Few places on Earth are farther from Chicago than the remote northern coastal villages in Papua New Guinea that were smashed and erased by a tidal wave a week ago, killing possibly 80 percent of the 10,000 people who lived there.
Yet it turns out that Chicago has extraordinarily close ties to those villagers. The Field Museum began delving deeply and intimately into life in the villages 90 years ago, when Chicago anthropologist Albert Lewis spent two years there. Since 1990, two of Lewis’ modern counterparts at the Field have been going back to broaden and deepen his work.
Moreover, American history is deeply entwined in the villages whose names have been filtering out in news reports on the disaster– Sissano, Warapu, Arop, Aitape and others. They are etched in the memory of tens of thousands of American veterans who, in village lore, now are legendary warriors who battled desperately there against the Japanese in 1944.
“It’s silly to say you love one place on Earth more than any other,” said John Terrell, a Field Museum archeologist who knows the area well, his voice husky with emotion, “but, for me, two of the places I love the best are gone. They simply don’t exist, anymore.”
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Terrell, curator of oceanic archeology and ethnology at the Field, was speaking of Arop and Warapu, two villages of a couple of thousand inhabitants each, stretched along a sandspit on the ocean side of a palm-fringed South Seas coral lagoon in the West Sepik province.
Terrell and his Field colleague, anthropologist Robert Welsch, have been visiting the villages and studying the villagers since 1990. They were not there when the tidal wave, called a tsunami in the Pacific, struck the area. But this week from the U.S. they frantically have been trying to find out the fate of the people and places they have come to know so intimately. Officials have asked the men to return to the area to talk with the survivors and help ease their trauma.
Arop and Warapu, Terrell said, were the hardest hit. Their fragile wooden stilt houses and buildings were swept into the 2-mile-wide lagoon, which filled up with debris and bodies of thousands of villagers.
“I look at my photographs of me with my friends in Warapu, and it is hard to believe that now all these friends are gone,” said Welsch in a telephone interview from New Hampshire, where he is teaching this summer at Dartmouth College.
The carnage is so devastating and rotting bodies have posed so many health problems that survivors have been cremating the bodies and burying them where they are found in mass graves without a chance to mourn them or give them proper religious rites. Fearing the sea and being haunted by the souls of the hastily disposed of dead, survivors may be reluctant to rebuild the villages on their old grounds, Terrell said.
“Suddenly our collections here at the museum from those places take on a whole different significance,” Terrell said of the thousands of items of homemade handicrafts the museum has collected from the villages in this century. “This may be the most complete surviving record of a suddenly vanished way of life.”
Living in a remote and lightly populated area, the local tribes and clans of fishermen and farmers, each speaking languages of their own, have interested Field scientists because they are closely interconnected by a way of life that honors friendship with neighbors above all else.
Albert B. Lewis brought back thousands of artifacts from the area after living there in 1909-10. The artifacts came to be recognized as the best New Guinea museum collection in the world, some of it on display in the Field’s permanent “Pacific Spirits” exhibit.
In World War II, American Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s plan to leapfrog across the South Pacific and reconquer the Philippine Islands thousands of miles north relied on surprising and destroying Japanese airfields in these same coastal villages.
In April 1944, American planes dropped leaflets warning villagers that there would be great danger the next day. Most locals heeded the warning and were safely in hiding when American bombs the next day devastated the villages and Japanese bases.
When the villagers emerged from hiding a week later, they were astonished to see what the Americans had wrought.
“In three days, the Seabees (Army construction corps) had built a highway all along the coast,” said Welsch, “and they had put up a headquarters city at Aitape, housing 10,000 troops.”
The Japanese soon counterattacked in a vain attempt to drive the Americans out, and three weeks of battles along the coast became among the fiercest in three years of fighting in Papua New Guinea.
“The GIs are still very fondly remembered there,” said Welsch.
“We’ve seen a lot of American veterans fairly frequently back over there, revisiting the old war haunts. A lot of them have been from Chicago.”
Anthropologists had almost entirely ignored the coastal villages after Lewis’ work there until Terrell, 55, and Welsch, 48, decided to retrace Lewis’ footsteps in 1990.
On their first visit, they brought with them photographs of the household crafts, fishing gear and hunting equipment Lewis had collected. The artifacts have only nominal monetary value, but they are priceless for depicting a way of life.
“People knew of Lewis,” said Terrell, “and they were astonished that the museum had taken such good care of the things he had traded for. They wanted to resume the trade. They were making very many of the same handicrafts still.”
About 2,000 languages, one-third of all languages in the world, are spoken in the lightly populated South Pacific region.
Rather than along kinship lines, much of village society operates on friendships they inherit from other family members. Goods that are the specialty of one language group in one village are passed along to other villages in the form of gifts to friends up and down the coast during the voyaging season, from April to October, when people travel and visit friends.
“I’ve interviewed 130 older men about their friends in other villages,” said Welsch. “Most had friends in at least 20 other villages, a few in up to 80 other places.
“This is how agricultural products, fish, household goods and things like fishnets and hunting gear, all locally made, get distributed. It is not trade or barter, it’s done through this extensive ritual of gift giving.”
It is also how he and Terrell have lived and worked in the villages, off and on for the last eight years. They have been adopted into families who have shared their friends up and down the coast, giving them entree into the places they have wanted to study.
The same people opened their doors last year when Welsch and Terrell took a group of Field Museum members, including Field President John McCarter, to the coast. This week the museum started a relief fund for the villagers with a $10,000 gift that has since grown to $14,000 with contributions from individuals.
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Papua New Guinean officials have asked Welsch and Terrell to return to the coast in an attempt to alleviate the trauma of the village survivors.
The government wants somebody who can get people to talk about life in the villages before the disaster and what happened to them when the wave struck.
So, Terrell and Welsch soon will be leaving their families for another sojourn on the benighted coast.
“This won’t be an academic exercise,” said Terrell. “We are friends, and friends always go back when they are needed.”
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Readers who would like to contribute to the Field Museum’s relief fund can send a check made out to “Field Museum/PNG Relief,” and mail it to: C/O Sephanie Powell, Field Museum, Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, IL 60605.