‘ Removing the Youth from their Pernicious Environment ’ Child Separation Practices in South Dutch New Guinea , 1902-1921 maaike derksen

This article examines practices of child separation in South Dutch New Guinea during the first two decades of colonial administration and missionary presence, spanning the years 1902-1920. By examining the ways in which the Dutch Catholic missionary priests and brothers of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Missionnaires du Sacre Coeur –  MSC) sought to ‘civilise’ the Marind-anim and reconfigure Marind society, I argue that this ‘civilising’ project concentrated on the management, control and transformation of bodies and bodily practices – especially those of children. This project only appeared to be feasible in what I define as ‘spaces of transformation’, constituted by the mission’s boarding schools and new model villages, in which missionaries could establish some degree of authority. Designed specifically to separate Marind youth and socialise them in a manner distinct from that undergone by their parents, these institutions enhanced missionary efforts to transform Marind society by interrupting the transmission of knowledge and practice from one generation to the next. Dit artikel onderzoekt praktijken die erop gericht waren kinderen uit hun oorspronkelijke milieu te verwijderen in het zuidelijke deel van Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea tijdens de eerste twee decennia van het koloniaal bestuur en de katholieke missie van 1902-1920. De analyse van de manieren waarop Nederlandse katholieke missionarissen en broeders van de Missionaires du Sacre Coeur (MSC) de Marind-anim en hun samenleving wilden hervormen toont aan dat dit ‘beschavingsproject’ zich concentreerde op het controleren en transformeren van lichamen en lichamelijke praktijken, met name op die van kinderen. Dergelijke ‘beschavingspraktijken’ werden alleen uitvoerbaar geacht in die ruimtes waar de Nederlandse priesters en broeders een zekere mate van gezag konden uitoefenen. Kostscholen en modeldorpen, die in dit artikel als ‘spaces of transformation’ worden gedefinieerd, werden speciaal opgezet om Marind kinderen en jongvolwassenen tijdelijk aan hun oorspronkelijke omgeving te onttrekken, zodat de overdracht van kennis en praktijken van de oudere generatie op de jongere generatie onderbroken werd. De missionarissen beschouwden dit als de enige mogelijke werkwijze om de kinderen te socialiseren op een manier die wezenlijk verschilde van de opvoedingspraktijken van hun ouders.


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time, sexuality and education, became crucial to any colonial modernising agenda. 10 These colonial civilising projects cast children as 'objects and agents' -components of what David Scott has termed a 'modern' form of colonial governmentality. 11 In Colonialism's Culture (1994) Nicholas Thomas demonstrated that conversion was important to this modern form of colonial governmentality, characterised as not 'just a matter of religious change, but of wider social transformation'. 12 Under these conditions, imperial exploitation was linked in paradoxical ways with the management and improvement of the welfare of colonised populations. Allan Lester and Fae Dussart described this ethos with the rubric 'humanitarian governance', arguing that 'humanitarianism was intrinsic to the emergence of modern governmentality'. 13 Others who have written about the 'moral' obligations of colonisers, as well as the humanitarian justifications for dispossession and exploitation, have done so in terms of 'humanitarian imperialism' to convey the rationales of colonial rule. They showed how humanitarianism was linked to western philanthropy and Christian missions that facilitated colonial rule and subjugated non-western cultures. 14 For the Dutch case, this colonial paradox was already put forward by historian Elsbeth Locher-Scholten in 1981. She showed how much the drive to 'removing the youth from their pernicious environment' 61 derksen imperial expansion in the Dutch East Indies was linked to the Ethical Policy.
This 'civilising' colonial politics was armed with a moral discourse stressing the obligation to improve indigenous welfare but at the same time mandated an overall intensification of colonial interventions for the purpose. 15 In this article I will demonstrate the way the civilising colonial politics played out in child separation practices that were equally framed in a moral vernacular of 'saving children', and whereby these practices were cast as part of a project that was 'civilising' Marind-anim.
The focus of this article is the region of South Dutch New Guinea. This was, and still is, a region far from political, administrative and Protestant centres based in the north of West Papua. Nowadays, the region hosts the largest number of Catholics in West Papua and the city of Merauke is the centre of both the ecclesial province and the regency. Catholics, however, are still a minority, numbering fifteen percent of the total population of West Papua. Nevertheless, one can roughly state that all (ethnic) Papuans are Christians and that Christianity is a core element of Papuan ethnic and national identity. 16 Christianity, however, did not create West Papuan nationalism which developed since the 1960s, but rather drove its institutionalisation and with it the quest for statehood. The networks facilitating the adaption and redefinition of Christian Papuan identity originated from an institutional framework provided by the missionary presence, as historian Suzanna Rizzo argued recently. 17 In South Dutch New Guinea, these institutional networks materialised only after 1922. That year the Catholic mission -in collaboration with the colonial government -began to grow a network of model villages to house all Papuans, with accompanying village schools for their children. It was a resettlement programme that eventually brought about the 'pacification' and de-facto control of South Dutch New Guinea. 18 As I have argued elsewhere, the Dutch msc missionaries and the colonial administration ran these institutions to place a portion of the Marind under strict supervision, promoting habits of conformity, discipline and godliness. This project was not possible without the engagement of hundreds of Catholic goeroes from the Kei and Tanimbar islands. 19 15 Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Ethiek in fragmenten: Vijf studies over koloniaal denken en doen van Nederlanders in de Indonesische archipel, 1877-1942(Utrecht 1981 213.

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The period under review, 1902-1921, was an exploratory phase of trial and error that laid a basis for the model village policy, in which village schools came to be the operative principle for a fundamental redefinition of Papuan (Christian) identity. During the years 1902-1921, only a dozen or so Papuans were baptised, most of whom were infants, children, or adults in articulo mortis. Initial resistance to Christianity was not the sole cause of this slow progress. Rather, Dutch msc missionaries intentionally delayed baptism to concentrate their efforts on 'civilising' children first. These had to become a new generation responsible for generating deep and lasting change in Papuan society.
As I will elaborate in the first section, missionaries believed that this large-scale transformation of Papuan society lay in its human fundamentals: bodies, and the material cultures placed on them. Henceforward missionaries' efforts concentrated on altering children's bodies. They saw that a new kind of dress, made from fabric, changed Marind identity and had the ability to shake children loose from former cultural certainties.
Missionaries came to see, however, that the success of their civilising project depended on what I define as 'spaces of transformation' -physical spaces that enabled missionaries to separate, detach and distance children from traditional ways of life. In the second section of this article I will elucidate the formation and functioning of such transformative spaces, concentrating on the Catholic mission's boarding schools and new model villages established in Merauke and Okaba and designed specifically to socialise Marind children and youth, pressing them to break with the culture and customs of their community. In the last section before the conclusion, I return to the aforementioned picture of the 'six happy children' and shall examine their life stories more closely to pursue the question of why they were more eligible than other children to be sent to the boarding school of the Catholic priests and sisters in Langgur.  Initially the msc priests preached their beliefs to Marind as a desirable alternative to their 'barbaric' and 'heathen' traditions, with little success.

Re-dressing Papuans: cultural and social detachment
Nor did the missionaries' curative interventions prove to be effective.
The missionaries intermeddling in the completion of 'barbaric' rites like vivisepulture and infanticide did not put an end to these customs. 25 Furthermore, providing alternatives for 'getting head-names', after missionaries had learned that the main reason for a headhunting raid was to gather pa-igiz (literally head-names) for their children, was not sufficient to terminate these raids. 26 Preventative measures in the form of child separation, detachment and re-education, the missionaries hoped, would eliminate these customs among new generations, effectively changing Marind society as a whole. This meant that Marind were not to convert to Catholicism only, but that the missionaries desired a transformation of what anthropologist Peter Pels described as 'family and gender patterning; corporeal regimes like clothing, dances, and initiation; and agricultural and domestic objects and spaces '. 27 Missionaries' ethnographic experience led them to believe that 'civilising' Marind-anim required a drastic transformation of culture and society. 28 Marind culture was constructed and constituted through dress, particularly by the elaborate hairdo described in great detail by Father Henricus Nollen in Anthropos (1909). 29 An individual's transition to an older age group was marked by a distinct hairstyle and accompanying dress: the adoption of a new corporeal identity laden with social meaning. The plaited hairstyle was first received as a rite of passage into adulthood marked by onset of puberty. With these rites, Marind children were initiated into the secret cults of the Marind, where adult knowledge was closely guarded. On reaching adulthood, Marind youths' attainment of fertility was celebrated with an initiatory sexual ritual, and boys received additional coaching in preparation for their first headhunting expeditions. 30 It was these tribal traditions in particular that missionaries sought to transform.

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Missionaries gradually became aware of the openness to change among younger Marind generations, whereby a new kind of dress -fabric garmentscould signify a departure from 'regressive customs' and an entry into the modern world of colonial citizenry. 31 Already in 1906, Henricus Nollen wrote in the station diary that Topoem and Warangau worked and lived in the colonial settlement of Merauke. Against their family's wishes, they had broken with Marind customs by adopting garments. According to Nollen, this was an act of independence that could prove useful for missionaries in the future. 32 A few years later, Brother Jannus Joosten noted that 'the Marind youth has become tired of their old habits because many come to Merauke and become Marind-Poe-anim (...) which means as much that they are now dressed kajakaja's'. 33 Marind who adopted a different kind of dress were stigmatised by with local customary law and cultural practices (adat) was the exact result missionaries sought to achieve. Henceforward, with procedure resembling the initiation experience of Marind age-grade rituals, the missionaries ventured to re-dress Marind children to detach them from society and shake them loose from former cultural certainties.
'removing the youth from their pernicious environment' 67 derksen By way of experiment, Father Van de Kolk began distributing clothes to all children who were not yet fully initiated into Marind secret cults, and some willing adults, in the village of Okaba in 1911. In his initial enthusiasm, Van de Kolk wrote several letters to colleagues stationed in Merauke and to his superiors in Langgur and the Netherlands, celebrating their initial success in 'dressing' the Marind. He even wrote to the newspapers, appealing to the Dutch public for donations of green and red clothes, believing Marind were particularly fond of these colours. 38 While Van de Kolk's re-dressing experiment seemed to work at first, most adults and children discarded these clothes made of fabric in a matter of weeks. 39 Transforming Marind lives and identities proved difficult in a society whose culture, according to the missionaries, 'hindered' the progress of In 1913, as a small-scale pilot, Noh-Okaba was set up on a plot of land beside the Okaba mission station. The establishment of a model kampong in Merauke followed soon after, for which the old station for experimental agriculture and its houses were put at the mission's disposal by the colonial administration (see Figure 4). The number of residents gradually increased.
Noh-Okaba began with ten residents, and their numbers tripled within the first year, growing to about 50 residents in 1915. 58 These first residents of these model villages were married couples who had previously called the mission stations home, as well as a few interethnic Catholic couples, Timorese and Chinese Catholic merchants and their Marind wives. As soon as the first families had moved in, the Dutch public was asked by the missionaries to donate money to 'redeem a whole family from slavery of heathenism and the devil. The wild men who join the new village are won for civilisation and conversion'. 59 These separation practices were discursively framed in the article -artikel Christian terms of 'redeeming', but it was thereby emphasised that this was for the moral good of the civilising mission.
The design and spatial layout of this model village was supposed to foster a bourgeois lifestyle inspired by western, Christian norms and designed to inculcate the according sense of community, space and time. Photographs in the archive also indicate that houses were neatly arranged, and the station diaries mention that streets had to be swept and cleaned regularly. This  With the relocation of Catholic children to boarding schools in Langgur, missionaries not only hoped to secure their Catholic upbringing, but also to educate future role models who could reach out to the rest of the population. Appointing and fashioning local men and women as teachers and religious leaders was a common missionary strategy, which can be observed in the whole Pacific region. 83 Except for the few relocated children, Marind were article -artikel not educated in these schools in Langgur until 1942, and the same was true for Papuans from other tribes. Furthermore, Wangei was the only one who, after he had married Anna Li, returned to work as a teacher in the village school of the newly established model kampong in Wambi in 1923. Unfortunately, he died a few months later. 84 From 1921 until the Pacific War in 1942, the missionaries did, however, recruit many pupils of Keiese and Tanimbarese descent to work in the many newly established village schools throughout South Dutch New Guinea. 85 These Keiese and Tanimbarese teacher families were regarded as 'more civilised' than Papuans, to carry out such a profession.
That certain categories of children, and of colonised people in general, were marked by the Dutch missionaries as more suitable role models of 'civilisation' and colonial modernity than others, and how this distinction fed into processes of inclusion and exclusion, as well as into present-day nationalist resentments, are subjects worthy of further investigation. 86

Conclusion
The 'six happy children' depicted in the aforementioned photograph were not only used as propaganda to wring the hearts and wallets of Dutch readers. Such images also legitimised child separation practices as a pillar of the missionary 'conversion' strategy and as part of a benevolent civilising project.
As such, separation practices were discursively framed in terms of 'saving',