Appearing in contradistinction to this appraisal of Sia Raga social organisation are widely held impressions of alengan tuturani, or the ‘ways of whites/foreigners’. Tuturani has become an important oppositional category in the Sia Raga classification of their world, providing terminology for marking the otherness of introduced objects and styles. The concept of tuturani gives the Sia Raga a tag for most every plant, animal, artefact and kastom that has crossed their shores since contact with Europeans (cf. Dening 1980). People might speak of ginau tuturani (white man’s things), including such things as uhi tuturani (fruit: tuturani, pawpaw) and wai tuturani (water: tuturani, alcohol). In this way, alengan tuturani (white man’s fashion) is contrasted with alengan vanua (ways of the place) as two related but opposing ‘sides’ (tavalui) within Sia Raga classificatory idiom.

Once I told Jif Ruben that my parents were divorced, and that this was not an uncommon situation for children of my generation. In response, he suggested that together we write a book outlining the basic principles of Sia Raga kinship, and of moiety dualism in particular, and that we present this book to the New Zealand Government. The nationwide implementation of this social strategy in New Zealand would, he believed, put an end to the break-up of marriages.

When people say that there is no divorce on Pentecost they are articulating their faith in alengan vanua (ways of the place), and of a social cohesion bound up in the play between ‘sides’ (tavalui). ^[24] At the same time, Jif Ruben’s proposal reflects the idea that, in contrast with Sia Raga sociality, the world of tuturani (whites) is ‘free’. It is a society without structure, and devoid of the restraints formed by the webs of connectedness that bind the two moieties together. The price of this freedom, social chaos, is seen to extend beyond the family sphere. It is also made evident in negative images of theft, violence, self-advancement, and the gap between rich and poor in the West.

What follows is abstracted from a North Pentecost creation history that was narrated orally by the late Father Walter Hadye Lini in 1981. This history, which was transcribed and translated from Raga by Lini and David Walsh, is titled ‘Veveven bwatun tauvwa, ata la Vanua Raga’, or ‘A story about the beginning of creation, from Pentecost Island’ (Walsh 1981). ^[25] After the emergence of the island from the sea, the story begins with the birth of a baby boy from a kind of shellfish. After the boy grows up, he meets a sea snake that later transforms into a woman:

Thus the man and the woman came together and produced children. They two produced ten children while they stayed there, at Atano. They produced ten children, and they [the children] stayed there—and then they two moved on and went so that they would stay at the place of that woman. They both went and stayed there, at Anarasi. They stayed there until they produced some children there. Their children were many—they two arose from there and went up and stayed at Loltongo. They stayed at Loltongo and they produced some children there. They produced some children, and they [the children] stayed there—they two arose from there and went up and stayed at Bwatnapni. They stayed there and produced some children there also. They produced some children and they [the children] stayed there, and then they two arose from there and went up and stayed at Vat-tangele. They stayed at Vat-tangele and they produced children there also.

It—all the children that they two produced—began at Ahivo and went up until it reached Vat-tangele; some were white people and some were black people. Today we call the white people tuturani and the black people atatmato. (Walsh 1981: 368-9)

The people then began quarrelling with a land snake, teltele, who eventually trapped them in their village by covering the entrance with a large rock. They then decided that the white people should try to escape by digging their way out of the village:

The tuturani dug a hole—it went down underneath the fence of that village. They dug it—it went until it went down and came out on the coast; but on that coast stood various boats they had made—canoes and sailing ships. When the tuturani went down so that they would get away, they took those sailing ships and went with them, and those black people stayed and kept the canoes that lay there.

The tuturani went—they went and stayed at other islands on which today tuturani are found; and the black people stayed at Raga—so today black people are found on Raga island … Raga people today say that the tuturani went with those sailing ships and also with all the knowledge and wisdom, and therefore today the black people stay back from certain knowledge and wisdom which the tuturani know today. (Walsh 1981: 370; all spelling is as it appears in the original text.)

This history differs from those that I was told on North Pentecost in several important respects. The unitary origins and kinship of atatmato and tuturani, along with the latter’s departure from rather than arrival at Pentecost Island, represents a revision that bears relation to the political climate of national independence in which the story was told. ^[26] However, the narrative components provide a condensation of themes that recur frequently in Sia Raga histories. ^[27]

In particular, ‘upward’ (hae) colonisation of the land along a north to south itinerary followed by division or branching into ‘sides’ reinscribes the crucial orienting pathways by which the Sia Raga understand the emergent and present relationship of people to knowledge and place. Here, moving from the village of Atano in the far north (at Ahivo, ‘at down’), then moving progressively southwards through a series of places—Anarasi (at Abwatuntora), Loltong, Bwatnapni (in Central Pentecost)—until eventually reaching Vatun Gele at the very south of the island, the peopling of the land occurs along a reverse trajectory to that which was forged by Bwatmahanga in his journey to abanoi. Significantly, histories recounting the 19th-century arrival of the Anglican Church and its spread across the island also follow this path (for instance, Leona n.d.). Likewise, the departure of tuturani, ‘with those sailing ships and also with all the knowledge and wisdom’ (Walsh 1981: 370), represents a splitting into ambivalently composed ‘sides’. This is understood to exist within much the same kind of relationship as the two Sia Raga moieties, Bule and Tabi.

In this chapter, we have seen how the people of North Pentecost deploy metaphors based on arboreal imagery in order to explain ideas of origin, ancestry, historical emergence and social organisation. In the apical ancestor, Bwatmahanga, we saw how the concept of foundations or roots (bwatuna), coupled with that of bifurcation or branching (mahanga), constituted significant features of reference within these metaphors. The importance of trees as images of spatio-temporality rests not only in their shape, but in the manner of their growth. The becoming of the tree is seen to ‘take place’ along these two interrelated trajectories (hala), one appearing to take the form of lineal sequence, the second the form of divergence or branching. As the land-tree designs drawn by Jif Ruben and others demonstrate, the tree has the capacity to incorporate simultaneously an atemporal cartography or topography and a spatialised temporality and itinerant history.

Anyone familiar with the ethnography of Southern Asia and the Pacific will be aware that the employment of trees as metaphors for understanding social topography on historical terms are common throughout this region. ^[28] What is unusual about the Sia Raga example, and similar to the Moorhead people (Rumsey 2001: 28), is that although this topography is considered to have emerged in sequential fashion, it is not perceived to be hierarchically ordered, as so often appears to be the case elsewhere. The Sia Raga conceive of historical linearity as articulated with spatial divergence, and in terms of this articulation the past does not appear as a series of substitutions, but rather as layers of renewal. Histories produced within the rubric of this ontology entail a condensation of the language of time into that of space and place. In stressing the presence of historical location and movement, the past is not seen to be wholly ‘gone’. Instead, the past might constitute a crucial path of action. For people in ureure, travelling such a path entails an overcoming of crises brought about through the passing of time. This pathway leads to the perfection of abanoi, where lies the truth of the people of the place.