Jarai people or Dega (, , or ; , or , ) are an Austronesian indigenous people and ethnic group native to Vietnam's Central Highlands (Gia Lai and Kon Tum Provinces, with smaller populations in Đắk Lắk Province), as well as in the Cambodian northeast Province of Ratanakiri. During the Vietnam War, many Jarai persons, as well as members of other Montagnard groups (Khmer Loeu and Degar), collaborated with US Special Forces, and many were resettled with their families in the United States, particularly in North Carolina, after the war.
The Jarai language is a member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian language family. It is related to the Cham language of central Vietnam and Cambodia and the Malayo-Polynesian languages of Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, Philippines and other Pacific Islands such as Hawaii and New Zealand. There are approximately 332,558 Jarai speakers. They are the largest of the upland ethnic groups of the Central Highlands known as Degar or Montagnards and they make up 23% of the population of Ratanakiri Province in Cambodia. Both groups, the Cambodian and Vietnamese Jarai, share the same traditions and keep a close relation of cultural interchange, but their language gets the influence of their respectively Khmer and Vietnamese linguistic environment. A few of khmer Jarai words are borrowed from Khmer and Lao. While trading conversation between Khmer Jarai and Vietnamese Jarai, there can be some perplexity among them. Vietnamese Jarai has a written form in Latin script, but Khmer Jarai does not.
Name
The word Jarai (ចារ៉ាយ - Charay) means "People of the Waterfalls" or "People of the Flowing River".Khong Dien (2002). Population and ethno-demography in Vietnam. Chiang Mai, Thailand : Silkworm Books, cop. 2002.
Origins Studies about the Jarai people and their culture have mainly focused on their language and were made by evangelical groups seeking conversions. Linguistically, they are related to the Malayo-Polynesian language family. There are no known ancient records of Jarai people in the area. The first reports come from the French colony during the 19th century that demarcated the border between Vietnam and Cambodia, dividing the Jarai territory and letting a small portion in what is today Ratanakiri Province.Leighton, Marian Kirsch. 1978. Perspectives on the Vietnamese-Cambodia border conflict. Asian Survey 18, 5, 448-458.
The Jarai People have inhabited the region of what is today the Vietnamese provinces of Gia Lai, Kon Tum and Đắk Lắk and the Cambodian Ratanakiri Province for many centuries. Research is needed on specifics such as dates and geographical movement.
Being part of the Zomia Region that include all highlander indigenous peoples along the range mountains from the Tibet Plateau to all the northern areas of the Indochina Peninsula, it is possible that the Jarai belong to a very ancient migration from the west and central areas of Asia. In a DNA test to some Jarai students in Cambodia in 2017, they presented evidences of belonging to the Haplogroup T-M184Rodas A. (2017). Cambodian Jarai People. Don Bosco Kep Children Fund. April 30, 2017. Link retrieved on 04.30.2017 from http://donboscokepchildrenfund.org/?p=692&lang=en that originates more than 25 thousand years ago at the Mediterranean Basin.
The studies of the Jarai language since the middle of the 19th century, found that Jarai is related to Thiames (Chams) and Rade languages of the ancient kingdom of Champa, putting the ancestors of the Jarai in the Malayo origins and Chamic languages.
The modern Jarai people can be divided in six subgroups, the last one in Cambodia:
Jarai Chor. Jarai Hdrung. Jarai Arap. Jarai Mthur Jarai Tbuan. Jarai Khmer also bilingual in Tampuan language.
History
The highland regions of the north of Mainland Southeast Asia were settled by humans somewhere between the later Stone Age (Neolithic) and the Bronze Age, 10,000 years ago. The Jarai people have experienced waves of colonization attempts from earlier Han Chinese invasions, to later French colonization, to current majority Vietnamese continued repression.
Sa Huỳnh culture
The Sa Huỳnh culture was a culture in modern-day central and southern Vietnam and Philippines that flourished between 1000 BC and 200 AD.John N. Miksic, Geok Yian Goh, Sue O Connor - Rethinking Cultural Resource Management in Southeast Asia 2011 Page 251 "This site dates from the fifth to first century BCE and it is one of the earliest sites of the Sa Huỳnh culture in Thu Bồn Valley (Reinecke et al. 2002, 153–216); 2) Lai Nghi is a prehistoric cemetery richly equipped with iron tools and weapons, ..."Vietnam National Museum of Fine Arts (Bảo tàng mỹ thuật Việt Nam) 2000 "Right from the early history - before and after the Christian era - over twenty centuries from now, there was a cultural exchange among three major Centres Z Đông Sơn culture in the North, Sa Huỳnh culture in Central and south-eastern Nam Bộ ..." Archaeological sites from the culture have been discovered from the Mekong Delta to Quang Binh province in central Vietnam. The Sa Huynh people were most likely the predecessors of the Cham people, an Austronesian-speaking people and the founders of the kingdom of Champa.Higham, C., 2014, Early Mainland Southeast Asia, Bangkok: River Books Co., Ltd.,
Champa
The term Champa refers to a collection of independent Cham polities that extended across the coast of what is today central and southern Vietnam from approximately the 2nd century through 19th century (1832), before being absorbed and annexed by the Vietnamese state. The destruction of Champa caused the spread of different tribes in the regions of what is today Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia sharing the same linguistic root like the Jarai People.
Early Vietnamese and Western contacts
Trades between highlanders and lowlanders living around the Gulf of Thailand happened around the 4th century A.C.,Glover, Ian (2004). Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History. Psychology Press, 2004. P. 96 but there were also raids led by Khmer, Lao and Thai slave traders.Indigenous Peoples: Ethnic Minorities and Poverty Reduction, pp. 6–7; "Settlement and agriculture in and adjacent to Virachey National Park", p. 5. The Jarai Kingdom was conquered by Lao rulers during the 18th century, then by Thai during the 19th. The region was incorporated to the French Indochina colony in 1893 and the slave trade was abolished,"Settlement and agriculture in and adjacent to Virachey National Park", p. 5. but indigenous peoples were used for the huge rubber plantations.Indigenous Peoples: Ethnic Minorities and Poverty Reduction, pp. 6–7. The French contributed to the delimitation of territories inside their Indochina colonies of Cambodia, Vietnam and Lao. The Ede-Jarai people were mostly divided between Cambodia (a small part of their territory inside Ratanakiri) and Vietnam Central Highlands, although another theory said that Ede-Jarai people moved into the Cambodian territory during the colonial times, but it is probably that they have inhabited the whole territories for centuries.
During the Katip Sumat uprising against Đại Nam, some Jarai joined the rebellion along with the lowlands Cham Muslims and the highlands Churu Muslims.
The first Western report about the Jarai comes from Fr. Bouillevaux, a French missionary that made an incursion through the Mekong in 1850 and mentioned about certain "King of Fire", a man of respect belonging to a certain group of people called Jarai.Joachim Schliesinger (2015). Ethnic Groups of Cambodia Vol 3: Profile of Austro-Thai and Sinitic-Speaking Peoples. Booksmango, January 11, 2015. Pages 35-37
The French rulers did not interfere too much with the highland indigenous groups, but considered them an excellent source of personnel for army outposts and recruited large number of Jarai, Khmer Loeu and Degar young men to French forces.
Indochina wars
After the Independence, Cambodian and Vietnamese governments led programs to teach indigenous peoples their respectively languages and assimilate them into their national societies, but such efforts were met with cultural resistance from most indigenous communities. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge guerrillas took advantage of that disaffection and recruited many Khmer Loeu in their ranks, while in Vietnam, the US army retook the French tradition to recruit them into military activities in which many Jarai youth participated. It made the Jarai-Ede and many other indigenous groups target of other enemies. In 1977 a number of 100 Jarai men were tortured and executed by Khmer Rouge cadres in Ratanakiri in a case filed at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.Cambodia Tribunal Monitor (2016). Witness Confirms Execution of Jarai Minority Group. March 21, 2016. Link retrieved on 05.01.2017 from http://www.cambodiatribunal.org/2016/03/21/witness-confirms-execution-of-jarai-minority-group/
During the Vietnam War, Jarai villages suffered the struggle between US military and communist guerrillas. By 31 October 1970, US military ordered a massive resettlement of highlander villages saying that they were "insecure".Gerald Cannon Hickey (2002). Window on a War: An Anthropologist in the Vietnam Conflict. Texas Tech University Press, 2002 - History - P. 288. At the same time, US Evangelists entered in contact with Jarai people and published Bibles in their language (excluding the Khmer Jarai-Ede). The Jarai-Ede Bibles created some literacy to them, but after the Vietnamese reunification in 1975, most of the Jarai assistants of the US military, were evacuated from their land to United States. The Khmer Jarai suffered the intense US bombing of their territory in what was called Operation Menu (1969-1970) with the intention to destroy communist sanctuaries, but displacing hundreds of civilians and indigenous peoples that eventually joined the Khmer Rouge.Clymer, p. 11; Sith Samath et al., p. 353; Vajpeyi, p. 127.
The Khmer Rouge kept attempting to incorporate Khmer Loeu peoples in their fights against the Vietnamese and Cambodian central government after its defeat in 1979, but in 1984 there was a campaign to integrate indigenous peoples into the nation, promoting literacy and creating government structures similar to the rest of the country. In Vietnam, the Jarai people has suffered under restrictions of religious parties, making that some of them preferred to emigrate.
In the 1950s and 1960s the Montagnard Degar movement gained popularity among the Jarai and their Montagnard brethren (Degar is a Rhade word meaning "sons of the mountain"). The goal of the Montagnard Degar was to create an independent state in the Vietnamese highlands, consisting entirely of indigenous people groups. As a result of the movement, the Vietnamese government has become increasingly suspicious of the Jarai. Human rights abuses on the part of the government have become frequent among all Montagnards.
Modern times
In modern times, Jarai people suffered from colonization, land eviction and land grabbing, especially in Cambodia under a big system of corruption and the deforestation to create huge rubber plantations. Although Cambodia has laws to respect and protect the indigenous territories, the law is not applied and powerful individuals and groups profit evict the Jarai communities from their ancestral lands. In Vietnam, some Jarai persons seek for refuge in other countries, crossing the Cambodian territory to escape restrictions of their traditions and cultures.
Legends