Tribal Quest: Back from Papua New Guinea

We’ve completed our Tribal Quest expedition to Papua New Guinea, where we had an incredible experience documenting the family histories of people in remote tribes whose stories are at risk of being lost forever.

We traveled to five different tribes in various regions of rural Papua New Guinea where we lived and worked with local families to preserve their unique histories for future generations.

This trip was the second expedition in our Tribal Quest project. Learn more about our global initiative at the Tribal Quest website.

Papua New Guinea is one of the most culturally diverse places on the planet. With 7 million people spread out over an area of 460,000 square kilometers, tribes live isolated from one another, separated by forests, rivers, and mountains.

Papua New Guinea has remained isolated from the rest of the world for a long time; many of the tribes were not contacted by outsiders until the 1970s. As a result, many of the varied local traditions are both ancient and completely unique to their area of origin. We had a rare opportunity to take an inside look at the traditions, legends, and family lore of the different clans we visited.

Papua New Guinea is home to over 800 distinct tribes, and each community speaks its own languages and has its own customs.

We were honored to have been welcomed so warmly into the communities we visited. We were treated as special guests wherever we went.

All the communities that we visited in Papua New Guinea value family history and were enthusiastic about documenting their heritage. Many have unique rules surrounding lineage as it pertains to marriage and land inheritance. For this reason, documenting family history is most valuable to them. Additionally, proving their heritage through accurate family trees is necessary for acquiring land rights from the Papua New Guinea government, and ensuring the ultimate financial survival of their communities.

Although it sometimes took a lot of hard work and careful genealogical mapping to make sense of the complicated family relationships between clan members, we managed to build their family trees and document their family histories as accurately as we could.

The communities we visited held family and heritage in very high esteem, as reflected in many of the interesting local inheritance and lineage rules we learned about. For example, children are often adopted rather seamlessly between families. The adopting parents simply take in the adopted child without going through the official legal channels, and the child becomes a full-fledged member of the family. The reasons for adoption vary but they stem from a desire to do a kindness to either the biological family, the adopting family, or the child himself. If the biological family has suffered a series of tragedies — like the loss of multiple children — then another family will take in their child to provide him or her “a new lineage” and a more safe and promising future. If a young couple cannot have children, one of their siblings may give the couple their own child so that they can also continue their family line.