"Belonging to the political we does not place us outside it as neutral judges. We inherit its histories, its grievances, and its obligations. Solidarity can be necessary because nobody survives political marginalization alone. But the fact that a call comes from one’s own people does not tell us everything about what answering it would mean."
First published on 10/30/2026
By June Rubis
Macquarie University Research Fellow, Australia; Co-Founder, Building Initiatives in Indigenous Heritage (BiiH), Sarawak; and Honorary Member, ICCA Consortium
The haze[i] has been particularly bad in Kuching these past weeks. The sort that keeps the windows shut and makes me repeatedly check the air-quality readings while wondering how long it will last. There is the immediate worry about what we are breathing, and the larger environmental anxiety of knowing that somewhere forests and peatlands are burning. Yet from where I am, I cannot see the source. The haze arrives from elsewhere. It crosses borders, changes what I can see and what I breathe, while the events producing it remain beyond my sight.
I found myself remembering the haze of the late 1990s. My memory of 1997 is partly a memory of not being able to see. I remember holding up my hand in front of me and barely being able to see it. Kuching became unreal. There were whispered stories of how high the Air Pollution Index (API) had climbed, of 1000 API even, but eventually suppressed. But I remember the physical experience more clearly than the numbers: familiar distances disappearing, the strange light, and the feeling of being enclosed by something whose origins were somewhere across Borneo.
During this haze, Paraiso has again become an earworm, something I keep returning to almost as a way of coping. One line, in particular, keeps circling in my head: “The smoke that screens the air.”[ii] The song imagines a place where even birds can no longer inhabit the air. It is about another damaged landscape where human dignity persists, but the words have felt strangely close: smoke obscuring what should be visible, while we continue to live, breathe, and hope inside it.
My memories of haze are entangled with another source of unease from those years: the outbreaks of terrible violence[iii] between Dayaks and Madurese communities across the border in Kalimantan. Neither of those names is as straightforward as that sentence makes them sound. Dayak[iv] is itself a historically and politically layered category, used across Borneo for Indigenous Peoples with distinct languages, territories, and histories. In colonial Sarawak, “Sea Dayak” and “Land Dayak” were used principally for peoples now known as Iban and Bidayuh, while the term has since also been reworked as a wider political identity and basis for solidarity. Dayak communities across Borneo were and still are living through profound pressures on their land, customary authority, and political life, although these took different forms in Kalimantan, Sarawak, and Sabah.
The Madurese are a people originating from the island of Madura, off Java, whose presence in Kalimantan also has a long and uneven history. In West Kalimantan, small numbers were arriving by the early 20th century; others were brought as contract or indentured labor in the 1930s and 1940s, while later decades brought considerably greater migration. Some arrived through Indonesia’s state-sponsored transmigration program, but Madurese movement to Kalimantan cannot be reduced to transmigration alone (Human Rights Watch, 1997).
I knew who the Madurese were then, although understanding of how they had come to be in Kalimantan was much less complicated than it is now. I remember thinking of them largely through the story of transmigrasi, rather than the longer and more uneven histories of movement and settlement I have since come to understand.
I do not mean that the haze caused the violence, or even that I understood them then as parts of the same political ecology. But my memory pieces them together haphazardly. What returns is an atmosphere around those years: smoke, disturbing reports from across the border, and people wondering what would happen next. I remember the border being closed, and a peculiar sense of stillness. Kalimantan was on the other side of an international border, yet it never felt entirely elsewhere.
There was another reason it did not feel distant. During the first outbreak of violence, my father told us that people had come to see him in Kuching with the mangkok merah, the red bowl, a call to war. He declined it.
I wish I had asked him much more about what happened, although knowing my father, he might well have become impatient with the interrogation. In an earlier essay, I wrote about how he would chastise me for asking too many direct questions about our culture and family histories, something I eventually came to understand as a methodological lesson of its own. I learned more from being around stories and conversations than from insisting upon answers (Rubis, 2024).
What I understood even then was that the approach to him mattered. My father was a Bidayuh political leader who had recently gone through a serious political rupture that had left him outside the state cabinet. There was anger among native communities on his behalf, and he had political momentum. If he had wanted to mobilize that grievance, there were people who might have followed him. Someone had decided that his participation mattered. I do not know what was said when the bowl was brought to him. I know only what he later told us: it came, and he refused it.
The red bowl and Sarawak, February 1997
Political ecologist Nancy Lee Peluso’s reconstruction of the 1996-1997 West Kalimantan violence records that on February 2, 1997, the mangkok merah was passed as mobilization widened. She describes what had been associated with particular Dayak communities extending much further. Her account notes that “As far away as Sarawak, Dayaks of all language groups … were called” (Peluso, 2008, p. 50).
Reporting in the Far Eastern Economic Review provides another part of the historical record. On the same date, February 2, 1997, Malaysia sealed the Sarawak-West Kalimantan frontier, reportedly because of fears that Sarawak Dayaks might cross into West Kalimantan to join the fighting. The report also described the mangkok merah passing from village to village as the conflict escalated (McBeth & Cohen, 1997).
Neither source independently verifies my father’s account that people came to him in Kuching. They establish the political world within which his remembering becomes historically intelligible. A call to wider Dayak solidarity was reaching towards Sarawak, and the prospect of participation from this side of the border was serious enough for the border to be closed.
Peluso’s account goes further. The complexity of the term Dayak matters here. She follows people preparing ritually for war, traveling through the region, assembling at command posts, and moving beyond narrower linguistic and territorial affiliations. Her argument goes beyond a pre-existing Dayak community mobilizing to defend a pre-existing Dayak territory. She examines how mobilization itself helped produce a broader racialized territory and political category, describing one concern of her paper as understanding “the processes by which ethnic categories are constructed through violence” (Peluso, 2008, p. 48).
In 1997, a wider “Dayak” political identity was being expressed through violence, but it was also being consolidated through it. The mobilization helped create the scale of the political community it claimed to represent, summoning people belonging to different linguistic groups and histories into a larger we. The circulation of the red bowl did more than affirm an existing Dayak political body; it extended a claim of solidarity across those differences, and eventually across an international border.
Peluso’s argument interests me for another reason. She was not only trying to explain an outbreak of ethnic violence. She was interested in how ethnic categories themselves could be made through violence. The mobilization drew people with different languages and histories into a wider Dayak political identity. The red bowl did not have to stop at an international border because the we being invoked did not stop there.
I keep returning to that we.
Solidarity is something I hold dear. Much of Indigenous politics depends upon recognizing that what happens to another people may concern us too. Indigenous Peoples have created political solidarities across enormous differences in language, territory, history, and relationships with states. Those solidarities have made it possible to defend lands and rights that states and other powerful actors have repeatedly failed to protect. I know the force of saying: these are our people; what is happening to them concerns us.
The history in Kalimantan makes that sentence difficult without making it untrue.
Dayak communities have experienced profound transformations of their lands and political worlds. Logging concessions, plantations, migration and transmigration, changing access to customary territories, and the marginalization of Indigenous political authority formed part of that history. Questions of land and belonging were not imaginary grievances invented afterwards to explain the violence.[v]
Madurese communities experienced another reality. People were killed, displaced, and terrorized. Heads were taken. I find this particularly difficult to write because “headhunting” has so often been used to reduce Dayaks to a colonial stereotype of primitive violence. Refusing that stereotype cannot require making what happened disappear. Nor do I want Madurese people to enter this story only as the category against which a Dayak we was made. They were people and families living through the consequences of that violence.[vi]
Holding these histories together does not require deciding that one cancels the other. It requires asking how people who were themselves experiencing dispossession and political marginalization could, in particular historical moments and in relation to another community, exercise devastating power, while the larger structures transforming their lands remained beyond their control.
Structural marginalization is not a total social position. People can be dispossessed in relation to the state, capital, and the institutions reorganizing land, while holding very different forms of power in relation to neighbors, migrants, or other communities. The capacity to inflict violence on another community is not the same as the power to determine the political economy transforming the land.
That question feels especially uncomfortable to me because I understand the insistence that we must guard our lands and territories. I have made that argument myself. I still make it. Indigenous Peoples have had to defend territories against states, companies, and forms of development and conservation that repeatedly treat our lands as available to others. The irony is difficult to miss when Indonesia’s new capital is now being constructed in Kalimantan, while Indigenous communities in and around the capital area continue to struggle over customary lands and the consequences of development (Batubara et al., 2026; AMAN, 2026).
The violence against Madurese people does not mean that Dayaks therefore possessed the power to determine what happened and is happening to Kalimantan. Nor does Dayak dispossession make the violence against Madurese communities less terrible. It leaves me with the more difficult question of where power is being held, in which relationship, and at what historical moment. Power is not held once and for all by one category of people; its location changes with the relationship, the scale, and the historical moment.
Remembering categories
There is a smaller contemporary question that I cannot entirely separate from this history. Much of my present work takes place in global biodiversity politics, where the distinction between Indigenous Peoples and local communities is becoming increasingly politically charged.
As a Malaysian Bidayuh,[vii] I know where I stand within the wider Dayak and Indigenous political we. The fact that Dayak is itself a historically layered and politically reworked category does not make that belonging less real to me. I recognize my Dayak kindred across the border in the same way, even though Indonesia has its own legal and political vocabulary around masyarakat adat and masyarakat hukum adat (broadly, customary communities and customary-law communities). In a 2022 response to UN special procedures, Indonesia asked that the nationally recognized terms masyarakat adat and masyarakat hukum adat be used in communications addressed to the Indonesian Government, rather than assuming that the international category “Indigenous Peoples” maps straightforwardly onto the Indonesian context (Permanent Mission of Indonesia, 2022). In other contexts, peoples who understand themselves as Indigenous may not be recognized as such by the state, or may appear within national and international frameworks under different terminology.
The history between Dayaks and Madurese communities makes me wonder, however, what these categories can actually tell us about our relationships with one another. The categories may be necessary for particular institutional and legal purposes, especially where the distinct collective rights of Indigenous Peoples must be protected. But they cannot tell us in advance where power, belonging, or responsibility lie.
Recognition is not relationship. A category can name a difference, including a difference that matters profoundly for rights, without determining how people within and across those categories should relate to one another. Nor does a history of structural marginalization settle every relationship of power in which people may find themselves.
A political ecology of remembering
This brings me back to an argument I made years ago in A Political Ecology of Remembering for Dayaks of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. That essay also began with an incomplete story from my father. He told me how our ancestors had refused to pay taxes to the Sultan of Brunei’s collectors, eventually killing them after deciding that they had endured enough oppression. The story eventually became entangled with another one: how Dayak warriors seeking help came upon a white man, and how James Brooke would later become the first White Rajah of Sarawak. When I asked my father why our people had needed a white man to save them, why one of us could not have become Rajah instead, he became impatient. He had not been there. I was asking too many questions (Rubis, 2024).
I returned to that ambiguity later in the essay through what I called contra-remembering. Some Dayak activists appeared to remember Brooke rule more favorably than a decolonial account might expect. I argued that this did not necessarily amount to nostalgia for colonial rule. Remembering Brooke could instead work politically in the present: as a way of shaming contemporary Dayak political elites for failing their responsibilities to less-advantaged kindred and native customary lands, and of keeping the customary rights debate wrenched open against political closure (Rubis, 2024).
What interested me, then, was not whether a memory of the past was properly favorable or properly critical. It was what remembering was doing in the present. A story of colonial rule could become a critique of postcolonial power. A story of violent refusal could preserve Indigenous agency without yielding a simple account of what followed. And an incomplete story could remain politically alive precisely because it had not been resolved.
The memories returning through the haze bring me back to that argument, but from a more difficult direction. If remembering is a political practice, then recovering Indigenous agency cannot mean deciding in advance what forms of agency we are willing to remember. Some memories make refusal legible against structures of domination. Others force us to ask what our people were able to do in relation to people who were differently situated, and what was done in the name of a collective we.
This is why I keep returning to the red bowl.
The call that reached my father was not coming from the state or from an outside institution. It was coming from a wider Dayak we. Whatever words accompanied it, the political claim carried by the bowl was one of solidarity. Something was happening to Dayaks across the border, and other Dayaks were being called. I do not know why my father refused. I am reluctant to give his decision a political theory that he never gave me. I do not know whether he was thinking about the violence against Madurese people. I do not know whether he was thinking about the political situation in Sarawak, about his responsibilities as a leader, about the consequences of answering the call, or about something entirely different. He is no longer here for me to ask.
The question matters to me now because much of my earlier thinking about Indigenous refusal was directed outward: refusal of colonial authority, imposed governance, dispossession, and the appropriation of Indigenous lands and political life. The red bowl leaves me wondering about something I had thought about much less: what happens when the call comes from within.
Belonging to the political we does not place us outside it as neutral judges. We inherit its histories, its grievances, and its obligations. Solidarity can be necessary because nobody survives political marginalization alone. But the fact that a call comes from one’s own people does not tell us everything about what answering it would mean.
I do not know whether that is what my father thought. I know that the bowl came. And he declined it.
Still in the air
Yesterday the weather finally changed. After weeks without rain, the wind came suddenly, followed by thunder and a hard downpour. I opened the windows for the first time in weeks. I thought the haze might finally clear.
The rain stopped almost as suddenly as it had begun. The haze remained even after cloud seeding.[viii]
What reaches us from elsewhere is often partial: smoke whose source I cannot see from my window; a story my father told only partially, perhaps because I did not ask enough questions or because he did not wish to answer them; Peluso’s reconstruction of events written years later; my own memories of a closed border and a hand disappearing in front of my face.
Remembering does not necessarily resolve these fragments into a single account. I am less certain now that it should.
Nearing the end of writing this, I found myself listening again to R.E.D., a North American collaboration bringing Indigenous, Black, and Iraqi voices together. Narcy described it as people coming together across their different histories to counter narratives constructed about their communities (Darville, 2016). One line rapped in R.E.D. stays with me: “What I forgot is better than whatever they remember.”
I hear it now alongside the question of the we: not as a reason to distrust solidarity, but as a reminder that these categories cannot tell us in advance where solidarity should begin or end.
Nearly 30 years later, I find myself thinking again about a red bowl that traveled across Borneo.
Acknowledgments
I thank K’eguro Macharia, whose public writing has taught me not to become too comfortable in the categories I inhabit and to resist the demand that every story be made complete. I am also grateful to my family, my kin, and K.E. for years of occasional but intellectually generative conversations that have repeatedly opened new ways of thinking for me about questions of Dayak politics, memory, and belonging. I am especially grateful to P.L. for questions about Indigenous representation in global multilateral spaces that were generative for my thinking, including some whose significance I understood only much later.
For my parents, whose stories are still continuing.
Bibliography
Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN). (2026, August 5). AMAN, Masyarakat Adat Suku Balik Sepaku menggugat UU IKN Mahkamah Konstitusi. https://www.aman.or.id/news/read/2457
Batubara, Bosman, Kei Otsuki, Femke van Noorloos, & Michelle Kooy. (2026). Everyday land speculation without production in state-led urbanization: The case of Indonesia’s new capital city. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 58 (6). https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X261447120
Borneo Post. (2026, September 7). MetMalaysia Sarawak: Cloud seeding ops successful but results lackluster, focus will be on catchment areas. The Borneo Post. https://www.theborneopost.com/2026/09/07/metmalaysia-swak-cloud-seeding-ops-successful-but-results-lacklustre-focus-will-be-on-catchment-areas/
Darville, Jordan. (2016, July 21). A Tribe Called Red shares “R.E.D.” with Yasiin Bey, Narcy, and Black Bear. The FADER. https://www.thefader.com/2016/07/21/tribe-called-red-yasiin-bey-narcy-black-bear
Human Rights Watch. (1997, December 1). Communal violence in West Kalimantan. https://www.hrw.org/report/1997/12/01/communal-violence-west-kalimantan
Human Rights Watch. (2001, September). Human rights developments: Indonesia – Central Kalimantan. https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/asia/indo-bck-sept.htm
McBeth, John, & Margot Cohen. (1997, February 20). Murder and mayhem: Ethnic animosity explodes in bloodshed. Far Eastern Economic Review. (Reproduced by Asia Pacific Solidarity Network). https://www.asia-pacific-solidarity.net/news/1997-02-20/murder-and-mayhem-ethnic-animosity-explodes-bloodshed.html
Natural Resources and Environment Board Sarawak. (2026, September 4). Daily haze watch. https://www.nreb.gov.my/web/subpage/webpage_view/530
Peluso, Nancy Lee. (2008). A political ecology of violence and territory in West Kalimantan. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 49 (1), 48–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8373.2008.00360.x
Permanent Mission of the Republic of Indonesia to the United Nations, WTO, and Other International Organizations in Geneva. (2022). Response concerning terminology of Indigenous Peoples / masyarakat adat and masyarakat hukum adat. https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadFile?gId=36826
Reuters. (2026, September 4). Malaysia declares emergency in Serian district in Sarawak state due to haze. https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/malaysias-sarawak-declares-emergency-serian-district-due-haze-2026-09-04/
Rubis, June. (2024). A political ecology of remembering for Dayaks of Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo. In Thinking with the South (pp. 249–274). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110780567-012
Smokey Mountain. (1991). Paraiso [Song written and arranged by Ryan Cayabyab]. On Paraiso. Musiko/BMG Records (Pilipinas). https://www.shazam.com/song/1889246544/paraiso
[i] In early September, official readings placed Kuching’s air in the very unhealthy to hazardous range with an Air Pollution Index in the mid-500s, while severe haze across Sarawak prompted cloud-seeding operations and an emergency declaration in nearby Serian (Natural Resources and Environment Board Sarawak, 2026; Reuters, 2026).
[ii] Paraiso (“Paradise”), written by Filipino composer Ryan Cayabyab and recorded by Smokey Mountain in 1991, draws its imagery from Manila’s Smokey Mountain dumpsite. Its environmental lament is also an assertion of dignity: a refusal to allow a life lived amid pollution and poverty to be seen only through the pitying gaze of the outside world (Smokey Mountain, 1991).
[iii] The 1996-1997 violence in West Kalimantan killed hundreds and displaced thousands of Madurese. Another major outbreak in Central Kalimantan in 2001 killed around 500 Madurese and displaced more than 150,000 people (Human Rights Watch, 1997; Human Rights Watch, 2001).
[iv] In later Sarawak political discourse, Dayak has sometimes been broadened into an umbrella category encompassing Iban, Bidayuh, and Orang Ulu peoples, although that wider usage has never displaced the distinct identities of Orang Ulu peoples, and has not necessarily been their preferred form of self-identification. Its history therefore includes both external classifications and later political reworking without implying that all the peoples brought within the category have inhabited it in the same way.
[v] Human Rights Watch’s 1997 investigation, while cautioning against reducing the conflict to a single cause, documented the very real effects of New Order development and commercial land appropriation on Dayak communities (Human Rights Watch, 1997).
[vi] [6] Human Rights Watch, 1997; Human Rights Watch, 2001.
[vii]In Malaysia, domestic legal terminology varies by region. Federal policy identifies Orang Asli in Peninsular Malaysia, Anak Negeri Sabah, and Natives of Sarawak as Indigenous Peoples, while the Federal Constitution and Sarawak law use the category “native” for the Indigenous Peoples of Sarawak. Bidayuh or Land Dayaks are among the peoples recognized within this Sarawak native framework.
[viii] The next morning, MetMalaysia Sarawak said that the cloud-seeding operations had produced rain, but not in the volume hoped for; strong winds had carried many of the clouds away, and the operation was being extended with a greater focus on dam catchment areas (Borneo Post, 2026).
