Peaceful Societies

On Friday and Saturday, September 30 and October 1, a Tahitian group organized a contest to see who could prepare the best traditional feast celebrating elderly Tahitians, particularly older women. A group called the Fédération Te Ui Hotu Rau No Pare Nui and the town of Pirae, a part of Papeete, the capital city of Tahiti, got together to organize this year’s event, held in the gardens of the town hall.

An article in a major Tahitian news reporting service last week described preparations for the festival, which had not been held since 2008. The point of the contest was an ahima’a, a traditional cookout of Polynesian foods in large, underground pits. Each group entering the contest was required to have inter-generational teams of 18 people. An English-language page in a website devoted to Bora Bora, another large island in the Society Islands, provides numerous photos and an effective description of the construction and use of the ahima’a.

The point was to promote the transmission to younger people of the traditional knowledge of Tahitian elders, in this particular case the ways they prepare foods and share them with family members. The news report emphasized that other important traditional values cherished by their ancestors—sharing, teamwork and community life—were also important to convey to Tahitian families, along with the foods being prepared.

The stated objectives of the event were to develop in the neighborhoods of Pirae the knowledge and techniques of traditional cooking, to foster inter-generational exchanges through the transmission of knowledge between the elderly and young people, to value collective sharing, and to foster a strong sense of respect in the community.

A plate of traditional Tahitian food, called “Ma’a Tahiti” (Photo by Demonzeed on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The meals would be shared with the Matahiapo, elders in the community who are over 65. Plates of foods were expected to be given to around 400 people, including 300 Matahiapo and their escorts. The festival was organized to coincide with the International Day of Older Persons, declared by the United Nations to occur on October 1 annually.

Contrary to the beliefs in some other peaceful societies that older people deserved a lot of respect for their knowledge (see Biesele and Howell (1981), for instance), Levy (1973) indicated that that was normally not the case in traditional Tahitian society. While people talked about the ideal of treating parents or the pastor with respect, in reality there were no specific social or verbal forms for doing so. Instead, older persons were treated in response to the ways they acted as individuals.

Image of two older Tahitians at the municipal market in Papeete; the photographer only says about the lady’s unusual hat, “The intersection of Gallic flair and local flora?” (Photo on the travel website of Grumpy-c-bear.org, Creative Commons license)

The implication was that old people were more or less ignored and were provided only minimal support by their children. “When [old people] become nuisances, they are treated as nuisances,” Levy wrote (p.208). The way the elderly were treated was situational. Some people, reflecting on their deceased parents, would mention that they should have treated them better, but in fact, the anthropologist observed, they were treated the same as everyone else, depending on their behaviors, manners, and how useful they had been.

Levy concluded his analysis by writing that the elders could not count on any special respect because of their senior status. They were valued due to their specialized knowledge of special crafts, such as gardening, canoe building, magic practices or medicinal herbs, but knowledge of other traditional values and ways? People didn’t care.

In a more recent paper analyzing the relationships between masculinity and the struggles for independence in the Society Islands, Elliston (2004) pointed out that a culture of romanticizing the rural areas of Tahiti, in contrast to the urban communities, had developed in recent years. The more rural parts of the main island—Tahiti itself—and the smaller outer islands were the locations of true, traditional, Polynesian values, according to that narrative, in contrast to the hustle and bustle of the city, Papeete. Among the romantic values Tahitians proposed for themselves and their traditional rural society, she wrote, were hard work, friendliness, sharing, and the notion that children are “raised to respect their elders (p.622).” In essence, she was agreeing with Levy regarding attitudes toward the elderly.

The outsider has to wonder, however, if developing a narrative of respect for older people is gaining ground among urban Tahitians, and is that going to help reinvent a tradition of peacefulness? Perhaps such a new tradition, including respect for older persons, will differ somewhat from the conditions that Levy wrote about, but the development is still worth watching.

Numerous news stories at the end of last week focused on forgiveness, unusual in an autumn dominated, in the United States at least, by unforgiving attacks on political opponents. The occasion was the 10th anniversary, on Sunday October 2, of the Nickel Mines tragedy, when a deranged man murdered five Amish girls in a one-room schoolhouse in Pennsylvania.

Perhaps a dozen news stories last week replayed the details of the tragedy and the remarkable forgiveness that followed immediately afterwards. They provided some sketches of what has happened since 2006 to some of the people involved. The details about the events ten years ago are easy to find, particularly since the spontaneous forgiveness displayed by the Amish may have been the most newsworthy occurrence involving any of the peaceful societies over the past decade.

Monday October 2, 2006, would have been a wash day in the Lancaster County Amish community (Photo by JR P on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Early reports back in 2006 covered the events of that bright, beautiful October Monday morning in eastern Lancaster County. Charles Carl Roberts, IV, the driver of a milk truck who lived in the neighborhood, barricaded himself with an arsenal of guns inside the Nickel Mines school. He ordered the adults and the boys to leave and began shooting the girls. As the police arrived outside the schoolhouse, he shot the ten girls, five of whom either died instantly or later in the day, and five survived. Then he killed himself. The news reports speculated about how the Amish were going to handle the tragedy.

The story and the attention of the media quickly changed into amazement at the fact that the Amish community, including the families of the murdered girls, started visiting the family of the killer, Mr. Roberts. They expressed their sorrow at the tragedy and their forgiveness for what their husband and son had just done. One Amish man, visiting the home of the killer, hugged the man’s father for quite a while as a way of expressing his sorrow and his condolences.

The international media wrote about 2,400 news reports in the week that followed the tragedy, focusing on the drama of Amish people forgiving a killer—not after meeting and discussing what they should do, but spontaneously. The Amish themselves were puzzled at the international attention they were getting because of the way they had instantly forgiven Roberts. As Donald Kraybill, famed expert on the society, said, “a number of Amish people told me that it’s the normal Christian thing to do, just standard forgiveness and ‘everybody does it.’” Of course, readers and viewers around the world were aware of the value of forgiveness and its importance in fostering peaceful relationships, but what was so rare was to witness it given in such a spontaneous fashion and after such a horrific event. Millions of people were fascinated.

An Amish cemetery (Photo by Cab02 on Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

At the funeral for Roberts five days after the tragedy, about half the mourners were Amish. They greeted the family of Mr. Roberts as fellow sufferers—they had just come from the cemetery where they had buried their own girls a few days before. The father of one of the murdered girls was quoted as saying, “Can you imagine what it would feel like to be the father of a killer? [The] pain would be 10 times worse than our pain.”

Donald Kraybill, Steven Nolt, and David Weaver-Zercher, each a prominent Amish expert, soon published a book about the Amish practice of forgiveness and the lessons of the Nickel Mines tragedy. Titled Amish Grace: How Forgiveness Transcended Tragedy, it sold widely. As reviews of the new book pointed out, the Amish realized that the family members of Charles Roberts were also victims of his crime. The Amish established a fund at a local bank to assist the Roberts family. An Amish woman said on a national television show, “We have to forgive him in order for God to forgive us.”

As the Amish explained to the inquisitive media, Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, told his listeners in what is now referred to as the Lord’s Prayer to forgive others if they expect their Lord to forgive them. Furthermore, at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus returned to the same message of forgiveness, re-emphasizing it, perhaps signaling that it may have been one of his most important teachings—if you expect God to forgive you, you have to forgive others (Matthew 6:14-15).

The book Amish Grace makes it quite clear that the Amish take this teaching by Jesus quite literally, as they do his other lessons about acting peacefully, turning the other cheek, and not resisting aggression or authority structures. The authors quoted the father of one of the dead girls: “forgiveness means giving up your right to revenge (p.116).”

The events of early October 2006 and the scholarly book that followed it inspired at least one play, a televised movie, academic conferences, and a vast amount of additional literature. Many individuals remain fascinated by the phenomenon of people actually practicing their beliefs, rather than just praising ideals but minimizing them as impractical in today’s violent world.

School children playing next to a Lancaster County schoolhouse — Amish school children playing next to a Lancaster County schoolhouse (Photo by Mark Goebel on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Of all the news stories that were published last week about the horrors inflicted on Amish children in their school and the aftermath, perhaps the best was a detailed report in the Washington Post this past Saturday morning. The Post noted how, on the day of the killer’s funeral, about 30 Amish men and women, some of whom were parents of the victims, stood at the cemetery and formed a wall with their bodies to block the views of the media. And four weeks afterwards, with the cameras of the world finally gone, the families of the girls invited the Roberts family to a meetup in a local fire hall. They told them that they were all grieving for their losses.

The healing and forgiving process has continued to this day. Terri Roberts, mother of Charles, has continued to be personally involved with the life of 16-year old Rosanna King, the youngest girl in the Nickel Mines school ten years ago. While she survived the bullet, she is nearly brain dead now and still lives in a wheelchair. The Post describes how Terri has gone to the King home almost every Thursday evening to help care for and interact with Rosanna, forming a strong personal bond with the child. The kind of outreaching goodness exemplified by the Amish 10 years ago has clearly been communicated to the neighbor whose son committed the awful shooting. And recently, with Terri herself now severely ill, the local Amish are helping her out in her home, repaying the visits.

Lancaster County Amish (Photo by Ted Van Pelt on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The story of Amish forgiveness is not just an event that happened 10 years ago and now just reverberates among the ageing participants. The Amish keep perpetuating their message about the value of forgiveness. Two months ago, local news sources in Lancaster County reported on a unique meeting that had just been held in the county between one of the Amish bishops, some other leaders in their community, and some representatives of northeastern U.S. Native American tribes.

The point of the meeting was for the Amish leaders to apologize for the way their ancestors had treated the Native Americans in the early history of the U.S. and to ask for their forgiveness. The Amish had never fought with the Indians but they had taken their land and they asked the descendants of the Native Americans present at the event to forgive them for that injustice.

Among the various Amish and Native American leaders who spoke at the ceremony and were quoted by the news report, the words of Shelia Hansen, a Shawnee Indian from Virginia who formally accepted the bishop’s apology, were especially noteworthy. “You raised the bar for this country, for all humanity, for forgiveness,” she said, referring to Nickel Mines. “As we came in here, the wind blew really hard, and it came through the trees,” she said. “And I believe that the spirits of our old ones came by the wind, and they spoke, and this is a good day.”

Perhaps the spirits of Ms. Hansen will visit others and promote a forgiveness that will lead to good days for the rest of humanity.

Egyptian Nubians are becoming more assertive since the government is reneging on its promise that they have a right to return to lands along the Nile in southern Egypt. Current developments were described by a news report in The Economist on September 17.

Rooftops of some Nubian resettlement homes in Aswan (Photo by bri on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The reporter provided a brief summary of Nubian history that included the relocation of ancient monuments to save them from being inundated by Lake Nasser, formed when the Aswan High Dam was constructed across the Nile in southern Egypt in the 1960s. About 50,000 Nubians were resettled from their villages along the river into inadequate houses in Kom Ombo, about 50 km. north of the city of Aswan. That population has swelled to nearly 90,000. The Nubian people have also settled into crumbling houses in Aswan itself as well as the cities of northern Egypt, especially Cairo and Alexandria.

While they complain about the quality of their homes, their primary concern is that their culture is based on proximity to the Nile, and Kom Ombo is about 25 km. from the river. But their newly-found sense of activism, energized by the revolution of 2011, seemed to finally be leading to a reasonable solution when the new constitution, passed in 2014, officially recognized their right to a Nubian homeland. It outlawed discrimination and, critically, in article 236 it established the Nubian right of return to lands along the Nile—or Lake Nasser—in southern Egypt.

A collection of stories about Old Nubia by Haggag Oddoul, prominent Nubian author and leader

But Nubian leaders are becoming convinced that the government is stalling on its commitments. Haggag Oddoul, the prominent Nubian Egyptian writer and participant in the drafting of the constitution, has become disillusioned. “Egypt’s corrupt institutions are working on preventing Nubians from returning so they can take over the Nubian land and use it [for] their benefit,” he said.

A draft law of the proposed resettlement has “disappeared,” according to Muhammad Azmy, the head of a pressure group called the Public Nubian Union. Much worse, President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi issued a decree that the parliament approved in January designating a military zone in southern Egypt which excludes many areas that the Nubians were considering as possible places to which they might resettle.

Nubians help preserve their culture by presenting dance performances (Photo by Tony Mendez on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Some Nubians fear that the government is spearheading an effort to eliminate Nubian culture as part of its attempt to foster a single Arab identity. Many of the Nubian people who were raised in Alexandria and Cairo have forgotten their native language and their heritage. Mr. Oddoul summed up the fears of their leadership: “If we don’t return soon to our home, we will only be Nubians by colour,” he said, referring to their darker skin. In response to these concerns, younger Nubians, using the Internet, are trying to reinvigorate their culture with traditional art and music performances.

According to The Economist, the government may fear that Nubians might ultimately want to declare their independence from Egypt. While that seems farfetched to many, there is little doubt that the actions of the government are fostering resentment. The journalist wrote that the Nubians have started protesting—and organizing lawsuits—to fight the president’s decree. The older generation of Nubians have been more accommodating, more patriotic, and more willing to admit that the Aswan dam could benefit all of Egypt. Younger Nubians are not convinced.

When the Mbuti trespass in the forests of the world famous Virunga National Park to forage or to hunt, park guards frequently treat them brutally. The Inter Press Service reported recently on the harsh treatment and the discrimination that the indigenous people of the northeastern D.R. Congo receive from the national park service. The Mbuti fear that they will lose their traditional hunting and gathering skills if they can’t continue to use the forest resources.

The Bukima Patrol Post camp for tourists, with Mt. Mikeno looming behind it, in Virunga National Park about 20 km. north of Goma (Photo by Cai Tjeenk Willink in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

The IPS covered the story in two parts, one on September 14 and the second on September 15. The focus of the description is the Virunga National Park, which stretches north from Goma, the capital of North Kivu Province, in a patchwork of lands for about 300 kilometers. It includes the Virunga Volcanoes, the mountainous habitat of many mountain gorillas, and, farther north, the Ruwenzori Mountains. The IPS journalist interviewed Congolese park officials and Mbuti living in the small hamlet of Mudja, located at the south end of the park about 20 kilometers north of Goma.

The Virunga National Park, the oldest in Africa, was created in 1925 as Albert National Park by Belgian King Albert and it has had a policy of excluding Africans right from the beginning. With over 7,000 square km. to protect from poaching, the park agency has become more determined and forceful in the past few years in excluding all people other than tourists. The park is managed cooperatively by the Congo’s National Park Authority (the ICCN) and a group called the Virunga Foundation, funded by the EU. About a quarter of the world’s mountain gorillas live in the park—and serve as magnets for many international tourists.

An Mbuti woman holding the non-timber forest products she has gathered, some mushrooms (Photo by Terese Hart on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A man in Mudja showed the journalist an injury he got on his arm from a park guard. Another man, Giovanni Sisiri, chimed in with his account: “Just the day before yesterday, they shot at me when I was looking for honey and firewood. I abandoned everything, took my tools, and ran.” The fact that the Mbuti were the original inhabitants of the forests around the volcanoes and mountains is irrelevant. They have continued to defy Congolese law by going into the park to collect wood, gather non-timber forest products, and hunt small animals for food. However, those activities have become more dangerous in the past couple years.

In contrast to a news report only a few weeks ago about the cooperative spirit that is developing between park managers at the Itombwe Mountains several hundred miles south of Goma and the Mbuti living around that newest protected area, a spirit of active conflict has developed in the Virunga region. Patrick Kipalu, the manager for the DRC of the Forest People’s Program, attributed the hostility to the approach promoted by the Belgians during the colonial period—remove all the people from the forests in order to protect the plants and animals. The Belgians trained the Congolese, who have continued to manage using those same strategies, he argued.

Norbert Mushenzi, the deputy director of the park, defended his employees from charges of repressive behavior toward the local people. His rangers are “undertaking legitimate defense,” he said. He maintained that the park is trying to help the Mbuti find alternatives to going into the forest—such as farming in the surrounding fields. “The problem is not land. It’s that people want to concentrate in the park and we don’t know why,” he said.

Mbuti mother and her baby (Photo by Marc Louwes on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Mr. Mushenzi, however, had little good to say about the Mbuti themselves. They have an “intellectual deficiency,” he argued, and one way for them to get along more effectively with the park authorities would be for them to “sell their cultural products and dances to tourists.” The IPS journalist pointed out that Mr. Mushenzi’s arrogant attitude is shared by many of the Bantu Congolese, who accept the notion that the Mbuti, with their persistent preference for living in forests, are decidedly inferior human beings. If only they would settle into an agricultural lifestyle they would be more acceptable, many Congolese seem to believe.

But Mr. Kipalu, the official with the Forest People’s Program, believes that the living conditions of the Mbuti are much worse now than they were when they were living in the forest. “Being landless and living on the lands of other people means that they end up being treated almost as slaves,” he told the IPS.

Doufina Tabu, the president of the Association of Volunteers of Congo (ASVOCO), a group that tries to help the Mbuti, agrees and disagrees with Mr. Kipalu. Mr. Tabu told the reporter of an Mbuti man who was arrested because he persisted in trying to use his field, which he was tricked out of. He was accused of illegally occupying his land, for which he did not have a title even though it is his own property. “He was arrested one year ago and we are still trying to get him out,” Mr. Tabu said.

Mbuti bow and arrow hunter (Photo by Marc Louwes on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Mr. Sisiri, the Mbuti man from Mudja who was attacked by the park rangers, reacted to the whole discussion by taking out his bow and arrow and pointing at the nearby forest. “We will have to start a rebellion one day!” he said, and he laughed. “We first want peace. But if the provincial and central governments do not find a solution for us, we will have to fight for it.”

His comments reflect the traditional peacefulness of the Mbuti, but nonetheless the indigenous people living around the Virunga National Park are being repressed as never before. Mr. Tabu may advocate for Mbuti rights but in his opinion the only solution for them is integrating with the larger society. “There are things in their culture that we must change. They can’t continue to stay in the forest like animals,” he said. Mr. Kipalu expressed a longer term, wait and see, attitude.

The press in Namibia reported last week that the Nyae Nyae Conservancy had just held its annual meeting, with representatives from all 37 Ju/’hoansi villages attending. The major order of business was distributing a new solar-powered Lifeline radio to each village.

“The Freeplay Lifeline is the world’s most popular humanitarian radio. It has brought untold benefits and hope to millions of listeners in the developing world,” claims the website of the Lifeline radio.

The website for the Lifeline radio indicates that it is designed for remote locations in developing countries. Provided with a 4-inch speaker, the radio is designed for groups of villagers to sit together and listen to broadcasts from remote stations. A detachable solar panel is included which allows it to be placed in the sun with the radio located in the shade or even indoors. A battery encourages people to use it at night, and a winding crank is included on the back for use on cloudy days. The manufacturer clearly was thinking of severe Kalahari Desert conditions: “The internal mechanisms are free from grease to ensure the radio operates even in very dusty and arid environments.”

Since villages in the conservancy lack electricity, the alternative sources of power for the radios are essential. The radios pick up AM, FM, and short wave broadcasts. Another feature, according to the news story, is that they have USB ports that will allow the villagers to charge their phones. That feature will assist in communications among the villages, as well as help the Ju/’hoansi report illegal fencing and grazing in the conservancy.

The radios, funded by the European Union with their EU Climate Change Adaptation Grant program, are intended to help the San people adapt as well as possible to the effects of changing climate conditions and to diversify their livelihoods as a result. The Nyae Nyae Conservancy hopes the villagers will listen to broadcasts about strategies for improving conservation agriculture, fire management, food security, and other similar information.

Ju/’hoansi starting a fire for tourists at the “Little Hunter’s Museum” of the Ju/’hoansi San in //Xa/oba, the Nyae Nyae Conservancy of Namibia (Photo by Gil Eilam on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The tourist villages in the Conservancy, where Ju/’hoansi can be engaged to do traditional things such as start fires in the old way, will have to decide whether to allow their visitors to see and photograph people listening to broadcasts on their new, solar-powered radios. In any case, Lara Diez from the Nyae Nyae Development Foundation of Namibia, which has led the EU Climate Change Adaptation Project, told the press, “The community is very happy with the radios, especially as there is a local NBC radio station, Ka Radio, broadcasting in their local language.”

Ms. Diez added that those broadcasts in the Ju/’hoan language were important for ensuring that no one gets the feeling of being left out. The Annual General Meeting also included annual reports, a discussion of finances, and an agreement on the budget for the coming year. People attending the meeting discussed the achievements of the Conservancy over the previous year and what actions need attention from management personnel in the near future.

Last week a Canadian research team announced that they had found a sunken ship, the Terror, from the lost Franklin Expedition and that the knowledge of an Inuit man had prompted the discovery. Crew members of the research vessel Martin Bergmann found the wreck at the bottom of Terror Bay, located at the southwestern corner of King William Island fairly near the route through Victoria Strait where the Franklin Expedition ships had become frozen into the ice nearly 170 years ago.

Coincidentally, the first large modern cruise liner to sail through the Northwest Passage, the Crystal Serenity, described in news stories a few weeks ago, had sailed in open water through that same strait only four days before the discovery of the Terror. The blogs of the tourists aboard the Crystal Serenity had celebrated their occasional sightings of polar bears and views of distant ice.

The HMS Terror stranded on the ice (an engraving after a drawing by Captain George Back in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

In 1845, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, under the command of Sir John Franklin, left England, commissioned to map the fabled Northwest Passage across northern Canada linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The expedition disappeared into the icy Arctic vastness with all officers and crew members presumed lost. Two years ago the Erebus was discovered. News stories in September 2014 about that discovery highlighted the prominence of the Inuit oral memory of two lost ships from over 165 years ago. The news last week renewed a persistent worldwide interest in the expedition.

According to an article in the New York Times on September 13, the Terror had a strong connection with American history—it was one of the British ships involved with the attack on Fort McHenry in the Baltimore Harbor during the War of 1812, the battle which prompted Francis Scott Key to write what has become the U.S. national anthem, the “Star Spangled Banner.” The ship was used subsequently for various polar expeditions until it joined the Erebus in the ill-fated attempt to sail through the Northwest Passage.

The Times article made it clear that the input of an Inuit man, Sammy Kogvik, provided the key to finding the Terror. The Times quoted the chief executive of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, John Geiger, on the subject of Inuit knowledge of their environment: “The Inuits’ oral traditional knowledge around Franklin has been the only authoritative account,” he said, comparing their stories with the possibilities offered by modern research methods. He added, “Right from the early days, the Inuit had provided extraordinary insight, and it continues to this day.”

An Inuit hunter in a traditional kayak and carrying a harpoon (Photo by Ville Miettinen on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A longer account in The Guardian gave more information about the role of Mr. Kogvik. A crew member on the Martin Bergmann—he had joined it just the day before—Kogvik was chatting on the bridge with Adrian Schimnowski, Operations Director of the Arctic Research Foundation, the owner of the research ship. He told the expedition leader an odd story. He and a hunting friend had left Gjoa Haven, located on King William Island, one day about seven years ago on snowmobiles—not on their traditional kayaks—to go fishing together.

In the coincidentally-named Terror Bay, about 75 miles west of their homes, they saw a tall piece of wood sticking up out of the ice—a remarkable occurrence in a landscape that has no trees. It looked like the mast of a ship. He said he stopped to take some pictures of himself hugging the mysterious wooden object, but when he got home he discovered that he had lost the camera from his pocket. He decided to keep the sighting secret—the loss of the camera may have been an omen from the evil spirits that some Inuit believe have haunted King William Island ever since the Franklin Expedition tragedy. The National Geographic report on the finding indicated that when he went back later with another camera, the mast was no longer there.

Schimnowski listened to Kogvik’s account and, since Inuit observations and stories have been instrumental in so many Arctic discoveries, such as the finding of the Erebus two years ago, he decided to follow up and divert the Bergmann into the un-charted waters of Terror Bay. The Bergmann launched a small boat to do an initial search and after finding nothing for two and a half hours, the ship raised its anchor and started to leave the bay in order to resume its original course.

The Martin Bergmann in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, August 2015 (Photo by Ocean Networks Canada on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

As it began heading out of the bay, the sonar on the ship suddenly revealed it was sailing directly above a sunken sailing vessel: the Terror. If the route of the Martin Bergmann had been more than 600 feet off in either direction, it would have failed to find the sunken boat. Mr. Schimnowski, interviewed by the New York Times from Gjoa Haven, said, “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack, and this is a very, very big haystack.”

The 10-member crew of the Bergmann of course were quite excited. They stopped and spent over a week quietly surveying the sunken shipwreck and sending remotely controlled cameras to photograph and film it from all angles, before publicly announcing their discovery last week. The 20-foot long bowsprit still points out from the bow, the ship’s bell is still there, a cannon has been spotted, the ship’s helm is visible, and even the exhaust pipe from a steam engine, installed in the vessel to help power it through sea ice, was exactly where the old drawings had indicated it would be.

Mr. Schimnowski said that the vessel “looks like it was buttoned down tight for winter and it sank. Everything was shut. Even the windows are still intact. If you could lift this boat out of the water, and pump the water out, it would probably float.”

A group picture of the crew of the Bergmann taken in August 2015 (Photo by Ocean Networks Canada on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The crew of the Bergmann worked to record everything they possibly could. Mr. Schimnowski told The Guardian how they had sent their cameras into the mess hall of the ship, found their away into some cabins, found the room on the ship where food was stored, and they even “spotted two wine bottles, tables and empty shelving. Found a desk with open drawers with something in the back corner of the drawer.”

Many of the news stories focused on the new information that the discovery provides about what exactly happened to the Franklin Expedition members in the late 1840s. What did they try to do to save themselves? Hints about all that are available, but at least part of the importance of the discovery is, once again, showing the Inuit knowledge of the land.

In a release, Mr. Kogvik indicated that he was delighted to see the ship again. “I am very excited, we found the boat I touched seven-eight years ago and then it vanished again. Gjoa Haven will be excited too because an Inuit found the boat so many years ago.” The news report from National Geographic indicated that the Inuit in Mr. Kogvik’s community were indeed celebrating the fact that one of their own had played such an important role in making a historic discovery.

A young Lepcha woman who has professional university degrees and works as a librarian in Gangtok, northern India, is pioneering the revival of traditional women’s clothing. Tshering Lhamu Lepcha, who goes by the alias Tshela, experiments with fashion designing, particularly clothing that revives the styles worn traditionally by Lepcha women. The regional Indian publication The Northeast Today published a profile of Ms. Lepcha last week.

A Lepcha woman in this old woodcut shown carrying water gives an impression of rather drab traditional dress (From Joseph Hooker, *Himalayan Journals*. London, 1854, vol. 1, p.156; in the public domain)

In November 2012, Ms. Lepcha presented her first designs of modified traditional clothing at an exhibit called the Himalayan Ethnic Lepcha Fashion Event (HELFE) in Gangtok. The 29-year old emphasized to the interviewer that “Lepcha costumes need not be just regularly traditional with monotonous designs and fabrics but [they] can also be interpreted with modern or contemporary aesthetics yet with the traditional essence and ethos.” Her designs, she said, made a favorable impression on viewers plus the 20 or so other designers present.

The reactions she received at the HELFE event prompted her to persist in her creativity and she exhibited at another fashion show in the city of Kolkata in 2013. She hired a tailor and opened a tiny shop that year, and launched her business on a Facebook page, which prompted more orders. Soon she was getting orders for festivals, school events, weddings, and for formal office wear.

Ms. Lepcha has no formal training in fashion design—she has a master’s degree in library science—but that doesn’t lessen her passion for her art, her urge to experiment, and her determination to build a business. The growth of her business forced her to move out of her first space into a larger boutique called “Tshella’s Traditional One Stop” in Gangtok, the capital of the state of Sikkim. She has a support staff of two tailors, two craftsmen who do embroidery work, and a manager. She continues her librarian profession and does her fashion work in her spare time.

A Lepcha man and woman shown in an 1872 engraving (Image from Dalton’s *Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal* in Wikimedia, in the Public Domain)

She makes it clear that her mission is to foster “professionally designed Himalayan ethnic attires.” Tshela’s Traditional One Stop is designed to promote pride in ethnic clothing—and to improve on it. She acknowledges that the Lepcha ethnic dress is perceived as having been quite limited in fabric choices and styles. She wants her creations to not only be worn on special occasions, but as regular, daily clothing. “This would also give the wearer a sense of pride and belonging to her/his heritage,” she said.

Ms. Lepcha spends a lot of time shopping for high quality fabrics, researching trends in the clothing markets, and searching for ideas for her growing business. She told the journalist interviewing her that she has no particular approach for gaining inspiration for her new designs. She gets ideas wherever she goes around Sikkim.

In addition to her regular profession as a librarian, she also spends some time as a social worker—her second master’s degree was in sociology. She regularly pursues a variety of social initiatives and participates in events organized by the Sikkim Lepcha Association. But to judge by the article last week, one of her foremost passions is her evening work managing and developing her fashion design business.

The contemporary dress of many Lepcha women has little relationship to their traditional designs, though the nature of their flowing skirts are evident in this image (Photo by the International Institute for Environment and Development on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

It remains a challenge for her. She tells the journalist that ethnic dress is rarely seen in Gangtok except at religious occasions, cultural events, or weddings. This is not a recent phenomenon, however. Halfdan Siiger, a Danish scholar who did ethnographic field work among the Lepcha over 50 years ago, wrote in 1967 that their fondness for their traditional clothing was fading at that time.

Siiger wrote (1967, p.71) that “owing to the increasing influence of the bazaars, where piece goods are sold and entire garments are made on sewing machines, the former types of clothes, as we know them from … about a century ago, are more and more falling into disuse, and nowadays few Lepcha women know how to make the clothes of the members of the family, as they used to do.”

The colorful blouse and skirt of the fourth woman from the left in the previous picture is shown in more detail in this close-up portrait of her (Photo by the International Institute for Environment and Development on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

On the other hand, a much more recent book on Lepcha culture by Sharma (2013) provides a somewhat different perspective on their clothing. She writes that the “traditional dress of the Lepchas is woven in exquisite colour combinations (2013, p.117).” Sharma goes on to briefly describe the ankle-length traditional flowing woman’s dress, called a dumvum, or dumdyam. It finally becomes clear why Tshering Lepcha called her first creation at that HELFE event in November 2012 “dhumdhem,” the traditional Lepcha female article of clothing.

Sharma says that today some younger Lepcha women have taken to wearing trousers and, less commonly, the shalwaar kameez, a generic term for various types and styles of popular Indian clothing. Sharma provides 91 color photos at the beginning of her book, some of which give good impressions of sometimes colorful—and sometimes drab—clothing worn by the Lepchas of Sikkim. Tshering Lepcha has an interesting tradition to enrich.

Early last week some people in Ohio organized a wild weekend party in a farm field that was attended by about 1,000 Amish youngsters, of whom 73 were arrested for underage drinking. One news story reported that over 40 police officers converged on the field in Hardy Township, west of Millersburg in Holmes County, Ohio, on Saturday the 3rd in response to reports coming into the county sheriff’s office.

Bucolic Ohio Amish country (Photo by Mike Sharp in Wikimedia, Creative Commons license)

Police officials said that of the 73 people arrested, 35 were juveniles. Some were charged with resisting arrest and a few were taken to a hospital for alcohol-related problems. The Millersburg police assisted deputies from Holmes and numerous surrounding counties in rounding up the Amish people and transporting them to the county jail.

According to another news report, Holmes county Sheriff Tim Zimmerly said that it was a record-setting bust. A video accompanying that news report, filmed a couple days after the party, showed lots of trash still littering the out-of-the-way field owned by one Clarence White. Mr. White said that he has been renting his field to the Amish kids for parties as part of their well-known “rumspringa” activities for 12 years.

Years ago, he said, the Amish young people ordained him as “the party pope.” He charges them $20 per person, which brought in $20,000 for the 1,000 who attended. Expenses came to $15,000 for bands, tents, and portable toilets for the event, he told the reporter. He said he is opposed to underage drinking, and that plenty of people who attended were over 21, the minimum legal age for consuming alcohol in Ohio. But he was candid: “There was a lot of alcohol being consumed here.”

In rural Holmes County, Ohio, some Amish kids are still too young to party with the teenagers (Photo by Alvin Trusty in Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Mr. White said that there was a sign posted warning attendees that the county sheriff would be monitoring the party for illegal drugs and underage drinking. He said he was irritated that some of the kids who were arrested had not touched a drop. In fact, he concluded, “The parents pull in and drop their kids off, because they know they’re going to be safe.”

A different news report indicated that the organizers of the party had rented the property from Mr. White and had charged $25 per person. Mr. White had provided security for the event, but he said the organizers did not ask him to verify the ages of people attending. He insisted that he was providing a service by keeping the Amish kids off the roads at the party on his farm. “It gives them a safe place. They’re not out in the road, and everybody knows they’re going to party,” he said. “They like to drink their beer and everything, so they’re going to party.”

Others disagree. Capt. Doug Hunter in the county sheriff’s office said he is working with the leaders of the Amish settlement to try and prevent their young people from engaging in the rumspringa partying, “but it’s been kind of a heritage with the Amish to go out and do this kind of thing.”

Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish, by Tom Shachtman — *Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amish*, by Tom Shachtman

He was right of course. The practice of allowing their youth to run wild in their later teenage years—rumspringa—has gotten a lot of press, and many books on the Amish touch on the tradition. Two published about 10 years ago covered the practice in considerable detail. One, by Tom Shachtman (2006), explained that “rumspringa” simply means “running around.” It’s a simple concept, practiced especially in the larger Amish settlements of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Holmes County Ohio, and northern Indiana.

Starting at about age 16, the Amish young people in those settlements want to try living more or less like the people in the majority American society. The rumspringa period usually lasts for several years. When the young people reach adulthood, they normally choose to either baptize into the church and become life-long, committed Amish adults, or they drop out and join the “English” society, the majority culture, with all its advantages and disadvantages. Most make the first choice.

A prominent part of that running around period in their lives is the partying in back corners of farms. Shachtman related how a young Amish woman told him how much she enjoyed partying with several hundred other kids, with lots of loud music, smoking, and drinking. Everybody, she told him, was “having a great old time.” This website reviewed the Shachtman book in 2006.

The Amish tend to idealize the lives of their children, shown here singing Christmas carols (Photo by Mark Peters on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

A book by Richard Stevick (2007) further fleshed out the rumspringa period enjoyed by many Amish teenagers. Stevick wrote that the Amish often idealize the activities of their young people, who usually join their elders every other Sunday in the three-hours long worship services held in the home or barn of one of the farms in the church district. The boys and girls will dress exactly as their fathers and mothers do. They will join in the singing from the Ausbund, the book of traditional hymns, and sit quietly during the lengthy sermons. Afterwards, they may go hiking, play games, or join their friends in other activities until the evening supper is ready. After that, they will often join together in the Sunday evening youth singing.

But the reality, in the larger settlements particularly, may be quite different. Beginning on Saturday night, many Amish young people, most changed out of their traditional clothing, hang out around convenience stores and other urbanized locations, waiting for the wild parties to begin in the back corners of fields or the edges of woodlands. Their parties may last until 3:00 or 4:00 am, hindering many from attending church services on Sunday morning. While this second scenario, like the idealized first one, only represents a portion of the young people in the large settlements, both scenarios are part of the changes that Amish youth look forward to when they turn 16, Stevick argues.

A review of the Stevick book in this website pointed out that Amish parents encourage their teenagers “to find out for themselves what the world is all about.” The parents fervently hope their children will remain in the fold and baptize into the faith as adults. They will earn respect when their sons and daughters do so, and they will lose status if they don’t. Even grandparents may feel a sense of shame in some Amish districts if a grandchild decides to leave. Most, however, reject the ways of the broader society and stay.

The process seems to strengthen the Amish society because of the way it prompts commitments by most of their young people to their basic beliefs and to an acceptance of the rules of their group. Uncomfortable as rumspringa may be for Captain Hunter in the county sheriff’s office, it is clearly a successful strategy for the Amish to follow.

Inuit women eating maktaaq, whale skin — Two Inuit woman eating maktaaq, a Inuit delicacy of whale skin. (Photo by Ansgar Walk, from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

The goal of this website, Peaceful Societies, is to promote peacefulness through the study of societies that are already nonviolent. They provide examples from which we might learn to be more peaceful by dealing more effectively and nonviolently with conflict. This website also strives to reflect the goals of its host, the UAB Department of Anthropology. This department further expands the notion of peace studies by taking a multidisciplinary approach and including the equally important areas of peace, justice, and ecology. Keeping these broader goals in mind, Peaceful Societies has decided to create a section dedicated to videos representing many of the peaceful societies included in the encyclopedia page.

But why bother with videos? Videos provide a glimpse into the lives of people and their lived experiences. They also reinforce the written ethnographic word with an additional sensory medium. Anthropology itself is a holistic field and by its very nature highly descriptive. Videos are essentially another implement in our tool kit to bring cultures closer to the reader and other researchers.

ladakhi woman in traditional dress — Ladakhi woman in traditional dress and hat. (Photo by Steven Evans, from Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

The videos included here come in various forms and exhibit different contexts of these societies. They include, for example, the work of nonprofits, academics, and even students. There is a wealth of video material available online so this meant choosing those with the most relevance to this website and the overall goal of Peaceful Societies. Like the news and reviews, many of the videos expand and modify our understandings of the ways nonviolence plays out in the real worlds of these 25 societies.

In some cases, such as the Amish and the Ladakhi, a number of videos give us insights into the daily lives of these people as well as the tourism industry that has developed around them. Another example might be the Nubians or the Birhor, many of whom have been relocated by their respective governments to areas where their traditional ways of life have been challenged. For the Ifaluk and the Inuit, their latest struggles arise as a result of climate change and its effect on their subsistence patterns.

Each society has its own distinct attributes and faces its own challenges. Furthermore, cultures are never static and are constantly responding to environmental and human borne conflicts on a regular basis. However, this also brings up issues of social justice as some peaceful societies are poorly represented and often misunderstood, leading to the decline of their cultures in the face of globalization, modernization, and institutions that seek to integrate them into the locally dominant cultures and religions.

nubian wedding near aswan — A Nubian wedding near Aswan. (From Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Some of the videos here have already been reviewed on Peaceful Societies and more information may be found through the provided links to the news and reviews as well as the encyclopedia page for each society. We encourage viewers to explore these different options in order to gain a well-rounded view of each society. Also, the video section will be an ongoing project that we hope to keep updating as new videos become available. It is our goal to create a user-friendly experience and encourage viewers to learn more about these peaceful societies.

An Mbuti group in the eastern D.R. Congo has successfully forestalled government attempts to establish a nature reserve that would have prevented their traditional uses of their forests. Instead, they are working with several major NGOs to develop an effective preserve that will include their indigenous rights to use sustainably the forest products. The Guardian published a detailed story about the development last Thursday.

The Hamlet of Miki on the Itombwe Plateau (Photo by Radio Okapi on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

The home range of this group of Mbuti is the Itombwe Mountains, located 60 miles south of Bukavu, the capital city of South Kivu province of the DRC and over 300 miles south of the Ituri Forest where many other Mbuti live. Like so much of the Eastern Congo, the Itombwe region has very poor roads but it also has enormous riches in coltan, gold, and forest products.

The government sought to create an Itombwe Nature Reserve in 2006 with the support of the Wildlife Conservation Society and WWF, to forestall the sort of devastation that has plagued other forests in the Congo. Trees were being chopped down for charcoal; wildlife such as pangolins and gorillas were being hunted out. Irangi, an Mbuti man in his 30s, told The Guardian reporters that people were coming from Bukavu and Rwanda with their weapons and taking everything—trees, animals, anything of value. “Because they have weapons, they believe that they’re above our laws,” he said.

An industrial logging operation in the Congo Basin (Photo by J.G. Collomb, World Resources Institute in Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

Irangi, who lives on the edge of the Itombwe reserve, castigated the government for allowing the devastation. It hands out licenses to timber the forests to anyone who is able to pay for them. The loggers cut down the trees with impunity. “They cut down our medicinal trees and, with them, the bark and fruits used for our medical treatments. They cut down our caterpillar trees, our oil trees,” he complained.

But the proposed reserve would have prevented all human activity within its boundaries. When the Mbuti in the Itombwe heard about it, they were angry, according to Marie, an Mbuti woman who lives in a nearby village. The forest has provided the needs of people for millennia. “If you found out that the place where you gather and hunt your food, where you find your medicines, where the resting place of your ancestors is located, was to be taken … would you be happy?” Marie asked. “We were afraid that they would steal all of this from us. So we met and decided: we’re not going to let this happen.”

A Batwa woman gathering food from the forest floor before they were expelled from their forests (Screen capture from the video “Conservation Refugees—Expelled from Paradise” in Vimeo, Creative Commons license)

Irangi and the others were quite aware of what had happened to another Pygmy group, the Batwa, who used to live as gatherers and hunters in a forest 120 miles to the northwest of them. But in the 1980s, their forest was designated as the new Kahuzi-Biega National Park. The nearly 6,000 Pygmies living within the borders of that park were expelled from their villages and had to find new ways to obtain food, without any support from the government. They learned to survive doing farm work or other kinds of manual labor without any access to their traditional sources of foods.

The Mbuti activists started protesting the creation of the Itombwe reserve. They blocked the entrances to the forests, their protests catching the attention of the government as well as international organizations that promote indigenous rights. The proposal to establish the reserve was stopped. In 2008, the international conservation organizations and the government started negotiating with the Mbuti.

A Batwa child put to work carrying a heavy load of vegetables after they were expelled from their forests (Screen capture from the video “Conservation Refugees—Expelled from Paradise” in Vimeo, Creative Commons license)

The Mbuti were determined that the degrading conditions that had overtaken the Batwa around Kahuzi-Biega would not happen to them. But mutual suspicions stood in the way. At first, WWF viewed the Mbuti as enemies, people with whom they couldn’t even talk, according to Bitomwa Onesiphore Lukangyu, an employees of WWF. But those attitudes have changed. The two groups realized that they share a common goal: to protect the Itombwe forest. “So we’ve started to work together. To create the reserve together,” Mr. Lukangyu said.

The collaboration seems to be paying off. In June, the government recognized officially the boundaries of the new reserve, which were decided with the input of the Mbuti. The Guardian observed that, while cooperating with local indigenous groups that have lived in their forests for millennia might seem obvious, such collaborative projects have been mostly quite superficial. But this one represents the first really cooperative park development in Central Africa. The international aid organizations have the funding to help the governments protect large areas, but the local people have the knowledge about how to conserve the forests most effectively.

An Mbuti net hunter who has taken a small forest antelope (Photo by Kim Gjerstad on Terese Hart’s photostream on Flickr, Creative Commons license)

Mapenzi, a young Mbuti hunter, told the reporters “We know how to protect our forest because nobody knows it the way we do. We know where the animals give birth, where they sleep and during which periods one must never kill them.” He said that he knows all the traditional methods of hunting, and he is clearly proud of the fact that he was trained by older guardians of Mbuti customs. “I know the sites and the periods for hunting and fishing. During the dry season, we don’t hunt, because the animals give birth.”

The young hunter captured the attention of the reporters when he spoke so forcefully about Mbuti approaches to conservation. “We have our own traditional conservation technologies. The animals that the modern law wants to conserve are already under our customary protection,” he asserted.

He went on to speak about the ways the rules of their society control what they do. If you violate the rules by setting a trap for an animal next to the river where it goes to drink, the guardians of their customs will sentence you with a muzombo, a form of excommunication. The members of the Mbuti Pygmy group believe the punishment is effective so they respect the rules, The Guardian concluded. It appears from the report in the newspaper as if future generations of at least this one Mbuti group will continue to cherish their forest-based traditions.

Peaceful Societies

Peaceful Societies

Celebrating Elders

Amish Forgiveness on the Tenth Anniversary of a Tragedy

Impatient Young Nubians

Protect the Gorillas and Hassle the Mbuti

New Radios for the Ju/’hoansi

Finding the Terror

Traditional Lepcha Fashions Reinvented

Ohio Police Arrest 73 Amish People

Peaceful Societies Introduces a New Video Resource

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