| caption: |
Chapter six: Cycle migration |
| caption: |
pressures on land and crop failures |
| note: |
footnotes indicated by boxes within square brackets |
| text: |
Although a large proportion of the land formerly available to the Impoi community had passed to Kukis and the resettlement of the Impoi site could only prove a temporary expedient to improve the food supply, such land as was available to the settlers was of higher fertility than any accessible to Asalu and in the first few years Impoi crops were good. One or two more households moved from Asalu to Impoi each winter and by 1941 Impoi had 29 houses and Asalu 26. In 1941 there was almost complete failure of the rice-crop at Asalu, and partial (133) failure to Impoi. The Asalu community then disintegrated further, the Hakaokhang segment of 11 households leaving to resettle the Hakaokhang site. No regenerated land was available there, and the move sprang from a recrudescence of the earlier quarrel between Asalu and Hakaokhang. On the Asalu site there remained one household of an Impoi autochthon and 14 households of Asalu autochthons. The nucleus of this remnant community were aged men and women anxious to die and be buried on the Asalu site, and the remainder were their younger kinsfolk. |
