First Contact: The Selling of the Last Savage

Outside Magazine February 2005

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The Selling of the Last Savage (cont.)


	OLD AQUAINTANCES: Woolford, far right, has connections all over West Papua. With him are two Baliem Valley tribesman he's know since 1993. (Stephen Dupont)

NEARLY A YEAR AGO, I happened across Woolford's Web site, Papua-Adventures.com, while searching for outfitters in Indonesia. The site featured half a dozen tantalizing trips, but one in particular caught my eye: the First Contact expedition, billed as a "full-on exploratory" trek to find indigenous tribes, which Woolford defines as people who have not only never met or seen outsiders but are not even aware of their existence.

"According to anthropologists the best place... to make a ‘First Contact' is indeed Papua," Woolford writes on the site. (Like many people, Woolford uses the province's official name, Papua, interchangeably with "West Papua," a more specific name favored by academics.) "In fact there are unexplored areas which harbor truly ‘stone age' tribes."

This sounded incredible, so I started asking around and got different opinions on the likelihood of Woolford's claims.

"I don't believe there are any ‘uncontacted' people, nor that anyone has to worry about making a ‘first contact,' " Marshall Sahlins, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Chicago, told me. But Miriam Ross, a researcher at Survival International (SI), a London-based nonprofit that works on behalf of indigenous people, estimated that at least 70 tribes—mostly scattered throughout the Amazon—remain uncontacted, entirely cut off from the outside world. After checking with other anthropologists, I learned that, based on word-of-mouth reports and the occasional sighting by a local villager out hunting, it's believed there may be a few uncontacted tribes still roaming the foothills, inland swamps, and low-lying jungle along West Papua's north coast.

"But how do you know where they are?" I asked Woolford.

"I study missionary literature," he said. "I study maps. I have good contacts in all the regions."

Woolford, who made his first trip to West Papua in 1989, led his inaugural First Contact trek in November 2003 with two paying clients: a retired 66-year-old Dutch orthopedic surgeon named Herbert Schrouff, and Robert Ferdiny, a 49-year-old veterinarian from Austria. The men were a week into the jungle when eight tribesmen emerged and pointed arrows at their heads, before calming down and allowing them to take a few photos. Ten minutes later, the encounter ended when Woolford's camera startled the natives. "They saw the flash and started to shoot their arrows," says Woolford. He and his group quickly beat it.

Woolford's next trip was scheduled for September 2004, and I signed up. Ferdiny had already reserved a spot—his second trip—so he obviously had faith that Woolford wouldn't get us killed. As he described it, the lure of these trips was perfectly suited to his interests. "I like to see things that other people haven't—I guess that's a problem I have," Ferdiny told me later. "My wife tells me to leave the natives alone. Sometimes I wonder why I go."

I asked Woolford to arrange my surat jalan, a $12 special permit, with the West Papuan police—mandatory for all foreigners traveling outside West Papua's larger towns. He'd also assemble a team of nine Papuan porters and arrange a boat to pick us up near Nabire, a scruffy port town of 26,000 on West Papua's Cendrawasih Bay, where we would begin our journey. To "protect the natives" and "keep out the idiots," Woolford forbids clients from carrying GPS devices and insists they keep the exact location and geographical markers of their treks secret. "We don't try to corrupt [the natives]," he said.

So how does he justify going at all?

"People are always looking for the latest thing. I wanted to see these tribes, but I couldn't afford it on my own. So I figured, why not get the experience, take some other people, and make money, too?

"Besides," he joked, "I'm not giving 'em a Mini Maglite, and they're not gonna go out and get a plasma TV after we talk to 'em. Five minutes is all we do. My clients understand that."

Anthropologists I spoke with questioned these tactics. Intruding on uncontacted natives, they warned, is a recipe for disaster. And even though Woolford has experience in the field—he's made 26 trips into West Papua—he has no official scientific credentials, just a 1985 bachelor's degree in criminology, with a minor in sociology, from Springfield's Drury University.

"First-contact tribes in West Papua have typically been forced into marginal areas by more aggressive neighbors," warned William A. Foley, head of linguistics at Australia's University of Sydney, who has done field research in both West Papua and Papua New Guinea. "They don't have a positive view of people coming to see them, because in the past it has not led to positive results—i.e., people have been murdered, heads taken, eaten. So they shoot first and ask questions later. You can't just march in, because you could easily be shot at and somebody killed, and it can't be done for some bored Westerner who wants a thrill."

First contact, especially with the wider outside world, has rarely been a pleasant business. When the earliest European explorers headed for new lands, they often traveled with a throng of soldiers in tow, just in case. For more than 300 years, from the late 1400s through the early 1800s, first-contact encounters were usually synonymous with swords, guns, and violent conquest. From Columbus to Captain Cook, the clash of modern and primitive has almost always led to disaster for native people, in the form of warfare, colonization, disease, and economic exploitation.

More recently, even distinguished anthropologists have been criticized for wreaking havoc on primitive tribes. In his 2000 book Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, author Patrick Tierney alleged that anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, then a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and University of Michigan geneticist James Neel conducted unethical research in the sixties and seventies on the Yanomamö, an indigenous group residing along the Brazil-Venezuela border in the Amazon. Tierney argued that Chagnon intentionally incited battles between the Yanomamö and neighboring tribes to study the relationship between aggression and reproductive success. Many anthropologists and scientific organizations feel that Tierney's criticisms of Chagnon were inaccurate or overstated, but whether the charges are true or not, they address an important dilemma: Does making contact with native tribes inevitably do more harm than good?

"If people are really a first contact, they don't even have resistance to colds," says Foley. "It is a big risk to their population—you're talking about small groups, no more than 100 people. You get a case of flu going through and you could wipe them out."

According to Fiona Watson, who coordinates field campaigns for Survival International staffers, in the years following first contacts, tribal populations can plummet by as much as half "purely because of disease." SI estimates that, stemming from this and other causes, several hundred tribes have gone extinct in South America alone since the era of colonization began in the 1500s.

This is one reason anthropologists increasingly shun the notion of first contact in favor of a more subdued approach. These days, a lone anthropologist will typically live with a known group for several months, chronicling cultural and social customs. In West Papua in particular, solitary surveys are also necessitated by government regulations: Indonesian officials—wary of foreign journalists and scientists who might publicize the mounting separatist movement being pushed by the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or Free Papua Movement—have drastically limited permits for formal research in the province.

So how is Woolford able to operate? As an independent tour guide, he can move around the country more freely with clients who are on less-regulated tourist visas. Also, over the years he has befriended many of the officials in the regions he travels. But as much as anything, it's because West Papua is still a wild place.

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