Murut Serudung

Like other Murut peoples of Borneo, the Serudung descend from communities that inhabited the highlands and river valleys of the island's interior long before the arrival of any outside administration. The name Murut, meaning hill people, reflects these origins tied to the uplands and the rivers that run through the forest.

Over time, the group settled on the banks of the Serudung River, from which its present name comes, forming villages that lived by farming, hunting and fishing. The more recent transition from traditional communal houses to separate family homes marks a shift from a traditional collective way of life toward a social structure closer to that of other rural communities in Sabah.

For generations, the Murut Serudung lived in large communal houses built along the river, which also served as a route for people and goods. They moved fairly often, growing upland rice and cassava, hunting with spears and blowguns, and fishing in the streams that run through the forest around their villages.

Today, most live in separate family homes built on the same sites where the communal houses once stood. Growing rice on hillsides remains their main activity, alongside work in sawmills and timber processing, which have become part of how younger families earn a living.

The traditional beliefs of the Murut Serudung center on respect for the spirits of the forest, the river and their ancestors, which feature in rituals connected to planting, hunting and important stages of life. This spiritual outlook is intertwined with the people’s identity and the way the community understands its relationship with the land it inhabits and with earlier generations.

Among those who now identify as Christians, faith often blends with these inherited practices, resulting in a religious life that combines Catholic or Protestant elements with older spiritual customs, without one entirely replacing the other.

The Serudung language has never had a written tradition: everything people know, teach and celebrate is passed on by word of mouth from one generation to the next. This oral tradition makes any Bible translation work an unusual challenge, since it requires developing a way to write the language from scratch before even a single page can be translated. Until this happens, the people depend almost entirely on neighboring languages for any contact with the sacred text.

Murut identity remains tied to spiritual traditions inherited from their ancestors, and many see abandoning these customs as breaking with their own community and the memory of those who came before. The isolation of villages along the Serudung River, combined with the lack of a writing system for their language, makes it difficult to access any material that speaks about Jesus in a way that feels like their own.

The shift from a collective way of life to separate family households has changed how the community cares for its members. Livelihoods now depend increasingly on work in sawmills and timber processing, activities subject to fluctuations in the forest economy. There is a real need to preserve the people’s language and collective memory, since oral tradition alone faces pressures from the passage of time and new generations.

Spiritually, the Murut Serudung lack a Christian community of their own, one that speaks their language and understands their customs, able to walk alongside families through their daily challenges with the message of Jesus.

Part of the community already identifies as Christian, including families from both Catholic and Protestant traditions, and translation of the Scriptures into Serudung has begun. These are still small steps in the face of the challenge posed by a language without its own writing system, but they point to an open path for the Word to reach these river people more fully.