The Akha People

The Akha are an indigenous hill tribe that live in small villages at high altitudes in the mountains of Thailand, Burma, Laos and the Yunnan Province of China. They made their way from China into South East Asia during the early 1900s. Civil war in Burma and Laos resulted in an increased flow of Akha immigrants and there are now some 80,000 living in Thailand’s northern provinces of Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, where they constitute one of the largest of the hill tribes. Many of their villages can be visited by tourists on trekking tours from either of these cities. (10)

The Akha speak Akha, a language in the Loloish (Yi) branch of the Tibeto-Berman family. Akha language is closely related language to the Lisu and it is conjectured that the Akha once belonged to the Lolo hunter tribe people that once ruled the Baoshan and Tengchong plains before the invasion of the Ming Dynasty (A.D 1644) in Yunnan, China. (1)

The Akha are closely related to the Hani of China’s Yunnan province. They are also known derogatorily in Thai as the Gaw or the E-gaw. The Akha are one of the dominant cultural influences in the area. There are two to three million Akha and Akha-Hani in total, 70,000 of whom live in Thailand. The Akha speak a language in the Lolo/Yi branch of the Tibeto-Burman language group, but have no traditional written language. (2)

Although many Akha, especially younger people, profess Christianity, Akha Zang (The Akha Way) still runs deep in their consciousness. The Akha are a shamanic group that share the ancient universal archetype that the Goddess spins a universe where nature is not distinguished from humankind. They embody the essence of its consciousness into an holistic continuum where there is no dichotomy between themselves and the natural world. The Akha Way, a prescribed lifestyle derived from religious chants, combines animism, ancestor worship, shamanism and a deep relationship with the land. The Akha Way emphasizes rituals in everyday life and stresses strong family ties and the hymn of creation; every Akha male can recount his genealogy back over fifty generations to the first Akha, Sm Mi O. (2)

A decline in village size in Thailand since the 1930s has been noted

and attributed to the deteriorating ecological and economic situation in the mountains. (1)

According to the Akha Heritage Foundation:

“The Akha have been maligned as slash and burn migratory farmers. This is not true. Stable village sites are many years at the same location, the land being farmed in a circle around the village for years and years on end, rice terraces slowly creeping up from the bottoms of the watershed. Forced relocations and wars have resulted in the Akha villages being relocated over and over, leaving them no option but to cut and farm in the new location. Distant relatives of the Akha, the Hani, in China, are regarded as ‘The terrace builders’ for having used terraces at the same locations for centuries in a fine tuned harmony to get along with what supplies them with food.” (3)

“The Akha have been maligned as slash and burn migratory farmers. This is not true.”

References

1.Wikipedia, “Akha People”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akha_people (retrieved 2/15/2014).
2.Wikipedia, “Hill tribe (Thailand)”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_tribe_(Thailand) (retrieved 12/15/13).
3.The Akha Heritage Foundation, “The Akha Belief and Life System”,
http://www.akha.org/content/aboutakhalife/akhabelieflife.html (Retrieved 2/15/14).

Proud young Akha girl. Photo by Steve Murray

Akha smoker. Photo by
G. Richardson

Akha woman in doorway.
Photo by Nicholas Mayo