Ma'anyan

The Ma'anyan, or Dayak Ma'anyan, are an Eastern Barito Dayak people of central and southern Borneo. Their language is the closest relative of Malagasy: between roughly 50 and 500 AD, Ma'anyan-related people were carried across the Indian Ocean as labourers and slaves on Malay and Javanese trading ships, carrying their Southeast Barito speech to Madagascar.

Before the twelfth century the Ma'anyan had built their own realm, Nansarunai, in southern Kalimantan. Ma'anyan oral histories remember two invasions from Majapahit, called Nansarunai Usak Jawa, the destruction of Nansarunai by the Javanese.

The kingdom had fallen by 1389, and its people scattered up the Barito into several sub-groups, some later falling under the influence of the Muslim Banjar sultanate. In later centuries they kept to rice agriculture. Their elaborate funeral rites were led by shamans, who also tended the sick.