Chapter-1

14 August 1982. We expected a small party. We had been living in Viaku for almost nine months and
had reached the dreaded moment when my wife Anne's leave from her university job ended,
requiring her return to Canada.
Anne would return to the village for three months at the end of the school year, but that was a long
eight months away. The village councillor had told us that the people were organizing a goodbye
dinner. We had been to many community gatherings and had a good idea of what to expect. Late in
the afternoon, women gathered by the shelter near our house with baskets of food, firewood. and
blackened clay cooking pots. Young boys husked and scraped coconuts while the women sat
peeling taro. They filled the pots to the brim with large chunks of the grey tubers along with
plantains, squash, sweet potatoes, wild pork, and fish, topped by edible greens. They then poured
in water sweetened hy squeezing it through coconut shavings. They covered the pots with banana
leaves and laid them our in a long line, each atop a pile of firewood. As the food cooked, the men sat
on the shaded shelter platform, chewing betelnut," smoking, and discussing the events of the day.
Anne came attired for the occasion in a finely decorated bark cloth ("tapa") skirt and top that the
church women's group, the Mothers Linion, had made for her. As I took pictures, Anne pitched in to
help the women, who greeted her with a chorus of jokes and laughter. Eventually, we were
requested to sit at the place of honour on a large, gorgeously designed tapa cloth at the head of the
shelter. Women forked food into bowls and then climbed onto the plat-form, crossing it on their
knees to place the food before the seated men. Once the deacon had said the grace, Anne rejoined
the women on the ground and we all tucked in. After the feast ended and the women had cleared
the bowls away, the senior men made speeches thanking us for our work in the commu-nity. There
was a pause for more betelnut chewing. An elder called out to the crowd around the shelter, "Has
anyone gifts to give our sister?" Then the most amazing thing happened. Women, children, and men
came forward to place shell ornaments around Anne's neck and tuck flowers and fragrant leaves
into the coconut husk bracelers adorning her arms and legs. They brought an abundance of tapa,
opening each folded cloth with a flourish and then placing it before Anne or on her lap.
This event marked one of those moments that occur periodically in the course of anthropological
fieldwork and serve to define a culture, illuminating what makes it special and unique. Over the
course of six visits extending over three decades. I have come to think of the Maisin who inhabit
Uiaku and neighbouring villages as "tapa people" because their distinctive, beautiful cloth figures
so centrally in their history, interactions with each other, and dealings with the outside world. This
book is about how the Maisin make a living, organize social interactions, conceptualize the spiritual
world, and meet the opportunities and tragedies of life. It is about the ways they have adjusted to
the encroaching colonial and post-colonial worlds. And it is about the fateful decision the Maisin
made in the early 1990s to refusc commercial logging on their ancestral lands.
Much has changed over the years, not least during recent times when the Maisin have faced grave
threats to the rainforest and waters that sustain their lives. Maisin tapa cloth, adorned with rich red
geometric swirls and curls, has also sustained the people. It connects them to a still vital ancestral
past; it defines gender roles and the modes of sociability; it provides income where there are very
few opportunities to make money; and it stands as an iconic symbol of identity within the cultural
mosaic that is Papua New Guinea. It is appropriate, then, to approach Maisin culture and history
through the medium of tapa.
Tapa is the common name for cloth made from the pounded inner bark of the paper mulberry
(Broussometia papyrifera) and some varieties of ficus trees. Prior to European colonization, most of
the inhabitants of the South Pacific Islands manufactured bark cloth, ranging from the delicately
coloured kapa worn by nobility in the Hawaiian Islands (from which we get the word
"tapa") to simple unadorned loincloths worn by men in parts of Melanesia (Neich and Prendergast
2005). Across the region, people experimented with a wide variety of trees, dyes, rools, and
techniques, resulting in a kaleidoscope of styles as varied as the cultures themselves. Tapa served
many purposes: clothing, wealth, a symbol of authority and divinity, a canvas for decorative designs
or the face of an ancestor. European visitors admired tapa for its beauty and practicality. The
incorporation of the islands into global commer cial networks, however, opened the door to the
import of cheap and durable mass-manufactured cotton and, later, synthetic clothing, hastening the
demise of tapa. Today, tapa is regularly made in only a few places such as Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga,
chiefly for the tourist trade and for ceremonial purposes (Kooijman
1972). Where tapa has survived, it is associated with people's cultural identiry in an increasingly
mobile and interconnected world (e.g., Addo 2013; Ewins
2009). The Maisin are one of those people.
The people of Uiaku and neighbouring villages call themselves the Maisin (pronounced "My-seen").
Numbering around 3,000 people, many of whom now live in distant towns, the Maisin form one of
the more than 850 linguistic groups that make up the nation of Papua New Guinca. The cultural
diversity of Papua New Guinea has long been a beacon for anthropologists. Although the land and
population are relatively small (as of 2013, around seven million people live on its 462,840 square
kilometres of land spread between several islands), few places have been as intensely studied by
ethnographers—leading to the old joke that the typical New Guinean family consists of a husband, a
wife, children, a pig, and an anthropologist. Anthropologists originally went to faraway places to
document exotic cultures before they were transformed by the juggernauts of Christianiry,
commerce, and Western "civilization." It cannot be denied that the area continues to exert a
romantic allure, but anthropologists working in Papua New Guinea today seck mainly to understand
present-day experience. We have much to learn from people like the Maisin, not just about the
diversity of human culture but, just as importantly, about the ways in which people in the far corners
of the globe are dealing with problems that confront us all. This book is concerned with two of
those challenges in particular: first, how a people can retain a setise of cultural identity in the face
of the homogenizing influences of the global system that has so greatly eased the mass movement
of people, products, and ideas; and second, how they can create and maintain a decent standard of
living without destroying the environment in which all life is ultimately sustained.
All people face these challenges, but the stakes appear far more consequential and stark for some
Indigenous cultures due to their small size, lack of economic and political clout, and, in many areas,
direct dependence on the natural environment for their survival. By the time that Anne and I arrived
late in 1981, Maisin culture had already been inalterably transformed by outside interventions. A
school and church had existed in Uiaku since 1902. All of the people were Christian, all had
attended at least the village school, and a quarter of the population resided outside the rural
villages. Yet for all of the changes, Maisin villages retained a strong connection to a distinctive
ancestral past, including their language, key traditional rituals, active local kinship and exchange
nerworks, and, nor least, a sense of pride in their cultural achieve-ments, most notably tapa cloth. It
seemed to us that people had found a mix that combined some of the best features of the old and
new. The balance, however, was fragile. Most villagers considered themselves shamefully poor and
eagerly sought opportunities to make money. In the early 1980s, the best option appeared to lie in
selling off timber rights to the nearby rainforest. The cleared land would be replaced by profitable
commercial plantations of oil palm, providing the people with a steady income. Many people were
aware of the risks; even at that early date, word had reached them of the environmental damage
caused by industrial logging elsewhere in the country and the unfulfilled promises made by the
logging companies and their political backers.
Yet people felt that their isolation from markets and shameful poverty left them with little choice.
Many Indigenous peoples have made such choices or, more often, had their lands and resources
taken from them in the name of "development." Knowing this, Anne and I left Liaku in July 1983,
quietly lamenting that, even if the opportunity arose to return, the village we had come to love might
well be changed beyond recognition. But the people had a change of heart. Doubts about the
wisdom of clear-cutting the rainforest had, by the mid-1990s, hardened into a determination to
keep out commercial loggers. Villagers fought off a series of projects pressed upon them by urban-
based promoters and logging companies. Their quixotic campaign attracted the attention of
international environmental organizations and, soon after, museum curators and the interna tional
media. Maisin delegations visited North America, Australia, and Japan to promote their cause.
Maisin tapa was exhibited in art galleries in Berkeley.
New York, Philadelphia, and Tokyo.
I had the good fortune to return to the Maisin villages in the midst of these developments for a
couple of brief visits in 1997 and 1998. In July 2000, Anne and our 12-year-old daughter, Jessica,
came as well. We were met with a joyful celebration in which Jess was taken through the first stages
of the initiation ceremony for a first-born child. Physically, the villages and their surroundings
looked much the same as in the carly 1980s. The changes that had occurred were less visible but
perhaps more significant. More people could speak English, and villagers appeared more affluent.
They had better clothes and owned more store-bought goods. There was now a biweekly market at
which people sold garden produce for cash. As we met with old friends and got to know younger
folk who were babes-in-arms during our first visit, we detected a remarkable sense of confidence
that had largely replaced the shame people had expressed over their "poverty." People spoke
proudly of their ancestral traditions and contrasted their subsistence way of life favourably against
the daily struggles of relatives to make enough money to survive in the towns. They eloquently cold
of the need to preserve both their distinct traditions and the environment for future generations.
Tapa cloth had become the key symbol of that determi-nation. Yet tapa had also become a major
source of income for villages, alleviating the pressure to find money. At the time of our last visit, in
June 2007, the boom in tapa sales was over and Maisin were again struggling with the choices of
how best to foster local economic development without losing the most cherished aspects of their
culture.
Tapa inspires my approach to this ethnography of the Maisin. Ethnographic fieldwork is based
largely upon participant-observation of as anthropologists occasionally joke, *deep hanging out."
One learns not just through asking questions or observing but by getting involved directly, trying
things out oneself. Making my own piece of tapa enabled me to better appreciate the skills involved
and the wider significance of the cloth to the Maisin. Making a tapa involves several discrete stages,
each building upon the other while employing distinct techniques and procedures. A human culture
is a bit like that. You encounter a way of life as a scamless whole ar first, but in time you learn to
distinguish among the general processes and domains that sustain it.
Each chapter of this book thus opens with a short section concerning tapa cloth as an introduction
to differing facets of the society as I observed it during the latter two decades of the twentieth
century. The introductory sections of Chapters 2 through 4 trace the making of a piece of tapa from
the cultivation of the tree that provides the bark to the finishing application of red dye. These
sections, in turn, introduce three of the fundamental domains of social life: economic activities,
social organization, and religion. Chapter 5 opens with a survey of the various ways Maisin use tapa
for community purposes and as a source of income, leading into a discussion of the legal and
political aspects of community life. While not ignoring change, the first five chapters focus mostly
upon the enduring fundamentals of Maisin society, Chapter 6 focuses on the Maisin campaign to
save their rainforest in the 1990s. It opens with the visit by a four-man delegation from iaku to the
Berkeley Art Museum in California to celebrate a major exhibition of Maisin tapa cloth. While Maisin
culture retained its distinctive shape, the decision to reject commercial logging significantly
increased the involvement of Maisin with outside agencies. These entanglements, in turn,
encouraged the people to rethink their relationship to their own ancestral roots and the world
outside their villages.
The first edition of Ancestral Lines ended in 2002 when the Maisin won a major victory in the
National Court blocking logging on their lands. Since that time, the people have faced continuing
pressure to allow logging and, more recently, mining in their ancestral territory. During the same
period, the land faced a new threat when flooding trom Cyclone Guba destroyed the gardens, a
harbinger of the threat global climate change poses to low-lying regions. The closing of the local
grass airstrip leaves the area even more of an economic backwater than 30 years ago, yet cheap
cell phones have made communication with the outside world vastly easier. A new conclusion in
Chapter 7 discusses these changes, bringing the account up to May 2015 and the Maisin's second
victory against loggers in the National Court.
Before turning to these topics, it will be helpful to provide some back-ground, beginning with an
account of how Anne and I came to live and work with the Maisin. I then turn to the physical world
within which Maisin live, and finish with an overview of the historical changes that have occurred in
the area since first contact with European colonials in 1890.
FIELDWORK IN ULAKU
As is the case with most anthropologists, a twisting path led us to Uiaku.
I first became interested in the South Pacific Islands while studying for my
BA in anthropology at Western University in London, Ontario. In 1978, 1 landed a Commonwealth
Scholarship that took me to Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand for graduate studies
under Ann Chowning, one of the great figures in Melanesian anthropology. I was excited about my
proposed project: a study of the impact of multinational corporations upon the self-image of Pacific
Islanders. This turned out to be impractical, given my tiny research budget and the difficulties of
gathering scattered information in the days before the Internet. I spent my mornings in the
Alexander Turnbull Library scanning ads in newspapers from its marvellous collection of Pacific
Islands documents, my spirits steadily sinking as the impediments to the project became obvious.
From time to time, my attention wandered to the Library's famed collection of carly works on the
Pacific Islands, many of which had been written by pioneering missionaries in the period prior to
formal coloni-zation. I was soon captivated. The books were not the stiff-necked "preachy" tracts I
had expected (although they contained many expressions of picty and more than a little
ethnocentrism)—they were more like the Victorian adventure stories by the likes of 11. Rider
Haggard, the author of King Solomon's Mines, which I had enjoyed as a child.
In the end, I wrote my MA thesis on the social history of three missions that operated in southeast
Papua New Guinea berween 1871 and 1930 (Barker
1979). This in turn led me to the topic for my PhD research. I had read widely in the anthropological
literature on Melanesia by this point and was surprised by how little attention anthropologists paid
to the impact of the missions and the presence of Christianity (Barker 1992). The most recent
national census figures from Papua New Guinea indicated that an overwhelming majority of the
people, more than 90 per cent, considered themselves Christian.- I also learned that most of the old
missions had been succeeded by national churches headed by Papua New Guineans. Yet you would
never know this from anthro pological works, which focused almost exclusively upon Indigenous
religious practices and ideas (Barker 1990a, 1992). What happened when people became
Christians? I had some ideas from my MA research, but almost all of the assessments had been
done by European missionaries writing decades earlier. I wondered what Papua New Guinean
Christians themselves made of their Christian faith and its relationship to their ancestral cultures.
To pursue this topic, 1 decided that it would be best to study a community where the church had
been an accepted part of ordinary life for generations and missionaries were a fading memory. This
limited my choices to a coastal area. I also wanted to work in the southeast of the country so I could
make good use of the historical research I had already done. Of the three missions I had studied, I
was most intrigued by the Anglicans who, in contrast to the stereotypes many hold about
missionaries, had been ardent defenders of most village traditions and fiercely critical of industrial
society (Wetherell 1977). This narrowed my search to the northeastern coast of the island of New
Guinea where the Anglicans were long established.
In 1979, 1 returned to Canada to take up PhD studies at the University of British Columbia under the
supervision of Kenelm Burridge, another great Melanesianist scholar best known for his writings on
religious movements and, more recently, missionaries. I had abour 500 kilometres of coastline to
consider for possible held sites. Two events led me to the Maisin and Viaku village. The first was
falling in love and marrying Anne Marie Tietjen. Trained as a developmental psychologist at Cornell
University, Anne was kenly interested in cross cultural research, having carried out her dissertation
fieldwork in Sweden. She developed a project to study the development of social cognition and
behaviour that required a village with lots of children (Tietien 1986).
I came across an old census of the region and found that the two largest villages along hundreds of
kilometres of the New Guinea coast lay within 12 kilore-tres of each other on Collingwood Bay:
Wanigela and Uiaku. The second event was a fundraising visit to Vancouver by the Right Reverend
David Hand, the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea. He had begun his
missionary career in 1946 working as the priest-in-charge for the area and greatly admired the
Maisin, who he told us had achieved a remarkable balance between their ancestral ways and
modernity.
Bishop David suggested I contact Father Wellington Aburin, the parish priest for southern
Collingwood Bay who resided in Viaku. I dutifully wrote, outlining our research plans. I didn't receive
a reply. This was worrisome, but Anne and I pushed on, writing grant proposals and applying for
research visas. Soon everything was more or less in place. In October 1981, I set off ahead for
Australia, where I carried out archival research, and then to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New
Guinea, where Anne caught up with me about six weeks later.
At the time of my departure, all we knew about the Maisin was the names of some of their villages,
the approximate size of their population, and some aspects of their unusual language gleaned from
a few brief articles. I reasoned that they shared cultural features and a similar experience of
colonization with better-documented coastal peoples, but it was disconcerting to be going in so
blind. Once in Port Moresby, 1 managed to pick up some details about Viaku. I met my first Maisin-
Father Kingsley Gegeyo, then a chaplain at the University of Papua New Guinca. He was friendly and
encouraging, praising the village way of life and making suggestions on where we might stay until
we arranged to have a house built. We stocked up with provisions before flying to Popondetta, the
capital of Oro Province, to meet with government and church officials. We then flew out in a tiny
prop plane, passing over heavily forested nountains and swampland before circling around the
cloud-shrouded volcanic peak of Mount Victory and landing on the grass airfield ar Wanigela,
located two kilometres inland from Collingwood Bay. We were greeted by Sister Helen Roberts, a
missionary nurse who had lived in Wanigela since 1946. She was a font of information on the local
people, who held her in the highest regard, and quickly became a close friend. We also met David
and Berry Buchan, a New Zealand couple managing a small rubber plantation on the lower slopes of
Mount Victory, who also became fast friends during our stay.
Within a few hours of our arriving at the airstrip, Sister Helen introduced us to several women who
had come up from the Maisin villages to sell tapa.
They spoke little English so mostly we smiled at each other. A couple of days later, Father
Wellington appeared. As it turned out, he had received our letters and told us that we had been
expected to arrive two weeks earlier. He was friendly but quiet, and I worried that this was less from
shyness than annoyance with our tardiness. Father Wellington returned to Uiaku in the afternoon.
We really did not know what to expect at this point, but the next morning several young Maisin men
appeared at the mission house ready to take us and our gear down to the beach to be loaded on a
dinghy for the trip across Collingwood Bay to Uiaku. We had reached the final stage of our journey.
As the dinghy swung out from the beach into open water, we were dazzled by the dramatic scencry-
the broad sweep of rainforest rising from the coast, the immense mountain wall to the south, and
the line of volcanic peaks to the west. An hour later, we approached Viaku. The boat operator pulled
up the little outboard motor and we surfed across a low sandbar into the mouth of a broad river,
shaded by high coconut palms. We landed at what we were told was the "mission station." Father
Wellington was there along with the community school headmaster and dozens of curious children.
Father Wellington took us up to his house—a commodious, cool building constructed of bush mate-
rials, with a broad verandah looking out over the river.
As we sipped heavily sugared tea, we were relieved to learn that a house had been made available
for our use. A small bush house had recently been built to serve as an office accommodating a
radio-telephone promised by the Bishop. When we materialized instead of the radio, the village
leaders decided that it would serve as our home. The house was small, but more than suit-able, with
an extension that would serve as our kitchen, a bedroom just large enough for our mattress and
mosquito net, two small offices with rough tables, and an alcove that we adapted for a bucket
shower and wash area. As we walked to our new home, we were relieved to find a group of men hard
at work constructing a latrine to the side (we had been contemplating the station latrines with some
dread—they were little huts built over the river at the end of long rickety bridges).
After moving in our suitcases and boxes, we took a walk through the nearhy part of the village. We
felt a bit like royalty on parade, with cheerful people lining the sides of the path to see us and the
children calling out *hello, hello" and breaking into hysterical giggles every time we replied. White
people rarely visited the area, and so we were quite a novelty-so much so that the smaller tots burst
into terrified screams at our approach. Around dinnertime, Gideon Ifoki appeared at our door.
Gideon and lima Joyce Daima served as our first research assistants. They were our age and spoke
excellent English. Both had left paying jobs elsewhere in the country to return home to care for
aging parents. At the moment we met. Gideon was leading the first of a succession of groups of
women who over the next two days brought string bags full of garden produce, which they unloaded
just inside our house. The mounting pile of food, we were told, was a gift. We were not to pay for it.
We could hardly have dreamed of a more welcoming reception, with a house, food, and rescarch
assistants all pre-arranged by the people themselves.
We were grateful bur also overwhelmed. Why were they doing this? What did they expect of us? The
morning after we arrived, Father Wellington introduced us to the community after the church
service. I took the opportunity to give an explanation in simple English of our rescarch goals and to
invite questions (all this was translated for the congregation by Gideon). Later I repeated the
spocch at a community meeting called to discuss our project. In succeeding weeks and months,
loften repeated my speech as I made the rounds of the villages. I think that most people understood
the basics of what we said we were up to, yet they simply couldn't credit that white people would
come all that way to live among them just to study their culture. Some people assumed we were
missionaries who had come to translate the Bible, perhaps Pentecostals secking to challenge the
long-established Anglican Church. Others hoped that we would make use of our (supposed)
connections to "American businessmen" to bring "development" to the area. Many years later, we
learned that there had been whispers among some of the old people that we might be ancestral
spirits returning to our old home." I doubt that we were able to entirely scotch the rumours that
attended our arrival, but after a time when nothing miraculous happened, most people seemed to
accept that we really had come to learn about their lives.
Living in Viaku required adjustments. First of all, there were the physical discomtorts. We had
arrived at the start of the rainy season, and the combination of heat and high humidity left us
exhausted. We found it impossible to remain clean for long. During the day we had to slather
ourselves repeatedly with strong insect repelient, to fend off swarms of tiny sandflies that rose as
the air heated up, topped with additional layers of sunscreen. In the evenings, we lathered on more
repellent and donned extra clothes despite the heat to protect ourselves from the anopheles
mosquito, the carrier of malaria. Grit got into everything-our clothes, our skin, our hair. At first, the
lack of running water and electricity scemed romantic, like camping out. The novelty quickly wore
off. Everything took longer: hauling and boiling drinking water, lighting the stubborn wicks on our
kerosene stove, adjusting and mending our mosquito net in a vain attempt to keep the bugs out, and
on and on. Fortunately, we liked the local food. The staples of taro, sweet potatoes, and cooking
bananas were starchy and bland, but there was plenty of fruit from the gardens, and we had
brought spices and tinned sauces to add some variety. Periodically, visitors offered fish or game.
This was always a treat.
The lack of privacy posed another challenge. The thin sago-ribbed walls of the houses did little to
muffle sounds and so we, along with everyone else, got to listen in wherever voices became raised
in our neighbourhood.
We ourselves were objects of intense curiosity, espocially to children, who often hung around and
under our house, hoping to catch sight of us. It is rather unnerving to glance down and see a pair of
young eyes staring at you through a crack in the floorboards. We had brought scrapbooks with
pictures of animals and places around the world cut from magazines and invited the children into
the house, where they sat mesmerized for hours at a time. The kids living closest to our house soon
got used to us, but whenever I ventured to the further reaches of the village, I would be followed by
curious children, shouting out "Bye! Bye!" or "Bariyawa!" (Whiteman) and squealing with laughter
whenever I replied
Over time, we adjusted to our new home. I suspect that the Marsin were just as unsure of how to
deal with us as we were with them. In the early days, people continually brought us food whether we
needed it or not and, just as insistently, requested things from us. We knew that they were treating
us as one of their own, but we did not have gardens and realized quickly that we had to carefully
pace our gift-giving of tobacco, rice, and other goods because of both the expense and the
difficulty of getting new supplies.* Eventually we worked out a balance. People brought a more
reasonable amount of food, and we learned how to negotiate a more balanced rate of return in store
goods (see Chapter 2). Perhaps the most welcome and useful thing we did was to provide some
basic first aid for our neighbours. Fach morning began with Anne treating a line of men, women, and
children with bandages for curs and scrapes and care for other minor ailments.
Ethnographic Fieldwork
Anne and I arrived in Uiaku to pursue specific rescarch projects. We knew, however, that the path to
learning about the contemporary religious ideas and the psychological development of children ran
through the culture as a whole.
We would not be able to gain more than a superficial grasp of our research topics without the
broadest possible understanding of Maisin historical experience and cultural orientations.
Echnographic research draws on a nolistic perspective, a basic assumption that "the various parts
of a culture must be viewed in the broadest possible context to understand their interconnections
and interdependence* (Haviland et al. 2013:3). Ethnographic fieldwork is thus intimate and slow. To
fully understand the impact of Christianity on the Maisin, I would need to do much more than attend
church services and conduct interviews. I would need to become familiar with the language, daily
routines, social organization, and care of the young and elderly—-the minu-tie of life. I would
witness crises and conflicts, celebrations and debates, all of which would shed light on deeper
social patterns. Through this, I would grad. ually enculturate, become increasingly familiar with
Maisin ways and expec-tations. The more Anne and 1 learned, the more our projects took new and
often unexpected directions. They became less our own and more a collaboration with our Maisin
hosts.
Learning about a culture requires engagement and gaining a degree of competence in its ways.
Here's an example. From our reading on other Melancsian societics, we knew that reciprocity would
play a central role in social relations. This was confirmed by the school headmaster moments after
we stepped out of the boat on our arrival. He advised us not to pay money for any services or food.
-We live by the "Melanesian Way.'" which he explained meant that people share their resources
rather than buying and selling them (see Narakobi 1980). This confirmed what we had read, but we
quickly learned that understanding a social system intellecrually and dealing with it practically are
two very different things. We received our first of many lessons in the complexities of reciprociry
that first afternoon in Uiaku as we watched the pile of garden produce deposited in the centre of
our empty "kitchen" mount.
We couldn't possibly eat more than a tiny amount of it. And if we reciprocated in kind, the small
store of rice and tobacco we had brought to use as gifts for those who assisted us in our research
would vanish before we started.
By the afternoon of the second day, the taro, bananas, sweet potatoes, and squash were beginning
to rot, but still people kept bringing us more. What should we do? If we refused these gifts, wouldn't
the people be insulted? Yet throwing it out would be worse. We decided to ask Father Wellington,
who we noticed eying the food on his frequent visits to our house. His suggestion was simplicity
itself: "Give it to the priest." Under the cloak of darkness, he relieved us of our burden. Later 1
learned that, within the hour, the food had been redistributed across the station, to the three
teachers and church deacon. with the excess eventually returning to families in the village. We had
been initiated into the local exchange network.

We thus began a process of cultural immersion that anthropologists call

"participant observation." The basic idea is that one can learn a great deal about a society by
joining in ongoing activities. Fieldwork for me has involved garden work, making tapa cloth, tying
roof thatch, traditional dancing, attending church services, and endless hours chewing betelnut on
verandahs while sharing the gossip of the day. "Being there" is often challenging.
Whenever I work with Maisin, 1 am reminded of my relative physical weakness and incompetence at
even the most basic tasks. Anne and I faced numerous obstacles, beginning with the language but
also including Maisin assumptions about proper behaviour. We made mistakes and did our best to
learn from them. The Maisin were gracious, although we certainly must often have tested poople's
patience.
If participant observation only involved engagement in local activities. however, fieldwork would
amount to little more than adventure tourism. Anne and I immersed ourselves in community life with
a serious purpose in mind— to further our rescarch. This required maintaining good fieldnotes. I
carried a notebook everywhere I went, jotting down observations. These could be very detailed,
especially for events like village business meetings, funerals, or disputes. In the evenings, I
reviewed and reordered my notes, filling in gaps and noting questions to pursue further. I also kept
a daily journal for more personal reflections. As I reviewed my notes, I gradually began to see
patterns of behaviour and thought emerging. These, in turn, led into more informed lines of
investigation.
Fused participant observation in conjunction with a variety of other research methodologies. The
day after we arrived, I walked the length of Viaku with Gideon, sketching a map indicating the
location of houses and major features such as the mission station and the river and two creeks that
formed natural divisions. Where I saw uneven lines of houses, Gideon identified clusters belonging
to different clans, their boundaries subtly marked by trees or bushes. A couple of weeks later, I
devised a basic houschold census. Gideon translared the questions into Maisin, and, with his help
as an interpreter, I proceeded to visit all of the houses in the village. The census provided
information about household composition, education, marriage, languages spoken, and a variety of
other basic matters, giving me an overvicw of the social makeup of the village. I practised my small
Maisin vocabulary as I read each question haltingly, to the great amusement of all, and spent time
with every houschold in the village. Census work could be tedious, but I was surprised by how much
I enjoyed myself. The questions often led to free-ranging conversations on the people's lives,
traditional cuscoms, culture, and local history. I gave participants gifts of packaged rice and oily
tobacco sticks. Interviews always ended with smoking, in which 1 did not indulge, and a chew of
betelnut, for which I rapidly developed a fondness.
Soon after completing the census, I arranged group meetings with members of the different clans to
record genealogies. While not without their difficulties—-few Maisin remember their ancestors back
further than two to three generations— the genealogies provided useful details on kinship relations
and marriage alli-ances, the basics of the local social system (described in Chapter 3). Later, I
conducted surveys probing understandings of death, attitudes towards leaders, the frequency and
contents of economic exchanges, and understandings of Christianity. In my secund year, I carried
out a census and other inquiries in the Maisin village of Sinapa, a coastal village about six kilometres
to the east, to broaden my knowledge of the Maisin beyond Uiaku.
Most days, I interviewed individuals about a wide range of subjects. I tried to engage with as wide a
circle of people as I could on most matters, but incv-itably 1 found myself frequently consulting a
small number of people who were especially knowledgeable and helpful. In anthropological
parlance, such people are known as "key informants," The term does not adequately describe the
reality. I first visited elders such as Adelbert Sevaru, Frank Davis Dodi, and Agnes Sanangi intending
to interview them, as they were very active in the church and respected for their knowledge of
Maisin traditions. It didn't take long for them to define our relationship. They were the authorities,
the elders, the teachers. They listened patiently to my questions but more often than not talked
about what they knew to be relevant. Eager to get on with my work, I was at first impatient. With
time, I calmed my urge to direct the flow of conversation and just sat, hour upon hour, listening
quietly, asking the occasional question. I dimly realized I was being offered a gift. My "informants"
became my mentors and, as my knowledge grew, my collaborators. At the most intimate level, as
trust grew, they drew Anne and me into their families.
Learning the Maisin language posed the greatest challenge. Bronislaw Malinowski (1922), a superh
ethnographer who worked on the Trobriand Islands to the cast of Collingwood Bay between 1915
and 1918, argued that fluency in a native tongue is a precondition ot good fieldwork. It is, alas, one
of the worst kept secrets that many anthropologists fail to measure up 10 Malinowski's high
standards. In my own case, I diligently studied the Maisin language through my first season of
fieldwork, driving my teachers to distraction as I struggled to shape my mouth to pronounce Maisin
words and stumbled over (to me) complicated verb formations. I developed a good working
vocabulary and learned to "hear" spoken Maisin-as long as it wasn't spoken too quickly or by more
than a couple of people at a time-but my ability to speak the language was limited to simple
sentences. Fortunately, many younger villagers were fluent in English, and I found it possible to get
by in most situa-tons with a mixture of English and Maisin, assisted as needed by translators.
The time I spent on the language was far from wasted. Early in my fieldwork, I began recording folk
stories on tape and transcribing them as a way of building my vocabulary. I eventually amassed a
working lexicon of the language while developing a passion for the Maisin's rich oral tradirions. Over
the years, Eve recorded nearly 200 kikiki (*narratives*), including stories and histories of elders now
long passed away. For future generations of Maisin, these tapes-now digitized-may be the most
lasting contribution of my research.
The work was not without frustrations. A few people were suspicious or scared and refused to talk
with me. Sometimes villagers were too busy with gardening or other chores to bother with my
endless questions. Anne and I had a hard time keeping good research assistants. Some got bored
with the work, but most quit because they couldn't cope with endless badgering by relatives who
suspected them of amassing a fortune from the wages we paid them. Most trying was the sheer
difficulty of making sense of what was going on around us, especially during the carly months. Yet
even at the end of my heldwork, I was acutely aware that there were questions I had not thought to
ask, many aspects of Maisin experience that remained a mystery to me. I had amassed several
thousand pages of notes, hundreds of hours of interviews and stories on tape, and countless
photographs and films of people engaged in ordinary activities and ceremonial events. As I reviewed
this material, rich as it was, I came to appreciate that I was barely scratching the surface.
Departures and Returns
Anne and I loved living in Viaku. We learned to cope with the difficulties, and each day presented
something new and remarkable. We compared notes on our projects during the evenings and were
encouraged that we were independently experiencing the same basic cultural and social patterns.
We became very close to some people, some of whom adopted us into their families. In August
1982, Anne returned to Canada while I remained in the village. She returned to a boisterous
welcome the next May for three final months of fieldwork.
The final push was very productive but also a time that brought us closer to our Maisin friends.
Finally, the time came to depart. We spent a day visiting and dividing our gear amongst different
families, in a way reciprocating for that huge gift of food that had welcomed us. With many tears all
around, we left as we had come, by dinghy, up to the Wanigela airstrip. It was July 1983.
Three years later. I returned on my own for two months to research tapa cloth and women's facial
tattooing. I found that our neighbours had torn down our old house and taken an axe to the
surrounding coconut palms, treating our departure as a death. So on this visit, as on most
subsequent ones, I lived with a family in the village, which gave me a different vista than we had
experienced from the mission station. The return trip was very productive, but perhaps its main
importance was to establish for Maisin as well as ourselves that our mutual bonds would not be
easily broken. As it turned out, however, this was the last fieldwork I was able to carry out in Uiaku
for some time.
I moved from a post-doctoral rescarch position at the University of Washington to a teaching post at
the University of British Columbia. Soon after this, Jessica was born, and I looked for fieldwork
possibilities that would not require long absences from home. I began to work with the Nisga'a and
Nuxalk First Nations of British Columbia on different projects.
Of course, Anne and I did not forget about the Maisin. We continued to publish academic papers,
mailing copies to friends in Viaku along with tapes and notes we had recorded in the 1980s. We
received the occasional letter in response, informing us of deaths and other events. In late 1994, we
received an unexpected letter from our dear friend Franklin Seri. He and four other men were
travelling to Berkeley, California, to put on a museum exhibit of tapa cloth and talk about the
rainforest. This is how I first learned about the Maisin's decision not to allow commercial logging in
their territory and their alliance with Greenpeace, which had co-sponsored this trip with the
Berkeley Art Museum (see Chapter 6). Anne, Jess, and I went to Berkeley where we had a wonderful
reunion with the Maisin delegation. Franklin stayed behind with us for two months during which time
we produced a reader of stories, in Maisin and simple English, for the elementary schools in Uiaku
and Airara (Barker and Seri 1995).
This event renewed our ties to the Maisin. I returned to Uiaku in February 1997 for six weeks to
study the community's attitudes towards rainforest conservation and the impact of their
partnerships with national and international environmentalists. My role was now changing. In the
past, I had studied the community while remaining detached from politics. People appreciated the
records I made, especially of traditions that were fast disappearing. But now I wanted to make a
contribution to improving social conditions and defending Maisin rights. My knowledge of Maisin
history and culture was useful to some of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working with
the people, for whom I served as a consultant.
I also developed a new project of my own. I returned briefly in 1998 with two Canadian filmmakers
to discuss the possibility of setting up an exchange of delegations berween the Maisin and the
Stô:lo First Nation in British Columbia. The visits would be filmed as documentaries to highlight the
Maisin's fight to save their rainforest from commercial loggers and to witness two very different
Indigenous peoples working out solutions 1o common problems. The concept intrigued Bruce Miller,
a colleague in my department with long experience working with First Nations communities in
southern British Columbia and Washington State, and he agreed to join in.
Following a frenzy of fundraising, recruiting, and planning, Bruce, five Stó:lo delegates, and I arrived
to a glorious welcoming ceremony in Ganjiga village in June 2000. The film crew had already arrived
and for the next two weeks proceded to document the exchange." While exhilarating, dealing with
the often conflicting needs of the delegation, the film crew, and the Maisin left me exhausted. It was
with some relief that I travelled to Port Moresby to see Bruce and the Stó:lo off to Canada (the film
crew had already departed) and to greet Anne and Jessica, who had arrived on the same plane. As
our dinghy touched the shore in liaku, we were met with a boisterous reception from Anne's
adoptive family who, to our amazement, swept up Jess to a shelter and then adorned her with shell
necklaces and tapa marking her initiation as a first-born child (see Chapter 3).
In June 2007, Anne and I returned for a month's stay. Anne carried out interviews recording the life
histories of three generations of Maisin women while I focused on what turned out to be possibly
the largest end-of-mourning ceremony in Maisin history (described in Chapter 7). Physically, the
village looked much the same, and we were cheered by the sight of familiar faces. Yet we noted
many changes. The population had greatly expanded. Some people had left jobs elsewhere in the
country and moved their families, sometimes with a non-Maisin spouse, back to the village.
Because of poor job prospects, many more young people were staying in the village. While Maisin
remained the main language for most, we heard far more English than in the past. A few houses,
including the one we borrowed, had solar panels, and here and there fluorescent lights appeared in
the evening. We too had changed, of course.
For most of the youthful population, we were now "grandparents" associated with a period of Maisin
history that was rapidly receding from memory as the older generation-our teachers— passed. It
was an exhilarating visit and a physically trying one. When we left, we wondered if we would ever
return.
Anne's and my association with the Maisin now stretches back more than 30 years. Much has
changed over the decades. While the regional airstrip at Wanigela is now closed, in some ways the
Maisin villages are not as isolated as they once were. The area is served by a small passenger boat
that cruises the coast each week between Alotau and Lae. Although reception is poor, cell phones
have also reached the area. The large Maisin diaspora, scattered across the country and in Australia
and New Zealand, are connected by e-mail and Facebook. Yet, despite the passing of time, much in
the local communities remains the same-the subsistence basis of life, adherence to Christianity,
strong kinship ties, and an ethic of moral egalitarianism-values all exemplified by that central
emblem of Maisin identity, tapa cloth. Above all, through determined resistance, the Maisin have so
far been able to protect the forests and waters that sustain them.
THE PHYSICAL SETTING
The Maisin live in a breathtakingly beautiful place. From a canoe or small boat in the midst of
Collingwoed Bay, the southern shore stretches out in a vast arc. The coast is outlined by a dark
green line of mangrove swamps.
Behind this, a sweep of dense forest spreads upwards to the mountain wall of the Owen Stanley
range, about 20 kilometres inland. In the early morning. before heavy clouds ser in, one can often
see the 3,676-metre peak of Mount Suckling (Gorofi). The mountain wall is torn at places by the
scars of massive landslides and broken by waterfalls plunging from high basins. From the beach,
one has a clear view of the dormant volcanic peak of Mount Victory (Kerorova) and its now extinct
sister, Mount Trafalgar.
As one approaches the Maisin villages from the sea, houses slowly emerge as glimmering brown
aggregates of cubes suspended between the sea and the forest. Drawing closer, the cubes
separate and take on sharper outline, as groves of coconut palms also emerge into focus. Finally, a
dark beach comes into view, lined by greying outrigger canoes of varying sizes and the occasional
aluminum dinghy. The Maisin villages are long and narrow, situated along sand bars between the
surf and the swampy bushlands behind. They are vulnerable to erosion and flooding. The Vayova
River that runs chrough Uiaku, for instance, has broadened and shifted in the past decades, forcing
some of the villagers who used to live on the south side to relocate their houses to the north.
On the mission station and scattered in the villages, one finds a few buildings with rusty corrugated
iron roofs, but even most of these "modern" houses are built largely of materials gathered from the
nearby bush and forest. Village houses are simple in design but very appealing. Built on posts, rising
one to three metres above the ground, many have broad open verandahs or underlying platfors
where residents eat their meals and socialize with neighbours.
In most villages, the houses are arranged in uneven parallel lines, facing across an area of hare
packed earth that serves as both central path and plaza, In a few pluces, the houses spread apart to
enclose much broader plazas, usually to the side of the main village pathway. The ground under and
around the houses, paths, and plazas is kept completely bare of grass. One often wakes up in the
morning to a gentle rhythmic sound of women and girls sweeping up dead leaves, twigs, and bits of
refuse with palm filament brooms. The Maisin plant areca palms, small shade trees, and flowering
plants around their homes.
The villages are clean, open, and breezy, forming an attractive contrast to the contorted mix of tall
grasses, palms, and jungle that commence immediately behind the interior row of houses.
At the geographical centre of Uiaku lies a large grassy sports field bordered by neat croton shrub-
lined paths. Classrooms, the church, houses for the priest and teachers, shelters for visitors and
special occasions, and, since 1986. market stalls line the edges. Graceful mango trees planted a
century ago by Melanesian teachers mark the site of the first church. Although decades have
passed since the last Anglican missionary worked in the region, Maisin refer to this space as the
mission station."
Maisin have only a single word for a settlement (wa'kf), but they nonetheless recognize several
encompassing levels. At the broadest level are four village clusters along the southwestern shores
of Collingwood Bay. These are, going from the north to the southeast, Yuayu, Viaku, Sinapa, and
Airara. The last three are made up of smaller villages. The Viaku cluster is composed of Ganjiga on
the northern side of the Vayova River and Viaku on the south.
Viaku proper is further divided into Vayova, Maume, and Yamakero. Two of the villages making up
the Sinapa cluster are occupied by single clans.
Everywhere else, however, the villages are multi-nucleated: home to two or more clans each with its
own hamlet. These are often contiguous, although everyone knows where the boundaries lie.
Beyond the swampy area behind the village houses lies a zone of secondary forest radiating out
four or five kilometres; this is where people make their gardens and harvest sago. Further inland,
one finds areas of extensive grassland and primary rainforest. The lush jungles, swamps,
grasslands, and forests of the Maisin environment nurture a rich diversity of flora and fauna. The
forest is home for a profusion of birds: cockatoos, hornbills, and birds of para-dise, among, many
others. Hunters track bandicoots, wallabies, cassowaries, and wild pigs in the bush and grasslands.
Giant pythons, monitor lizards, and dangerous saltwater crocodiles inhabit the low-lying swamps
and rivers. Insects of all descriptions, even the rare Queen Alexandra butterfly-the largest in the
world-thrive in the area. As in other parts of Papua New Guinea, the lands around Collingwood Bay
are rich breeding grounds for the anopheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria. The dark sands under
the villages provide a home for billions of sand flies, infinitesimal insects that, until the invention of
Deer-based insect repellents, probably did more than anything to discourage anthropological
research along these coasts. The shallow waters and coral reefs of southern Collingwood Bay teem
with a diversity of marine life.
When breezes fail to blow in from the bay, the combination of hot tropical temperatures and high
humidity can be oppressive. The annual rainfall ranges between 1,800 and 3,300 millimetres,
increasing as one moves inland towards the mountains. The Maisin speak of distinct "rainy" and
"dry" seasons. The rainy season generally runs berween November and April, marked by short but
heavy downpours most days, including dramatic tropical thunderstorms.
The rains taper off in the dry season, with afternoons marked by strong winds from the north and
east, Temperatures average 27.5°C annually, but may rise to higher than 32.2°C during the wet
season. Nights in the dry season can actually feel quite cold. Local climatic patterns have been
greatly disrupted since at least the early 1980s by global shifts, especially the El Niño phenomenon.
Along with the rest of Papua New Guinca, the Maisin lands have recently suffered through extended
periods of drought followed by rainy seasons lasting several years. In November 2007, the villages
and garden lands were flooded during Cyclone Guba along with much of the rest of Oro Province-an
indication of how vulnerable the low coast is to rising sea levels and the extreme weather events
associated with global climate change. In 1997 and 2015, the entirety of Papua New Guinea
experienced profound drought, causing severe water shortages and crop failures.
The Maisin have always lived close to the land, which furnishes them with food, medicines, and
building materials. Yet, as we shall see repeatedly in these pages, the land is far more than a source
of resources. It is, for most Maisin, alive with historical memories and ancestral spirits. It is the key
to their identity and survival as a people.
THE CULTURAL SETTING
Evidence of human settlement in New Guinea dates back 40,000 years, but there must have been
much earlier movements, as the ancestors of the Australian Aborigines journeyed through New
Guinea from Asia at least 55,000 years ago (Moore 2003). During that long early period, humans
gradually spread to the furthest reaches of New Guinea's vast interior and offshore islands,
diversifying into hundreds of distinet cultures and languages, referred to collectively by linguists as
Non-Austronesian or Papuan. Around 9,000 years ago, some groups learned to cultivate taro as a
supplement to foraging and hunting. The last group of Asian migrants was Austronesian speakers,
who settled along the coasts and islands of Papua New Guinca around 4,000 years ago. From these
jumping-off points, further waves of Austronesian migrants pushed eastward. Their descendants
crossed vast expanses of open ocean to discover and colonize the far reaches of the southern
Pacific, from Vanuatu to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and from Aotcaroa (New Zealand) to Hawaii (Kirch
2000).
Collingwood Bay was a cultural and linguistic meeting place in the centuries before the arrival of
Europeans (Egloff 1979). The 10,000 or so people who make the hay their home speak five distinct
languages. Korate and Onjob belong to the older Papuan group, while Ubir and Miniafia are
Austronesian.
When Maisin was first studied, it was immediately seen as anomalous. possessing both Non-
Austronesian and Austronesian grammatical features (Ray
1911; Strong 1911). Linguists now consider it to be basically Austronesian with horrowed non
Austronesian elements (Frampton 2013)-interesting given that Maisin traditions relate that the
people migrated from a Papuan-speaking area near the Musa River to the west in the mid-
nineteenth century.
Prior to the enforcement of colonial control, incessant warfare and raiding led to much movement,
resulting in a confusing linguistic situation on the ground. While most Maisin live along
southwestern Collingwood Bay, one group shares the village of Uwe on Cape Nelson with Miniafia
speakers and a remnant of Maisin speakers lives near their origin place deep in the Musa
swamplands. When not fighting, Collingwood Bay people traded shell valuables and stone axes
among other items, arranged marriages, and engaged in competitive feasts. Ethnographic research
on the bay indicates that all of the language groups share similar forms of social organization,
cosmology, and ritual, suggesting an extended period of mingling and cultural co-development
(e.g., Gnecchi-Ruscone 1991). The decorative culture is also largely shared: dance forms and
costumes, women's facial tattoos, and tapa clothing. Given such commonalities, Maisin and their
neighbours are often called "Tuf people" by outsiders, after the sub-district station on Cape Nelson.
This rich mix of distinct languages and overlapping customs is typical of much of lowlands Papua
New Guinea, Confronted by such linguistic diver-sity, outsiders often wonder how people manage to
communicate and share in customary practices, In colonial times, government officers, traders, and
missionaries encouraged the spread of several simplified trade languages, either based upon a
native language, like Moru spoken by people living near Port Moresby, or using mostly European
vocabulary with a simplified Melanesian grammar, like Pidgin English, also known as Neo-
Melanesian or Tok Pisin.
Today, English, Motu, and Tok Pisin are the official languages of the country.
Many Maisin speak all three, but most adults also speak or at least understand the other languages
spoken in the Collingwood Bay area, and this must have been the case in the past as well.
A BRIEF HISTORY*
We will return frequently in this book to the dynamics of continuity and change. At the onset,
however, it will be helpful to sketch out a historical chronology of the main changes and challenges
the Maisin have faced since the first contact with European oursiders in 1890. We cannot know for
certain what Maisin culture was like before this time. The historics related by elders, however,
describe the Maisin as recent migrants to the bay, expanding their territory through wartare and by
absorbing other groups before being checked by the arrival of the colonial government.
In May 1874, Captain John Moresby sailed across the northern reaches of Collingwood Bay. He was
so impressed by the dramatic scenery that he turned to the memory of the great English naval hero
Horatio Nelson for suitably grand names for the main features: Cape Nelson, Mounts Victory and
Trafalgar, and the name of the hay itself (Moreshy 1876). A small number of missionaries and gold
prospectors settled along the southeastern coast of New Guinea, but no one ventured into the bay
again for 16 years. In 1884.
Britain and Germany divided the castern half of New Guinea and offshore islands (the western half
had long before been claimed by Holland). Four years later, Dr. William MacGregor took up the post
of Administrator of the British possession with the mandate of exploring its reaches, establishing
the rudiments of government control, and bringing some semblance of British civilization to the
Queen's newest subjects. This was all to be accomplished on the most minimal of budgets.
MacGregor was a resourceful innovator who set up the basic structure of the colonial state in what
became Papua, after the newly independent Australian government assumed control in 1906 loyce
1971)." The government took upon itself the task of exploration and pacification of local tribes. This
was accomplished by establishing a network of district stations under Resident Magistrates who,
with the aid of a native police force, set out on regular patrols first to contact tribes and then to
control fighting, enforce ordinances meant to improve village life fat least, as the Europeans
perceived it), and eventually integrate villagers into the emerging colonial economy: MacGregor
encouraged white entrepreneurs to establish plantations and mines in the colony, creating a system
of labour recruitment from villages to provide them with an inexpensive work force. Finally, the
Administrator strongly supported the work of Christian missionaries, not only because he was
himself staunchly Presbyterian but because missions were able to reach the native peoples in their
villages in their own languages and provide, at no cost to the government, basic schooling and
medical services.
In late July 1890, on one of his first patrols along the northeastern coast of the possession,
MacGregor steamed into Collingwood Bay on the small government launch the Merrie Ergland,
landing at each village in succession.
The Maisin were wary of the strange newcomers; no women or children were to be seen, and the
men who did venture forth to meet them ran away terrified when one of the landing party lit a
match. The men were reluctant to accept gifts of tobacco or iron, unaware of their use. Still, the
short visit was friendly, The Merrie England returned several times over the next decade, always to a
boisterous reception from the Maisin, who quickly developed a hunger for steel axes, knives, cloth,
and other trade goods. The Maisin continued to raid their neighbours, but it was only a matter of
time before their autonomy was brought to an end. In 1900, the government built a district station
40 kilometres to the north at Tufi on Cape Nelson under the control of C.A. W.
Monckton, a brash, often violent New Zealander (Monckton 1922). After receiving news about a
number of Maisin raids, including a planned ambush of one of his own patrols. Monckton set his
police loose on Uiaku where they destroyed several canoes and shot three men dead, wounding an
unknown number of others. Following the fracas, a large party of Maisin men voluntarily travelled to
Tufi, accepting a short period of confinement in return for peace with the new power. Monckton
appointed two of the leading warriors as village constables and, over the next few years, recruited
more into his fledgling police force. The Maisin were now "pacified."
MacGregor had been accompanied in 1890 by a young Anglican priest, Albert Maclaren, who was
scouting out possible headquarters for a new mission for the northern part of the possession
(Synge 1908; Wetherell 1977)-He chose Dogura, a high plateau over Bartle Bay, about 80 kilometres
to the southeast of the Maisin. The mission got off to a rocky start. Maclaren died four months after
arriving, worn out by malaria, a poor diet, and physical exhaustion. His partner, the Reverend
Copland King, kept the mission going with a tiny statf and meagre support from the Australian
parishes. In 1898, on the verge of collapse, the mission received a boost with the appointment of a
British clergyman, John Montague Stone-Wigg, as its first bishop. Although frail in health, Stone-
Wigg was an effective fundraiser and administrator Expansion into Collingwood Bay became his first
priority. His initial choice for a head station at the Maisin village of Sinapa had to be rejected
because it was too swampy. Wanigela, located just north of Maisin territory, instead became the
residence of the district missionary in 1898 and, in later years, a district school for advanced
students and a small hospital (Chignell 1911).
In 1902, Percy John Money—an Australian lay missionary then in charge of the Wanigela district-
travelled down to Uiaku to supervise the building of an enormous mission station using only native
materials, including a school that could accommodate upwards of 210 pupils and a church that
could seat 550 (close to the entire population of the village at the time), with a dormitory for boys, a
house for teachers, and a lovely two-storey residence for himself (Barker 2005b). The Anglicans
intended to place a white missionary in charge of the Maisin because of their relatively large
population and their reputation as a "recalcitrant" people who required the "strong hand" of a
European.
Eventually, a recruit was found, but A.P. Jennings proved too sensitive a soul to abide the dirt, pigs,
and all night drumming accompanying major feasts that could last for weeks at a time. He suffered a
nervous breakdown and fled Viaku in 1920, less than three years after his arrival. The first
generation of teachers was made up of men from the Solomon Islands and New Hebrides (now
Vanuatu) who had converted to Christianity while working as indentured labourers in the
Queensland sugar fields. Barely literate, almost all died while labouring in the mission fields of
Papua. Their ranks were soon augmented by better-educated Papuan converts, trained by the white
missionaries at Dogura, Villagers thus learned about Christianity as well as the "three R's" at the
feet of Melanesian teacher-evangelists who looked very much like themselves. Under the direction
of the teachers, with periodic visits from the white missionary at Wanigela, a group of young men
and women received baptism in 1911, By the late 1920s, a Christian majority had emerged in Liaku,
made up mostly of the younger people who had attended village schools.
Throughout the colonial period, Collingwood Bay remained an economic backwater, the handful of
whites in the area limited to government officers, missionaries, and an occasional trader. All the
same, the Maisin were steadily integrated into the emerging colonial system. Regular labour
recruiting began around 1910. By the end of the decade, it had become routine for young unmarried
men to spend one or two 18-month stints working on copral or rubber plantations or on the gold
felds elsewhere in the territory, and people had come to rely upon the calico cloth, robacco, and
steel knives and axes workers brought back to the villages. The government became more intru-
sive, enforcing a series of decrees meant to improve village health such as the construction of
latrines and the replacement of traditional houses-windowless shelters entered via ladders in the
floor, literally smoked over the cooking fires below-with a standard coastal design of simple
rectangular houses on low posts with window openings. In 1918, the government imposed a head
tax and ordered villagers to set up separate coconut plantations from which they could make and
sell copra to pay the tax. The Maisin resented and resisted these changes at first, but by the 1930s
they had accommodated to the new regime. Soccer tournaments became the rage, and Maisin
villages regularly won small prizes from the Resident Magistrate in the annual contest for the most
attractive village in the Tufi region.
World War Il was a watershed moment here as elsewhere in the Pacific, On 22 July 1942, Japanese
troops landed near the village of Gona to the northwest of Collingwood Bay. Facing little resistance,
they marched to the treacherous Kokoda Track in the mistaken belief, based on a poor map. that it
was a road providing a direct route over the Owen Stanley Range to Port Moresby. A month after the
landing, the Australians sent boats to Collingwood Bay, which remained outside of the occupied
area, scooping up every available able-bodied man who could be found to serve as labourers in the
war effort. The Maisin were assigned to a large force of Papuans slogging heavy loads of supplies
up the northern end of the mud- and blood-soaked Kokoda Track and carrying the broken bodies of
Australian soldiers on the return trips, as the exhausted Japanese forces fell back. Once on the
plains, Australian and American troops tought a horrific campaign against Japanese forces
entrenched on the coast, which left hundreds of soldiers on both sides dead (Mayo 1974).
Amazingly, only one Maisin was killed, shot by a Japanese soldier while investigating what he
supposed to be an abandoned tunnel. As bodies piled up and rotted in the coastal swamps, the
Maisin carriers saw many horrors.
Forty years later, the veterans broke down in tears as they told me of their experiences. Yet the war
revealed other more positive truths to Papua New Guineans. They were surprised by the friendliness
of the Australian and American soldiers, their willingness to share food and cigarettes, and their
frank criticisms of the Papuan colonial regime. The war, older Maisin often told me, "changed
everything." They had met white men who treated them as equals, and they heard speeches from
army commanders promising a new cra of economic prosperity once the fighting was over.
Following the defeat of Japan in 1945, however, the Australian government proved slow in meeting
its promises and, in the eyes of many Papua New Guineans, appeared more interested in restoring
the old colonial system.
Local people were not content to wait. So-called cargo cults broke out in several areas, particularly
parts of the former German colony of New Guinea that had been administered by Australia since
1914.* However, here, as elsewhere in long-contacted coastal areas of Papua and New Guinea,
would-be prophets proclaiming the return of ancestors delivering the coveted wealth of white men
failed to stir their audiences. On the other hand, news of an economic experiment at Gona village
spread like wildhire across the region (Dakeyne 1966). The Reverend James Benson, an Anglican
priest who had survived three horrific years of internment in a Japanese prisoner camp on New
Britain, returned to his ruined mission station to establish a Christian cooperative socicty in Gona.
Benson was influenced by the Christian socialist movement in Australia and hoped that a
combination of new types of crops. prayers, and commitment to sharing work and its profits would
improve the lives of villagers. Soon Christian cooperatives were springing up all over the Northern
District.
The Maisin experimented with a series of cooperatives from around 1946
to the mid-1980s (Barker 1996). The cooperatives sought out local commodities that could be sold
to traders-such as sea cucumbers, trochus shell, panned gold, copra, coffee, and cocoa-and
opened small trade stores oftering a selection of commercial goods to locals. Few of these ventures
made money, and, when they did, it was soon spent. They faced several obstacles, including the
distance to markets, the people's unfamiliarity with keeping financial records, and local politics. All
the same, the cooperatives profoundly affected the way that the Maisin thought about and
organized their community. At the founding meeting for a Christian cooperative held in September
1949, representatives of different Maisin clans publicly broke war clubs, symbolizing an end to
internal divisions. Like the church upon which it was modelled, the cooperative sought to unify the
entire community. The Maisin signified the close ties they saw between Christianity, social unity, and
economic success with their single most important cooperative project. With the aid of the district
priest at Wanigela, who blessed the project and managed the bank account, villagers in Viaku began
selling copra with the intention of buying materials for a permanent church. They succeeded,
erecting an attractive church with twin towers and an iron roof on the Uiaku mission station in the
late 1950s.
At the consecration of St. Thomas Church in 1962, Bishop George Ambo installed a Papuan man
from Buna as the parish's first resident priest since Father Jennings's abrupt departure in 1920.
When Anne and 1 arrived in 1982, the Maisin looked hack on the consecration of the church as a
golden moment, a crowning achievement against which the apparent failings of the present—the
cooperative store teetering on the edge of collapse, incessant gossip, fears of sorcery, the
ditficulties of getting people to work together on community projects, and so forth-stood out in
sharp contrast (Barker 1993). Other changes occurring through the same period had even more
profound social effects. Here again the mission played a major role. Maisin had attended mission
schools since 1902. Most had two or three years in the classroom, where they learned the
rudiments of "A-B-C" and "1-2-3," as they described the favoured methods of rote learning used by
the Melanesian teachers. Only a small number of male students had been able to further their
education under white priests at the district station in Wanigela and the small thcological college at
Dogura, as they trained to become teachers themselves. Following the war, the Anglicans worked to
improve the village school system and to expand options for advanced learning. In 1948, they
opened the Martyrs Memorial School for boys at Sangara in the central part of the Northern District,
named in honour of 11 Anglican missionaries and native teachers killed by invading Japanese
soldiers in 1942. Three years later, Mount Lamington exploded in a volcanic eruption, destroying
Sangara and nearby villages and killing more than 3,000 people. Fortunately, students were home
on holidays at the time of the disaster, but neither the staff nor the school was spared. The
Anglicans rebuilt an expanded school at Agenehambo, a safe distance from the volcano, opening its
doors in 1953. Maisin boys began to enroll regularly soon after. In 1956, Holy Name School for girls
opened ar Dogura. Meanwhile, the mission improved the quality of the village schools. gradually
adding fourth, fifth, and sixth years. Those students successful in completing tnal exams in the
village school could atrend the residential high schools.
The missionaries intended that graduates of the new high schools would go on to staff the mission's
expanding national system of churches, schools, and medical centres. Many did, but shifts in
administrative policy opened other opportunities. During the 1950s, the Administration had
intervened in the mission education system to set basic standards, especially the promotion of
English, and had tentatively begun to establish its own secular school system.
In the early 1960s, stung by a United Nations report criticizing Australias tardiness at preparing its
colony for independence, the government suddenly stepped up its involvement, investing heavily in
education, the civil service, and the economy. New secondary and tertiary schools were opened
across the country, including the crown jewel of the system, the Universiry of Papua New Guinea in
1966. The government's Department of Education now set the standards for the training of teachers
and the curriculum in the community schools and assumed responsibility for salaries. The frenetic
efforts of the Australians to prepare Papua New Guinca for independence created a boom in
relatively well-paying jobs for better educated Papua New Guineans, especially in the burgeoning
civil service. Maisin were in an excellent position to take advan-tage. Many of them landed positions
scattered around the country as priests. teachers, nurses, doctors, civil servants, and other
professionals. Meanwhile, the colonial government beefed up its outreach programs in rural areas
with improvements to transportation, the establishment of an extensive system of village aid posts
offering basic medical care, and expertise on cash cropping. among other programs.
In 1973, the Anglican Church of Papua New Guinea succeeded the old missionary diocese. By 1982,
all but one of its parish priests were Papua New Guineans, as were two of the five bishops. Papua
New Guinca itself gained independence in 1975, a scant 13 years after the United Nations report.
Most of a generation of Maisin had left the villages to work elsewhere. I was amazed to discover,
after completing my census of Viaku, that people in their 60s greatly outnumbered the combined
totals of people in their 20s and 30s.
Indeed, the 270 people living in Uiaku proper included only one man in his 30s. This exodus had
profound effects upon village life. The drain of younger folk meant that villagers found it difficult to
maintain large gardens and to mount traditional life-cycle ceremonies. At the same time, people had
become increasingly dependent upon remittances from working relatives. The Maisin's integration
into the wider Papua New Guinca society and economy has steadily increased in the years since
independence. While villagers spend much of their days engaged in subsistence activities, everyone
relics on an ever-increasing range of manufactured goods such as clothing, steel pots, and
packaged rice. Villagers also require money to cover transportation costs to visit relatives in town,
to pay the priests stipend and school fees, and for medicines for their families. Finding and keeping
sources of money have always been challenging. In the years since independence, the Maisin have
lost many of their educational and employment advantages as ever more high school graduates
compete for scarce jobs in the towns. Village populations have swollen as unemployed young
people have returned home. During the same time, government services to Collingwood Bay and
other rural areas have virtually disappcared. By the late 1990s, the local postal service had ceased
to operate, teachers often went for months without receiving pay, and village medical aid posts had
closed down for lack of supplies. The Maisin now find themselves urgently searching for new ways
to support themselves and their children.
The Maisin, no less than the rest of us, live in an increasingly interconnected world. This carries a
cost, most noticeably an alarming loss of tradi-tronal knowledge. Far fewer Maisin today know and
can narrate the histories and stories I recorded in the early 1980s; they have ceased to tattoo the
faces of adolescent girls; and no one knows how to construct the ceremonial shelters once required
for intertribal feasts. Even the language is not the same as it was, as younger people mix lok Pisin
and English with Maisin words and more subtly modify the cadences of their speech. Change, of
course, has always occurred, but it seems to be accelerating. All the same, were you to visit the
Maisin villages in the early years of this new millennium, I suspect you would be struck by the
traditional" appearance of the houses and the rhythms of daily life. The Maisin have little choice but
to maintain a lifestyle based upon subsistence activities. They cannot shop for food at the local
supermarket or hire carpenters to construct their homes. Yet they are also products of a culture that
leads them to perceive the world and organize their social life in particular patterns. Those patterns
are apparent even in the mundane activities of making a living. They are among the lines that
continue to connect the Maisin to their past in a rapidly changing world.
A NOTE ON TENSES
Ethnographies are historical documents. They are based on research that occurred in a particular
time and place. Yet the convention in anthropology is to write ethnographies in the present tense,
the so-called ethnographic present.
Because of this convention, an ethnography can give an impression that the society under study is
stuck in a time warp; the older the study, the more this impression is accentuated. The lives of the
Nuer of Southern Sudan or the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinca today are very different
(although not entirely different) from the ways they appear in classic studies most familiar to
anthropologists, yet those older ways often get referred to in the present tense as if they are eternal
and unchanging. This has led some anthropologists to argue thar ethnographies should be written
in the past tense to signal that they are the equivalent of snapshots taken at a particular time.
Yet to say that ethnographies are historical is not to say they are histo-ries. The use of the present
tense signals the anthropological attempt-always partial and incomplete-to create a holistic image
of a community as experienced at a particular time. This is a very different purpose from a history
and, I think, a useful onc, as it allows us to see patterns that while certainly shaping historical
developments may not be as apparent in accounts of sequences of events and changing
circumstances.
Here is how I use tenses in this book: Chapters 2 through 5 provide a portrait of Maisin society as I
observed it in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Luse the present tense in describing
aspects of that society that I perceive as foundational, generally shared, and enduring-modes of
subsis-tence, kinship terminologies, perceptions of ghosts, and so forth. I make no claim that any of
these generalizations still continue to hold true (although as of 2015, most have). I use the past
tense to relate specific events I observed and participated in. Chapters 6 and 7 shift to a more
historical mode, to describe the events of the anti-logging campaign of the 1990s and subsequent
developments in the region. Here, I mostly use the past tense. The earlier chapters, however,
provide a framework within which l attempt to explain Maisin atti-tudes, motivations, and actions as
well as to assess the nature of change as we move closer to 2015, the endpoint of this book.
Notes
. Betelnut is a mild intoxicant, widely used across South Asia and the western Pacific. When
chewed with the leaves of the betel pepper plant (Piper betle) and lime, the husked nut of the
areca palm releases alkaloids and produces a very bright red saliva that is eventually spat our.
Ir has a bitter flavour thar takes some getting used to. but it is chewed almost incessantly by
Maisin, young and old.
. In the national census of 2000, over 96 per cent of adults in Papua New Gunea declared
themselves members of one or another of the more than 200 Christian denominations
established in the country (Gibbs 2006), Papua New Guinea now ranks as one of the most
thoroughly Christianized nations in the world, matched only by a few Latin American
countries such as Ecuador.
. The appearance of white-skinned men bearing immense wealth and powerful weapons
caused much speculation among Melanesian populations. Many initially thought white people
were ancestral spirits, returned from the dead (Schietfelin and Crittenden 19911. Maisin today
refer to Europeans as bariyama (a loan word from further up the coast that means "spints" in
its original language), but have long understood that Europeans are as human as themselves.
. Tobacco was unknown prior to European contact, but like most Melanesians, the Maisin
were quick to pick up the habit. Tarry sticks of cured tobacco leaf were used as a kind of
currency during the colonial period and were still a common form of tobacco smoked by
Maisin in the 1980s. Smokers shaved bits of the tobacco onto a strip of newspaper, producing
a foul-smelling type of cigar. "Black stick" has long disappeared frum the market. Today,
some Maisin grow and cure their own leat but most prefer fast-burning cigarettes marketed
by global tobaczo corporations, a type of tobacco delivery that is far more damaging to
health than the older form. I ceased giving gifts of tobacco after 1983. Despite educational
campaigns and government restrictions, Papua New Guinea suffers from one of the highest
rates of smoking in the world (Marshall 2013).
. In my defence, Maisin is acknowiedged amongst Collingwood prople to be a challenging
language. The difficulties are partly to do with Maisin's unusual grammatical features that
have been debated by linguists for a century now (discussed later in this chapter). The
language also has an unusually large vocabulary of synonyms: differeut words with identical
meanings. This partly has to do with a taboo against mentioning the name-or even a word
sounding like the name-of an in-law. As a result, the Maisin have generated two and often
three words for many things, including ordinary items like coconurs, Malcolm Ross (1996)
argues that, as warriors who invaded and displaced poople on Collingwood Bay in pre-
contact times, Maisin may have deliberately devel oped a variant vocabulary and odd
grammatical forms as a kind of in-code to exclude outsiders, a process of "esoterogeny" that
has been reported from other parts of Papua New Guinea. It appears to have worked!
. The documentary Changing Ground aired on The Nature of Things science program ou the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television network in Canada m early 2001. In July
2001, seven Maisin paid a return visit to the Stó:16 Nation in British Columbia. This was also
the subject of a documentary, Years from Now, televised on the CBC in 2002. The Maisin
were also one of the subjects of an earlier film.
. Axtbropology on Trial, which includes a ten-minute segment on my fieldwork in Viaku.
. It appeared on the NOVA science series on the PBS network in the United States in
. 1983. The films are visually arresting and very suppoctive of the Maisin but unfortunately are
not very informative about their culture or history. For a detailed critique, see Barker (2004b).
So suggested the pioneer ethnographer, F.E. Williams, who preferred to brave the mosquito-
infested interior villages of the Orokaiva than cope with sandflies *whose irritating bite is out
of all proportion to their size* (Williams 1930).
. This section summarizes a number of much more detailed studies of Maisin history (Barker
1987, 1996, 2001, 2005b). For a good general history of Papua New Guinea through the
colonial and carly Independence periods, see Waiko (1993).
. In 1914, Australia seized the German territory, which it ruled separately from Papua during
the interwar years. Following World War II, the two administrations were merged into the
colony of Papua and New Guinea.
. Most missionary work in the Pacific region was carried out by islanders under the often
loose supervision of a small number of Europeans (Lange 2005). One of my reasons for
choosing, Usaku over Wanigela was because I wanted to study a community that had been
evangelized mainly by islander converts (Barker 2005b).
. Copra is made from the dried inner flesh of coconuts. The oil is later extracted for use in
commercial soap, cosmetics, and food products. It has been one of the major exports from
the South Pacific islands since the mid-nineteenth century.
. Cargo cults are the most studied and debated of the many forms of religious and political
movements arising across Melanesia in the wake of colonial penetration and control (Burridge
1969; Lindstrom 1993; Worsley 1968). While there are many varia-tions, the classic form of
cargoism rests on a helief that Europeans gained their immense wealth and power due to
events that occurred in ancestral times: The rituals engaged in by cultists are meant to undo
this condition and result in the return of ancestors bearing copious quantities of
manufactured goods and thus restoring dignity to Melanesians.