Rolly Wuisan: Indigenous Wisdom in Environmental Action

Within the dominant landscape of global cinema, narratives about protecting the Earth are often constructed through distance—distance in geography, culture, and lived experience. Environmental protection is frequently represented through exceptional figures: activists, scientists, or heroes who appear larger than ordinary life.

Such representations can be powerful, but can also create separation. Caring for the Earth begins to appear extraordinary, rare, or located somewhere beyond everyday life. Responsibility is displaced—geographically distant, institutionally defined, and seemingly inaccessible to people watching from elsewhere.

Beyond this dominant frame, other ways of living with the Earth have always existed. Such ways do not necessarily announce themselves as environmentalism, yet embody its deepest principles. Ecological responsibility is present in daily work, family obligations, community memory, and relationships with land.

The life of Rolly Wuisan exists within this space.

Rolly does not come from an environmental institution and does not describe his work through the vocabulary of global climate discourse. For almost sixty years, however, his daily routine has been a continuous practice of ecological responsibility.

He walks long distances to the plantation. He climbs palm trees reaching thirty to fifty metres. He collects sap, distils Cap Tikus, plants trees, observes the forest, and carefully reads changes in the surrounding landscape.

This is not simply labour. It is a system, a rhythm, and a way of being that sustains human life while maintaining a relationship with the environment.

At the centre of Rolly’s worldview is a principle that defines both action and responsibility:

“If not us, then who? That is the manifesto passed down by our ancestors.”

This statement is not rhetoric. It expresses an ethical framework embedded in Indigenous knowledge, where responsibility for the land cannot be separated from human existence.

The principle rejects postponement. Care cannot continually be transferred to institutions, experts, or distant actors. Responsibility demands presence and direct action.

This ethic is not expressed primarily through abstract concepts. It is carried by the body.

Rolly’s body is a site where knowledge has been produced, practised, and transmitted. Over decades, the body learned to move with precision and awareness—to climb towering palm trees without modern safety equipment, read the condition of the forest, and maintain a balance between taking and caring.

This knowledge was not produced in a classroom or preserved only in written documents. It was developed through repetition, experience, observation, and memory. Knowledge remains in movement, muscle, breath, and rhythm.

At the age of seventy-three, the body also begins to reveal its limits.

Rolly: A Story of My Father observes this condition with quiet intensity. Rather than relying on a dramatic narrative structure, the film develops through duration and repetition. Time is felt through physical labour rather than through conventional chronological markers.

Rolly’s breathing becomes one of the central elements of the film, carrying endurance and vulnerability at the same time. Slower and more careful movements reveal a body negotiating with time.

A central tension emerges: the continuity of knowledge exists beside the vulnerability of the body carrying it.

What is at stake is not only physical strength. An entire knowledge system can disappear when no process of transmission, continuation, or translation is created.

Within this context, labour is not merely economic activity. Labour is a relational practice.

Walking, climbing, carrying, collecting, and distilling are also forms of care—care for family, land, trees, and future generations.

Rolly explains this relationship in simple terms:

“I only work like this, but this work allowed me to send you and your siblings to school, buy cattle, build a house, and plant trees in this plantation.”

The statement transforms the meaning of labour. Work that may appear ordinary or invisible becomes the foundation of a complex system. It supports education, family life, economic survival, and ecological continuity.

Love is not always spoken directly. In Rolly’s life, love is practised through persistence. Responsibility takes the place of declaration. Repeated labour becomes an expression of care.

Rolly’s relationship with nature also challenges dominant environmental frameworks. The relationship is not organised around ownership, extraction, or control. It is grounded in kinship.

Rolly says:

“Nature is our closest relative. God created nature to care for us. Because of that, we must also care for nature, just as we care for our relatives.”

This understanding changes the position of nature from object to subject, and from resource to relative. Human survival becomes inseparable from the condition of the surrounding environment.

The same relationship is present in the understanding of the seho tree as A’kel. A’kel is not simply a tree that provides sap. A’kel is understood as a guardian of life.

Collecting from the tree therefore becomes part of a reciprocal relationship rather than an act of extraction. The tree sustains human life, while human responsibility includes protecting the tree and the forest where it grows.

This relationship also shapes actions directed toward a future beyond one person’s lifetime:

“We plant so the forest will remain, and the next generation can receive the results.”

Sustainability is not presented as a policy, project, or temporary campaign. It is a moral obligation extending across generations.

This knowledge system now exists within a rapidly changing social landscape. Many young people leave villages in search of education, employment, stability, and different possibilities for life.

Such movement is understandable. At the same time, migration can interrupt the transmission of knowledge that depends on direct practice, long-term observation, and relationships with a particular place.

What may be lost is not only a set of technical skills. An entire epistemology is at risk—a way of understanding the world through relationship, responsibility, reciprocity, and continuity.

Within this situation, Rolly: A Story of My Father works as both documentation and intervention.

The film records one life, but also translates knowledge carried by the body into a medium capable of travelling beyond its place of origin. Cinema becomes a way to extend memory without separating knowledge from the person, land, and labour that produced it.

In this sense, filmmaking can become an instrument of decolonisation.

For a long time, Indigenous life has often been represented through external viewpoints. Outsiders have frequently determined the frame, language, interpretation, and meaning.

A story created from within changes this relationship. Indigenous Peoples are not objects of observation. Indigenous Peoples are knowledge producers, image-makers, storytellers, and interpreters of lived experience.

The relationship between filmmaker and subject is central to this process. Intimacy does not necessarily reduce understanding. Intimacy can produce a form of knowledge that distance cannot reach.

The film therefore becomes a space of testimony, where personal experience meets collective memory.

Ultimately, Rolly: A Story of My Father is not only a film about a father. It is a reflection on time, memory, labour, love, and responsibility.

The film asks what happens when knowledge is carried by an ageing body. It also asks how such knowledge can continue into the future.

If bodies such as Rolly’s body are living archives, cinema can help extend their presence beyond physical limits. Yet film alone is not enough. Film can record, preserve, and circulate, but cannot replace the living practice from which knowledge emerges.

A pressing question remains: when knowledge rooted in the body, land, and daily practice is no longer recognised or continued, what will remain, and what will disappear?

Within this uncertainty, one principle continues to resonate—not as a slogan, but as an ethical foundation:

“If not us, then who?”