Gope board
Papua New Guinean tribal art
A gope board (or kwoi) is a wooden ritual object made in the Papuan Gulf of New Guinea. Each board represents the spirit of an ancestral hero that can protect clans from evil spirits and death.
Design
Gope is a term for a spiritually charged carved board made to represent an ancestral hero in the Papuan Gulf of Papua New Guinea. Papuan Gulf people of Kikori, Baimaru, Uruma, Hohao, and Orokolo refer to these sculptured boards as Kwoi.
The sculptures are often made from the sides of an old canoe.
Use
Gope sculptures are believed to protect the island clansmen from evil spirits and death. A full size board is made and named by the uncle of a boy for his initiation (into adulthood) ceremony. Also, warriors are awarded gope boards for each act of bravery they perform in battle—these boards are often made from the remains of an enemy's canoe. Gope boards have a consistent elliptical shape and can vary in size up to eight feet long. They are carved in relief and then painted with lime (to whiten), red ochre, and other native paints.
“Gope board” enters the record as papua New Guinean tribal art. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gope, board and Papua can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5584254. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gope board” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.