their social calendars were full and they needed expert chronography.

I asked Elisio why the Batak needed watches. His answer was a bit strange. “Because they think the city people are rich.”

I assume he meant that wearing a watch made them more like city people and thus made them appear rich.

I ducked around the house, to see what the Filipino boys were up to. Somehow I suspected they would be laundering money, dealing arms, trafficking narcotics — anything but selling watches. But there they were, with huge handfuls of watches, showing off their wares to a crowd of wide-eyed Batak. Behind the house, I found an old bolt-action rifle under a shed which had been converted into a muzzle loader.