Cultural Heritage and Arts Society of Sarawak

Without trust, the cuisine does not begin. The communities of Sarawak — the elders, seed-keepers, foragers, and household cooks whose knowledge anchors every plate — do not open their kitchens to a chef who arrives unannounced. They open them to a partner who has earned the right to be brought in. CHASS is the partner who carried that introduction.

The Cultural Heritage and Arts Society of Sarawak is the cultural-research society that anchors Serumpun’s standing within the indigenous communities of the State. Their work is the long, patient labour of community engagement — the fieldwork conversations, the heritage research, the methodological discipline of recording living knowledge without flattening it into folklore.

Three things CHASS carries that the platform could not have carried without them:

Community trust. The introductions that brought Serumpun into the kitchens, longhouses, and forest fields of the indigenous communities. CHASS is known to those communities. Their endorsement opens doors that no marketing budget can purchase.

Methodological backbone. The fieldwork procedures, the consent protocols, the heritage-research discipline that ensures every entry in the Indigenous Ingredient Codex sits on a foundation other practitioners can read against and build upon.

Cultural validation. The recipes, the narrations, the menu language — held to a standard that the communities themselves recognise as faithful. CHASS reads the work before the public reads it.

Datin Sri Dona Drury-Wee

Datin Sri Dona Drury-Wee leads the CHASS work that touches Serumpun. Her hand is in every selection round of the Mentee Programme — the technical and cultural interviews, the shortlist that narrowed thirty-odd applicants to twelve, the considered judgement of which young Sarawakian practitioners carried both the discipline and the heritage to deserve a place on the Mentee Programme.

The platform is not where CHASS first stewarded Sarawakian heritage. The work CHASS holds across cultural arts, language, and indigenous practice is decades older than Serumpun. Serumpun is one of the platforms CHASS chose to lend its ground to. The honour is mine.

Chef Laura Sim Bara — CHASS in motion

Chef Laura Sim Bara sits on Serumpun’s current Mentee Programme. She is also a CHASS practitioner — the bridge that walks both grounds. Her cultural validation in the menu work, her on-pass discipline at Mulu, her field foraging with the Baram communities — these are not separate from her CHASS standing. They are CHASS in motion.

The Mentee Programme would not be what it is without CHASS practitioners passing through it. The cuisine would not be what it is without that exchange.

The discipline this acknowledgement asks for

Acknowledging CHASS by name is the easier half of the work. The harder half is keeping the discipline they have entrusted Serumpun with. That discipline reads as follows:

The communities are not subjects of the cuisine. They are the cuisine’s senior teachers. The Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of every community whose knowledge enters the platform must be carried — not assumed, not retroactively annotated, but secured before the entry is made. The Codex is not a chef’s pantry. It is a record of trust held and trust kept.

The long thanks

To Datin Sri Dona Drury-Wee and the CHASS team, and to every community elder, seed-keeper, forager, and household cook who has chosen — quietly, on terms of their own — to share what they know with this platform: the cuisine’s debt to you is permanent.

The forest feeds our future. CHASS held the door that let us walk into the forest at all.