While the Korowai are rumored to be a cannibalistic tribe, most of the clans are very open to outsiders.
The first known contact between the Korowai and caucasians occurred in 1974 when they were stumbled upon by scientists. Before then, it had been around five years since Papua was incorporated into Indonesia and around a decade since the last Citak raid, a tribe that previously practiced headhunting. It is unknown whether or not the tribe was exposed to outsiders prior to this date.
The Morning Star flag of West Papua
Liam Easley · May 28, 2020
Contact with the Laléo
In 1980, Reverend Johannes Veldhuizen, a Dutch missionary, founded Yaniruma, a village that, at the time of his being there, was just underneath the southwest corner of Korowai territory. He also had an airstrip built. When he was with the tribe, however, he quickly realized the harm in converting the Korowai. He saw their culture as rich, and he began to observe them instead.
According to a recorded account of Veldhuizen's first arrival, the Korowai saw him arrive in his canoe and thought he was a bad spirit. They even contemplated shooting him with arrows, but others warned that doing so would cause the end of the world.
Gerrit J. van Enk lived in Yaniruma from February 1987 to September 1990. He was with ZGK (Mission of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands) and was a part of the ministry of GGRI (The Reformed Churches of Indonesia). Lourens de Vries lived in Yaniruma from February 1984 to July 1985 and again from June 1990 to March 1991. He was a linguist for ZGK and had worked with the Korowai language since 1982. Van Enk and de Vries also chose to study the Korowai.
Van Enk, Veldhuizen, de Vries and other missionaries were known as laléo, the Korowai word for "spirit," "demon" or even "zombie."
"I had the impression that when I travelled deep into Korowai territory in the early 1980s," said de Vries in a written account of his work in Papua, "and sometimes met unsuspecting Korowai who were scared to death of seeing me, trembling and shaking, that they called me laléo because they thought I was a laléo in the literal sense: an after-death zombie or demon."
According to de Vries, Rupert Stasch, an anthropologist known for his work on the Korowai, noted that the first impression the Korowai had of caucasian outsiders was that they were "grave-pit demons."
Van Enk and de Vries wrote their book “The Korowai of Irian Jaya” which was published in 1997 by Oxford University Press. Thanks to the work of de Vries, the book has an in-depth Korowai-English dictionary as well as a pronunciation key and phonetics guide. Thanks to his translation, the two also included the first ever written versions of Korowai folklore. Along with this, the book contains summaries of Korowai culture, history, traditions and more.
Within the book is described a psychological insight into the tribe's most infamous characteristic: cannibalism. Click here for the next article in this study.
References:
De Vries, L. (2018). Word hunters: Field linguists on field work (H. Sarvasy & D. Forker, Ed.) John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Gros, M. (2015). The Korowai Tribe. Maptia. https://maptia.com/martingros/stories/the-korowai
Raffaele, P. (2006, September). Sleeping with cannibals. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/sleeping-with-cannibals-128958913/?page=6
Raffaele, P. (2008). Among the cannibals. Harper Collins Publishers.
Van Enk, G. J., & de Vries, L. (1997). The Korowai of Irian Jaya. Oxford University Press.