New Guinea in Two Parts – Part 1

Our first day in Wamena is spent visiting the main marketplace and driving around to get somewhat oriented to the Valley and the river running through it. The Dani people live in rural villages and compounds throughout the sixty mile long fifteen mile wide Valley and everything they grow, craft, weave, bead, knit, and sharpen that they do not utilize or consume themselves is brought to market for sale in Wamena – green vegetables, yams, fat carrots, scallions, spears, passion fruit, tobacco, stone age adzes, stylized penis sheathes, caps, woven grass skirts and bags, avocados, tangerines – and where modern electronic devices are offered back to them – most of which they can’t use other than the ubiquitous cell phone. Remember, these are folks who didn’t have metal tools until the 1980s, who didn’t wear western clothes before the 1990s … and who now are driving motorcycles and occasionally shopping in stores.

Wamena is a dry town, no alcohol of any kind not even beer is available anywhere. The streets are crowded with Indonesians and Papuans, and although there is a fair sprinkling of naked men and even more with feathered headdresses, in the main what you see – especially outside the marketplaces where traditional people have come to sell their produce – is – at least on the surface – akin to what you’d see in similar post modern market towns in Myanmar, Cambodia, Kenya, and Tanzania … a marginal cash economy, dull and simple housing, and shops selling processed food, soap, and cigarettes. There are about fifty thousand Dani living in the Valley along with dozens of other tribal groups. It is said that over five hundred languages are spoken in New Guinea. 

Early on our second day in the Baliem Valley we drive south and are dropped off at a footbridge on the west side of the Baliem River, near where an avalanche killed hundreds of people about twenty years ago. The Indonesian government has been attempting to build a more substantial road and bridge across the river at this site but repeated fatal accidents involving modern equipment being used in the bridge building attempt – bulldozers, front loaders, backhoes, a crane, big trucks and tractors – has led the government to at least temporarily abandon the effort. The Dani see the hand of ghosts in these accidents, perhaps ghosts of those perished in the avalanche, ghosts being as real to the Dani – albeit invisible, but with absolutely clear and obvious effects – as gravity, also invisible but with obvious effects – is to us.

We cross the bridge on foot and trek about a third of the way up the mountain to a path used daily by these slash and burn subsistence agriculturalist pig raising villagers to connect to their fields, to other villages, and ultimately – about ten kilometers up river – to reach another footbridge which connects to a path that connects to the road to Wamena. The living compounds we see are classic expressions of Dani culture: enclosed by a wooden fence or stone wall with a men’s house, a women’s house shared with children of both sexes under eight years of age, and a kitchen longhouse, shared with the pigs in their pigsties. All of the structures are made of wood and thatch roofs earthen floors, a small fire pit, and no furniture. Some compounds have a single solar panel mounted on a post that produces enough energy to power one small, low wattage electric bulb that hangs in the kitchen. There is no running water, all of which must be drawn from nearby streams or the river. All human eliminative functions are taken care of at random sites in the bush outside the compounds.

We have been trekking for three hours or so when we reach a tiny wooden church we are told has about fifty active members and where we take shelter from the sun to rest and eat lunch in the shade of some tall trees growing next to the stone border surrounding the modest lawn of the church. Within minutes of our arrival more than a half dozen children from three to twelve years of age have come by and seated themselves in a semicircle a respectful distance from us, watching us eat. Yeskeel has brought nothing for his lunch. Olfied has brought some bananas and a pineapple. Joy and I are given box lunches with a chicken thigh, a tangerine, a small plastic bag of cooked vegetables, and a small bag of rice in them. I give the chicken to Yeskeel, eat the tangerine, and, signaling a young boy to come over in order to give him the box with the veggies and rice still in it, which he takes back to the semicircle of kids and shares with them. No squabbling. No power plays. No teasing. From the tiniest girl to the biggest boy they just share the food amicably.

Throughout the trek we are passed by women carrying huge loads of vegetables in woven sacks carried across their foreheads and suspended down their backs with the sack handle straps. When the women get to the river they wash the vegetables and set off again toward town. When filled the sacks weigh well over fifty pounds.

During the trek we learn that Yeskeel lives in a compound/village at least a five-hour walk from the nearest roadway, and that because of his dependability and demeanor he is regularly used by this tour company under Olfied’s supervision for trekking expeditions such as ours. I also realize walking around Wamena with him that Yeskeel is a well-known and popular figure among the Dani and Hoopla people and that many men call out Yeskeel’s name, come over to greet him warmly, and are genuinely happy to see him. I’m not sure why this is so, but imagine in part it is because he has been selected as a tourist guide – a role they respect – and that they recognize Yeskeel as a living repository of their honored traditional culture and way of life.

The transformation of village Dani from naked stone-age agriculturalists with fertile gardens, pigs, bows, arrows, spears, and digging sticks, to subsistence horticulturalists still living a more or less traditional Dani lifestyle – absent all-consuming ritual warfare – in still small clan compounds but with the addition of metal shovels, solar panels, cell phones, Christianity, and a certainly broadened awareness of the larger world is ongoing and I have no idea what will remain of their culture as they transform from grass hut dwellers to town dwelling, motorcycle driving, national government assisted, urban peasants. My experience of the Dani in New Guinea makes me think long and hard about the remaining indigenous relatively un-acculturated Amazonian tribes, and about indigenous Native Americans, about what is unique and worthwhile in their traditional cultures and what as a practical matter can be preserved.