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“Some years ago, the Indonesian government determined that all its citizens should belong to an official religion”.
Laccà, the shaman of a Mindawai clan, a population living on an archipelago off Sumatra, slips a huge cooked woodworm in his mouth and chews it with pleasure.

“Then the Christian missionaries, the Muslim mullhas and other cults' representatives came here. We listened to all of them. But every religion had laws that clashed against our traditions. If we consider pigs as an important source for food, the Muslims see them as taboo. If everything is peopled by spirits for us, it is not like this for the Christians. In the end we returned to our belief that we call 'animism'”.
Although the distance between Sumatra and Siberut is not big, gales, an unpredictable sea and insidious coral reefs make navigation difficult.
The result is that one of Indonesia's most interesting

indigenous societies can still be found in Siberut. Despite the recent changes, two-thirds of the island is still covered by a thick tropical forest.
The Mindawai people are tall and thin. Both men and women braid flowers in their hair and this earned them the name “Flower people”.
Despite patriarchal elements are strong, the Mindawai society is based on equality principles. Neither hierarchic structures, nor titles, or hereditary positions or subordinate roles exist. The actual social, political and religious centres of every clan is the uma, or common house, the place where debates involving the whole community take place and where the man to represent the village externally is chosen.

The Mindawai - or Mentawai - people believe in the existence of an immortal soul and in the spirits of their ancestors, nature and animals.
Even inanimate objects possess, they argue, a spirit, a vital power.
The Laccà shaman believes that a disease is nothing but the temporary absence of the soul, whereas dreams mean that the soul went on holiday.
“The soul leaves its body various times during life. When death approaches, it leaves it forever to become spirit in a world that exists alongside ours”.
Unlike other religions, the Mindawai people do not personify the vital power with the image of a creator. They do not believe that there is an entity judging human beings by punishing or forgiving them. “We are part of the whole”, the shaman explains, “like plants, rivers, rocks. Everything is sacred for us. Even the forest. It is the mother that gives us everything: food, clothes, medicine and shelter. In exchange for all this, we must respect it”.

Unfortunately, not everyone shares their views, so that even the flower men's paradise is invaded by people claiming their right to exploit their resources in the name of profits and progress.
“We also have another problem”, says Parman Sabolak, the spokesman of Yasumi, an association that protects its people's rights.
He unfolds a map of the island and explains the cheat his people went through: “To get our lands, they offer gifts to our old men in exchange for a signature as a receipt. This signature is then put on fake sale contracts”.
Both to protest against these alleged sale contracts and because some oil companies had invaded the Mindawai lands, Parman's brother, Robinson Sabolak, went to Jakarta to meet a UN delegation.
On his way back home he got killed in mysterious circumstances. The police never gave the results of the investigation.
After the protests that followed Robinson's murder,

the cutting of valuable wood and the oil and precious mineral search were temporarily discontinued. “Now a food multinational wants to create large oil palm plantations”, says Parman. “The carrying out of this project might mean the end of our traditional life-style”.
Yasumi's defence strategy is to carry out land surveys of the various clans to be recorded at the land registry office, thus proving that the lands involved already have a use and an owner. Besides, the Yasumi is promoting the transformation of most of the archipelago into a national park.
Back in the shaman's hut, I ask him to tell me about his job. “It is a vocation”, he says. “You never stop learning. New plants to cure the sick, spirits teaching you new things”.
He sits beside the fire and lights a cigar made with

wild tobacco. “We all have a spirit”, he continues, “It looks just like human beings, but you can't touch it because it is not physical. To cure a sick person, I call his spirit and send it back to his body. Even when we kill an animal we speak with its spirit. We say: 'I'm sorry spirit, don't be mad at me, I need your body to live'”.
The greatest danger jeopardising the Mindawai people's way of living is the government plan to settle the various clans in “model villages”.
Most of the population, however, is not giving up and, despite the government's efforts to ban them, they also continue to perform their traditional rites, such as teeth sharpening and tattoos.
Before leaving I ask Laccà whether he is worried about the fact that many young people today prefer the government villages to life in the forest. “If the young want to live in government villages”, he answers, “wear jeans and T-shirts, is because they like it that way. But when they return to their clans, they wear loin-cloths and have themselves tattooed, because this is their culture”.

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