Sawi Erotic

The Sawi are a river and swamp people of southern New Guinea. There are a few thousand of them, held together by a shared Papuan language and a network of villages in the waterlogged lowland forest of the island's south. Outside their own country they are known almost entirely through one book. In 1962 the Canadian missionary Don Richardson and his wife Carol settled among them, and his 1974 account, Peace Child, made the Sawi a fixture of mission reading around the world. That fame is a mixed inheritance, since much of what outsiders believe about them comes filtered through one man's story, and he wrote it with a purpose.

Their homeland lies in what is now Indonesia's South Papua province, a country of slow brown rivers, sago palm groves and forest that floods in the wet season. Travel has long been by dugout canoe. Sago starch is the daily staple. It is filled out with fish, wild pig and the fat grubs that grow inside felled sago trunks, a prized food at feasts. Houses traditionally stood on tall poles, and some were built high in the trees. That was a defensive habit from the years when villages raided each other as a matter of course. The Sawi language is Papuan rather than Austronesian, and it is usually grouped with the Awyu and Dumut languages of neighboring lowland peoples. Indonesian is the language of school and government.

Richardson described a society where headhunting and cannibalism were still practiced and where treachery carried real prestige: befriending a man before killing him was admired as the height of cunning. The counterweight was the tarop tim, the peace child. To end a feud, a father handed an infant son over to the enemy village, and everyone there who laid hands on the child accepted the peace. The peace held for as long as the child lived. Richardson built his preaching on that custom, and most Sawi became Christians in the decades that followed.

Read the book, but keep its angle in mind. Mission stories tend to make the time before conversion look darker so the time after looks brighter, and the Sawi did not stop being themselves when they joined a church. Today they live in villages linked by river traffic, schools and churches. They still process sago and fish the channels, and they face the same outside development and in-migration felt across Indonesian Papua.