Bauzi Erotic

The Bauzi are a people of the swamp forest, and that is not a figure of speech. Their country is the middle Mamberamo basin in Indonesian Papua, flat land that the river reworks every wet season: a lattice of black channels, oxbows and standing water under a canopy that closes over the water. Villages are small and strung along tributaries, and the whole population is counted in the low thousands. Sago sits at the center of the food economy. A palm is felled, the pith rasped out and washed, and the starch that settles will feed a household for weeks. Around that go fishing, hunting for wild pig and cassowary, small gardens, and the habit of moving: a family may spend long stretches at a forest camp near a good stand of sago and treat the village as the place it returns to rather than the place it stays.

They are identifiable first by language. Bauzi is Papuan, part of the small East Geelvink Bay family, unrelated to the Austronesian languages of the Papuan coasts and unrelated to Indonesian, which arrives with school, clinic and market. Missionary linguists worked on it for years and produced a dictionary and a translation of the New Testament, which for a language this size is a substantial event: it fixed a spelling, made literacy possible in the mother tongue, and came bundled with steel tools, cloth, medicine and an airstrip. Contact was late here. The Mamberamo gorge, the malaria and the mud kept colonial administration to the edges well into the twentieth century, and for many Bauzi the first sustained outside presence arrived by light aircraft rather than overland.

Most Bauzi today identify as Christian and church is a fixture of village life, though older understanding of spirits attached to particular places, and the caution that goes with it, has not simply been replaced. The larger pressure now comes from the map. Their forest lies inside one of the largest protected areas in the region, the Mamberamo Foja reserve, drawn by people who do not live in it, and the same basin has been eyed for logging, mining and a hydroelectric dam for decades. The Bauzi did not ask to be either a wilderness or a resource, and they are still working out, on their own terms, what to do about the traffic that keeps arriving.