Fire and Rice: the value of Dayak cultural practices

By Michael Hill.

On Kalimantan – Indonesia’s part of the island of Borneo – Dayak traditional culture is deeply connected to its people’s endless cycle of fire and rice.

Dayak people in the mountainous village region of Loksado have retained their ability to use wildfire to clear their fields, but they fear politics and confusion over their highly controlled wildfires and the destructive wildfires in other areas of Kalimantan will soon lead to a ban on their practices.

If the Dayak people are prevented from continuing to use wildfire, as they have done for hundreds of years as part of their system of slash-and-burn field rotations, their culture and identity will collapse.

I was fortunate to be invited to South Kalimantan in 2024 to practice wildfire-use skills with some of Kalimantan’s last Dayak people who live a remote, traditional lifestyle using fire to prepare fields to plant rice. The Dayak people use wildfire as a tool to manage the land on which they plant, and on which they and their ancestors have always relied.

Wildfire is used by the Dayak people to clear small, field-sized, often steep pockets of mountain forest; the ash created by the wildfires fertilizes the rice fields.

I witnessed the Dayak people’s control of wildfire as a tool, and it showed me they are global leaders in managing complex wildfire-use situations. Dayak fire knowledge has tremendous value for wildland firefighting agencies worldwide.

Borneo, where the Dayak live, is the third-largest island in the world. Kalimantan’s meaning in Indonesian refers to the whole island, while in English, the term describes only the 73 per cent of the land mass located in Indonesia, containing about 70 per cent of the island’s population. Kalimantan’s land mass covers 554,150 kilometers, divided into five provinces and the non-Indonesian territories of Borneo, Brunei and East Malaysia.

Kalimantan was originally Kalamanthana, or “burning weather Island,” meaning its climate is very hot and humid.

Kalimantan is home to many cultures and the Dayak, or people of the interior, are an Indigenous group of traditional people known for their complex spiritual beliefs, welcoming hospitality to strangers, and for being proud of their culture based on their mastery of fire.

Historically, Dayak people are tied to the use of wildfire in their agricultural practices to clean up land, or slash-and-burn farming. Using fire to clear farming plots in a rotating system allows for conservation. Preselected areas or fields are used for a predetermined number of years before they are allowed to go back to nature to recover their fertility, while other fields are cleared by cutting and burning to be ready for planting until the fertile cycle is complete. Then another field is cleared and so on.

The Dayak world is rich with nature and spirits and the rotating system of agriculture and wildfires to clear land is culturally important. Clearing is extremely well controlled with organized family groups using pre-constructed fire breaks, fire-control tactics, and planning to consider terrain factors, predicted winds, and fuel conditions.

Dayak people are no longer the only Indonesians who live in the interior of Kalimantan where the rainforests long acted as a moist blanket to keep out fires or retard fire growth. Now, cultural changes are happening as the Dayak people join the wave of progress brought by globalism.

Dayak people have maintained an incredible depth of fire-use knowledge, and if given the opportunity on a global scale, this knowledge could be part of the solution to manage wildfire in response to global climate change and potentially influence international fire management practices that are sometimes created for local political gains.

Over my 16 years as an Australian bushfire firefighter, with knowledge of North American and international Indigenous fire use practices, I have observed that Australia does not possess a national set standard course on advanced fire use skills for bush firefighters to the highly refined degree of knowledge that the Dayak people of Loksado possess. A relationship between the Dayak people and the Australian bush fire agencies would be a perfect marriage and would fulfill the needs of both cultures.

My journey with the Dayak people began more than 20 years ago when I was traveling the Indonesian islands as part of a trip across Southeast Asia. While in Borneo, chance led me to a riverboat to journey with a crew of Indonesian adventurers known as Bugies. We traveled upriver deep into the heart of the island of Borneo and back.

I saw many things on the river and occasionally on land, but I was most fascinated watching the traditional Dayak riverside villages during the burning season. I watched the pockets of smoke rise from the jungle, and in other places I saw blackened, fresh-burned fields among the otherwise jungled riverbank.

As a descendant of ancestors from the people of fire in America – the Cherokee Indian Nation – I was fascinated by the Dayak people’s slash-and-burn practice and developed a soft spot for the unique system. I wanted to know so much more.

Since my journey, outside forces have not been kind to the Dayak people. In the wake of recent bad fire seasons in Kalimantan Borneo, a storyline developed that all human-caused fires were a problem and, as a result, in the dry season, all fires were forbidden by law.

In my opinion, the traditional Dayak people were wronged by this blanket no-fire mandate and on discovering this and being invited to help the Dayak tell their story of fire, I agreed without hesitation. I was trained years ago as a US Forest Service fire fuels-management and prescribed-fire use specialist, so I enjoy staying abreast of fire use and management practices worldwide.

The Dayak people showed me they deeply understand their landscape, weather and wildfire behavior. The terrain is a combination of forest and steep mountainsides, and the areas to be burned are filled with heavy fuel loads of slashed, cured bamboo alongside light highly flammable fuels; fires could easily escape if not well managed.

Watching, then helping the Dayak people burn, I felt the magic of generations of Dayak people as they shared with me their knowledge, experience, and wisdom about what wildfire can do and how to respect its dangers.

Tactics used by the Dayak people to manage fires include months of preparation of a burn site by slashing fuels to pretreat and cure them, cutting, burning, and scraping fire line perimeters that are adjusted to control changing fuel conditions, slope, and locations where a fire could breach containment lines.

Fire tools are made on the spot for single use from bamboo, water is gathered to be on standby, allied families work as a team, and every factor is carefully planned.

The Dayak people’s traditional fire management is held to an extremely high professional standard because there is so much at stake. The target is to make no mistakes, because anyone hurt would be a family member, and if a fire should escape and burn another’s land, tribal law indicates the loser of the fire must pay the damage cost, which would lead to problems retaining the old ways of fire and rice with the Indonesian government.

I watched the Dayak adjust firing patterns on burn sites of medium-to-steep complexity, but I was especially interested in the challenging ignitions across steep ground, which demonstrated knowledge and fire skills.

During one burn on a steep slope, experienced men carried fire across the top of a mountain to slowly burn a portion of the site to build in an upper-level buffer for a future massive firing event down below, while being careful not to place too much hot fire at once that could run up and against the upper fire line.

The landowner always acts as the burn boss, staging participating families with their water containers and bamboo scraper tools held ready above the burners. The burners work together to hold the upslope fire line perimeters while the ignitions take place below to prevent any ember-driven spot fires above from escaping, or to stop any flaming fire line slopovers that could increase the size of a fire.

Once the top areas of the steep slope burn were more secure with the ever growing, reinforced burned out buffers, I watched the burners slowly carry more fire down along the extreme mountain inclines, expertly building in depth and safety.

I watched the burners climb halfway down the mountainsides across from the flames they had lit, where the firing would be halted; following steep slopes to the right, the ignition teams moved across the rugged mountainsides to start a new fresh fire, safely protected from its spreading higher and to the left by the previously burned buffer. Slowly and carefully the burners created larger safety zones across the upper portions of the steep mountainous sites.

The next firing was positioned to slowly eat down into the center of massive, potentially explosive, steep, thick, cured, cut and dried bamboo fields.

The ignitors returned after lighting the center fires to the burn’s right flank, with their center fuels strongly alight. On this flank, for more protection, the burners used their bamboo ignitions poles with tips alight to carry a strip of fire down steep slopes along the interior edge of preexisting fire trails. The burners touched their poles strategically here and there to the cut bamboo plants inside the fire line to create new ignitions and reinforce the perimeter control lines with a long strip of flames.

The effect of these tactics was a controlled lighting pattern that soon became a flaming mountainside that pulled in smaller, newly lit flank flames in a long line. Dried bamboo was consumed as the fire and its heat were pulled inward toward the much hotter center fires, quickly creating a massively reinforced fire line protecting the whole right flank of the field.

I witnessed other tactics, such as fire being used to reinforce control lines before a burn. I saw fire used in dot ignition applications, strategically placed along the bottom of steep and dangerous mountain slopes that were piled high with even more dried fuels that worked to drive flames across whole hillsides horizontally, in powerful walls of flames.

The Dayak people have rules about burning; men are the wildfire-use ignitors while women and children build fire lines around new fields, slashing the bamboo and other fuels to the ground to cure in the hot sun for months to be ready to be consumed by fire. Women and children hold the fire line defensive positions during the actual burns.

Dayak fires are first ignited by a landowner with a cigarette lighter (a very non-traditional tool), but after the fire takes hold, longer bamboo sticks are used to pick up and carry flames forward and out to pre-selected forest ignition locations.

Another recent addition along with cigarette lighters to the traditional Dayak firing kit is a hard-shell plastic backpack pesticide pump, temporarily repurposed and used as water-spraying firefighting pumps.

In my opinion, the Dayak people’s valuable but threatened traditional fire skills, and their wealth of knowledge and wisdom is a critically important resource. The Dayak people’s specialty knowledge of wildfire behavior and use is a treasure to humanity and is especially valuable considering extremes due to climate change.

Traditional cultures such as the Dayak people face unprecedented changes brought from powerful forces: the lure of money; technology, and globalization. One hundred years ago, the Dayak people could have escaped newcomers and government rules in their lands by retreating deeper into the forest, but this is no longer an option.

Around the mountainous Borneo community of Loksado, where the Dayak continue burning (for now), the traditional people are asking simply to be able to keep their burning and their rice cultivation; without this cycle, their treasured way of life cannot continue.

Preventing the Dayak people from burning, even for just a brief few seasons, will have a serious impact on their deep wildfire knowledge. If the Dayak people’s cultural treasure of knowledge is lost, some of their information might be able to be later collected and shared with others, but it will never be as complete as it is now.

The Dayak people told me they would be willing and interested in sharing their fire knowledge with the world. The Dayak need only to be approached to do so by wildfire researchers from international fire agencies, and not just academics who might wish to squirrel away their valuable information for the promotion of their own careers.

In return, the Dayak people told me, they wish only to be valued as a people and a culture uniquely empowered by their fire knowledge built across countless generations.

For the Dayak people’s valuable fire-use knowledge to remain, it must stay fresh and current. The Dayak people must be allowed to continue their cycle of fire and rice, even if only within their mountainous forest sanctuary setting of the Loksado region. Retaining fire knowledge comes with currency; as one traditional elder said, without this currency and historic fire knowledge, “the Dayak will be nothing.”

This Dayak elder explained that the people know well: “Fire can be dangerous. We must be careful with the fire.”

[This article first appeared in Wildfire magazine.]

Michael Hill began this journey in the 1980s as an American wildfire firefighter, and across his career worked as a hotshot and smokejumper. For many years Hill has been, and still is, deeply interested in Indonesia’s wildfires. He serves as an associate editor for Wildfire magazine and hosts a YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@ TalkingWildfireWithMichaelHill.