The Kelabit are one of the people who live in the highland area that has come to be known as the Heart of Borneo. The people of the Heart of Borneo live at an altitude of around 1000 metres above sea level, where the climate is cooler and drier than near the coast. The Heart of Borneo straddles the border between Sarawak, part of Malaysia, and Kalimantan, part of Indonesia. It includes mountain ranges but also flat areas that are suitable for growing rice in wet paddy fields. Rice is a central crop both for subsistence and, nowadays, for sale to the coast, but wild plants and animals from the forest were traditionally vital both for food and for crafts.
Until 1963, when a small airstrip was opened in Bario, it took weeks to reach the Kelabit highland area – or for highlanders to get to communities further downriver! This was on foot most of the way, as the rivers in the Heart of Borneo are too small to be properly navigable. But the people of the area were great walkers, and people have always walked downriver to trade. They had precious salt containing iodine from highland springs, damar resin, gutta percha and agar wood to exchange – mainly carrying back valuables such as glass beads, and Chinese jars and gongs decorated with dragons. Imagine having a heavy jar on your back for weeks!
In the early 2000s a logging road reached the Kelabit Highlands, and it now takes 12 hours to drive down to the coast in a 4 x 4. Travel within the highlands is now mainly by 4 x 4. Many people have left for jobs on the coast. Construction and craft materials are increasingly brought up from the coast. People are moving out of the traditional longhouses and building separate houses. However, there is still a heavy reliance on food that is grown or gathered, and craft and construction skills are still important, though with some more modern materials.
The Heart of Borneo is the one part of the island where the forest remains relatively untouched by logging. This does not mean that people have not lived here, however. People have hunted, gathered and managed natural resources here for millennia. The forest of the Heart of Borneo is a ‘cultured rainforest’ – and this is the term that my archaeological colleagues and I used for our research project in 2007-11, which investigated the human relationship with the forest over time in the highland area around Pa’ Dalih.
Until the middle of the 20th century, the people of the Heart of Borneo were animist, with a close and careful relationship with the spirits inhabiting the natural environment, whose approval had to be sought for all activities. In the mid-late 20th century they gave up these practices, when they were converted to a form of Christianity that is evangelical and charismatic. However, they still prefer to pray on forested hills and mountains, and go on an annual pilgrimage to pray on top of the highest local mountain, Mt. Murud.
Publications

My book ‘The Forest, Source of Life: the Kelabit of Sarawak’, published in 2003, focuses particularly on craftwork. It is currently out of print.
Talk on Kelabit Relationship with the Natural Environment
I include a link to a recording of a talk I gave in 2008 in Chicago about the Kelabit relationship with the natural environment.
Life in Pa' Dalih
I have made some short videos of snippets of life in Pa’ Dalih and include them here.
Dayak Daily articles about the Heart of Borneo
In 2024, I published a series of short articles about life, cosmology and culture heroes in the Heart of Borneo in a newspaper in Sarawak, the Dayak Daily, and I include links to these here: