Kreung people

Indigenous people of Ratanakiri, Cambodia

A Kreung meeting house in a village near Ban Lung, Ratanakiri, 2005. Photo: Franz Xaver, CC BY-SA 3.0

Community details
Khmer name	គ្រឹង
Also known as	Krung; Krueng; Kreoung; Kru'ng
Community type	Indigenous people
Country	Cambodia
Subjects	Community & Civic Life; Music & Sound; Language & Literacy

The Kreung people (គ្រឹង) are an Indigenous people of Ratanakiri in northeastern Cambodia, with villages in O Chum district near Banlung. The name is also written Krung, Krueng and Kreoung. A report by the Ministry of Planning and the Ministry of Rural Development draws on data from 2008 and 2013. It names the Kreung as one of only six of Cambodia's 22 Indigenous groups with more than 10,000 people each. The other five are the Tampuan, Pnong, Kuy, Jarai and Prev. Several Kreung communities hold their land as communal property.

History

Jefferson Fox, John B. Vogler and Mark Poffenberger list the Krung among the ethnic communities of Ratanakiri, citing Lebar and colleagues (1964). During the Khmer Rouge years, much of the population of Krala, a Krung village in O Chum district about 25 kilometers (16 miles) north of Banlung, was moved to Veun Sai district and made to farm paddy rice. The village was re-established right after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, and in 1984 it moved to the site it occupied in the three authors' account (published 2009), which puts its population at about 420.

With support from local non-government organizations, Krala kept control of all of its traditional land, and the three authors hold it up as a model for other communities. Its farming moved from swidden fields (shifting cultivation, where forest plots are cleared, farmed and left to regrow) in the early 1990s to a mix of swidden fields and cashew orchards. Four families had planted cashew trees in 1994, and nearly 100 of the village's 135 families by 2000.

From December 25 to 27, 2013, the first joint assembly of the Indigenous peoples of Ratanakiri met in Pa Chon village, O Chum district. More than 300 delegates came, among them Kreung, Tampuan, Jarai, Kavet, Kachok, Brao and Lun. The assembly opened with gong music and a buffalo sacrifice to the spirits of the forest and the mountains, following the peoples' own beliefs. A Kreung delegate from Koun Mom district told the assembly that the registration of communal land was very slow.

On September 23, 2010, the Ministry of Rural Development recognized the Kreung community of Kam village, L'ak commune, O Chum district, as an Indigenous community. A government sub-decree, listed undated by Open Development Cambodia, reclassified about 488 hectares (1,207 acres) of state land to grant communal ownership to the Kreung community of Mas village in Pouy commune. An Open Development Cambodia record posted on March 16, 2026 states that the provincial administration registered 415 hectares (1,026 acres) in Svay village, in the same commune, as the collective property of its Kreung community. The registration followed the Land Law.

Life and culture

Krung is a dialect of Brao, a language of the West Bahnaric branch of the Austroasiatic family, spoken in Cambodia. Glottolog rates it as threatened.

The Cambodia Daily wrote in 2015 that Tong Kropu, about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from Banlung, was one of five mostly Kreung communities in O Chum commune. It had seven families before 1991 and 366 people in 2015. For decades its families farmed by slash and burn; in the early 2000s they turned to cash crops such as cashew nuts and used the income to build Khmer-style wooden houses.

In the ministries' report, traditional midwives attended 65.6 percent of births to Indigenous women in the previous 12 months, against 9.8 percent for Cambodian women overall. The Kreung were among the groups where this was most common.

Courtship huts

The Cambodia Daily wrote in 2015 that Kreung families traditionally built a young person a hut of their own on coming of age, called nam am berk in the Kreung language. The hut gave a young man or woman privacy to receive a possible spouse, and a first home away from the parents. The newspaper also wrote that couples were encouraged to live together before the young man asked the young woman's parents for permission to marry. An elder of Tong Kropu told the Cambodia Daily in 2015 that a man who ended a relationship without marrying owed a fine of a container of wine, or of livestock.

The same elder said that every family built a hut before the Khmer Rouge years, that the regime made people live communally, and that the custom resumed after 1979, though many Kreung turned to Khmer culture. Villagers named mobile phones, a move to Khmer-style wooden houses and men who left women before marriage among the reasons the huts became rare. In 2015 the commune chief knew of only a few, and believed they were kept mostly for tourists to see.

Music and dance

Life and Art Kreung Indigenous Culture (2006), a 45-minute documentary by Om Hongkiri in Khmer with English subtitles, shows Kreung music and dance and a community working to pass them on to future generations. In its account, the Kreung respect nature and the spirits around them, which they regard as their protectors and as giving them a place to live. The Bophana Center screened it on August 6, 2022.

Sounds of Angkor, a site by Patrick Kersalé, presents a Kreung set of five bossed gongs (gongs with a raised center knob). It was recorded in the village of Kro Pou on February 7, 2010, at the inauguration of a house, with the customary jar of rice beer. Kersalé writes that the melodies have always been few, and that the gradual loss of ancestral skills, as Christianity took the place of animist belief, has reduced them further.

In 2018 Cambodian Living Arts gave an Arn Chorn-Pond Living Arts scholarship in Kreung traditional dance to a Kreung woman, who went on to teach Indigenous musical instruments to women in her community as a volunteer.

References