Cambodia UPROOTED: "Our spiritual roots"

VoA Cambodia | 17 September 2015

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"Our Spiritual Roots"

Editor’s Note: In this series ‘Cambodia UPROOTED,’ VOA guest columnist Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam will release a series of six video clips and essays, over the course of twelve months that will seek to understand how Cambodia is being “uprooted” by massive and unrestrained development and how Cambodia can learn to retrace its “roots” again. Utilizing footage captured over the course of five years and personal and insightful essays, the series will seek to explore significant social and environmental issues related to deforestation, land grabbing, industrial agriculture, overfishing, sand dredging, migration, and urban development. This series will emphasize that only when Cambodia protects its people and environment can it root and ground itself again in the natural and cultural heritage of its ancestors.

The first video featured is of a special ceremony in Areng Valley, an area in Southwest Cambodia considered one of the most rich and bio-diverse in the country. This ceremony happens only once every three years to honor the forest spirits and to seek their protection. During this ceremony, a leading village elder speaks about the importance of land and water. We come from the land and water, he says. Without the land and the water we cannot survive. Land and water is the root of our natural and cultural identity.

The message is simple but it strikes at the heart of the natural and cultural genocide that is taking place in Cambodia today. Millions of Cambodians live directly off nature, off its rivers, lakes, and forests, and thus depend on healthy ecosystems and their sustainable usage. Destruction of this thousand-year old relationship would not only spell the destruction of the country and its people, but of Cambodia’s currently faltering national identity. How do we retrace, recapture and reclaim our roots? This video, urges for the protection of our ancestors – our land and our water - as the answer to finding ourselves again.
 

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