Riska: Memories of a Dayak Girlhood

Thomas S. Abler is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Waterloo and the author of A Canadian Indian Bibliography, 1960-1970.

When Linda Spalding reached her destination in Kalimantan, the portion
of Borneo under Indonesian jurisdiction, she engaged a female tour guide
of Dayak origins. The bond formed in this first encounter in 1994 grew
through subsequent trips by Spalding to Indonesia. Conversations led
Spalding to urge Riska Opra Sari to write her own story of her life.
This book tells that tale, from a childhood in a remote Dayak village in
interior Borneo through a convoluted and tortuous route to her current
status as an independent but contemplative participant in the Indonesian
tourist industry.

Born in 1969, Riska spent the first eight years of her life in Kudangan
on the Delang River. The Dayak identify their groups with the names of
the rivers they live beside, and the waters of the rivers with
beneficial and negative effects is a recurring theme in this book.
Kudangan is also the birthplace of Riska’s father also; her mother
came from another Dayak village. Her father farmed and her mother taught
school. Most of the Dayak were Christian, but this foreign veneer
overlay strongly held traditional religious beliefs. Riska’s memories
of her childhood in her natal village are interspersed with local
folklore and oral traditions of historical and recent local events,
which include tales of mythical transformations and stories of past and
recent headhunters.

So that her father could obtain employment, the family journeyed
downstream to the larger multiethnic, but largely Muslim, centre of
Pangkalan Bun. Here, the Dayak practice of eating pork led to their
being shunned by their Muslim neighbors. Riska describes the course of
her romances, leading to a pregnancy, marriage, and early divorce.
Fiercely independent, Riska left her daughter in the care of her parents
so that she could work as a tour guide, leading visitors into the
forests of interior Borneo—an occupation well suited to her
personality and linguistic skills.

The text provides a good deal of information about the life of the
Dayak, but the complete absence of annotation or explanation often
leaves the reader unclear as to what exactly is being described. A
glossary of the terms used would have been of great help to a reader
unfamiliar with the details of Dayak ethnography. Still, the work
provides a lively introduction to the complexities of life on the
frontiers of contemporary Indonesia. An introduction by Linda Spalding
tells something of the genesis of the text, while an afterword by
anthropologist Carol J. Pierce Colfer places Riska’s autobiography in
the context of current academic work on gender roles.