2 - Human Settlement

Summary

There are many traditions of explaining how the world and its people came to be where they are and how they are. In this chapter we present several samples, including oral histories in poetry, archaeology in the prose of the natural sciences, linguistics in the form of genealogies, and the more conventional language of academic history.

All people order knowledge of past events, as statements of eternal truths and guides to current choices. These folk histories are not fixed, they need not agree with each other, and they do not ‘add up’ to a chronology of Islanders’ experiences. For many centuries Hawaiians and Palauans told variations of the following narratives, before professional folklorists recorded, published and fixed them. Two sets of conventions therefore shape these texts. The Kumulipo chant and the ‘Story of Latmikaik’ are not narrowly historical, but creation stories from Polynesian Hawai’i and Micronesian Palau. They describe the creation of the islands and their inhabitants; then they go on to their more important purpose when they prescribe proper relations between people and spirits and environment, between past and future, and among different groups of people within the community. The narratives must hold the audience’s attention in order to instruct them, so they use every available poetic device.