Mythologies of the Mlabri People

The Mlabri (Thai:มลาบรี) or Mrabri, also called the Phi Tong Luang, are an ethnic group of Thailand and Laos, and have been called "the most interesting and least understood people in Southeast Asia". Only about 400 or fewer Mlabris remain in the world today, with some estimates as low as 100. A hill tribe in northern Thailand along the border with Laos, they have been groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Those in Thailand live close to the Hmong and northern Thai. Those living in Laos live close to other ethnic groups. The name Mlabri is a Thai/Lao alteration of the word Mrabri, which appears to come from a Khmuic term "people of the forest". In Khmu, mra means "person" and bri "forest". They are also known locally as Phi Tong Leuang (Thai: ผีตองเหลือง, Lao: ຜີຕອງເຫລືອງ) or "spirits of the yellow leaves", since they abandon their shelters when the leaves begin to turn yellow.

The Mlabri are one of the smallest ethnic groups living in Thailand, numbering about 400 people. In a period of about 20 years they made a transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer communities living in the forest to a sedentary lifestyle in permanent settlements. They experienced rapid social change when encountering the modern world. Until the 1990s, the Mlabri lived a nomadic life mainly in forested areas. They lived in mobile units, staying in one place for about five to 10 days, and subsisted largely on hunting, gathering, and digging activities in the forest. They had limited relations with other ethnic groups living in the mountains, but would sometimes exchange forest products for consumer items such as salt, steel, tobacco, clothes, pigs, rice etc. and occasionally were hired through exploitative, short-term labor arrangements in which they worked for food and clothing as laborers on the farms of Hmong and northern Thai living nearby.

The Mlabri are an enigmatic group of about 300 people who nowadays range across the Nan, Phrae, and Phayao provinces of north and northeastern Thailand and the Sayaburi province of western Laos. Their traditional lifestyle is to move frequently through the dense forests of the high mountains, building temporary structures of bamboo sticks thatched with banana leaves, which they occupy for a few days, until the leaves turn yellow (thus accounting for their traditional Thai name, Phi Tong Luang, which means “spirit of the yellow leaves”). First contacted by Europeans in 1936, they are unique among the hill tribes of northern Thailand in that, until recently, they subsisted by hunting and gathering combined with occasional barter trade with villagers. The origins of the Mlabri are controversial. Some investigators have assumed that there is a direct connection between the Mlabri and the ancient Hoabinhian hunting–gathering culture of Southeast Asia [1]. However, a limited investigation of blood group variation raised the possibility that the Mlabri originated via a founder event from an agricultural group, and preliminary linguistic analyses support this idea. The Mlabri language seems lexically most closely related to Khmu and Tin, two languages of the Khmuic branch of the Mon-Khmer sub-family of Austro-Asiatic languages, both of which are spoken in agricultural highland villages. The cluster of dialects jointly referred to as Tin, or Mal/Prai, is spoken in the Thailand–Laos border region that the Mlabri also occupy, whereas Khmu is spoken over a much wider area. The grammar of Mlabri additionally has features that deviate markedly from typical Mon-Khmer, suggesting that Mlabri developed as a result of contact between speakers of a Khmuic language and speakers of a quite different language of unknown affiliation.

The Mlabri hunt and forage for wild foods. Based on the tribe's location, many scientists assumed that the Mlabri came from the ancient Southeast Asian Hoabinhian culture that predates agriculture. Traditionally, anthropologists thought that modern hunter-gatherer tribes like the Mlabri descended through the ages unchanged. But an analysis of the tribe led by Mark Stoneking of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, indicates that these communities are more complex than previously imagined. Stoneking and his team compared Mlabri DNA with that from neighboring tribes. Astonishingly, all of the Mlabri mitochondrial DNA turned out to be identical--a total lack of variation that hasn't been found in any other human population. As hunter-gatherer societies are thought to have less genetic diversity, the lack of variation suggests that the Mlabri descended from a hunter-gatherer culture. However, unlike other hunter–gatherer groups, the Mlabri share genetic information with neighboring agricultural hill tribes as well as other agricultural groups in Southeast Asia.

The Mlabri have a nickname. “Spirits of the Yellow Leaves,” or Phi Tong Luang in Thai. Its origin is generally the only blurb of information you can find about the Mlabri without doing some serious digging. It goes like this: while moving through the landscape, the Mlabri would hunt and gather from specific areas for a few days at a time, building tiny structures of banana leaves as shelter. Suspicious of outsiders, the Mlabri had generally moved on before anyone could notice them, leaving only the fading leaves of their shelter, which turn bright yellow after a few days of being severed from a tree. Because the Mlabri language is preliterate, their origin and history is not known in great detail. The first mention of the Mlabri was a description of a 1938 exhibition by Austrian anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik in his work “The Spirits of the Yellow Leaves,” an account accompanied by vivid photographs of his time spent hunting and foraging through the mountains of Phrae with a band of what would later be known as Mlabri. There is little mention in academia of the Mlabri afterwards, until a 1963 exhibition of archeologist and historian Kraisri Nimmanhaeminda who described his contact with a group of Mlabri and who later attempted to study the loose records of Mlabri language.

The Mlabri are one of the smallest ethnic groups living in Thailand, numbering about 400 people. In a period of about twenty years they made a transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer communities living in the forest to a sedentary lifestyle in permanent settlements. They experienced rapid social change when encountering the modern world. Until the 1990s the Mlabri lived a nomadic life mainly in forested areas. They lived in mobile units staying in one place for about five to ten days and subsited largely on hunting, gathering, and digging activities in the forest. They had limited relations with other ethnic groups living in the mountains, but would sometimes exchange forest products for consumer items such as salt, steel, tobacco, clothes, pigs, rice etc. and occasionally, were hired through exploitative, short-term labor arrangements in which they worked for food and clothing as laborers on the farms of Hmong and northern Thai living nearby. Their traditional lifestyle continued until the 1970s but has gradually changed since then because of deforestation due to agricultural expansion, logging, and road construction. Day labor became more important for survival as the natural resources that the Mlabri depended on decreased dramatically; the forest was exploited by lumber companies and by ethnic groups who engaged in swidden agriculture. In the late 1990s state-led initiatives introduced a sedentary lifestyle to the Mlabri, bringing them in places near already settled Hmong communities, and encouraging them to start cultivating their own rice and corn fields. Today, they live in five permanent settlements in the Nan and Phrae provinces, engaging in wage labor, cash crop cultivation and ethnic tourism. Traditional hunting and gathering activities still continue, but on a minimal scale (about 7% of their food source) and are restricted by access to already rare and over-hunted forest areas, which are under the control of the Thai government. In 2001 the Mlabri gained formal recognition through citizenship and ID cards with presumed birthdates for individuals born before 1998, and the actual registered birthdates for those born after. Citizenship provided them with access to health and nutritional services at government facilities and children started attending school. Authorities carried out different programs in education, public hygiene, and occupational training, including cultivating cash crops and livestock farming. Traditional, animistic beliefs still remain, but new faiths and activities were also introduced through Christian and Buddhist missions.

Ironically, the smallest ethnic group in Laos happens to be one of the most interesting. Twenty-two Mlabri people, in four families, live in the Phiang District of Xaignabouri Province. Their numbers are actually down from 24 in 1985. Epidemics and a decrease of their resources has almost wiped them out. Approximately 300 Mlabri live across the border in Nan and Phrae provinces of Thailand. Mlabri or Mabri is the self-name of this group. The Lao and Thai call them Kha Tong Luang, which means 'slaves of the Yellow Banana Leaves'. This name is given to them because of their custom of living in temporary ground-level shelters made of a wooden frame and covered with banana leaves. When the leaves wither and turn yellow the Mlabri abandon their homes and move to a different area to hunt for food. This cycle usually repeats itself every 5-15 days.

The Mlabri are a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers inhabiting the rural highlands of Thailand. Little is known about the origins of the Mlabri and linguistic evidence suggests that the present-day Mlabri language most likely arose from Tin, a Khmuic language in the Austro-Asiatic language family. This study aims to examine whether the genetic affinity of the Mlabri is consistent with this linguistic relationship, and to further explore the origins of this enigmatic population. Mlabri share more recent common ancestry with the Htin. We thus provided, to our knowledge, the first genetic evidence that supports the linguistic affinity of Mlabri, and this association between linguistic and genetic classifications could reflect the same past population processes.

Mlabri is a language spoken by the Mlabri people in the border area between Thailand and Laos. It is usually classified as a Khmuic language, a subgroup of the Austroasiatic languages. Linguist Jørgen Rischel has studied the language and described its peculiarities in several works. He divides the language into three varieties: one spoken by a small group in Laos and previously called Yumbri, and two others spoken by larger groups in Thailand. They differ in intonation and in lexicon. Although it is possible to count up to ten in Mlabri, only the numerals one and two may be used to modify a noun, and the word for 'two' has uses closer to 'pair' or 'couple' in English than a numeral. Mlabri distinguishes rounding in its back vowels. It does not have the register systems of some other Austroasiatic languages.

Mla are known as yellow leaf or “Mlabri”. The meaning of the name “Mlabri” can be separated into two words. The first word is “Mla” meaning human, this is the word the tribe use to call themselves. The second word “Bri” meaning forest, this is just a word to add after, thereby they have the word Mlabri which means “barbarian tribe” but they would like to be known as “Mla tribe”. This means “human” because they are not barbarians. They live in the forest. Mlabri is what they are called by others but not what they call themselves. “Yellow leaf” is the name given to them by other people but they do not like being called this because it makes them sound like ghosts, which they are not. They are human like us. “Yellow leaf” is a name that the “Mla tribe” do not like being called, and to not call them yellow leaf, honors. Them they will call others “Gwao”.

The Mlabri traditionally lived a nomadic lifestyle. They moved frequently, and had no permanent houses, instead making temporary shelters from palm leaves and bamboo-string. They wore only a loin-covering of bark or cloth, though most Mlabri now wear factory-made clothes gained by trade with other hill tribes. They are hunter-gatherers, with most of their food coming from gathering. Women give birth alone in the forest and infant mortality formerly was very high. The Mlabri have few regimented social ceremonies, and are said to have no formal religious system, though they believe in forest spirits and other nature spirit. Marriages are made with simple request; there is no bride-price. The dead are buried near where they expired, and the tribe moves on. In 1938, Austrian anthropologist Hugo Bernatzik published an ethnography of the "Yellow Leaf People" which contained his brief observations of the tribe in the early 20th century. Since the 1990s, the Mlabri in Thailand have settled into more permanent villages in Phrae and Nan provinces. The houses they live in are made of cinderblock and wood, with metal roofs and even electricity. Mlabri children have started going to public schools, and their health care has improved. As was recently reported, however, the Mlabri's suicide rate has also risen.^[2] Mlabri villages have some economic activity. While still hunting and gathering, the Mlabri now engage in highland farming and hammock weaving, besides working as day laborers. One of the Mlabri settlements in Nan Province is under the patronage of HRH Princess Sirindhorn. The Thai Suksaneh family has lived among the Mlabri and helped raise their standard of living for many years.Fongchan Suksaneh.

Mlabri is one of the only recorded nomadic hunter-gatherer groups in Thailand. Here, we sequenced complete mitochondrial (mt) DNA genomes and ~2.364 Mbp of non-recombining Y chromosome (NRY) to learn more about the origins of these two enigmatic populations. Both groups exhibited low genetic diversity compared to other Thai populations, and contrasting patterns of mtDNA and NRY diversity: there was greater mtDNA diversity in the Maniq than in the Mlabri, while the converse was true for the NRY. We found basal uniparental lineages in the Maniq, namely mtDNA haplogroups M21a, R21 and M17a, and NRY haplogroup K. Overall, the Maniq are genetically similar to other negrito groups in Southeast Asia. By contrast, the Mlabri haplogroups (B5a1b1 for mtDNA and O1b1a1a1b and O1b1a1a1b1a1 for the NRY) are common lineages in Southeast Asian non-negrito groups, and overall the Mlabri are genetically similar to their linguistic relatives (Htin and Khmu) and other groups from northeastern Thailand. In agreement with previous studies of the Mlabri, our results indicate that the Malbri do not directly descend from the indigenous negritos. Instead, they likely have a recent origin (within the past 1,000 years) by an extreme founder event (involving just one maternal and two paternal lineages) from an agricultural group, most likely the Htin or a closely-related group.

Mlabri is the smallest ethnic group in Thailand. There are only 150-200 of them. ‘Mlabri’ are sometimes called ‘Yellow Leaf People’. They were discovered in 1936 by an Australian researcher named Dr. H. Bernatzik discovered them in Nan Province. Then, in 1962, Mr.Kraisri Nimmanmintr and his expedition found an ethnic group, which is believed to be Mlabri. Mlabri people were from Xyaburi, Laos. They inhabited in different part of northern Thailand, including Phrae(Muang District, Rong Kwang District, Song District) and Nan Province(Sa District). They love to live in humid areas and 3,000 feet above the sea level. To catch fishes and other aquatic animals easily, they live near water resources. For their houses, they look like shacks with roofs sloping backwards and without supporting poles. For your information, they don’t live in same houses for their whole lives. Instead, they relocated every 5-10 days or as soon as the leaves used to make roofs fade to yellow colour. The reason that force them to relocate over and over again is how their ancestors said about evil spirits. They just believe that it they don’t relocate, they would be haunted by evil spirits. Farming and raising animals are how they make their livings. Usually, they grow corns and rice. They raise animals for food. Sometimes they are hammock weaving employees.

The Mlabri are an enigmatic group of about 300 people who, until a few decades ago, used to live a nomadic life as hunters and gatherers in the dense forests and high mountains of Northern Thailand. They would build temporary structures of bamboo sticks thatched with fresh, green banana leaves and occupy these for a few days, until the leaves turned yellow.

Since the proof of their existence consisted mostly of these abandoned huts, they were given the traditional Thai name of “Phi Tong Luang”, meaning “Spirits of the Yellow Leaves”. However, since they are peaceful people, they wish to be referred to as “People of the forest”