How a land stewardship custom honouring eldest daughters has allowed a Sumatran indigenous group to flourish over three hundred years
South of the shiny skyscrapers of Singapore and west of the beach parties of Bali lies Sumatra – a vast, forested island at the western edge of the Indonesian archipelago. The largest island wholly within Indonesia’s borders, Sumatra is a place where modernity presses in from every side: new roads, palm oil plantations and the endless churn of commerce. Yet in the highlands of southern Sumatra, the Semende tribe has held its ground, quite literally, for centuries.
While the surrounding world has rushed toward headlong development, the Semende have managed to preserve a way of life rooted in a sense of place and a finely tuned ethic of stewardship. Writing for the Indonesian environmental news site Mongabay.co.id, journalist Taufik Wijaya offers a window into this resilient community: one that has learned, against the odds, how to protect both its land and its traditions.
According to local lore, the story of the tribe itself began in 1650 when seven wise ancestors known as puyang gathered in a place called Paradipe and struck a foundational accord. The details of that agreement, and even the names of those seven figures, are preserved with remarkable fidelity. For more than three centuries since, the Semende have tended not only to their rice paddies and coffee groves but to a living archive of who they are and what they stand for based on that accord.
At the heart of this quiet endurance is a custom known as Tunggu Tubang, a system that weaves inheritance, gender roles and land rights into a tapestry of mutual obligation. Under this tradition, the eldest daughter of each family is considered the keeper of its heirlooms: the stilt houses that stand like sentinels in the village, the rice fields carved into hillsides, the gardens that feed both body and spirit. These are not considered commodities to be traded on an open market; they are entrusted, generation after generation, to those who will care for them in good faith.
“Our traditional lands have survived because of Tunggu Tubang,” says Sarmani, a resident of Muara Tenang Village, where some houses date back centuries. The custom has proven remarkably adaptable, coexisting with Indonesian property law while still honouring ancestral mandates. Responsibility, in the Semende worldview, is not a static thing: an eldest daughter can lose her status if she neglects her duties, to be replaced by a younger sister, or in some cases, a son’s wife if there is no daughter to inherit. What ultimately matters is not so much who holds the title, but whether the land is tended in accordance with custom.
Today, the Semende’s customary territory encompasses fields, farms and nearly 15,000 hectares of coffee plantations, lush green slopes that have become the tribe’s economic lifeline. Yet this is not a monoculture imposed on the land; rather, the article suggests, it is a living system that reflects the Semende’s ethic of shared belonging.
The name “Semende” itself contains this idea of collectivity. As Wijaya explains, the word can be traced to same nde (“same belonging”) or se-man-de (“a unified house owned by all”). Their resilience is not accidental but actively cultivated: a form of what scholars like Handoyo, an anthropologist with the BRIN Population Research Center, call “epistemic resilience”, the ability of a community to sustain its local knowledge and values in the face of external pressures.
All in all, the article suggests, the story of the Semende reminds us that to protect a piece of earth is never only a question of legal rights or physical boundaries. It is about cultivating a web of relationships, between people, ancestors, land and future generations, that binds them all together in a moral economy of care.
In Wijaya’s telling, there is a lesson here for policymakers and would-be stewards of the environment alike: that true sustainability demands more than the language of conservation or the bureaucracy of land management. It asks for the patience to listen, the humility to learn and the imagination to see another way of living with the land.
Original article (“Relasi Sosial dan Kearifan Suku Semende Menjaga Wilayah Adat”) by Taufik Wijaya was first published in Bahasa Indonesia on 1 June 2025.
It’s available here.
Mongabay.co.id is an Indonesian environmental news organisation founded in 2012 to raise awareness of environmental issues, an offshoot of the US-based Mongabay.com.
