In the mountains of West Papua, the Una still cut stone by the torrents. Until recently, the axe took the trail south: ten days’ walk to the Korowai, who live in houses perched in the heart of the lowland forest, to be traded for rattan. The journey is hardly ever made now. Between the two peoples, the missionaries’ planes now pass, and there is talk of a gold mine and a motorway.
Five hundred years ago, Portuguese sailors named it “the island of bad people”: people killed one another there with axes and arrows.
Ouk holds the two stones “that the gods gave us”: the hammerstone, round and solid, and the raw material that is cut.Laryé, a few huts and three hundred souls, appears on no map. To reach it, the porters, barefoot, go down a thousand metres to the torrent and climb back up eight hundred by the straightest path: here, the quickest way is necessarily the shortest. At six in the morning, the village empties. People go down to the river to cut stones behind Ouk, the oldest, the wisest, who no longer knows how to do anything else. The block of basalt must be roughed out, struck in the right place, in the vein where the rock is strongest, to detach the blade that will become an axe or an adze. Knocking off a flake is so difficult that it is greeted with a cry of joy. Ouk knows that iron exists and that elsewhere axes are made of it; the missionaries now arrive by plane. He carries on, because he needs to work and his stones sell in the mountains, to the east, the west, the south. His father taught him the craft; his children leave for town to look for work, days’ walk away. “Here, I am the keeper of the stones. The keeper of this river, the keeper of this valley, is me.”
In Laryé, the rain falls every day with nightfall; here they say that “the sky weeps to make the earth laugh”.
Setting out with fourteen porters, they number at least thirty on arrival in Laryé: more were picked up all along the way.
People from here make the trip in two hours; it takes Christophe seven to reach the village.
A few days’ walk away lies the town, and iron axes; young people now “go to town, they travel”.One of the stone-cutters has heard that where Christophe comes from, there are cars. Are his stones pretty enough, he asks, to trade them for a car or a moped? Among the Una, people now dream of cars. Only a few years ago, once the stone was polished and mounted on its handle, they took the trail south: ten days’ walk to meet the Korowai and barter the stone for rattan. The hut is entered through a small, high door, against the cold and, in the past, against attacks from neighbouring villages. The pigs sleep there with the women: it is they who give a family its worth. “We women, our work is the pigs”, says one of them; the piglets are even breastfed, because pigs are like children. The men sleep in another hut, and to make children, couples meet in the little shelters along the fields, down by the river. In the evening, Bera, his host, old and tired, entrusts Christophe with stone axes: since he is heading south, he will give them to the Korowai.
It is the women who bring the pigs in at night and let them out in the morning; they never sleep in the men’s hut.
Small and high, the doors of the huts keep the cold out; in the past, they also protected against attacks from neighbouring villages.
Here, cut stone makes it possible “to have pigs and women”.
Here, women nurse the piglets; left outside and deprived of the breast, French pigs, people joke, “wouldn’t grow so fast”.
One day, no doubt, the tarmac will be laid, “to bring peoples closer together and better control the region”.With deforestation and a growing population, one has to go further and further to reach the forest where the pigeon hides are built. Perched above the void on a platform of branches and lianas, Teclop, the hunter, can stay hidden for two or three days before shooting a pigeon with his bow. He believed in the god of the mountain and the god of the forest; now it is Jesus who brings him the birds. “Basically, it doesn’t change much. I just changed gods.” There are more and more people, and less and less game. On Sundays in Laryé, it is the village wise man who begs forgiveness for sins: the white missionary, the Dutchman, disappeared one day without a word, leaving behind a Bible translated into the Una language. People no longer kill one another; they take up a collection: yams, which will be sold to repair the church roof. With religion came the planes. In Langda, a grass airstrip, they wait four days for the mission plane. The pilot came here to make himself useful more than to earn money. Not long ago, an angry tribe shot arrows at a plane; on average there is one crash a month.
Above the platform, Teclop has placed a pigeon-shaped decoy: a lure, “like for duck hunting”.
For Teclop, with the pigeons here, “only the bow works”: you wait in silence, “and then boom, down it comes”.
A crash, the pilot recounts: two passes that look alike, the second a hundred metres or so higher; it was noticed too late.Further south, the government has built houses to settle the nomads; the place is deserted, the Korowai have stayed in their trees. There are three thousand of them, scattered through the forest, and they move about to survive: they depend on the sago palm, whose heart they eat and under whose leaves they shelter. On Korowai land, one arrives singing, as a sign of peace. Baylon welcomes Christophe into his tall house, built in the trees “to protect ourselves from mosquitoes, wild animals, snakes, centipedes”, and in the past from wars; the highest are for the young, who have the strength. He accepts the Una axes: here, no one knows how to cut stone, there are only trees and mosquitoes. To cut the sago, he still takes his iron axe. The larvae found in the trunk are eaten raw; the pulp, washed and filtered, yields within an hour a paste from which balls will be cooked. The sago palm is not cultivated, it grows in the swamps: it has to be followed. Clothes are arriving, and the world with them. “You have to go ever further to find exactly the same thing as before.” There is talk of a gold-mining company that wants to take over the Una’s territory, and of a motorway project that would threaten the Korowai’s.
Some Korowai houses rise five metres above the ground, others ten, others higher still.
“Before, it really was better. There was more to eat”: today, you have to search three times as hard.
Balls of paste cooked so that their crust can be eaten: the sago then becomes “the nomad’s energy”.
In the Korowai forest, it is “the paradise of the cockroach, the spider and the leech”.“I like walking in the forest, going to find food, going from one place to another, from one house to another, watching and listening to the forest. It’s my world, I’m happy here.”Baylon