57 Re-uniting Students with Elders in PNG
Reuniting With Village Elders in Papua New Guinea: A Key to Understanding Environmental Realities
Abstract: Papua New Guinea University of Technology students enrolled in an environmental studies course are sent back to their villages to learn and record the environmental knowledge of their tribal elders. Students are astonished at how much environmental lore is present. Tribal elders welcome their prodigal sons with an environmental immersion and refresher in village lore and are empowered by helping a university student with an assignment. The students find a niche in the village as a recorder and a responsible link to the outside world.
Papua New Guinea is an independent country of mountainous islands pushed up by the tectonic convergence of the Australian and Pacific plates. Fourteen thousand feet peaks cap this highly dissected terrain. Located between Australia and the equator, the total land area is slightly larger than the State of California. The great majority of PNG, the mainland, is located on the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. The western half, Irian Jaya, is controlled by Indonesia. Entirely confined within the Tropics, the climates are composed of windward rainforests, rain shadow savannahs and mountain environments. Melanesians settled the island of New Guinea upwards of 20 thousand years ago developing one of the original agricultural hearths. Now numbering 7.6 million people, PNG is a nation of tribes speaking over 880 languages that belong to the Austronesian and Papuan language families. Bound by geography and history these Melanesian people communicate with “Tok Pisen” a lingua franca based on English with a scattering of words from some of the more dominant tribes. Each tribe maintains its cultural traditions and its relationship with each unique environment. Farming, hunting and fishing have been the most common way of life. (Diamond, Jared, 1997)
I was teaching at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology in the late 1990’s (1996-2000). Most of my students had originated in rural agrarian communities, but because of school commitments had lost contact with the rural life of their villages,. Although they learned some of the family and village traditions in early childhood, the route to becoming educated had forced them to be separated from much of that life. PNG children normally begin school at the age of eight, when they lose contact with the normal subsistence activities of farming, fishing, or hunting and in general, any contact with the natural environment that village life presents.
Location of Papua New Guinea village elders interviewed.
The children who complete four years of elementary school and pass the entrance exam to the middle school must leave the village to pursue grades 5-8. The government houses and boards these children at distant district schools. Here the effect of this isolation is more pronounced as formal school education replaces village lif