Local People Hope to Rekindle Traditional Ritual ‘Bersoyong’

KOMPAS/BAHANA PATRIA GUPTA

Residents of the Paser Tribe perform the Bersoyong ritual in Sepaku Village, Sepaku District, North Penajam Paser Regency, East Kalimantan, Saturday (27/7/2022). The Bersoyong ritual is carried out in many activities of the Paser Tribe, including cleaning the village, starting farming and starting to clear the forest.

Four people sat in solemnity with two baskets full of offerings in front of them. Two came from the Paser tribe; the other two were the Balik tribe representatives.

The two tribes are known as indigenous peoples who have for generations inhabited the land, which has been designated as the starting point for the construction of Nusantara as the new capital city of Indonesia. The land, which is part of capital area, is located in Sepaku district, Penajam Paser Utara, East Kalimantan.

They were performing bersoyong, the tribes’ ritual ceremony to express gratitude for the gift of sustenance and praying for safety when doing work.

Balik tribe’s head Sibukdin (58) said the event, which was held on Tuesday (26/7/2022), marked a return of the traditional ceremony for the first time in almost three decades. It was held also as part of the documentation of local people’s traditional and cultural life in the new capital area by the Environment and Forestry Ministry.

During the ritual, supplications were recited solemnly in Balik or Paser languages by a Balik tribe’s elder. He wore a black-cloth headband.

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The supplications were also recited in Arabic. The two indigenous tribes in Sepaku have largely immersed themselves in Islamic and Malay culture, as indicated by the black caps with yellow embroidery they wore as traditional-head coverings.

“Our ancestors did not know about religion as we do now. They used to be [adherents of] kaharingan,” Sibukdin said, referring to the animistic folk religion, on the sidelines of the ritual at his stilt house in the Old Sepaku area.

He said that, being called impromptu for documentation purposes, the ceremony provided offerings less complete than the usual, which would have had dozens of types of ingredients from nature and food.

In addition, they would usually serve herbal plants, crops, rattan grass, fish, glutinous rice, jungle fowl meat, as well as several traditional cakes such as serabi (rice-flour pancake with coconut milk) and cucur (rice flour and palm-sugar cake).

Thanksgiving and safety

In the past, the Balik and Paser tribes carried out bersoyong as a thanksgiving ceremony after harvest season, or as an occasion to pray for safety in healing treatment in the time prior to the planting season.

Sibukdin recalled that the last time he had participated in a bersoyong event was when he was a teenager. Especially after harvest season, he said, people gathered either at the customary elder's house or in a field. The event participants would come, along with all of the family members, bringing harvest crops, and cook together.

Bersoyong was an opportunity for gathering and sharing knowledge.

The ritual leader would chant a prayer in Balik or Paser language, which communicated their expression of gratitude to the Creator. They were grateful that the harvest season had given them crops in abundance. From the harvest, residents stored mountain rice in the barns that could cater to their year-long consumption needs.

“Bersoyong was an opportunity for gathering and sharing knowledge. For example, there were those who succeeded in planting certain fruits and others would ask how to grow those fruits. When someone had a certain disease, they would ask [others] for information about what kind of [herbal] plant was used to treat it. So, there was free knowledge exchange,” Sibukdin said.

KOMPAS/BAHANA PATRIA GUPTA

Residents of the Paser Tribe perform the Bersoyong ritual in Sepaku Village, Sepaku District, North Penajam Paser Regency, East Kalimantan, Saturday (27/7/2022).

Lifestyle changes

Saparudin, Paser customary head at Binuang village, said that bersoyong had no longer been a practiced ritual for more than 30 years due to changes in the habits of the community. A shift has also occurred in how they make their livelihoods by farming. They used to adopt nomadic farming, in which they would move from one farming plot to another. This traditional way of cultivation is no longer practiced.

In post-harvest, as they were waiting for the farming plot to rejuvenate itself with weeds beginning to grow, they would move to another plot to plant mountain rice.

They did not use fertilizers. Mountain-rice cultivation, which gave them only one round of harvest in a year, relied on rain for irrigation. “We cleared land by burning. We used traditional ways that could prevent forest fires. We worked together and we did not clear land extensively,” Saparudin said.

In their efforts to prevent the fires from spreading over land, the residents uprooted weeds and collected them into several piles. The piles were burned one by one under the watch-out of family members. With them were water-soaked vegetation leaves they used to beat up the fires when they were about to spread.

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The slash-and-burn farming is no longer practiced today, since they were faced with cultivation-land shrinkage. The forest areas have largely turned into industrial plantation, covering an area of 190,000 hectares, due to the government’s land-concession policies beginning in the 1970s. Concessionaire permits have been granted for customary forests and dry lands that were previously managed by the indigenous peoples as cultivated-farming plots.

To make things worse for local people, their farming lands were also converted into settlement areas for newcomers who were brought into the region by the government-administered transmigration program. Local people were banned from burn land for agricultural purposes for fear that the fires would spread to industrial plantations.

“Gradually, nomadic farming was abandoned. So was bersoyong, because there was no longer a planting season for nomadic farming," Saparudin said.

The indigenous tribes have also been struggling to hold on to other traditions, such as animal hunting, taking forest produce and making herbal medicines from forest plants. Those cannot be passed on to the current generation. The tradition of brewing the root of bajakah (Spatholobus littoralis) consumed for health purposes is no longer practiced because the woody plant has become scarce. “In the past, we used sembung leaves (Blumea balsamifera) as medicine for cough or fever. Now sembung leaves are hard to find. The forest is also far away,” Rimba (61), a community member of Balik tribe, said.

Natural honey is also almost non-existent because the lumu tree, where honeybees nest, does not grow around the villages anymore. Neither does mountain rice.

The concept of Nusantara as a forest and green city is expected to rekindle the legacy of local knowledge and wisdom of the indigenous peoples so that they can communicate their gratitude via bersoyong.

This article was translated by Musthofid.