Edith Mirante

Edith Mirante has roamed Asia since the early 1980s, investigating human rights and environmental issues. She is the founder of Project Maje, which distributes information on ethnic struggles in Burma (Myanmar) and is the author of two books on that country’s civil war. Her latest book is “The Wind in the Bamboo: Journeys in Search of Asia's ‘Negrito” Indigenous Peoples” about marginalized hunter-gatherers who survive in Malaysia, the Philippines and India’s Andaman Islands. She has presented lectures at the Explorer’s Club, Society of Women Geographers, American Museum of Natural History, Oxford (the university in the U.K. and the one in Mississippi.) Tattooed by a Shan spirit doctor and carries a Boy Scout compass.

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Mardi Gras Museums You Should Visit in New Orleans

Street Parade Culture Lovingly Curated by Louisiana Collectors

Two extraordinary private museums reveal a panoply of New Orleans African American Mardi Gras culture. Owner/curators Ronald Lewis of The House of Dance and Feathers and Sylvester Francis of The Backstreet Cultural Museum preserve the vibrant regalia of costumed marchers who take to the streets in the Crescent City during the weeks leading up to Fat Tuesday (Feb. 13 this year.)

The House of Dance and Feathers is in the Lower 9th Ward and Mr. Lewis had to rebuild his collection after the catastrophic effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It is contained (barely) in two small buildings in back of his home.

Open by appointment (directions at www.houseofdanceandfeathers.org) or on a bike tour, the House is an enchanting melange of artifacts, photos, costumes and masks and Mr. Lewis has a story to give context to any item you might ask about, including those of the macabre Skull and Bones Gangs and the all-female Baby Doll marchers.

The Backstreet Museum is in a former funeral home near Louis Armstrong Park in the Treme neighborhood (hours at www.backstreetmuseum.org.) Mr. Francis, has assembled a glorious display of Mardi Gras Indian costumes. This local African American tradition honors Native Americans who hid escaped slaves and the intricately beaded and feathered costumes are created from scratch every year.

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Troop Withdrawal Crucial for Peace in Myanmar

By removing occupying Tatmadaw troops from ethnic regions, the source of conflict is removed, writes Edith Mirante.

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My new travel essay “Beasts of the Northern Mountains” can be read at: https://maptia.com/edithmirante/stories/beasts-of-the-northern-mountains

The article, with photos, describes my (successful) search for mithuns in remote northern Chin State, Burma. What’s a mithun? Here’s an excerpt:

“Mithuns (bos frontalis, also spelled mithan or mythun) are bovines, as are cattle and bison. Mithuns are the fewest in number of the large animals domesticated by humans. They live only in a few rugged corners of Asia, usually at elevations between 1,000 and 3,000 meters above sea level. Northeast India has about 300,000 mithuns (often called gayal in India.) Perhaps 35,000 live in northwest Burma (Myanmar), mainly in remote Chin State. Smaller populations have been found in Bhutan, southern China’s Yunnan province and the hill tracts of Bangladesh.

These dark-coated, white-legged ungulates are 120 to 170 cm. tall at the shoulder. They are descended from the much larger wild gaur, a vulnerable-to-extinction forest ox I once glimpsed in an Indian wildlife sanctuary. Mithuns roam forests by day, browsing on leaves and return to their owners at night. According to Chin political leader Pu Lian UK, whose family kept mithuns, ‘They like salt very much and that makes them very easy to rear. They know their master's voice. If their master makes a usual way of shouting loud to call them to come to him, all of the herds will run to the voice.’”

Mithuns have been used for ceremonial sacrifice and are a symbol of an indigenous society in transition. Read more at: https://maptia.com/edithmirante/stories/beasts-of-the-northern-mountains

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Chin State needs support for local groups, research, attention. Photo essay on environmental challenges in The Irrawaddy. New Project Maje report, "Unsheltered Heights: Northern Chin State’s Environmental Issues.” www.projectmaje.org/chin_environmental_report.htm

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The newest Project Maje report is "Unsheltered Heights: Northern Chin State’s Environmental Issues.” It provides an overview of the environmental situation in the northern mountains of the poorest region in Burma (Myanmar.) Topics include mining, forests, water and energy.

www.projectmaje.org/chin_environmental_report.htm

From the introduction: Chin State remains highly vulnerable to exploitation through non-sustainable resource extraction, which may be presented as beneficial to the State although it really is not. Burma's environmental regulatory framework is weak and government officials are perceived as easily corrupted. The people of northern Chin State need:

transparency on proposed projects or business ventures determination of environmental impacts clear procedures for informed consent land rights protection Land rights, including traditional land use should be clarified, strengthened and respected. In September 2016, a settlement of people displaced in the 2015 flood disaster was forcibly removed to make way for a teak plantation near Falam. Vulnerable people without established legal rights to land should be treated humanely.

There is an urgent need for scientific expertise in the State. Research studies and other types of academic involvement should be encouraged. Many people from Chin State who have been living overseas for education or work have excellent ideas for preserving and restoring the State's environment while enhancing local livelihood opportunities. They should be encouraged to use their abilities to initiate, consult on and sponsor projects at local and State-wide levels.

The mountain watershed of northern Chin State has been severely damaged by logging, field-clearing and other erosion. In 2015 deadly floods brought on by heavy monsoon rains and Cyclone Komen displaced over a million people in Burma. Hundreds in Chin State lost their homes to landslides and the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation reported that over 190,000 acres were flooded on the plains of neighboring Sagaing Division. With climate change more flood-causing conditions are to be expected, so protecting this vital watershed is now more urgent than ever.

Northern Chin State is at a crossroads where its people may be led down the road to resource extraction leading to terrible "natural" disasters or may instead choose a more cautious and well-informed path leading to sustainability, self-sufficiency and watershed protection. To assist with awareness and action, this Project Maje report contains summaries of environmental issues currently affecting northern Chin State. Links to relevant news articles and reports are included.

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Nickel and Dimed on Frog Mountain

Chin State and Sagaing Division are in need of roads, not a nickel mine.

My new article on nickel mine schemes in Burma (Myanmar) and the villagers of Chin State who oppose this potential watershed devastation.

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Viewing the Colors of the Past

A pair of wings enclosed in amber, found in Myanmar within South East Asia, have been analyzed by scientists and x-ray scans indicate that they likely belong to juvenile enantiornithes. Both the structure and arrangement of the feathers on each wing specimen proved to be quite similar to what we see on birds today. Appearing uniformly black encased within the amber, the fossilized feathers show up in shades of white, silver and brown when viewed under a microscope.

Keep reading

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There are only three Sumatran rhinoceroses left in Malaysia and time is running out for conservationists to save our gentle giants from becoming extinct.

In Operation Sumatran Rhino, a documentary by National Geographic Channel, the plight of the endangered rhinos is given a spotlight along with the challenges faced by the Borneo Rhino Alliance (Bora), a non-governmental organisation based in Sabah.

The smallest rhinoceros species but the loudest in vocal capacity (they are also known as singing rhino), the Sumatran rhino is a close relative of the ice age’s woolly rhino and consumes a diet of rainforest plants leaves.

Before it became critically endangered, the Sumatran rhino roamed freely in the rainforests, cloud forests and swamps of Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, China, India, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Today, fewer than 100 are left. In August last year, the Sumatran rhino was declared extinct in the wild in Malaysia.

According to Bora executive director Datuk Dr John Payne, the process of the Sumatran rhinos’ extinction began over a thousand years ago due to habitat loss. By the 1930s, it became clear extinction was inevitable.

Their habitats continue to disappear with palm oil and logging taking up fertile land.

“The palm oil sector has an ethical responsibility to shoulder a bigger role in conserving wildlife. Unfortunately, the government does not share that view, and tends to support the oil palm sector much more than nature conservation — that ought to change,” Payne said.

Rhino horns are deemed valuable in traditional Chinese medicine and poaching too, became a major factor for their speedy decline, despite proven to have no medicinal value.

Just last week, the Wildlife Justice Commission announced a public hearing in The Hague, the Netherlands, after a year-long investigation of a Vietnamese wildlife trafficking hub. Among the vast volumes of endangered species traded were 579 rhino horns, a figure that makes up half the amount of South African rhinos poached last year, according to the Wildlife Justice Commission executive director Olivia Swaak-Goldman.

In Malaysia, hope now rests on the three rhinos under the care of Bora, located in Tabin Wildlife Reserve.

Payne and his team believe the only viable solution to save the last Sumatran rhinos is to capture all remaining rhinos in the wild and breed them no matter what it takes.

“All rhinos now in the wild have to be brought into managed, fenced conditions so that fertile females and males can be in the same place as often as possible, bearing in mind females ovulate only about once per month,” explained Payne, who has been studying rhinos for the past 40 years.

Although Bora has one fertile male and two females, natural conception proved futile when it was revealed both the female rhinos have reproductive abnormalities. Their only hope is in-vitro fertilisation to produce a rhino embryo. With scientific advancements and the help of experts from Germany, Italy and Indonesia, the possibility of implanting a test tube embryo into a healthy surrogate is the best case scenario to ensure their survival.

Providing a glimpse into their personality traits, Payne elaborates: “Their sense of hearing is moderate and sight is poor. They rely mainly on odour to detect danger and to locate one another.”

At Bora, no one works closer to the trio of rhinos — females Puntong and Iman, and Sabah’s only captive male rhino, Kretam, affectionately known as Tam — than field manager and veterinarian Dr Zainal Zainnudin who has been working with rhinos since 1985.

The best part of Zainal’s job is interacting with these ancient creatures and discovering their unique personalities. Tam the bull, he says, “is a gentle creature who comes back on time for breakfast and dinner.”

He also loves wallowing in mud pools and “eats like a gentleman.”

While the intelligent Tam can sense changes in his night quarters, Puntong isn’t very fussy when it comes to sleeping arrangements.

“She is a princess that will take her own sweet time to come back for mealtimes — many times, the keeper had to go and get her out of her mud wallow for breakfast,” said Zainal, adding that Puntong is the most stubborn of the three but loves to be touched.

The third and newest addition to Bora, Iman, is said to be the noisiest of the lot and loves vocalising, even during feeding. While she enjoys wallowing and returns regularly to eat her meals, a tumour in her uterus makes her rather temperamental.

Endearing traits aside, the controversial million dollar question some scientists have asked is: If saving all the world’s endangered species costs billions of dollars and is a part of evolution, what are the benefits?

To put things into perspective, Payne said: “Every day, trillions of dollars circulate in the global economy. At least billions are locked up by wealthy individuals to preserve their power and wealth. The amounts going into species conservation are less than trivial, a tiny fraction of a percentage of global human wealth.”

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photo: The Borneo Project (this is how rainforest ends up when oil palm plantations take over.)

September 21, 2016 is an international day of awareness about the environmental damage caused by monoculture plantations of commodities such as oil palm. Below are a few excerpts from my book “The Wind in the Bamboo: A Journey in Search of Asia’s Indigenous ‘Negrito’ People.” These excerpts describe the devastation caused by oil palm plantations on mainland Malaysia and the degradation of the land rights and environment of Orang Asli indigenous people. For more information about Malaysia’s oil palm industry and the terrible effects on the Orang Asli see this Al Jazeera article on the website of the Center for Orang Asli Concerns: www.coac.org.my/main.php?section=news&article_id=169

Excerpts from “The Wind in the Bamboo: A Journey in Search of Asia’s Indigenous ‘Negrito’ People” by Edith Mirante, Orchid Press:

From Taiwan another flight brought me to the biggest city in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur (nicknamed KL.) Oil palm plantation contours were visible from the air like the whorls of so many dirty fingerprints.

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The last scraps of non-park forest in Malaysia were being logged and replaced by oil palm plantations, in apparently unstoppable ecocide.

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I made my way by bus back to KL, seeing evidence everywhere of the oil palm scam that had swept the nation like the science fiction Triffids, a plague of soil-depleting short-lived palms replacing long-lived forest for short term profit.

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It was just a five hour straight shot to Baling, the town near the Kensiu settlement I had visited a couple of times in 2007. As the bus sped along the oil palm highway, I imagined a blooming pink desert of spiky jatropha replacing the palm trees when they died off. Plantation palms had a life span of about 25 years before the fruit got too high to pick; at that point they’d need to be cut down. Nutrients leached out of plantation soil, so post-palm earthen terraces were not a pretty sight, barren eroding red mud ziggurats. I found it bizarre that Southeast Asia, such a wonderland of biodiversity, was now this devil’s playground of monoculture non-native species like oil palm and jatropha, lakes and ponds stocked with tilapia. Once upon a time, the “Negritos” had found a wealth of species which had evolved to thrive in the Southeast Asian climate and terrain. Now they witnessed the drastic replacement of flora and fauna with things alien, the day of the Triffids.

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I caught another quiet bus south to Gua Musang, a town near Taman Negara’s northwest corner. The bus went past the turnoff for the “Rabbit Proof Fence” school I’d visited the year before and traveled through another paradise lost landscape, dirt ramparts for oil palm, gloomy rubber plantations, log yards. I walked across the road from the Gua Musang bus stop to the Kesedar Inn, an old fashioned hotel compound run by a state development agency whose website included a telling typo: “Kesedar too is not logging behind in giving attention to the eradication of poverty.” Kesedar’s rural development programs of course included oil palm and rubber plantations.

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It was raining rather hard as we drove through oil palm land for about an hour. Everything seemed to belong to FELDA (Federal Land Development Authority), a Malaysian government agency which had resettled poor Malays into new rural villages and distributed plots of oil palm for them to tend, forming a vast national plantation system. After a wrong turn deeper into FELDA land and a swerve to avoid an oncoming palm fruit truck, Din announced, “There is the real jungle. It is the Taman Negara border, the park. No more oil palm.”

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As his Proton [car] splashed unsteadily through Milo-colored creek floods in FELDA land, Din remarked, “Rubber trees, palm oil, rubber trees, palm oil,” the defeated mantra of a Malaysian eco-tourism guide.

=== www.windinthebamboo.com

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“Men hunt, women gather” — for a long time that was the conventional academic wisdom about foraging societies. But in the 1970s anthropologists Kirk and Karen Endicott were living with the Batek indigenous people of mainland Malaysia’s rainforest. They observed a young woman named Chinloy heading into the deep forest to hunt with her top-of-the-line blowpipe. Paradigms shifted, and the Endicotts' documentation led to realizations that in small band foraging societies, gender roles are often very fluid. Among the Bateks and other hunter-gatherers of Asia, men frequently take care of children, women can hunt and anyone might search for forest products.

Of course this is all made more difficult in the 21st Century by the decimation of the forest and seacoast environments that support that way of life and by the lack of land rights protection for the indigenous people who have long survived that way. In my book “The Wind in the Bamboo: A Journey in Search of Asia’s ’Negrito' Indigenous Peoples” www.windinthebamboo.com I describe how I found Chinloy in 2008 (2nd from left, with her family in this photo.) Her daughters still hunted sometimes on the edge of Malaysia’s Taman Negara (National Park) but oil palm plantations have replaced forest, marginalizing and endangering the Bateks and other Orang Asli people.

Edith Mirante

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Faces of the North Dakota pipeline protest: 'Sacred land is who we are'

Native Americans and protesters await a ruling on an injunction to stop work on the $3.7bn pipeline they say threatens their water and protected land

Standing for their water, their future.

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Fleeing persecution at home, thousands of Rohingya land in Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 30 — Malaysia is considering opening up its job market for thousands of refugees, who are mostly Rohingya and up until now have no legal right to work in the country. Although not a signatory to the United Nations Refugee

Malaysia is considering opening up its job market for thousands of refugees, who are mostly Rohingya and up until now have no legal right to work in the country.

Although not a signatory to the United Nations Refugee Convention, Muslim-majority Malaysia has been hosting a large number of Muslim Rohingya, who are shunned and persecuted in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

Here are some facts about refugees in Malaysia and the Rohingya:

- As of end of June this year, there are some 150,700 refugees and asylum seekers in Malaysia, South-east Asia’s third-largest economy with a population of 30 million. Among them are 34,000 children aged below 18.

- About 90 per cent of the country’s refugees and asylum seekers are from Myanmar. Topping the list are 53,140 Rohingya, followed by ethnic Chin from the country, Myanmar Muslims, Rakhines and other ethnicities.

- The remaining refugees and asylum seekers are from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestinian territories.

- The Rohingya are often referred to as “Bengali” in Myanmar, a term that implies they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, although Rohingya families have lived in the area for generations. They are stateless as the state does not recognise their citizenship.

- Sectarian violence between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state in 2012 displaced about 145,000 people and around 20,000 homes were destroyed. An estimated one million Rohingya live in Rakhine.

- Worsening violence sparked an exodus by boat. Some 25,000 Rohingya and economic migrants from Bangladesh boarded smugglers’ boats between January and March 2015, almost double the number over the same period in 2014. An estimated 300 people died at sea during this period as a result of starvation, dehydration and abuse by boat crews.

- Thousands of Rohingya and Bangladeshis were left stranded in the sea for weeks in May 2015 after Thai authorities cracked down on a popular smuggling route, sparking the Asian migrant crisis.

- Malaysia and Indonesia ended the impasse by agreeing to offer temporary shelter to the boat people on condition that a resettlement and repatriation process would be carried out within a year by the international community.

- Of over 1,000 people who landed in Malaysia in May 2015, 371 were identified as Rohingya and “of concern” to the UN refugee agency. So far, only 36 have been resettled in the United States, leaving in May this year.

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Go Now: The Ziro Music Festival in Arunachal Pradesh

There are a number of reasons to visit Arunachal Pradesh: gorgeous landscapes, incredible wildlife, delicious local fare, and mugs of marua (millet beer). This month, there’s also the Ziro Festival of Music, between September 22 and 25, 2016. It’s the break you’ve been hankering for: An outdoor f

This seems pretty cool, with reminder to be respectful of local Apatani culture.

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The Mammoth Pirates

In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush is under way.

Could have been sustainable, instead it ended up as wreckage of rivers.

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Myanmar’s Shan minority fights to preserve culture

Ethnic groups are turning to music and radio to keep their traditions alive under a democratic government.

For musician Hsai Leng, singing is not just a passion, it’s a calling.

A former soldier, Leng has traded his gun for the microphone to encourage his people, Myanmar’s Shan minority, to preserve their ethnic traditions.

For more than 50 years, the Shan, along with other minorities, fought Myanmar’s former military government for the right to practise their own cultures.

But now, with the country under a democratic leader, they finally see hope.

“We are the young generation,” Leng says. “I want to use the music to call on people to pay attention to our nation.”

A new law was introduced last year, which allows ethnic groups to broadcast radio programmes for the first time in their own languages.

Broadcasters in areas such as Wan Hai welcome the change.

“Our radio is very important for our audience because some people, like pregnant women, don’t know what to do about their health,” says Nang Seng Reun, of Wan Hai radio station.

“So we can provide the information for them through the radio. We tell them how they can take care of their baby and their health.”

Despite the strides to lift censorship, minority leaders feel more needs to be done to preserve their cultures and bring ethnic languages to the state schools.

"The Shan language is part of our nationality,” says Nang Jam Kham, of the New Generation school.

“We cannot ignore it. It is important for us to hold on to our Shan language.”

State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi has set up a new ethnic affairs ministry to address these concerns.

After decades of military rule, Myanmar’s minorities are hopeful they may finally get the recognition they have been striving for.

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In 1991 I interviewed these Rohingya refugees from Burma. They were terribly persecuted then, which forced them to flee to cyclone-swept Bangladesh. I described how I found out about their precarious lives in my book “Down the Rat Hole: Adventures Underground on Burma’s Frontiers.”

Although much has changed for the better in Burma/Myanmar since then, the persecution of the Rohingyas and other Muslim people is even worse now. Vulnerable to genocide, they have been violently attacked by “Buddhist” extremists who have instigated mobs to commit mass killings, resulting in boat people refugees seeking haven in dangerous territory. Clearing them out may be to the benefit Burma’s military and commercial infrastructure projects including petroleum transport. The Rohingyas’ citizenship rights are denied despite long family residence in western Burma, and the current government has not protected them or supported their right to a self-determined identity.

Burma’s government, the region and the world have a responsibility to protect these vulnerable civilians from a small ethnic/religious minority. Their human rights to identity, safety, citizenship, history must be respected. Background on current situation (crisis in 2012): www.projectmaje.org/rohingya_2012.htm Background on Rohingyas and western Burma from 1991: http://www.projectmaje.org/pdf/journey.pdf Edith Mirante, Project Maje