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Father Frank Mihalic, a Jesuit missionary in New Guinea since 1948, views with sadness the degree to which education has alienated the young from their "one talks," as kinsmen are called. "They don't like history because history is embarrassing," he says. "They wince when I talk about the way their dad or their mom lived." Mihalic and other members of his order have intervened to prevent the government from burning spirit houses, used during tribal initiation rites. But other missionaries often tell the young people that their customs are primitive and barbaric. Relatives who have left villages for the city and return to show off their wealth and status also influence the young. Girls encounter educated women who work as clerks and are exempt from the backbreaking hauling done by their mothers' generation. How can these youngsters resist the allure of modern life? How can they make an informed judgment about which of the old ways should be respected and maintained?
John Maru, who works in Papua New Guinea's Ministry for Home Affairs and Youth recalls how during his schooling he came to see the endless gift exchanges and other traditions that marked his youth in the Sepik region as a waste of time and money and a drag on individual initiative. Now, however, he sees that such customs serve to seal bonds among families and act as a barrier to poverty and loneliness.
Sadly, tribal peoples often realize they are losing something of value too late to save it. In the village of Tai, in the Ivory Coast, three brothers from a prosperous family have tried to balance respect for the practices of their Guere tribe with careers in the modern economy. Yet their mother, an esteemed healer, has not been able to pass on her learning. One brother said he wanted to know about the plants she used but was afraid to ask because she would think he had foreseen her death -- the traditional time to pass on knowledge. Another brother would go into the forest with her but hesitated to ask what she was doing because he feared the power of her medicines; while the third, pursuing a successful engineering career, assumed that others would acquire her learning. Now with each passing year, it is more likely her knowledge will die with her.
Western Contempt
If the developed world is to help indigenous peoples preserve their heritage, it must first recognize that this wisdom has value. Western science is founded on the belief that knowledge inexorably progresses: the new and improved inevitably drive out the old and fallible. Western science also presumes to be objective and thus more rigorous than other systems of thought.
Guided by these conceits, scientists have often failed to notice traditional technologies even, for instance, when they are on display in the U.S. Several Andean artifacts made the rounds of American museums in the 1980s as examples of hammered gold. Then Heather Lechtman, an M.I.T. archaeologist interested in ancient technologies, examined the metal and discovered that it represented a far more sophisticated art. Lechtman's analysis revealed that the artifacts had been gilded with an incredibly thin layer of gold using a chemical technique that achieved the quality of modern electroplating. No one had previously suspected that these Indians had the know-how to create so subtle a technology.