Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1885 — A Curious Tribe. [ARTICLE]

A Curious Tribe.

The report of the Resident in the State of Selangore, in the Malay Peninsula, for the last year contains some curious information -with regard to “aboriginal tribes” called the Sakeis, who number between 700 and 800. They are in nine divisions, under headmen called Batins, and they live mainly by collecting gutta, rattans, and other jungle produce. As far as is known they have no form of religious worship, but they are very superstitious, believing in good and bad omens, the sacred character of certain birds, and they always desert a village as unlucky on the death of any member of the tribe. They tattoo figures on their arms, but apparently only for the sake of ornament, and do not use any specially significant figure, peculiar to each tribe, analogous to the totems of the North American Indians. They consider no kind of edible food unclean, but eat even monkeys, snakes and scorpions, which they kill by means of a blow-pipe, throwing a dart poisoned with the juice of the ipoh or upas tree. For large game they use a kind of crossrbow, consisting of a sharpened bamboo spear placed horizontally on a grooved log, and a bent sapling fastened back by a rattan cord. This cord is stretched across a patch in the jungle, and, on being touched, releases the sapling with sufficient force to drive it completely through a deer’s body. The Sakeis live in small huts made of bamboo, and thatched with leaves of the Bertam palm, raised eight feet or more above the ground. They are shy and easily frightened, but are quite harmless, and are gradually becoming accustomed to Europeans, by whom they are employed to track game and to cut paths through the jungle. They are small in stature, but are otherwise very similar in appearance to the Malays, from whom they differ, however, in usually having wavy instead of straightgrowing hair. A few Malays are attached to every Sakei community to act as go-betweens in the sale of their, produce, and the officials have received special instructions to protect aboriginal tribes.— Nature.