In the Pga K’nyau village of Ban Huay E Kang in the Chiang Mai province of northern Thailand, a newborn's umbilical cord is placed inside a bamboo container and hung from a tree. This is a sacred act of establishing a lifelong connection between each villager and the forest. The practice is known in the Pga K’nyau language as de paw thoo. This tradition has faced significant disruption from state-led conservation policies and the institutionalization of childbirth in state hospitals, which Ban Huay E Kang villagers contest through their revitalization of de paw thoo. Based on collaborative ethnographic research, we examine how spiritual, ecological, and cultural relationships structure Pga K’nyau epistemologies. In this research project, we ask: how is knowledge of de paw thoo transmitted and mobilized by women in Ban Huay E Kang to access resources? This paper argues that Pga K’nyau women in Ban Huay E Kang strategically transmit and mobilize de paw thoo as evidence of their long-standing relationship with the forest, to contest state territorialization, resist extractive state policies, and assert cultural belonging. We argue that de paw thoo functions not solely as cultural memory but as a dynamic tool for ecological governance that contests state territorialization and resists extractive policies. Drawing on feminist political ecology, the project investigates the tensions and innovations within these practices of intergenerational ecological knowledge transmission. This paper contributes to emerging scholarship on how gender, cosmology, and environment intersect in the making and remaking of Indigenous knowledge in upland Southeast Asia. De paw thoo serves as a lifeline of knowledge and a strategic political claim that secures the community’s reciprocal relationship with their ancestral land.
Worawongwasu et al. (Thu,) studied this question.