Nias Recovery News

Indonesian museum battles to save quake island's heritage

GUNUNG SITOLI, Indonesia : A private museum on the quake-ravaged Indonesian island of Nias is fighting a lonely battle to help preserve the unique cultural and heritage of the inhabitants here.

The seven-year-old beachfront museum plays host to a collection of more than 6,000 artefacts from the mainly Christian island, where many people still practise ancient animistic traditions.

Delicately-carved stone and wooden ancestral statues are on display along with earthenware utensils, sizeable architectural models of the different styles of traditional Nias' homes, ancient weapons, and impressive steel armory.

The museum, which emerged largely unscathed from a massive earthquake last March that killed more than 850 residents, was the brainchild of German-born Catholic priest Father Johannes Haemmerle.

He began to build his own collection in 1972, painstakingly adding individual items from across the impoverished island, which is about the size of Bali. The collection formed the centrepiece of the museum, which today lures researchers from around the world.

Haemmerle, a fluent speaker of the local language of Nias, has also compiled texts of Nias' legends and songs and published books on the island's culture.

"It has been, and continues to be, a difficult effort to preserve Nias' heritage," the 65-year-old priest told AFP, adding that the museum's work has been met with suspicion from many local officials.

Others however consider the museum to be a leading authority on Nias' culture.

"What he and his museum has done is extraordinary -- a lot of what is in his museum can longer be found on Nias," Nias district spokesman S. Yan Zebua said of Haemmerle.

Christian missionaries arrived on the island less than a century ago and convinced many eager residents to abandon links to their old beliefs, although in the south animistic traditions still very much permeate the lives of people.

And while links to the outside world have eroded some local customs, Nias' remote location -- about 100 kilometres (62 miles) off Sumatra island -- means it has been largely sidestepped by development elsewhere in Indonesia.

Huge stone monuments still dot the island along with about 1,000 of Nias' traditional, steep-roofed wooden homes constructed from massive logs, all testament to a culture that largely evolved in isolation from the modern world.

"This isolation has been beneficial to the rich culture of the island ... but it has also resulted in Nias being practically forgotten by the central or the provincial government," said Nata'alui Duha, deputy director of the museum.

None of the seven museum staff have formal education in archeology or architecture. "But we have been able to learn from the field and from the people and now even academics will come to us to get data or learn about Nias' traditional architecture," he told AFP.

The museum however has been snubbed by the agency overseeing the massive reconstruction required here after last year's 8.7-magnitude quake and the Indian Ocean tsunami three months before, which killed 140 people on the island.

The head of the agency's taskforce on culture in Nias, Ahmad Husin Ritonga, admitted that the museum was a "great contribution to the preservation of Nias' heritage" but said the museum had a different standpoint to his office. He declined to elaborate.

The museum is also directly involved in helping to preserve the living history of Nias, such as maintaining the traditional homes -- known as oma hada -- as well as megalithic sites. Funding comes only from private donations and ticket sales.

Operational costs are about 20 million rupiah (about 2,000 dollars) per month. "We are continuously facing a shortage of funds ... It is really sapping most of our energy," Haemmerle said.

Ticket sales on this island of 710,000 people clock in at around 5 million rupiah per month, with many visitors families coming to take advantage of the facilities at the museum -- including a small zoo and restaurant -- rather than to see the artefacts.

Nevertheless, Haemmerle is optimistic about the museum's fate. "We are talking about a legacy for Nias, for Indonesia. It has to continue to exist," he said. - AFP /dt

Labels: 2006

posted by BRR Perwakilan Nias @ 7:44 PM