The Ways of the Land-Tree: Mapping the North Pentecost Social Landscape

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. On a sunny afternoon, in the shade of a canopy of corrugated iron, beside a smoking fireplace on which green bananas were slowly roasting, my tama (father) and ratahigi ('chief'), Ruben Todali, talked to me about the history of Pentecost Island. He told me that in the past, many centuries before the arrival of tuturani (whites, foreigners) like myself, the people of North Pentecost could not speak. They communicated by way of designs that they described into the ground with their fingers. Instead of people, the sentient and mobile rocks and stones were talkative. 1 The dark soil of the hills and valleys also spoke. So too did the winds, the rain, and the salt water that lapped against the sand and coral of the island's coast. But some time ago this situation reversed, so now it is people who talk, while the land, winds, rain and sea remain wordless. Nowadays, said Ruben, people sometimes said of their island, 'We must speak for the land, because the land cannot speak for itself' (from an interview with Jif Ruben Todali, Avatvotu, May 1999). This intimate connection between people, land and language—of language as having somehow vacated the environment for the mouths of people—is echoed in the Raga words 'Sia Raga'. Raga speakers (see below) use this pronominal phrase when they wish to express a shared identity of language, land and alengan vanua ('ways of the place'). The word 'sia' means 'earthquake', and in this specific context refers to a seismic jolt known to have taken place many millennia ago, which caused the island's emergence from under the sea. 'Raga' refers to the Raga language, and also, in that language, to the island of Pentecost itself. In this paper I use the term Sia Raga to designate the Raga speakers of North Pentecost, being those people who claim ancestral connections to bwatun vanua ('foundation places') in the Raga-speaking region of North Pentecost, and who express that connection through shared links of land, kinship, language and culture. 2 Pentecost is a long narrow island stretching some 63 kilometres north to south and 12 kilometres across at its widest point. It is home to five distinctive vernacular languages (Tryon 1996: 170). The Raga language group has the highest number of speakers on the island—roughly 6,000. The area in which Raga is the defining language extends approximately 20kms southwards from the northern tip to Tasvarongo village, and also includes areas of South Maewo, the