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Updated: May 23, 2025


According to Nieuwenhuis the Bahaus and Kenyahs both remember that they came from Apo Kayan at the headwaters of the Kayan river; they were formerly known as the Pari tribes. In all the tribes of this group the social organisation is in the main similar, and this affinity is borne out by their material culture, thus they may be regarded as originally one people.

Nieuwenhuis' book , is the extent of our knowledge of the tatu of the inhabitants of the Kahayan river. The latter illustration shows a man tatued with a characteristic check pattern over the torso, stomach, and arms, but there is no reference to the plate in the text. Our figure is copied from a drawing by Dr. H. Hiller, of Philadelphia.

Doctor Nieuwenhuis on his journey ascended some distance up the Tjehan tributary, and in the neighbourhood of Lung Karang his native collector found an orchid which was named phalaenopsis gigantea, and is known only from the single specimen in the botanical garden at Buitenzorg, Java. On a visit there my attention was drawn to the unusual size of its leaves and its white flowers.

In the region of the Upper Mahakam River, above the rapids, where we had now arrived, it is estimated there are living nearly 10,000 Dayaks of various tribes, recognised under the general name Bahau, which they also employ themselves, besides their tribal names. The first European to enter the Mahakam district was the Dutch ethnologist, Doctor A.W. Nieuwenhuis, at the end of the last century.

The rise of a socialist party under the enthusiastic leadership of a former Lutheran pastor, Domela Nieuwenhuis, added to the perplexities of the position. It soon became evident that a revision of the Fundamental Law and an extension of the franchise, which the king no longer opposed, was inevitable.

This belief appears to be universal amongst the Kenyah-Klemantan of the Upper Mahakam and Batang Kayan. On Pl. 86 of Nieuwenhuis' book is figured the thigh tatu of a Long Glat woman; the front of the thigh is occupied with two rows of the hornbill MOTIF to which reference has already been made.

The followers of Domela Nieuwenhuis, whose openly avowed principles were "the destruction of actual social conditions by all means legal and illegal," were after 1894 known as "the Socialist Bond."

Nieuwenhuis, to study the people, their customs and conditions, and by its generous expenditure upon the publication of the handsome volumes in which he has embodied his valuable reports. On the second journey this intrepid traveller penetrated to the head of the Batang Kayan, and there made the acquaintance of the same Kenyahs who had recently visited the Resident of the Baram.

Under this very elastic heading he would include the Ot-Danum, Siang, and Ulu Ajar of Nieuwenhuis, but we treat of these in the next section. The ethnology of the Barito, Kahayan, and Katingan river-basins sadly needs further investigation; nothing of importance has been published on this region since the appearance of Schwaner's book on Borneo more than fifty years ago.

He distinguishes two main races, a dolichocephalic and a brachycephalic, terming the former Indonesian, the latter Proto-Malay. Doctor A.W. Nieuwenhuis, who about the end of the last century made important researches in the upper parts of the Kapuas and Mahakam Rivers and at Apo Kayan, found the Ot-Danum, Bahau-Kenyah, and Punan to be three distinct groups of that region.

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