The Last Longhouse

About the Book

With her adventure memoir “The Last Longhouse” Anna Goins adds to the vast and fascinating body of literature by intrepid women travelers originating in the nineteenth century with such figures as Isabelle Eberhardt. What distinguished “The Last Longhouse” is that its heroine was 62 years of age when she threw over the traces of life as an academic wife to adventure alone and disguised as a man into uncharted Dyak Territory. Gifted with the awareness, and sense of risk derived from her first experiences accompanying her anthropologist husband in his field work in the High Andes, she was able to make contact with the original head hunters of Borneo and live among them observing their traditional way of life to share with us this rare account. Cecile Pineda Author of FACE Winner of the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal Looking for a piece of paradise to allay a childhood memory, a sixty-two year old American widow travels alone into Borneo with a weeks supply of food and a hand-drawn map to make her way up the Mahakam River and into the forbidden territory of the Dyak headhunters. After making arrangements with a Chinese timber contractor to gain passage on an Indonesian launch, Anna’s trip is officially endorsed by confusion when her travel papers are stamped laki-laki (male) at an Indonesian army checkpoint. No woman is allowed to travel unaccompanied on the Mahakam River. Her unknown destination is Rukun Damai near the Mahakam headwaters, an isolated settlement where the Dyak live communally in traditional longhouses. Anna discovers how fiercely protective these people are of their way of life when she receives an aggressively chilly reception, undoubtedly influenced by her necessary reliance on “out-siders” to make her way up the river. During the three-day stay granted by the patinggi, the Dyak headman recognizes Anna’s sincere interest in his people and invites her to stay in his longhouse. Here, she is allowed to celebrate their life, and while learning to dance, to cook and to harvest rice, she falls in love amidst the timeless beauty of Rukun Damai. Only the expiration of her visa forces her to consider leaving. While the timber industry and the Indonesian government connive to move the Dyak to a government reservation downriver, she learns of the patinggi’s desperate measures to save his people. Anna hopes it is not inevitable that the patinggi’s longhouse is the Last Longhouse on the Mahakam.

About the Author

Freed from conventional responsibilities, widowed, her two sons grown and on their own, Anna Goins flees the comforts of the civilized world in pursuit of a childhood dream: to live with the wild headhunters of Borneo. No amount of formal training, expertise or even language can supplant the power of desire. This is her testament of fulfillment. She now lives in Montana, remarried, still dreaming.