To: Agus H. and Tetty (BuTet)
From: Celly Akwan
Subject: Dani in Baliem Valley
Date: April 20, 2005
Dear Agus H. Yahya and Tetty:
…. The larger part of this e-mail will be spent to let you have some glimpses of the Dani highlanders in the Baliem Valley. Other kinds of information related to your short visit will also be given so that you can have a fairly balanced picture of the Baliem Valley and its natives.
Expeditions into the Highlands
American Richard Archbold was the first white man who viewed and discovered the Baliem Valley on June 23, 1938. On that day, he was flying in a huge Catalina-like aircraft dubbed the Guba that eventually landed on Lake Habbema. The craft was a Consolidated PBY 2, the standard U.S. long-range patrol bomber, later specially modified by Howard Hughes for salmon fishing expeditions to Alaska and then sold. Archbold was on his third 14-month long expedition to the highlands of New Guinea; he first sighted the Baliem Valley during one of the exploratory flights of the Guba. The expedition was under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History.
A map of Papua and West Papua, with the Baliem Valley in the highlands, Wamena as its impportant town
Actually the Dani had been contacted six times by various Dutch teams before Archbold discovered them. The contacts began with 1909-1910 Lorentz expedition and J.H. Kremer who crossed the Baliem River’s headwaters in 1921 on his way to Mt. Wilhelmina (later called Mt. Trikora that soars to 4,750 meters). But they missed the valley by several kilometers.
Discovery of the “Shangri-La”
During WW II, the valley would make international headlines as a sort of lost paradise rediscovered. The rediscovery was a coincidental but news-making event.
To fight against the Japanese in Hollandia (later called Jayapura) and secure a military base, the Allied Forces under the supreme command of General MacArthur landed in this small town of Netherlands New Guinea. It was defended by 11,000 Japanese troops, with about one-fifth combat soldiers. (A total of 55,000 Japanese troops defended the northern coast of Irian with considerable air power and substantial naval forces.) The Allies, however, defeated the Japanese stronghold in Hollandia, the largest Japanese logistics supply in the South Pacific. Using 1,200 airplanes of the U.S. Air Force, the Allies destroyed over 300 Japanese craft at Sentani, leaving only 25 serviceable planes. More than 4,000 Japanese were killed and 650 prisoners were taken. About 7,000 Japanese tried to escape to Sarmi, a stronghold over 200 kilometers west of Hollandia, but disease, starvation and wounds killed all but 1,000 men. The Allies lost only 159 lives.
The airfield compex at Sentani Lake was huge. It eventually housed 1,000 planes. Around 300 planes took off and landed at the airfield, first constructed by the Japanese then enlarged and improved by the Allies, every day mid 1944! It has been a record that has not been broken yet in both Netherlands New Guinea and Irian Jaya/Papua.
The Hollandia landing in April 1944 was considered the largest Allied operation in the Pacific. MacArthur employed 217 ships and 80,000 men, led by 50,000 combat troops. The Humboldt Bay (now Yos Sudarso Bay) was filled with hundreds of ships, linked with catwalks and lit up at night. The view at these ships in the bay from Hollandia at night was so fantastic that war correspondents described it as “a city at the sea.”
Within a short period of time, Hollandia and its tiny community of Dutch and Papuan civil servants mushroomed into a city of 250,000 – with 140,000 Australian and American troops and support personnel. It has been a population record not surpassed within the last 74 years since Hollandia was established in 1910. The present-day population of Jayapura of below some 200,000 has even not reached that record yet.
It was during World War II that Allied planes flew over the Baliem, looking for possible airfield sites. An American pilot described the valley as “laid out in checkerboard squares as perfectly formed as farmlands of the Snake Valley in Idaho.” He dubbed it the “Hidden Vallley.”
A few months later, American pilots from Hollandia flew joy-rides over the Baliem. One of the planes crashed against the valley’s mountain wall, killing seven members of the Women’s Army Corps and 14 servicemen. Three people survived the crash, two men and a 20-year-old female corporal, Margaret Hastings. The survivors had to wait for 47 days before they were rescued by a Filippino team landing by parachutes and whisking them out in gliders. War correspondents George Lait and Harry Patterson, who covered the rescue, dubbed the valley “Shangri-La” for its beauty and idyllic setting.
The crash and evacuation of the survivors as well as the nickname made international headlines. They were also published in a Reader’s Digest issue some time later. Combined with Archbold expedition a few years earlier that had been published in a National Geographic article, the Baliem Valley would pique further scientific and missionary interest in the region.
The Baliem Valley has been populated by around 120,000 Papuans just stepping out the Stone Age. It is 1,600 meters high, 60 kilometers long, and 15 kilometers wide. The valley has the highlands’ largest and most fertile pocket of flat, arable land. Archbold who flew over the fertile land in the valley noticed neat geometric gardens and irrigation ditches. He described them as being “like the farming country of central Europe.” To grow sweet potatoes, the Dani’s staple food, the natives have for generations developed “a technically brilliant system of parallel or gridiron irrigation ditches allowing for fallow times equal to that of the cropping cycle.” They have gently shaped the landscape of the mild valley into what one author describes as “the only place on earth where man has improved on nature . . . as close to Paradise as one can get.”
Where the Dani Came From
No one knows for sure where the Dani came from. There have been various conjectures concerning their origin. They might have come from Southeast Asia or West Africa, have had their ancestors in the Indo-Malayan archipelago, or have been the result of an independent evolution in situ.
The Southeast Asia hypothesis indicates that the highland Papuans reached New Guinea as early as 35,000 to 60,000 years ago and as late as 16,000 to 18,000 years ago. For many milennia after reaching the island (that now includes the western and eastern halves of New Guinea), the Papuans expanded within New Guinea to the coasts and neighboring islands. Today, the Dani are a part of the Papuan highlanders who live in the Central Mountains – Jayawijaya, Mt. Jaya, Paniai, Nabire, Tolikara, Yahokimo, and Wisnumurti Range.
Intermarriage with the Seafaring Austronesians
Ancestors of the present-day Malays, Indonesians, Filipinos, and Polynesians have been traced back to Formosa (later called Taiwan). Collectively known today as Austronesians (formerly called “Malayo-Polynesians”), a handful of hardy seafarers left the coasts of southern China some 6,000-7,000 years ago, reached Taiwan as their jumping-off point, and voyaged through the Philippines to Indonesia and out across the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
This breed of Mongoloid stock brought with them a social organization of bilateral or non-unilineal descent. Within this organization, both biological parents are recognized for purposes of affiliation. This differs with the unilineal societies of New Guinea and Melanesia which are mostly patrilineal. In such a unilineal society, descent is recognized through the father – or sometimes the mother, but rarely both.
Austronesian speakers appeared in the islands of Indonesia by about 3,000 BC. Over the next two millenia, they developed superior technology in sea transportation and land cultivation and increased their populations significantly. They gradually displaced the Papuan populations who then lived there. But this displacement process never took place in the interior of New Guinea because of a combination of ecological factors and the existence of agriculturally sophisticated Papuans. In short, the Austronesians never penetrated to the interior of New Guinea.
The seafaring Austronesians then settled and intermixed with Papuans along the coasts as well as on nearby islands. They mingled their genes, but imposed their languages. Around the year 2,000 B.C., a major expansion of the Trans-New Guinea phylum (family) of Papuan language speakers also occurred. It spread west from Irian to the islands of Timor, Alor and Pantar, and replaced earlier West Papuan language speakers. These islands had already been settled by Papuan speakers long before the Austronesian arrival. Nevertheless, the Trans-New Guinea phylum was also strongly influenced by Austronesian loan words, and expanded into the island’s central highlands by about 1,500 B.C. This expansion also wiped out traces of earlier diversity there.
A result of the intermarriage of Austronesians and Papuans can be noticed from the Austronesian languages, also called the non-Papuan languages spoken today in the northern and western coasts of Irian. They include Irianese languages spoken by natives living in the present-day Jayapura and its vicinity, Sarmi to the west, a large number of natives in Yapen, Biak-Numfor, most coastal natives from Manokwari to Wondama-Windesi-Roon, Nabire and the nearby islands, some parts of Waropen, and in the Raja Ampat archipelago, west of Sorong.
Linguistically, New Guinea has been described as a “linguistic Babel” by an author. The phrase that alludes to the religious story of the language chaos caused by the collapse of the Tower of Babel in ancient times is meant to indicate the rich diversity of local languages spoken in the western and eastern halves of the island. It has been estimated that the indigenous peoples of New Guinea totalling 2,7 million (in 1991) form just 0.01 percent of the total world population, with Irian Jaya/Papua having around 250 tribes (in 2004).Yet they contribute 15 percent of their known languages to the world’s language heritage. The total number of languages spoken here is approximately 800.
The major language families in Irian Jaya/Papua can be divided into two main phyla: the Papuan and non-Papuan phyla. The first phyla include the Trans-New Guinea Phylum spoken by highlanders such as the Dani, Cenderwasih Bay phylum used by some groups of people in Yapen-Waropen, East Bird’s Head Phylum spoken by tribes living in the Tamrau Mountains and near Sorong, and West Papuan Phylum used by tribes living near Mt. Umsini, southeast of Manokwari. The Austronesian phyla include the languages used by the coastal people already mentioned.
The Trans-New Guinea phylum is the most widespread on the island. It comprises 84 percent of Papuan speakers and 67 percent of the languages.
Plans for a Lingua Franca
Due to this language diversity in the western half of New Guinea, the different tribes cannot understand one another except if their languages come from the same mother tongue, such as the linguistically related languages spoken in Biak, Numfor, Doreh Bay in Manokwari, Roon in the southern part of the Cenderawasih Bay, and in the Raja Ampat archipelago of the north-western coast. Naturally, a lingua franca must be used and so Malay, the Dutch word for what is now Indonesian, has been taught at elementary schools and used by these tribes since the Dutch colonial period. After the Second World War, the Dutch who had separated West Irian from the newly formed Republic of Indonesia and retained their power there planned to introduce a local language, dominant enough, to replace Malay. The Biak-Numfor language used by one of the largest and most proggresive tribes in Netherlands New Guinea was proposed but later turned down because it was not dominant enough. Then, Dutch was proposed, accepted, and taught for some years before that last Dutch colony in Southeast Asia/South Pacific was officially handed over to Indonesia on May 1, 1963.
The Koteka and Honai
The koteka is not a word from one of the three language sub-groups in the Baliem Valley: the Greater Dani, Southern Dani, or Central Dani. It comes from a tribe living in the Paniai highland, west of Wamena, and simply means “clothes.” The Dani in Wamena call it holim. The holim and koteka are the formal clothes of the male highlanders living in the Baliem Valley and Paniai region. They are typical to the highlanders there; coastal Irianese whose traditional clothes are different and disappeared gradually before WW II have never worn either one of both.
The holim is also a sign of authority and dignity of the male Dani. A Dani “Big Man” wears a larger and longer holim, a sign of his power.
A comical scene has been reported in which a holim-wearing Dani playing soccer suddenly raced into the forest as if chased by the Devil and did not show up for the rest of the game. Another player had kicked the ball that had accidentally hit and broken his dear holim; afraid of being naked and laughed at by other players and the spectators, the unlucky man tried to hold his broken holim from falling apart while running as fast as he could into the forest.
The government started some largely unsuccessful campaigns from 1964 to 1998 to change the habits of wearing traditional clothes into modern ones of the highlanders. Frans Kaisiepo, an Irianese islander from Biak and a renowned pro-Indonesian nationalist since the Dutch period as well as the second Governor of West Irian, began these campaigns in 1964 to “civilize” these highlanders. His government wanted them to wear western or modern clothes, like those worn by the generally modern coastal Irianese since the Dutch colonial period. It virtually failed. The last anti-koteka campaigns (1993-1998) carried out by the provincial government under Yacob Pattipi, another coastal Irianese who became Governor of Irian Jaya, also failed considerably. The highlanders were given no extra clothes, soap for washing the only clothes they finally wore out, and understanding of their importance. Obviously, these campaigns were not thoroughly planned and carried out.
In spite of these failures, not all Dani, in particular, refuse modernization. Particularly, the younger and educated Dani have shown successful adaptation to the modern life by wearing modern clothes and experiencing other things, such as the lures of the city, that the modern life lays at their feet. This generation includes children of converted Dani and educated by Protestant and Catholic missionaries.
Like the holim or koteka, the honai is a traditional house typical of the Dani. The honai have never been constructed and used as houses by coastal Irianese whose tradtional houses disappeared as early as the 19th century.
The Buah Merah “Fever”
Recently, the Dani in the Baliem Valley have been put again in the national-news spotlight for a local fruit, the buah merah (red fruit, pandanus conideus lam). It has been claimed to have potent cures for AIDS/HIV and cancer patients and, therefore, has been feverishly sought-after. This oval-shaped and large fruit with its thorny and hard skin comes from the pandanus tree, a palm-like tree. Perhaps, a variety of this grows in some coastal areas in the north; its fruit forms an irregular source of protein to the menus of the coastal people in the rural areas, such as in Roon and the Wondama Peninsula.
Bye for now,
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