Jayapura, the largest city on the island of Papua New Guinea, is not part of the country of Papua New Guinea. It’s in the Papua district of Indonesia. Which is something the inhabitants of the Papua district are not particularly pleased about. They feel that they have more cultural bonds, more shared heritage, with the citizens of Papua New Guinea. That the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, is a long way away and not looking out for their best interests. There have been issues. So, this is where you start to see the Free West Papua t-shirts and graffiti. The reason they ended up as part of Indonesia rather than Papua New Guinea has more to do with the regions of influence controlled by the Dutch (Indonesia) vs German (Papua New Guinea).
Our adventure for the day was to take zodiacs to shore, get in buses (with a police escort), drive to Lake Sentani which is famous for their fish farming of the endemic red rainbow fish, which is popular in the aquarium world and used as a local food source. So, on the drive around the lake to the dock, the shore is cluttered with fish pens.
Once we arrived at the dock, we were loaded into small wooden skiffs, riding very low to the water, and motored across to the island village of Assey, a small collection of huts on stilts hung over the water. (There are, in fact, 22 islands on this lake on the island.) (Fun fact, the traditional sewage system for these villages is to pour the raw waste out of the huts into the lake. Or, this is the reason we take all those vaccines when we travel.)
We were greeted by dancers and local artisans selling their wares (including a roughly taxidermied bird of paradise — not getting that one through customs). More dancing. Not many pictures because I was busy negotiating the purchase of a mural painted on pounded bark. (For reference, it’s 5 feet long and I still have not managed to get it framed.) But since wood is one of those big no-no’s for customs, right up there with seal fur products and taxidermied birds, you know I was going to stress out about getting this thing through US customs the rest of the trip.
Afterwards we went to a Museum Loka Budaya to look at some of the curated cultural artifacts — painted shields, carvings, roughly taxidermied animals. I had a conversation with the cultural expert on the staff about whether the locals are also working to get their far-flung cultural artifacts repatriated. A lot of stuff disappeared in the age of explorers and adventurers, but even more stuff disappeared in the modern era when the Rockefellers and the other mid-20th century art collectors descended on this region. And I guess the answer is, yes, they are trying to get their cultural heritage back which there’s a bit of yin and yang to it because they were paid for the pieces. But did they really know what the artwork was worth, did they understand what they were losing, partially the generational loss? Was it a trade between equals?
I wish them all the best of luck, but you know places like Egypt or Greece are not making much headway on getting their history back. And these are places that you could call the modern world and not be able to use the excuse that, well, they just wouldn’t know how to take care of these delicate pieces. In all fairness, in a museum in Bali, there were 600 year old painted cloth murals just hanging on the wall in a room with a door open to the outside, without air conditioning or humidity control or even a pane of glass between the insects and the delicate object. (I was a little gobsmacked by that one.)
Curation and the issues of ancestral ownership are tough ones. We haven’t even figured out the issues of the artwork that Jews were forced to sell / gift / trade for their lives in WWII and that hasn’t even been a 100 years.