First Contact: The Selling of the Last Savage

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Outside Magazine February 2005

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The Selling of the Last Savage
On a planet crowded with six billion people, isolated primitive cultures are getting pushed to the brink of extinction. Against this backdrop, a new form of adventure travel has raised an unsettling question: Would you pay to see tribes who have never laid eyes on an outsider?

By Michael Behar


	SHOCKING SURPRISE: a native of West Papua, Indonesia, September 2004 (Stephen Dupont)

I'M SOMEWHERE in a godforsaken rainforest on the north coast of West Papua, Indonesia, and I'm ready to get the hell out of here. I'm five days into a three-week jungle trek with 43-year-old Bali-based outfitter Kelly Woolford, and things have gotten both weird and dangerous. Now I'm scared and confused, and I've lost all faith in my guide.

"We'll meet 'em, share a little tobacco, chill for a bit, and then move on—like passing nomads," Woolford had said. But five minutes ago we encountered bow-and-arrow-wielding bushmen who were so angry that they charged our camp, lobbing three arrows high above our heads. To avoid puncture wounds, I ran straight for a nearby river and almost swam across it, until I remembered that it contained crocodiles that might have torn me to shreds.

Despite all the chaos, Woolford seems detached, remaining calm and puffing a cigarette as our porters grapple for their machetes and bows. I ask for reassurance that I'm not about to get skewered, but his answer isn't very soothing: "If they want to fill our asses full of arrows, there isn't much we can do about it." True enough. Plus, Woolford already told me that if these men wanted to kill us, they would have done so by now.

When I originally heard about First Contact, a trip offered by Woolford's trekking company, Papua Adventures, I couldn't believe he was really doing what he claimed to be doing. An easygoing American expat from Springfield, Missouri, who jokingly describes himself as a "hillbilly," Woolford marches into the jungle in search of uncontacted native tribes who have never seen outsiders—and who aren't supposed to mind tourists barging into their lives. I had trouble buying the idea that, in the 21st century, there were still nomadic hunter-gatherers out there using stone tools and rubbing sticks together to start a fire. But there are, Woolford assured me. From his home in Ubud, Bali, he explained the strategy behind his First Contact trips.

"There are a handful of places in West Papua that are untouched—still Stone Age tribes, still cannibals," he said. "It's just that a lot of people are too scared to go look for them."

Despite my initial reservations, when Woolford asked me to join his next trip to this easternmost province of Indonesia, which shares the island of New Guinea with the nation of Papua New Guinea, I decided that 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau might have had a point: Seeing a "noble savage" would rouse my spirit and reveal the primordial essence of my being. Of course, this outdated and arguably racist view ignores the fact that first contact has historically resulted in a deadly tsunami of disease, war, famine, slavery, and proselytization like those that engulfed nearly all of the world's tribal societies following the arrival of European explorers. But I signed on for the three-week trip anyway. Someone needed to check out Woolford's First Contact experience, which he was selling on the Web for $8,000.

Right now, though, I'm regretting my eyes-wide-open approach, wondering if I'll end up like Alejandro Labaca, the Spanish Catholic missionary who made first contact with a remote Peruvian tribe in the 1970s. Labaca was later discovered, as Joe Kane wrote in his 1995 book Savages, "pinned to the ground, spread-eagled, by seventeen palm-wood spears, which jutted like porcupine quills from his throat, chest, arms, and thighs. His corpse was punctured in eighty-nine places."

Whether these natives are really "savages" or this whole encounter is some sort of bizarre put-on, I don't know. But I do know this: I'm freaking out.

Michael Behar on NPR
Listen to an interview with the author of "The Selling of the Last Savage."

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