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Article Excerpt
As it is elsewhere, water is a vital natural resource in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The United Nations' Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (2004:4) states in a recent publication that '[w]ater is generally accepted as the most important natural resource that will affect the Asian and Pacific region's development over the next 50 years. It is a critical input in agriculture, industry, urbanization, and essential to the wellbeing of households'. (1) PNG has a coastline of 8 300 kilometres, its geography is characterised by the presence of numerous reefs, lagoons and islands (Connell 1997:94), and the surrounding waters are populated by some 1800 species of coastal fish. The largest river basins in the country are the Sepik, the Fly, Purari and Markham Rivers. There are over 5 000 freshwater lakes dotted throughout the country and it also has jurisdiction over a marine zone of over 2 million square kilometres (Aquastat 2007). (2) Brown and Ploeg (1997: 508) note that '[l]and has been the foundation of life of the people of Papua New Guinea. Its soils, waters, wildlife, vegetation, and minerals are the people's property and resources'. Conflict arising from competing interests and claims over the control, management and ownership of these resources has been common in PNG since earliest contact, as they have been developed or extracted by developers, traders, administrators and planters. This competition has taken various forms and exhibited varying levels of intensity: from disputes arising out of the mining of natural deposits by large, multinational corporations such as Ok Tedi Mining Ltd (OTML), Porgera Joint Ventures Ltd (PJV) and Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL) (cf. Banks and Ballard 1997; Connell and Howitt 1991; Connell 1991; King 1997; Kirsch 1997), or in relation to logging and the granting of timber concessions (cf. Holzknecht 1997; Wood 1998) or the establishment of fisheries or agricultural programs in rural areas (cf. Dundon and Wilde 2000; Foale and Manele 2003; Otto 1997).
The overwhelming majority of land in PNG is under customary tenure--principles and practices of resource ownership that are immensely varied and flexible--with only 3% of land held by the state, despite successive attempts by colonial Australian administrations to introduce and encourage customary land registration (Brown and Ploeg 1997:510, 513). In July and August 1995, Prime Minister Chan attempted to introduce the registration of customary land in order to meet certain criteria proposed by the World Bank. The reaction was one of 'overwhelming opposition, manifest in demonstrations, petitions and destruction of property' (Lakau 1997:529). University of Papua New Guinea students rioted in the capital, as did people in other urban centres. In 1995, several UPNG students visited the Gogodala Council Chambers in Balimo, Western Province, and held a public meeting about the rationale for their united opposition to the registration of customary land. The primary residents of Balimo, a peri-urban centre for the Gogodala, although excited by the possibilities of formalising customary principles of ownership of land, water and other natural resources, were also deeply suspicious of the government's intentions. Some argued persuasively, however, that land registration could represent the path to development, an issue that remains central to debate and conflict over land ownership and the management of natural resources.
To date, nothing has come of plans for customary land registration and communal tenure persists: 'no alienation is allowed without the full agreement of all members of the group concerned, individuals and families hold usufruct rights, and there are multiple rights to collect firewood, gather, hunt, and fish' (Brown and Ploeg 1997:514). The alienation of land through sale or mortgage is not the primary source of conflict over natural resources in PNG, but rather the 'commodification of land, reefs, and fish that underpins the majority of conflicts over property rights' (Foale and Manele 2003:8).
For the 25000 Gogodala language speakers situated in 35 villages and government/mission stations between the floodplain of the Fly River to the south and the Aramia River to the north in the Western Province, water is a vital resource that underpins their rural lifestyle. It is also an integral part of the tenure system set in place by the originary ancestors--iniwa luma--through their movements across the landscape during ancestral times. Set between two major parallel river systems, the environment is defined and dominated by the still, dark waters of the lagoons and the flowing, opaque tides of the rivers and creeks. For up to nine months of the year the lagoons are inundated and full of still or sluggish water, filled with clumps of floating grass and large pink and purple water lilies. These village communities depend upon water to support their primarily subsistence economy, to plant, grow and harvest sago and other garden produce, and as the source of fish and other aquatic life that provides an important supplement to these. In the form of the rivers, creeks and lagoons water is also the space of movement: people have to traverse tracts of water in many of their daily activities, as villages are often isolated from the land on which gardens or areas of bush and sago swamp are situated. It is also the site of seasonal transformation and a marker of the passage of time: seasons manifest through changes in the colour of the rivers and lagoons, in the flowering of certain trees that grow beside them: in water levels in the lagoons and creeks, and in the movement of different species of fish and other aquatic life up and down the waterways.
In this environment, canoes are not simply a vehicle for travel and communication among the villages but are the primary social group into which people are born. The relationship between people and clan canoes is encompassed in the concept 'standing' or 'sitting in canoes' as gawa or 'clan canoes' are a person's primary affiliation and the basis of people's access to land and resource ownership. People inherit their canoe membership from their father, and own or have access to water if they sit or stand in the clan canoe to which the body of water belongs. Strang (2004:1) suggests that in a variety of cultural and geographic contexts people are engaged in disputes over the ownership, regulation, control and use of water. Gogodala competition over this vital substance is part of a daily dialogue and dispute over ownership and management of natural resources. This competition over access to and control over tracts of water is not only a postcolonial preoccupation: the Gogodala were involved in inter and intra village conflicts as well as those with neighbouring language groups like the Kamula, Doso, and Dibiyaso before the presence of the colonial administration in the province in the early 1900s. In the contemporary legal context, this is entangled in efforts to demonstrate the validity of clan membership, ancestral connections and genealogical ties. 'Gogodala are always fighting for the land' is a frequent comment but the same could be said for water, as Feld (1990) notes in relation to the Kaluli and Weiner (1991) with regard to the Foi on the Papuan Plateau to the north of the Gogodala, where land is understood in terms of the water that surrounds it.
The ancestor most closely associated with the waterways in the...
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