The Murik Lakes Mixture
by Nancy Sullivan

The Sepik River meets the Bismark sea at a cluster of salt and freshwater lakes called the Murik Lakes. The combination is what really counts. Part riverine, part marine, part sago eaters, part seagoing, the Murik Lakes peoples are the confluence of two cultures, the watershed of two streams of thought. They call themselves 'hap-hap' because they're migrants from the islands mixed with migrants from the Sepik. Even their language is interstitial, part of the non-Austronesian language group otherwise found in the islands. But they have the resources and the customs of two places, and the combination is really more than the sum of its parts.

I came by speedboat from the Sepik, following the narrow brackish canals overhung by mangrove, sago and pandanus palms. Liana vines knit the canopy together in a loose, cool arcade through a waterway clotted with floating logs. The fungal, blackened water was banked by hundreds of nipa palms, whose fruit falls and rots untouched amidst the forests of sago palms. On both sides of the canals leading toward the lakes there were bamboo stalks bent and tied to mark the ground tambu, off limits to outsider because they lead to the sago gardens owned by the Murik people. The overgrowth all around was so thick and primordial-looking, it was hard to imagine that the Japanese once widened these barets to bring their U-boats up the Sepik during the War.

Finally we broke out onto a wide lake surrounded by magroves. At the far end we arrived at the small village of Mendam. The ground beneath our feet crunched as we walked the village. It was landfilled with broken clam and mussel shells on the swampy ground. The villagers had places boards across particularly boggy spots, but you could still feel the cracking beneath your weight, like stepping over the accumulated bones of years of human habitation on this spot. It was like walking across an open archaeological dig, and hearing all that fragile detritus crumble beneath your weight.

The lakes are an intertidal environment with lagoons and mangrove swamps, and sandbanks between fresh water and the sea. Dozens of types of freshwater and saltwater fish inhabit the waters. The Mendam women dig for five different clam types alone. Nobody starves. The men fish by drift nets (like coastal people) and spears (like Sepik people), the women with droplines (like at the coast), traps (like along the Sepik). They seem to have all the resources of both environments, plus enormous sago gardens.

A young man was roasting hundreds of shelled mussels on long spits, which they would take to sell at markets up the river. A young woman was threading small tambu shells on a cord, in strings of thirteen, which she would trade out to the Schouten Islands and Manam Island for ten toea kina per band of thirteen. These are still working currency in places like Rabaul, where they form an important part of the Tolai people's brideprice.

Elsewhere, a young woman proudly displays the enormous basket she's just woven. As in the islands and along the coast, these baskets are most important symbols during mortuary ceremonies here. But this basket, large enough to carry a whole family and all its belongings, is one for the Guinness Book of World Records. Once home, it's until I've developed my photo of her standing beside it, that I realize it's outlandishness-forcing me to look twice at what I first take to be a Lilliputian standing beside Gulliver's handbasket.

The highlight of our visit was the performance put on by the Mendam Players, a youth theatre group that has been polishing short, humorous skits based on local legends for several years now. They are a big draw at the Madang or the Goroka Show whenever they can make it. What a pleasure to visit a small remote village and find a band of witty performers ready to 'take the stage.'

Murik Lake people are unique among Sepik peoples, and among mainland people in PNG more generally, for having Chiefs. Leadership positions are more diffuse here than in the islands, but more institutionalized than elsewhere on the Sepik. Families are steered by sets of older and younger brothers, called nagam. These pairs may be ardent rivals as children but they grow into adults who observe more formal customs according to their birth position. Only elder brothers can become chiefs, and they inherit the rights to wear certain boar's tusks, called Suman insignia, which are the signs of a Sana (or Chief). In addition, they inherit special feast partnerships; pig-trading partnerships in the Schouten Islands; and the rights to fishing grounds, pigs, almond gardens and other resources. Elder brothers become the bestowers of these rights upon other members of their family. Like the executor of their ancestor's estate, or like generous older siblings anywhere, they distribute garden and fishing wealth amongst their generation. The younger brothers, called flying fox sons, must suffer the reduced prestige of people who always receive rather than give resources. An older brother cannot even accept food from his younger brother's wife, or it will make him sick.

Much like the islands-as in Manus, for example-it is cousins, rather then siblings, who have close, relaxed relationships with each other. The joking and flirting between sets of male and female cousins is called pilai kandare in Pidgin.

What sets the Murik Lake apart from anywhere else in PNG is the tradition of siblings competing for the 'elder brother' or Sana position. Remarkably, women as well as men vie for chieftainships, as these titles are never inherited automatically by the first-born male. A girl may lobby her father or uncle to inherit his Sana title, just as her brother does the same; and they may lobby through their mother's as well as their father's line. Part of the campaign involves staging a feast for the incumbent, and building a haus tambaran in the Sana's name of sort particular to the area's secret Brag religion. But what really complicates the accession to Sana are the marital customs of the Lakes. Here people commonly have live-in relationships during their youth that may, but more often do not, result in marriage. Children born to these first loves can compete with children of the later marriage when a father (or mother) decides to hand down a title. But even then, assuming the title requires a special education, much like the extensive initiations found all along the Sepik River.

Papua New Guineans remember what their first Prime Minister, Michael Somare, a Murik Lakes man, confessed when he came to power at Independence. 'I may be Prime Minister to you,' he told the country, 'but I'm still not fully a man in my own village.' Only after he returned to the Murik Lakes to complete the long series of initiation rites, becoming the Sana of his line, did he fully merit the title of 'Chief' which Papua New Guineans everywhere have given him. Since then, he has handed his Sana title to his eldest daughter.

More than the sum of its parts: From this little place where various waters and ideas come together, the Murik Lakes produced our first Prime Minister, and the country's only female Chiefs.

Viva la difference.