Spirited away

Gie Trieng ethnic minority are a highly traditional hill tribe from the Central highlands. There are around 30,000 Gie Trieng living in small hamlets each with 10- 15 households built around a rong (communal house) throughout Lam Dong, Kon Tum and Quang Nam provinces
The Gie Trieng hill tribe can be found scattered across Vietnam’s mountainous Central Highlands – mostly in Kon Tum, Quang Nam and Lam Dong provinces.
There are around 30,000 Gie Trieng though there are various sub-groups within the Gie-Trieng community: Ta re, T'rieng, Ve and Ba Nong. They live in small hamlets with 10- 15 households built around a rong (communal house).
Gie Trieng people live off weaving, farming, hunting and fishing. Generally they don’t pay much attention to livestock production.
Love and marriage
When a woman falls in love with a man, she is allowed to ‘accost him’. If the man refuses, he can be kidnapped by the woman’s friends and/ or relatives and forced to marry her! The man will stay in the woman’s home for five nights. After the deadline is up, if he still refuses to marry the girl, he will be fined one pig and 10 jars of alcohol.
An engagement ceremony (Ta Vuy Trieng) is often secretly organised. Only the couple’s close relatives are allowed to participate. It is said that a sudden mariage will bring the couple much happiness.
In the week before the wedding (Che Chia), the bride has to prepare as much firewood as possible for the wedding, as it is considered a dowry to warm her new hearth.
The groom’s family will present two pigs to the bride’s family. When the pigs are slaughtered, people will touch one another and the butcher in hope of bringing happiness and wealth to the couple and themselves. Blood from the slaughtered pigs is also doused on the couple’s bed to wish that they will have many children.
Spirit world
The Gie Trieng believe that all beings have a “soul” and a “spirit”. Therefore ritual ceremonies and the watching of good and bad omens have prevailed. However some of the tribal beliefs are extremely primitive. In Ta Pooc village in Kon Tum’s Ngoc Hoi district, a child was born by the name of A Trinh in 1989. Two days later his maternal grandmother died.
His grandfather attributed his wife’s death to Trinh’s parents, who were alleged to have had premarital sex so Trinh was considered to be a ghost. The grandfather wanted to kill Trinh and reported the case to the village’s council of elders.
The council asked the communal government to revoke Trinh’s parents’ marriage certificate and kill Trinh in the forest. Trinh’s father absconded with his son to Dac Mon commune in Kon Tum province’s Dac Glay district. A midwife by the name of Y Chay adopted Trinh into her home and today Trinh still lives in Dac Mon.
Chay became embroiled in another controversial case in 1999 when a woman from her village by the name of Y Suong died of tetanus after giving birth to her daughter, who was named U Ni. Suong’s husband was advised by some villagers to kill U Ni, who was regarded as a ghost.
He took his daughter to the forest and simply left her there. But Y Chay had followed the man into the forest and confronted him. She said she would report the case to the district’s police and he would be charged with murder. In the end Y Chay adopted U Ni.
In another case a woman from Chay’s village died of postnatal disease two weeks after giving birth to an infant named Y Truong. The baby was to be buried alive with his ill-fated mother until Y Chay appeared and asked the villagers to give her Y Truong. Sadly, the child died when he was one year old.
A veteran from the Vietnamese-American war, Chay and her own husband cannot conceive. As a result, she loves all babies and has never backed down from declaring her village’s customs to be unsound even though she has been subjected to abuse and ostracised from the community.