Nunuk Ragang

Nunuk Ragang entrance.

Nunuk Ragang seen from a street.

Nunuk Ragang is a site traditionally considered as the location of the original home of the ancestors of the Kadazan-Dusun natives who inhabit most of northern Borneo. The site, nearby a village named Tampias, is located at the intersection of the left (Liwagu Kogibangan) and right (Liwagu Kowananan) branches of the Liwagu River to the east of Ranau and Tambunan in Sabah. The two river branches joined up to flow into the Labuk river and drain out into the Sulu Sea. At the site, and under a giant banyan tree, a settlement referred to as Nunuk Ragang was founded. The giant banyan tree was said to be able to give shade to a longhouse sheltering 10 families in it. The legend about Nunuk Ragang had been passed down via oral traditions to the younger generations. No archaeological dig has been carried out to establish the veracity of the legend.

In 2004, the quasi-government group Kadazan-Dusun Cultural Association (KDCA) set up a memorial near Tampias at the site of what they believed to be the original village. The word "tampias" means "sprinkled" or "dispersed". The memorial was built in the form of a huge fig tree. The association conducts annual pilgrimages to the site, timed to coincide with the inauguration of its paramount chief, the Huguon Siou.

Etymology

The name Nunuk Ragang is derived from two Kadazan-Dusun words nunuk which refers to the banyan tree and ragang which could mean "newborn baby" or is a shortened form of the word aragang which means "red colored". The two words together therefore possibly refer to either a "newborn baby banyan tree" or a "red coloured banyan tree". Botanically, there is no known banyan tree with red leaves or trunk. This fact has contributed to the mystery surrounding Nunuk Ragang but the most logical reason for naming the settlement as "red banyan" is that the settlers, in their attempt to attract attention to their presence, intentionally made the banyan tree to appear red. The Kadazan-Dusun has a fondness for riddling, giving names to places, things and actions in terms other than the actual.

Religious and cultural life

At the Nunuk Ragang settlement began the belief system and culture of the Kadazan-Dusun. There was no word for "religion" among the ancient Kadazan-Dusun and to them it was just a sort of relationship between the seen and the unseen. Some people would equate this to Animism. This belief system centers largely on their livelihood and rituals so as to maintain the balance, order and harmony between themselves and between them and their environment, which consequently provide conditions for bountiful cultivation and harvests and continued existence of the race. At the settlement also began Momolianism, a philosophical system, which when coupled with the belief system, had guided the life of the Kadazan-Dusun people up to the present age. Surrounded by thick primary forest teeming in wildlife, nature and nurture became the foundation for the birth and growth of thee belief system and cultural heritage of the Kadazan-Dusun.

Food and material needs

The Dusunic-speaking peoples, descendants of the pioneers at Nunuk Ragang, are today agriculturalists and paddy planting is the common occupation among them. But according to oral traditions passed down from elders, the Nunuk Ragang people were practising vegeculture. Vegeculture is the cultivation and propagation of plant food by utilising the suckers of plants such as the yam, the sweet potato and cassava, eliminating the needs for seeds and permanent storage thus facilitating rapid migrations. Bamboo and Rattan were the primary materials used for all forms of activities connected to home construction and storage. To light a fire the settlers used dried cottony bark scraped from the Polod palm tree. Metal, used for making dangol (short machete) and pais (carving knives) was already available, most probably through barter trading with coastal peoples. The Nunuk Ragang settlers also adapted to their environment by becoming hunter-gatherers and trappers. Salt, an important food enhancer and preservative was only intermittently available from the distant coastal region, prompting the Nunuk Ragang settlers to search out for sosopon (natural salt lick) frequented by wild animals. This persistent shortage of salt also gave rise to two important techniques, "memangi" and "manalau", for the preservation of meat and fish. Memangi produces "pinongian" or "bosou" (meat or fish preserved using the fleshy kernels from seeds of the Pangium Edule tree), and manalau, a smoked meat called "sinalau".

Leadership and social hierarchy

The Huguan Siou leadership, a unique position to defend the culture, rights, identity and dignity of the Kadazan-Dusun was non existent at Nunuk Ragang. This leadership position, which had its roots at Guunsing, Penampang was only institutionalised after the formation of Malaysia in 1963. Although the Nunuk Ragang society was egalitarian, at times of challenge or crisis they were led by warriors, who in turn were guided by the words of Bobolians, as revealed by divine revelation from spirits. These bobolians were mostly women who play their role as priestesses. Women thus play an important function in the early Nunuk Ragang society.

Exodus and dispersal

After a number of years, a major crisis, called the Minorit Push, caused the Kadazan-Dusun to completely moved out of the site. The driving force behind the movement out and dispersal of the Kadazan-Dusun from Nunuk Ragang was said to be the Minorits, legendary tiny spiritual beings, emerging out of the ground to enforce their practice of infanticide. This exodus and dispersal led to the peopling of each territory in North Borneo. Each territory peopled had its own particular attraction or pull for peopling such as for example the Minkokook Pull for the Tambunan Plain and the Gomala Pull for the Kundasang/Bundu Tuhan Highland. It is not known why the ancestors were unable to fend off the Minorits, but in light of the Kadazan-Dusun love of the practice of riddling, and couching of taboo terms in alternative words and phrases, the legend of the Minorits is most likely a composite narratives of several natural phenomena and man-made activities, which evolved overtime into this reason for moving out of Nunuk Ragang. The most likely candidates are the smallpox and collapse of the soil fertility resulting from the advent of invasive lallang grasses. In this connection, the word "minorit" merit explanation. According to research conducted by I.H.N.Evans, the word minorit is used by Dusun in two phrases i.e. "minorit O' paka" referring to the vast sea of lalang invasively growing at newly cleared forest, as visible in Tempasuk and Matunggong. Another use of the word is in the phrase "minorit O' lasu" referring to skin disease with spots of the same size spread all over the body. The Minorit push can therefore be attributed to either the degradation of the land at Nunuk Ragang due to fertility loss as the grass species, lallang grass invades the land after forest clearing or the advent of smallpox epidemic among the people. The Smallpox pandemic which began in 1588 AD in Europe, decimated up to a third of the population. The population at Nunuk Ragang in that year was just about 180 individuals. The Kadazan-Dusun race would not have emerged to become a people if the ancestors had not moved out and dispersed. The people of Nunuk Ragang never had the opportunity to avail of the practice of Variolation (also known as inoculation) even though this method of prevention of the smallpox was first invented in China around 1500. Nunuk Ragang, an ideal site at the confluence of the Liwagu Kogibangan and Liwagu Kawanan and draining out into the Sulu Sea via the Labuk River had most of the ingredients for the emergence of a Kadazan-Dusun River Civilization. Unfortunately the dispersal of the Kadazan-Dusun contributed towards the failure of the race to rise above culture to achieve the status of a civilisation. The word Liwagu derives from the Kadazan-Dusun phrase "muli wagu" meaning "return home again". The male ancestors was never able to return to their homeland (possibly Taiwan). Cut off from their heritage, the descendants made the best use of the environment to which they were born into, thus giving birth to the unique Kadazan-Dusun culture. Present day Kadazan-Dusun leaders suggest that representatives of each sub-ethnic tribes under the Kadazan-Dusun race conduct an annual "muli wagu"/homecoming to Nunuk Ragang as added tourism product to develop their common home.

Minorit as a metaphor

The term Minorit is a metaphor of the monoculturalism emergence in the Kadazan-Dusun community, the deterioration of natural resources in Nunuk Ragang, and the extreme population there. It is related to the religion of the Kadazan-Dusun ancestors who at that time practised animism and worshipped Kinorohingan as God and Huminodun as in Bambarayon (the spirit of food sources and their saviour). After rice cultivation was introduced in the Kadazan-Dusun community, Bambarayon was associated with rice spirits. In the future, anywhere the Kadazan-Dusuns would make new settlements, monoculturalism and harvesting festival have become parts of their culture.

In the Minorit story, it is said that at the time of Kadazan-Dusun ancestors were living in early settlements in Nunuk Ragang, there was an attack that emerged from the soil in the forms of small creatures. It is unknown whether weapons were used by the Minorit creatures. An anthropologist had interviewed several people who claimed that the tiny Minorit spiritual beings forced the Nunuk Ragang community to follow their practice of eliminating newborn babies if the baby showed signs of abnormal growth. The Minorits were only selecting their babies, who were obviously very young, with the aim of reducing the use of their food, and to ensure the bodies of the people in Nunuk Ragang were "all the same" in size.

The Minorit Push is indeed a metaphorical depiction of social crisis in Nunuk Ragang because it refers to a kind of unspecified creature which does not exist today. However, it became a revolution which forced the community to initiate a massive evacuation of Nunuk Ragang.

Convergence

The possibility of further pinpointing the exact origin of the Kadazan-Dusun from before the Nunuk Ragang settlement was further enlightened during the official visit of Taiwan's minister of Council of indigenous People's, Icayang Parod in early June 2017. Masidi Manjun, Sabah minister of Tourism, Culture and Environment, referred to the numerous similarities particularly in ethnic languages between the indigenous peoples of Taiwan and the Kadazan-Dusun.

References

• Rutter, Owen. (1922). British North Borneo: An Account of its History, Resources and Native tribes. London: Constable and Company Limited. pp. 56–65
• Gidah, Mary Ellen (2001). Archetypes in the Cosmogonic Myths of the Australian Aboriginal People and the Kadazandusuns of Sabah. Kota Kinabalu: Universiti Malaysia Sabah Press.
• Berinai, Judy (2013). Liturgical Inculturation in Anglican Worship in Light of the Spirituality of the Indigenous people of Sabah. Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, Oxford. p. 62–67
• Monica Glyn-Jones (1953). The Dusun of the Penampang Plains, 2 vols. London, p. 117.
• I. H. N. Evans, (1953) The Religion of the Tempasuk Dusuns of North Borneo Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 187–88;
• Benedict Topin, (n.d.) "The Origin of the Kadazan/Dusun: Popular Theories and Legendary Tales" in Our Cultural Heritage, Kadazan Cultural Association, pp. 73–77.
• http://www.pensabah.gov.my/SETIA/artikel/lagenda_nunuk_ragang.htm The Legend of Nunuk Ragang in Malay.
• Nunuk Ragang and the Mystical Origin of the People of Sabah accessed 30 April 2006.
• Allan Dumbong, "Empowerment of Kadazandusun Youths in Nunuk Ragang" (2007)