When swearing peace doesn't mean "I forget"

A friend ask me if it is indeed true that the Dusuns are so forgiving that they swear-peace and forgive and forget when they have done so. Well, in the olden days at least, rivaling parties swore-peace (mitaruh/mitoruh) to publicly acknowledge that they were not enemies anymore. But did they actually forgive and forget? Or did they just do it to 'move on'?

My take is the latter. Although I dare not say that the Dusuns are grudge-holders (I might get killed for saying that), they definitely have long memories. That includes good and bad things. An elderly man from Bundu Tuhan told the friend and me a story about the swearing-peace between the Bundu Tuhan and Kinsaraban people of the past. (Bundu Tuhan and Kinsaraban are two places adjescent to each other, and they used to be enemies, in the sense that they took the heads of each other's people).

The man said that there was a mitaruh ceremony done in the 1890s to stop the war between the two places. A person (and allegedly, he was a bad guy) who passed by the villages was sacrificed for that purpose. The ceremony didn't really work though. Although they stop taking heads, they were still enemies in many aspects. For instance, they won't let their people marry each other because those who married still got jinxed! A series of unfortunate events involving marriages between the two groups led to the second swear-peace ceremony in the 1900s (presumedly mid 1900s), to reinforce the first one. And the most hilarious thing I heard with regard to that was that the place in which the second mitaruh took place was called Pinonorian do Kinsaraban (literally translates as "the place in which the Kinsaraban people were defeated")! Obviously, the Bundu people still wanted to feel superior even when they had agreed to make peace, not war (no offence, my anscestors were also Bundus!)

Anyway, the various Dusun groups are now friends, maybe having had realized that they are so small in numbers in this big bad world that they need to stick together :). I still dare not accuse them (that would include myself) of being grudge-holders, but I supposed deep down, they forgive but not forget! (Perhaps, just careful by nature).

Mitoruh- peace making

At my age I should have heard about this long time ago...but because of ignorance, mostly, I've only got to know this recently. Thankfully, a colleague who's also a neighbour at the office is investigating a lot of things with regard to the Dusun communities, and so I learn a lot from him.

Mitoruh- is a ceremony to indicate peace-making between two parties. Most people think that it only involves two warring parties during the head hunting time, about 100 years ago. In which case, two parties who had had enough of being enemies would call a truce. They would swear over some kind of animal or human sacrifice that they would no longer be enemies. Some people insist that the sacrifice must be a buffalo, and that later the buffalo meat have to be eaten, although my friend has evidence that there were cases where the sacrifice was human, obviously cannot be eaten after.

The most interesting story of mitoruh I heard was between human and rogon "jinn". A (another) friend told me that when she was 12, her Chinese grandmother bought a plot of land with the intention of farming. For some reason, nothing seemed to grow on the land. Later, the friend's Dusun grandmother saw that the reason for that was because the rogon refused to 'let go'. The only way to make the rogon relent was to have a mitoruh ceremony. They had the ceremony on that plot of land, attended by my friend's family members of all Chinese, Dusun and Bajau sides. A buffalo was slaughtered, the blood sprinkled all over the land...and then it was left on the land. Apparently, a buffalo offered to a non-human party can't be eaten for it would be 'tasteless'.

So that is mitoruh to the Dusun people...