Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

A folklore narrative that has intriqued me and other scholars is the cassowary women narrative. It is a folktale with lessons for the tellers, listeners, and researchers. The forest is home to cassowaries. On a sunny day the cassowaries took off their cassowary skin to bathe in a river. They become human women after they took off their cassowary skins. They swam in the river the whole day. A male hunter stumbled on to the site. He hid nearby and watched in amazement. He decided to steal the smallest of the cassowary skin. He hid the cassowary skin and himself. When it was time to go, the women put their cassowary skin back on and became cassowaries again. They all left except for the youngest cassowary; she did not find her cassowary skin. She began to cry until the man came out of hiding. He asked the young woman, naked and alone in the forest, how she got there, and why she was naked. The woman told him in her grief that...

Trobriand Islanders are known for mouthing away in their language with ease as with their knowledge and skills of yam planting. There is an intricate connection between their language and the knowledge of yam planting and harvesting. Anyone outside of this Milne Bay society would never understand the deep attachment to land and culture their language plays in their lives. The languages of the indigenous communities have a direct link to the cultural explanations and understanding of the natural and social world. In the Waria River area of Morobe Province in Papua New Guinea the older generation of villagers complained that the younger generation was unwilling to learn the names and knowledge of medicinal plants used in the area. The younger generation complained that fewer older generations were left, but were unwilling to teach the younger generation of the knowledge of medicinal plants. This dilemma emerged as a result of voluntary shift ...

Interests in traditional pharmacopoeia and medicinal practices of peoples in Latin America, Asia, Indian communities in North Americas and the Pacific were generated, largely due to the interests by pharmaceutical companies in discovering new drugs, spread of life threatening diseases, and the environmental concerns over large scale forest exploitation. Another approach is taken by linguists, anthropologists, and ethnobotanists in their research on biolinguistic diversity and cultural knowledge systems. One of the most interesting research work carried out to transfer cultural knowledge from a Papua New Guinea language to a permanent form was the work done by late Ian Dr. Saem Majnep with the linguists Andrew Pawley. Their work was carried out among the Kalam people of Papua New Guinea. Dr. Majnep, from the Kalam society, had earlier worked with the anthropologist and ethnobiologist Ralph Bulmer. After Bulmer’s death Majnep collaborated late...

Samoan Turtles Our folktales are important cultural features of our societies. Folktales explain so much about ourselves and who we are. This week I share a portion of my research on the importance of folktales in Oceania. In Folk Tales and Fables of the Americas and the Pacific , Robert Ingpen and Barbra Hayes retell the Fijian story of the Giant Turtle. The story is told by Fijians to explain how people from Tonga came to live among them. A fisherman from Samoa named Lekabai saved from drowning in the rough sea had managed to climb a rock into the realm of the Sky King. The Sky King helped Lekabai return to earth on a turtle. Lekabai left with the mighty turtle back to Samoa with the instruction that he is not to open his eyes at anytime. Through the journey to Samoa Lekabai was teased by dolphins and sea birds for being foolish in closing his eyes. This was the instruction from the Sky King. A feast was staged to celebrate Leka...

About this time last year I returned from teaching and research assignments at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA. In the course I taught over there I included a component on native features films. The first film I showed was Tukana: Husait I Asua? Soon after my return I took a trip to Bougainville to run a workshop for teachers of Buin Secondary, Bana Secondary, and Tonu Secondary. It was also an opportunity for me to travel through the no-go zone area right into the Panguna mine site. What remains now is only a memory like a bad scar, yet the film has kept alive much of the glory days of Bougainville in my visual memory. The film was produced in early 1980s and released in 1983. Tukana ’s release came seven years after Papua New Guinea gained its Independence in 1975. Three years before the 10 th Anniversary celebration, the timely production of the film helped asked deep questions about the direction to which the country wa...

Late Dr. Regis Stella.PNG writer and scholar His father was killed during the Bougainville Crisis. After the Crisis his mother and sisters fled in-land and settled at a plateau on a rolling hill at Bana in the Nagovis area. They planted coacoa to regain their strengths and lives back. Last Christmas he returned to the village to put up his mother’s headstone. On leaving the village to Port Moresby, the late Regis Tove Stella told his sisters that it was the last time he would return home alive. Instead a few months later his body was flown back to his village to lay next to his mother. For two nights and two days the people from all over the area to mourn his passing. On the week he died I did a book review of his latest book: Unfolding Petals: Readings in Papua New Guinea Literature , which would have been launched a day more if he had remained alive. Dr. Regis Tove Stella was someone I shared part of my life with for the better...

Young Milky Pine ( Alstonia scholaris ) The importance of plant names in the local language is an example of a complex structure of   meaning. Different plants are used for specific purposes in our traditional societies. The same plant known by a common name can have sacred names to different people. Most often these sacred names are linked to myths, rituals, and spiritual powers. Many people know the general names for plants, but different species have a different name or an additional word to indicate colour, wild plants, domesticated plants, or cultivated.  Where plants have medicinal and ritual values they may have sacred names known only to those who claim ownership of the plant and its powers. The tanget ( Cordyline fruticosa ), for example, is generally known in Nagum Boiken language as hawa . This name includes the cultivated ones, which are red in color and appears in long and short round leaves. The green wild ones are...