KUCHING, Oct 7: Society for Rights of Indigenous Peoples Sarawak (Scrips) will organise more training courses on Global Positioning System (GPS) and Documentation of Community Oral History for native customary rights (NCR) land owners, if requested.
Its secretary-general, Michael Jok, said Scrips put together such a one-day course for 50 NCR landowners at a hotel in Bintulu yesterday.
“The reasons for organising this kind of training course is simply to help NCR landowners use GPS to mark their territorial domain as well as their private ‘temuda’ land based on their respective ‘adat’.
“With this technology, we basically can do survey work on our own without depending too much on others,” said Michael, in a statement today.
He added that to enhance NCR landowners’ claims on their territorial domain and private ‘temuda’ land, they were also taught how to document the oral history of their respective community as well as the drafting of their community mapping.
“The participants came from different parts of the state. Every participant had expressed their satisfaction and appreciation to Scrips for taking the initiative to organise such an important training course,” he said.
The four main topics presented were on the recent Sarawak Land Code Amendment, how to use GPS, the importance of community mapping, and the documentation of community oral history.
“There have been a few requests from different communities and NCR landowners across the state for us to conduct the same training course in other major towns.
“Scrips is indeed planning to have this training course to be held in every division if possible, based on popular request,” he assured.
He added that Scrips would continue to assist the indigenous communities to deepen their knowledge on their ‘adat’ and law as well as in the documentation of their community oral history.
“This is also very important to smallholders as the federal government is serious in wanting to grant them Malaysian Standard of Palm Oil (MSPO) certification so as to upgrade their productivity in the oil palm industry,” said Michael. — DayakDaily
