Knowledgebase
The Dega people
Who we are, how many, which tribes, and the country we come from.
Articles
6 articles
Who are the Dega
We are the indigenous people of the Central Highlands of Vietnam — some thirty tribes, two unrelated language families, one homeland, and a single shared experience of what has been done to it. Almost every name we are known by in the outside world was given to us by somebody else. Dega is the one we gave ourselves.
How many Dega there are
Nobody knows exactly. The published figures disagree with one another by a factor of six, and the disagreement is itself part of the story. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel: there are far fewer of us than there were, in a homeland now holding many times the people it did, and we are a minority in every province of our own country.
The tribes and their languages
Around thirty tribes, in two language families that are not related to one another. The Chamic-speaking peoples — Jarai, Rhade, Raglai, Chu Ru — are Austronesian, cousins of the Cham of the coast and, further out, of Malay and Indonesian. The rest speak Bahnaric languages of the Mon-Khmer family, related to Khmer. Below: who is who, where, how m...
The country itself
A plateau country of red basalt soil, forest and river valleys, between 500 and 1,500 metres above the sea, some 54,548 square kilometres of it. Its boundaries were drawn on 27 May 1946 by the colonial power itself — and the drawing left out the coast we had already been driven from.
Dega culture
A village, the land around it held in common, kinship that decides obligation, and a moral order older than any state that has claimed us. Around thirty peoples, each with its own building, weaving, music and dance, held together by an animist thread that runs through all of them — and by a gong tradition UNESCO has recognised as a masterpiece o...
Dega women, and a record written about men
Among the Rhade and the Jarai, land, livestock and the heirloom jars pass through women. Yet almost every source this library is built from is about men — because soldiers, prisoners and petitioners are who got written down. This page sets out what we can establish, and is explicit about the shape of what is missing.
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