From hitchhiking across Canada and parts of the US, to backpacking through the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia, my friend John Fairfull is no stranger to stepping outside of his comfort zone. If you asked him about his most life-changing travel experiences, however, his four years spent in the wilderness of Papua New Guinea would certainly top that list.
In 2008, his best friend’s mom hired him to guide tours for a luxury tour company. John led expeditions on a riverboat lodge down the Sepik River, the country’s longest inland river, showing tourists (willing to spend upwards of $8,000 USD) the mountains, rainforests, crocodiles, birds of paradise, and the hundreds of villages that reside along the river and its tributaries.
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Within his first year, John had forged friendships with men from the surrounding villages and had already been asked if he wanted to be initiated into a tribe. At first he declined, but John was eventually persuaded and underwent the intense initiation of the Sepik people—a ritual that included having his upper body cut up for 20-40 minutes to create the tribe’s iconic patterned scars.
Since returning home to Canada over a year ago, John has been studying illustration and painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in an attempt to use his passion for painting to translate his experiences onto the canvas. I caught up with John to ask about the initiation, and who these mysterious Sepik people are.
Oh by the way, if you’ve got itchy feet and an eye for adventure like John, VICE and Cayman Jack want to send you and a friend to Costa Rica. Click here to enter the Cayman Jack Costa Rican Adventure Contest.
VICE: Hey John, let’s start with my most pressing question: How the hell did you get yourself into Papua New Guinea?
John Fairfull: That’s definitely a question that’s asked often. PNG is a country that’s really off the typical travel scene. It was lucky for me to actually get in there, just knowing the right people at the right time allowed me to get into PNG, and specifically the Sepik area, which is probably one of the most remote areas not only in PNG, but probably on Earth. I worked down there and I got to know the people really well, just bonding with the people, learning the language, hanging out in the villages and hanging with the Big Men (the chiefs of the spirit houses). We got along really well and I was invited to be initiated into a tribe. Initiation is scarification ceremony that a boy goes through to become a man. There’s a big transition period between going into the spirit house, getting scarred, learning everything the tribe has to offer in terms of legends and myths, and then you come out as a full grown man, as a chief, in a way.
How did the situation arise for you to be initiated?
When I was first asked I actually said no. I thought it was a ridiculous question at the time. I knew what it looked like when people left the spirit house; they looked very scarred. It looked pretty agonizing. But that really spurned my curiosity to learn more about a culture I really didn’t know. I don’t think a lot people know that area of the world all that much, especially to the depths that one would know when you actually enter the spirit house. In the following months the helmsman of the Sepik Spirit (the riverboat where I guided the tours) was putting his two sons through initiation, so I asked him—after spending some months researching into initiation, into the Sepik culture and scarification ceremonies—if it was possible for me as a white person, as a foreigner, to go through the initiation. He was absolutely ecstatic. He thought, “To have a white man go through initiation with my sons”—he was absolutely excited. So he adopted me into his family so I would have access to the spirit house, into his tribe.
What does it mean to be adopted into the family?
In order to have access to things in the village, whether it is a spirit house or whether it be to sleep in houses, you have to be part of a family.
Can you explain more about what the spirit house is?
Nowadays there is a new form of Western school. It’s not really too functional out there, but there is modern schooling. The school they had before westerners came in was the spirit house and it was where all the boys learned how to be a man in the Sepik. In the spirit house, the elders pass down all the stories, all the important vital information from the past.
And how would that storytelling take place during the initiation?
The initiation lasted one month. The ceremony itself was broken up into three parts. The first part is really learning about carving and stories. A lot of the elders would come in at night and tell stories… about spirits, about how the tribe came to be what it was, what spirits inhabited that place and what they had to do to appease the spirits to settle on that land. Not only that, but the first section of the initiation was when you learned instruments: drumming and playing flutes. The Sepiks believe that instruments are a way to communicate with spirits, or spirits can communicate with humans.
After learning all of this you would be scarred with what used to be bamboo but is now razor blades. They actually cut the pattern of a crocodile into the young men. You have to keep in mind that in the Sepik, it’s a very male dominated society. In order for a Sepik to be a true man you would have to blood let the mother’s blood, and the recovery time is where a man comes into himself and gets his own blood and becomes a true man. The latter part of the ceremony is a part where the initiates focus on communal activities: strength building, spearing, fishing and just really a recovery time because the human body goes through a lot of stress.
I can imagine…Could you tell me more about the cutting?
[The scarification] is really the only thing that people see of the initiation, but that’s not the whole part. It’s really the certificate of the initiation. When they start cutting into you with the razor blades, they start cutting around the nipples because that is one of the most sacred parts of the cutting and they cut very fast. The entire upper torso of your body is cut basically within 20 to 40 minutes.
It’s hard to believe that 20 or 40 minutes didn’t seem like a lot of time.
It seemed like hours almost. As they cut you all you hear is your skin ripping. But it sounds really bad, and it sounds like it’s really painful, but you have to keep in mind that these razor blades are really sharp.
After the cutting, we’re brought outside and are shown to all of the villages that are gathered around the spirit house. The first test comes along and men scrub your body down with handfuls of grass. I would have to say that was more painful then the cutting itself.
Yikes. I know we’ve talked a lot about what happens in the spirit house but we didn’t talk about everything. What kind of stuff are you not allowed to tell and why?
The power of the spirit house comes from its mystery. Without its mystery, really the spirit house is stripped of its power. In PNG there are over 750 tribes and there might be five tribes that go through this kind of initiation. So out of 750 tribes, you have to realize that 745 tribes fear those five tribes unlike any other tribe. The reason that fear is there is because there’s so much mystery surrounding the crocodile men.
In every day life, what are some of the ways men and women work together on things?
It’s a hunter and gatherer society so there’s no industry, there are no shops. Their need for money is very low. They’re behavior really suffices to survival. The men are responsible for building houses, or doing a lot of the heavy work. The women are responsible for fishing early in the morning. Their staple food is the sago palm, which the male and females work together to extract. They eat this type of pancake and fish. That is their diet—and bugs sometimes.
What do the Sepik people do for fun?
Volleyball!
Really?
Yup. And of course soccer is huge. One of the problems with having large soccer tournaments is that… [laughs] there’s still a very aggressive tribal nature inherent in their lifestyle. So when many tribes come together to play soccer it usually ends up it some kind of tribal war.
Like a serious war?
Yeah, I mean they get their bush knives out and they will cut each other up a little bit. It just kind of happens, but that’s just part of their lifestyle.
What about crocodile hunting? I know that’s a big thing on the Sepik.
Crocodile hunting happens all the time. The crocodile is very sacred; the crocodile in their culture represents wisdom, spirituality and strength. That being said, they do go a lot because it’s a place of survival. They slaughter them and take the skin to the costal areas (about two days away) and a lot of people from Singapore and lot of Asian boats buy the skins, which go for about 150 US dollars. If there’s a big crocodile caught, they’ll bring it back into the village and they will kill it and have a huge celebration. Coming from a community where they eat sago and fish three times a day everyday, having another kind of meat coming into the village is really a treat.
Are there many other outsiders who have done the initiation?
Ever since the 70s there have been a number of people who’ve gone through. One of the things I have to warn anyone interested in being initiated is that it is not part of the tattoo culture that we in Western civilization have come up with. Tattoo culture is really just a mark on the body. Initiation in the Sepik is a lot deeper than anything in tattoo culture.
This leads to my last question: Would you do it again?
[Laughs] You know, I think I’m at 50/50 right now. It was a really difficult time; the pain was excruciating. It’s really hard to answer that question because I’d want to take the experience with me without going through the pain, but I don’t think you can separate the two. If I knew it was that painful I definitely would have rethought my choice of going through with initiation. It definitely shaped me as a character and made me stronger.
Ask Ken if he’s been initiated: @kjrwall