Thailand (Lonely Planet, 13th Edition) - China Williams [35]
The second-largest ethnic minority are the Malays (4.6%), most of whom reside in the provinces of the deep south. The remaining minority groups include smaller percentages of non-Thai-speaking people like the Vietnamese, Khmer, Mon, Semang (Sakai), Moken (chow lair; people of the sea, or ‘sea gypsies’), Htin, Mabri, Khamu and a variety of hill tribes. A small number of Europeans and other non-Asians reside in Bangkok and the provinces.
Hill Tribes
Ethnic minorities in the mountainous regions of northern Thailand are often called ‘hill tribes’, or in Thai vernacular, chow kw (mountain people). Each hill tribe has its own language, customs, mode of dress and spiritual beliefs.
Most are of semi-nomadic origin, having come from Tibet, Myanmar, China and Laos during the past 200 years or so. They are ‘fourth world’ people in that they belong neither to the main aligned powers nor to the developing nations. Rather, they have crossed and continue to cross national borders, often fleeing oppression by other cultures, without regard for recent nationhood.
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Queen of Langkasuka (2008), by Nonzee Nimibutr, is a lavish period piece loosely based on the Malay kingdom of Pattani, a segment of history few non-Malay Thais know much about. The opening weeks of the movie positioned it as the year’s highest-grossing movie.
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A MODERN PERSPECTIVE ON THE HILL TRIBES
Hill tribes tend to have among the lowest standards of living in Thailand. Although it could be tempting to correlate this quality of life with traditional lifestyles, their situation is compounded, in most cases, by not having Thai citizenship. Without the latter, hill tribes don’t have the right to own land, educate their children, earn minimum wages or access health care. In the last couple of decades some members of hill-tribe groups have been issued Thai identification cards, which enable them to access national programs (in theory, though often extra ‘fees’ might prevent families from being able to afford public schooling and health care). Other hill-tribe families have received residency certificates that restrict travel outside of an assigned district, in turn limiting access to job opportunities and other necessities associated with a highly mobile modern society.
Furthermore, the Thai government has pursued a 30-year policy of hill-tribe relocation, often moving villages from fertile agricultural land to infertile land, in turn removing the tribes from a viable subsistence system in which tribal customs were intact to a market system in which they can’t adequately compete and in which tribal ways have been fractured.
Some suggest that the revenue generated by Thai trekking companies helps the hill-tribe groups maintain their separate ethnic identity. Most agree that a small percentage of the profits from trekking filters down to individual families within hill-tribe villages, giving them a small source of income that might prevent urban migration. One guide we spoke to estimated an optimistic 50% of the tour budget was spent on purchasing food, lodging and supplies from hill-tribe merchants at the host village.
In general the trekking business has become more socially conscious than in previous decades. Most companies now tend to limit the number of visits to a particular area to lessen the impact of outsiders on the daily lives of ordinary villagers. But the industry still has a long way to go. It should be noted that trekking companies are Thai-owned and employ Thai guides, another bureaucratic impediment regarding citizenship for ethnic minorities. Without an identification card, guides from the hill tribes do not qualify for a Tourist Authority of Thailand (TAT) tour guide license and so are less than desirable job candidates.
In the past decade, the expansion of tourism into the mountainous regions of the north presents a complicating factor to the independence of hill-tribe villages. City speculators will buy land from hill-tribe farmers for fairly nominal sums only to be resold, usually to resorts, for