Fern Ridge (Safla Rama) Digest

Is it hard to see that this country needs to have its own National Language Institute to train Papua New Guineans as linguists and literacy workers to serve as custodians of our Indigenous languages and as a special task force responsible for shouldering the national burden of eradicating literacy? We no longer can afford to lose many more of our languages. We are struggling with the slow pace in eradicating literacy. Language and literacy are the two sides of the same coin that we have not invested enough resources to develop. The National Language Institute can serve other purposes as well. It can serve as the central point in facilitating research, development, symposiums, translations, and publication of such data that pertains to the status of language, the linguistic properties of our languages, and the evidence of the intellectual or epistemological foundations of our languages and cultures. The Institute can also serve as the center of cross fertilization of languages and invo

This week I am inspired to write about the origin of domesticated plants in New Guinea after learning of the significant discovery by archaeologists Prof. Glen Summerhays of the University of Otago and UPNG’s Dr. Mathew Leavesley, at Kosipe archaeological site. Congratulations to both of them as well as to Herman Mandui from the National Museum and Art Gallery for a spectacular job. The UPNG students who worked with them deserve praise for making the discovery of the century. The discovery is significant enough to warrant an extended story about the activities of our ancestors. It is our ancestors’ story as much as it is ours. There is more we need to discover about ourselves. I have always been a keen enthusiast for the peopling of the Island of New Guinea and the domestication of plants. The island of New Guinea is truly a world of its own basked in the mysteries of this world. Domesticated plants in New Guinea were introduced from the Southeast Asian train. The traditional food cr

 Yauwiga displays his medals of honor. Courtesy of  Bikmaus Journal published by IPNGS  The only famous Papua New Guinean fuzzy wuzzy angel with a blue eye happens to be Paul Yauwiga Wankunale from Kusaun village in the Kubalia area of the East Sepik Province. I grew up marveled at this tall, well built, giant of a man from my area; legendary in his lifetime for his bravery in the Second World War, fighting alongside the Allied forces on Guadalcanal, Buka, Rabaul, Madang, Morobe, and the Sepik. Warrant Officer Yauwiga was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, Bravery Award, and other such medals for his valiant war efforts. One such campaign is described in Lorna Fleetwood’s book, A Short History of Wewak: “On 27th March 1945 Yauwiga was with an Australian Infantry Brigade (A.I.B) party at Aravia. It was learned that an enemy party of about eighty Japanese was approaching their camp. While the A.I.B escaped with their codes and essential equipment Yauwiga took up a defensive

The inmates and the CIS officers at the Buimo prison outside of Lae welcomed me as an old friend in my visit to their space last week. I was there to facilitate a workshop on proposal writing and basic report writing. The workshop is a joint project involving the Bible Society of PNG, the Correction Institution Services and the National Literacy and Awareness Secretariat of the Department of Education. A year ago I facilitated a writer’s workshop. Out of the writer’s workshop the first anthology of prison writings is ready to be published. The book is a rare work as it brings together the writings of prisoners and warders who attended the course. In this year’s workshop I worked with them to come up with a tentative title for the book. The book is the first of its kind in the country. Seeing the participants from the last workshop again was reassuring in a lot of ways. Since the first workshop a lot has happened at the Buimo penitentiary. There was a mass break-out, the former comman

When you have the lights beamed right into your eyes the immediate thoughts are for you to run. The best you could do is move away from those bright lights. You are immediately looking into the darkness. You know there are people there. You cannot retrace your footsteps back. You are the center of focus. Right now you have to say something quick. That was the feeling I had last Saturday at the Waigani Arts Centre during the poetry recital evening. It was an evening to remember. The poetry recital and musical arrangement from the talents of our students under the watchful eye of our Sanguma , Tony Subam, made the evening memorable. Tony also gave an impromptu recital in the evening to my amazement. The students from MIAC showed the musical talents through their original compositions. The evening jazz set the scene. I had invited a couple of writers, especially poets living in Port Moresby to turn up for the poetry recital. It turned out that only Nora Vagi Brash and I were the ones re

   35th Independence Anniversary celebrations at UPNG 16 September 2010   The celebration of nationhood is one moment in our lives when we celebrate our Independence from our former colonizers. We think of Independence as a political event that changed the political landscape in Papua New Guinea. We also think of Independence as an act of orchestrated collective will to free ourselves from the shackles of colonialism. In every celebration we renew our strength and vision to be a progressive and free nation. Our sense of nationhood is refreshed, revitalized, and re-energized in such a way that whatever we do we resolve to abide by the Constitution that holds us together. The Constitution of the Independent State of Papua New Guinea is the single most powerful document in this nation. It is the source of law, state, politics, and the foundation upon which the visions of the nation was engraved in. Since Independence in 1975, one would think by now the Constitution should

Indigenous knowledge systems in PNG embodies our way of life, our belief systems, our cultural practices and the very social political foundations that weld our relationships to one another. To have a sense of what indigenous knowledge is we turn to a new PNG book: Reframing Indigenous Knowledge: Cultural Knowledge and Practices in Papua New Guinea. The book was released last month, even though it took five years to have it published after a conference organized by the Melanesian and Pacific Studies (MAPS) of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences , University of Papua New Guinea in 2004. The following people had their papers published in the book. Peter Baki, then Secretary of the Department of Education opened the conference with his challenge on promoting indigenous education in Papua New Guinea. Baki discusses the reform school curriculum, which considers indigenous knowledge systems, and ways of doing things in Papua New Guinean. He challenges tertiary institutions to use