History and Contact

The Australians first entered the Mubi Valley along its southernmost stretch. In 1910, M. Staniforth Smith led a patrol from Goaribari Island up the Kikori River.^[3] The patrol reached Mount Murray by foot and crossed into Samberigi territory. It then continued along the Samberigi Creek in a northwesterly direction over several more arduous limestone ridges of the Murray Range. On the twenty-fourth of December, after a descent of 1200 feet, they arrived at a large river that "ran in a fierce rapid through converging mountains, forming a gorge 1200 feet deep. . .. The only conclusion we could come to was that this was the Strickland River." (Annual Report for 1911 :166). Smith later realized that he must have been in error and finally concluded that it was the Upper Kikori.

Smith and the expedition disappeared somewhere in the interior Gulf District along the Kikori, but Wilfred Beaver, who attempted to retrace Smith's journey the following year in the hopes of finding him, noted that it was in fact the lower Mubi River to which Smith had descended. On the twentieth of March, 1911, Beaver's party reached

Smith's No. Thirty-six camp, the last one they encountered. Beaver concluded that Smith had attempted his descent of the Kikori near that point, and he himself decided to descend the Mubi River, thinking it would flow into the Turama (Annual Report for 1911 :184). After encountering the same fierce rapids that Smith described, the patrol was forced to return to their Mubi camp on April 2 and return the way they had come. Beaver later became convinced that Smith and his party perished in an attack by "natives of the Kiko and others of the up-river tribes [presumably including the Foi]" (1911:178) somewhere along the river. However, on April 12 Beaver and his party learned from an officer who had come to meet them with fresh supplies that Smith and his group had arrived down the Kikori at Beaver's base camp (1911:185). In describing the rugged limestone country of the Lower Mubi and Upper Kikori, Beaver passionately wrote, "I can safely say, after an extensive experience of the roughest country throughout the Territory, that the portion traversed is the worst" (1911:186).

In 1923, Woodward and Saunders reached the Mubi in the course of their patrol through the Samberigi Valley (see Hope 1979: chap. 5). However, the Foi were not contacted again by the Australian administration until October 1926. In that month, a Kasere man arrived at Kikori station and reported that some Foi men under the leadership of one Poi-i-Mabu had crossed the Kikori River and raided the village of Sosogo, killing all of its inhabitants save for one adolescent boy. A punitive expedition was led by Sydney Chance, the assistant resident magistrate. He was, incidentally, the first white man to bring back a description of the waterfall that lies several miles above the confluence of the Mubi and Kikori, apparently the largest in Papua New Guinea (nearly 400 feet). Chance named it Beaver Falls after its discoverer (Annual Report for 1926-1927 :8).

The patrol followed Poi-i-Mabu and his associates who fled by canoe. For the next eight days the explorers traveled along the river and footpaths, confiscating canoes and eventually taking five prisoners at a village called Udukarua before returning to Kikori station. Chance also reported that most of the Foi men were in possession of steel axes that they obtained in trade from the Ikobi and Dikima (that is, Kasere) peoples south of the Kikori River.

This was the extent of European contact with the Foi for the next ten years. In early 1936, Ivan Champion made four reconnaissance flights over the area between latitude 5 degrees 50 minutes and 6 de-

grees 60 minutes and longitude 142 degrees and 144 degrees, the area between Mount Bosavi and Mount Giluwe, in the middle of which he viewed Lake Kutubu and the surrounding Upper Mubi River valley. Later that year, he and C. T. J. Adamson ascended the Bamu River and walked from Mount Bosavi to Lake Kutubu. They visited all five of the villages that existed at Lake Kutubu at the time but did not reach any of the Mubi River villages (Champion 1940). After crossing the lake, the party proceeded northeast across the Mubi and were shown a track leading across the Augu River and into the territory of Wola or Augu speakers.

The next year, Champion and Adamson established a police camp at Lake Kutubu. Champion made a number of patrols over the next two years, primarily for the purposes of suppressing warfare. In July of 1939, the men of Ku^~ hu^~ , Era'ahu'u, Harabuyu, and Pu'uhu'u (that is, Tunuhu'u) villages raided Ifigi village, burning eight dwellings and destroying twenty-two canoes and twenty pigs (Patrol Report No. 2 1939-1940:1). A head-man of Ifigi named Baiga reported the attack and enlisted the aid of men from Hegeso, Barutage, Herebo, Harabuyu, Yomaisi, and Yomagi to retaliate against Ku^~ hu^~ . Fighting continued and twenty men from the Herebo extended community were wounded. Champion finally led an armed party to Harabuyu where there had been more killings the night before. The Harabuyu men were armed and their village barricaded. One of the constables fired his rifle and the Harabuyu men responded with arrows. Champion finally arrested the culprits and brought the prisoners back to Kutubu station.

This was the only major fight that occurred before 1940, when the outbreak of World War II forced the Australians to abandon the station. However, in the three years of their initial administration, the Australians introduced a large number of pearl shell crescents into the Foi-speaking area, using them as payment for goods and services. It was during this period that the government anthropologist, F. E. Williams, spent four months gathering ethnographic information from the Foi villages of Lake Kutubu and the Upper Mubi. Prior to the administration's introduction of large numbers of pearl shells, the Foi had apparently been trading for them with their neighbors to the north and south. Williams reported that the Foi:

[spoke] almost with awe of the fine specimens which belong to the Grasslanders [to the north of Lake Kutubu]. . .. It would appear that there is in the upland valleys a great reservoir of shell some of which is occasionally traded down towards the south. (1977:176)

After the war, a new station was established in 1949 at Dage on the northeast corner of the lake, and regular patrols of the Fasu and Foi area began. Soon after the station was functioning, the patrol of-ricer appointed a village constable and village councilor for each long-house community. These men acted as intermediaries between their constituencies and the administration, organizing the villagers to carry out tasks ordered by the patrol officer, such as the construction of latrines and rest houses, footpath maintenance, and so forth. They were also given authority to settle quarrels within the village, though unless either of the village officials were head-men before their appointment they would have had little success.^[4]

In 1951, the Unevangelized Field Mission (UFM) established missions at Lake Kutubu and at Orokana, on the Mubi River east of the present-day site of Pimaga station. By the time I arrived in Hegeso, the Lake Kutubu mission at Inu was run entirely by Foi, and the single remaining European missionary and his family at Orokana who were there when I arrived in 1979 departed permanently in 1986. The entire Foi population considers itself Christian now, and many traditional practices, of which the most important include the healing cults and mortuary exchanges, have been abandoned as a result of UFM influence. The UFM became the Asia Pacific Christian Mission (APCM) around 1970, and it is now a branch of the Evangelical Church of Papua. In the national elections of 1982, the Evangelical Alliance, an association of fundamentalist mission organizations, wielded considerable influence in the Southern Highlands Province on behalf of the candidates it supported (Ballard, personal communication).

In 1968, however, Tugiri village invited the Catholic mission to establish a station. The mission is presently staffed by a Foi man who is trained as a catechist, and the mission is visited at regular intervals by a priest from Nembi or Mendi. The influence of the Catholic mission extends to Yo'obo village and parts of Wasemi, both at Lake Kutubu, but has made no further inroads on the rest of the still solidly APCM Foi population.

Although the Foi have had the longest history of permanent contact with the colonial administration of any group in the Southern Highlands Province, they have experienced only modest economic development. In 1959, the colonial government organized work on a footpath linking all the Upper Mubi villages which was completed in 1963. During this time, many villages, including Hegeso and Barutage, rebuilt their longhouses on sites along the footpath. By the time I arrived in the Foi area, the path had been upgraded to vehicular standards.

There are at present three airstrips serving the Foi area. Two are owned by the APCM mission and are located at Moro, west of Lake Kutubu, and at Orokana. The government airstrip at Pimaga was completed in 1974. The mission also runs two primary schools at Inu (Lake Kutubu) and Orokana. In 1974, the government opened Tanuga primary school located near Pimaga station.

Government aid posts were established throughout the Foi and Fasu area in the late 1970s. A larger health center, staffed by a provincial health extension officer, was opened at Pimaga in 1977.

Australian patrol officers introduced new food crops to the Foi at the very beginning of their administration. The most important among them were the Xanthosoma or Singapore taro, the Cavendish banana, choko, pumpkin, maize, cassava, pawpaw, citrus fruits, pineapples, and peanuts. In addition, birdseye chilies and Bixa orellana were introduced for their commercial value.

Until 1979, the possibilities available to the Foi for obtaining money were limited. The most common method until recently has been contract labor at coastal plantations. Twenty of the men of Hegeso had by 1979 experienced at least one two-year term of labor, mostly on the cocoa and copra plantations of New Britain and the north coast. The sums that these men are able to save, however, are low and are primarily dissipated in gifts to relatives.

Men and women earn small amounts of money by selling fruit and vegetables to government and mission employees at Inu, Orokana, and Pimaga. Both the government and mission employ a certain number of men as laborers. During the mid-1970s, the Southern Highlands Province allocated funds under the Rural Improvement Programme (RIP) for the maintenance of roads, and a number of young men obtained regular employment in this manner (see Patrol Report No. 3 1974-1975). When I returned to Hegeso in December 1982, however, funding for local road maintenance had been discontinued.

Most men have obtained some income through the selling of chilies to government buyers. However, due to the lack of agricultural extension by government officers, the availability until recently of RIP funds for local labor, and the decline in chili prices, the production of chilies diminished considerably by the time I arrived (see Patrol Report No. 1 1975-1976).

The APCM mission has had considerable success starting cattle projects in Foi villages. Because of the relatively high costs of purchasing calves and fencing materials, most cattle are purchased cooperatively by an entire village or clan segment. The Foi view cattle

in exactly the same terms as they do pigs. In fact, they call them nami kau , which can best be translated as "the type of pig whose name is cow," just as they call the white cockatoo, for example, the ya namuyu , "the namuyu bird." The owners of cattle slaughter them to be sold piece by piece for shell wealth (and nowadays cash), the traditional manner in which they dispose of their own pigs, as I describe in chapter 4.

The most significant and potentially successful attempt at development in the Foi area, however, began in 1979 when the Department of Commerce introduced silkworms. Both the climate and the abundance of riverine garden sites in the Mubi Valley are well suited to the growth of mulberry shrubs. At the end of that first year, Foi growers had produced 1374 kilograms of raw silk, and by the end of 1981 the amount was 4022 kilograms. During the initial three-year period of the silk project's existence, Hegeso village led the Foi area in production, and in 1983 it had nineteen individual projects. The price for raw silk varied between K2.00 and K2.50 per kilogram (PNG K1.00 = U.S. $1.47 in 1979), and it was thus comparable to coffee in its potential for profit.^[5]

The money that the Foi earn from these various means is primarily channeled into bridewealth and other traditional payments, although money still accounts for only a small proportion of their total value. The Foi also spend money at the trade stores: these purchases are largely confined to tinned fish and rice, which they give to guests on ceremonial occasions such as weddings. Although the introduction of cash has not as yet had a significant effect on the composition of traditional prestations, other factors to which I now turn have altered them considerably.