Tree Houses No. 1

Korowai Tree House

Iranian Jaya is the west-half of the largest tropical island in the world, which can be found on a world map above Australia and just below the equator. It used to be a Dutch colony, but was absorbed by Indonesia in 1963. The eastern half of the island became an independent state in 1975, after it had been administered by Australia and the UN.
Iranian Jaya is about the size of California and sparsely populated with less than 2 million people. About 12% of these are recent immigrants from Indonesia, often attracted by an Indonesian government policy of offering 5 acres of land, a year's worth of rice and a one-way ticket to anyone willing to leave the densely populated Indonesian archipelago.
The indigenous population are tribal people, often known as 'Papuans' from a Malay word meaning "frizzy haired". They are related to the Australian Aborigines and speak as many as 250 different languages. Many of them deeply resented the Indonesian take-over, but their bows and arrows were no match to the modern Indonesian army, who upholds a law where political dissent is a criminal activity.

Korowai Tree House
© National Geographic

I was privileged to have an encounter with a Papuan Man when I was a young primary school girl in the 1950's. I was traveling by myself on a train in the Netherlands to go and stay with my grandma and shared the otherwise empty train compartment with him. It was extremely unusual in those days to meet anyone from another culture or race. I was so fascinated by his deeply black skin and friendly face that I couldn't help staring at him, which was probably quite rude, but fortunately he did not take offence and we started talking for the remaining hour of the journey. This meeting made a deep and lasting impression on me. He kindly answered all my nosy questions and in addition told me about his childhood and tried to convey to me (who had as yet not much sense about history or geography, that he was born into a mountain-forest tribe, who still had a stone-age culture. He said that he was about the same age as me when a great noisy bird, which turned out to be a plane, flew over his village. It scared the wits out of everyone! Within weeks after that, he met the first white people he, or his folks, had ever seen. He said that he had been just as fascinated with their exotic appearance as I had been with his. He was studying agriculture now and often felt homesick.
Sadly I cannot remember his name, but my encounter with this kind man preserved me from much of the prejudices I might otherwise have been prone to, when we were later taught at school about stone age people in history or the so-called 'primitive' people who populated our former colonies. He said enough in that hour to make me see that we had humanity, dreams, fear, love and hopes in common. He waited with me at the station platform of our destination until my grandma appeared and he could be sure that I was safe in a strange town.

His homeland, Irian Yaja, has been called "the last great wilderness of the Asian Pacific. It is a land of rain and cloud forests, swamps and majestic mountains up to 16.000 feet.
These pictures, which I found in a 1996 issue of National Geographic, were taken in the lands of the Korowai, an Irian tribe who also had a stone-age culture until very recently. They were ignored by outsiders until missionaries visited them in 1977. Their culture, like that of all other Irian tribes is under threat from the continuing onslaught of treasure hunters in this rich land with tropical hardwoods, gold, enormous gold, copper, silver and other valuable metal reserves in its mountains and oil in the lowlands.

Korowai Tree House Interior
© National Geographic

Tree houses, such as the illustration shows, were built not only "to see the birds and the mountains and to keep the sorcerers from climbing my stairs", but also to keep dry in these swampy forests and to give its habitants a degree of safety in a country of hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers where a proud warrior culture meant that tribal war was a regularly occurring event.
The roof and walls of the house are made from sago palm fronds. The indoor cooking fires are build on mud-covered lattices which hang over holes in the floor, so that they can be cut away and drop out of the tree, if a fire ever gets dangerous. Several families, as well as as their dogs and domestic pigs would share such a house. In peaceful times, people would also build houses on poles lower to the ground or thatched huts on hill and mountain tops were water is not the same problem in a tropical deluge.
The ingenuity and engineering skills to construct the tree houses, some as high as 150 feet up in tall trees, is quite miraculous, especially considering the fact that many of them were built with stone age tools. The effort that it must have took to carry food, water, firewood, pigs and dogs up into the trees boggles the mind.
The Irians are famous for their former headhunting, which was an aspect of warrior culture, much the same as it was in some North American Native tribes. In addition some tribes believed, that when they killed and ate a person, they became that person and absorbed their skills. As a vegetarian I'm obviously not very attracted to this ancient practice, but it seems strange that the greatest vilification of this belief has often come in the past from Christians, who believe that they become one with Christ by partaking in holy communion eating the bread and wine, which are his body and blood.
However, it would be a great shame if our appraisal of the whole rich heritage of so many tribes is continuously overshadowed by this, for us, gruesome practice and condemned as barbaric because of it. We ourselves have quite a few even more barbaric and gruesome practices.
I hope that the tree people of Irian Yaja will manage to preserve some of their rich culture, whilst facing Mammon and a foreign invasion of (often desperately poor) Indonesian migrants in search of a new life. A Irianese quoted in National Geographic said: "While we believe we are descended from the forest, most Indonesians believe that devils live in the forest and that the forest must be destroyed."

Pictures and Facts in this feature from an National Geographic article on Irian Jaya in Feb. 1996
by Thomas O'Neill with photographs by George Steinmetz