Tribe Meets White Man for the First Time: (Video)

Tribe Meets White Man for the First Time: (Video)

NB Commentary: It is always worth the time to take a moment and look into the comments posted under a YouTube video. This is what I found when following one of the links listed there. You should read the whole article but this is a quoted comment under the article.

EXTRACTS FROM BELGIAN filmmaker Jean Pierre Dutilleux's first contact with a tribal people known as the Toulamis have recently been posted on Youtube.

This claimed first contact was said to have been as recently as 1976 and the extracts can be seen here  and here.

The footage is moving and poetic and appears to be authentic. More information about Dutilleux's films can be found on his website here.

His film was first aired on French TV in the mid1990's.  Perhaps because it has not been widely shown to English-speaking audiences, it has aroused keen interest and many favourable comments since its recent Youtube posting.

This controversial film also has been the subject of much scholarly debate in the Francophone world, and even threats of legal action.

It was severely criticised by French anthropologist and PNG specialist Pierre Lemonnier in his academic paper A la chasse à l'authentique (In pursuit of the real thing) published by Terrain, the European ethnological review in 1999, which is available here.

In this paper, Lemonnier points out that the Toulambis of the film are really the Ankave-Anga people from near Menyamya.  The records indicate that these people were visited by at least six Australian government patrols between 1929 and 1972: 1929 Middleton; 1950 Chester, 1951 Mathieson; 1965 O'Brien; 1967 Police patrols; 1972 Meikle.

In fact Meikle found the people talking basic Tok Pisin learned at Menyamya.

Historical sources reveal that the so-called Toulambis had steel tools and western implements more than 40 years before their encounter with Dutilleux, and were regular visitors to the administrative center of Menyamya the early 1970's - which was only a few days walk for them.

This familiarity with the outside world is confirmed by ethnography, and in particular one Toulambi man spent two months in prison in Menyamya in the early '70's.  Admittedly some remote groups may not have had regularly contact with the Australian administration before the 1960's, but they certainly did by the time Dutilleux encountered them.

When Lemonnier viewed the film for the first time he exclaimed: "I'm outraged!" He described the Dutilleux production as "untruthful, racist, revolting". Apparently Lemonnier recognised immediately the place where the fake "first encounter" had been filmed. The stream is known as New Year Creek, and the members of the "unknown tribe" probably walked for about a day from their settlement to reach the appointed well-lit meeting-place.

This had been conveniently cleared for the filming, with a few logs thrown into the creek so that the people could emerge confidently from the jungle (most unusual behaviour) and move naively towards the camera crew.

Lemonnier adds: "At that spot, they were about a four-day walk from an administrative centre with a schoolteacher, airstrip, radio, nurse and Seventh-Day Adventist preachers. Nearby, the navigable river Vailala enables the Papuans to reach the coast, where they exchange bark capes for tools."

For his criticism, Lemonnier faced a court case for slander in 1997, but the historical records support his case.

So how was the film made?  Simple - the locals were paid for their performance and rehearsed in how to act their parts.  In fact they were enterprising enough to have done this for several other 'first-contact' filmmakers before and after Dutilleux.  SOURCE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JXcWwHxCBE

lovemadness writes
"Human beings lived in an unbelievably brutal, savage world for at least 99 percent of the time we have been on earth. We have only just recently enjoyed living in a semi-safe, clean/semi-civilized world. This is why we need to get out of the animal realm while we can. To do it, we have to do the exact opposite of what we did in the past to be successful. We have to completely change a mind that has been evolving for millions of years in a very short period of time to be successful now. Google TruthContest read the Present Changing your mind is the last step in evolution. It is the step from mankind into spiritkind."

Here I felt the need to comment on this person's statement under this video.

+lovemadness I do not agree. If you are sighting 99% of humanity's time on earth was savage and brutal and then say that industrialized society is more spirit-filled, I have to strongly disagree. That 99% of the time may not have given humanity the so-called creature comforts of gadgets, apathy, laziness, weakness, and ten thousand other types of disease; it certainly did not connect them to spirit. Quite the contrary.. the more modern, the less spiritual.

The Ancients didn't need skyscrapers, rockets and nuclear weapons. They did not need to pollute the air, water and streams with ill regard to its impact on nature, they did not need GMO foods and pesticides or the ability to control the weather. They lived in the rhythm of the planet and learned to intuit and therefore be more in-tune with nature. That is the higher calling, as you can see worn out tired folks retreating back to the woods, and back to nature.

Comparing the life of an indigenous person, untouched by modern man and then saying they should be taken from their environment and thrust into a modern environment is genocide, homicide, suicide and nutricide.

Your ignorance calls it an unbelievably brutal, savage world. You true knowledge would tell you otherwise.

Just look at the modern world and tell me that it is NOT unbelievably brutal and savage, as we step over the homeless, throw people into the streets, raise taxes on the working class, allow the 1% to rule and control from their gold plated toilets, and decimate the planet through wars of aggression over natural resources. How brutal is it to experiment on animals and/or raise them in unnatural animal farms? How savage is it to lock animals away in Zoos and carnivals for human gratification? How savage is slavery of one human being by another? How savage is the exclamation that one religion is better than another to the point of mass murder? How savage and brutal is Empire building?

Yep, we need to change our minds, not as the last step but as the first step to accepting this Planet as our home and taking good care of it and its inhabitants by respecting their right to live as they chose without the imposition of bigoted suppositions that their way of life is savage and brutal!!