Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Nukuoro belongs to a family of Polynesian Outlier languages, which are spoken by island populations in Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia.These languages, though geographically outside the primary region of Polynesian influence, are more closely related to Polynesian languages like Samoan and Tongan than they are to their Micronesian and Melanesian neighbors.There are an estimated 1,000 speakers of Nukuoro.In recent decades, due to limited living space and arable land on Nukuoro Atoll, large numbers of Nukuoro speakers have relocated to Pohnpei, the state capital of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), and to various locations in the United States; in fact, the diaspora population of Nukuoro now outnumbers the in-situ population approximately two to one.Like many Pacific island cultures, Nukuoro boasts a vibrant oral tradition of chants, songs, and narratives, which center the culture and the language distinctly within both Polynesia and Micronesia.The knowledge contained within these materials is vast, encompassing the topography and directional systems of the atoll, family and social organization, ethnic origins and contacts, material culture, and spiritual cosmology.Much of this knowledge, integral to the cultural heritage of the Nukuoro people, is only known by a handful of speakers or has been forgotten entirely.In order to preserve this material, Nukuoro speakers have chosen to share narratives, chants, and songs both within and outside the Nukuoro community.Chants and songs are performed at cultural heritage celebrations, yearly events that take place in the Nukuoro Cultural Center in Pohnpei, and storytellers narrate for younger audiences.Storytellers have also recorded narratives with linguists outside the community for publication in books (Carroll 1980) and online.In this paper, we present the creation myth of Nukuoro, recorded in June 2015 by Johnny Rudolph at Swarthmore College. 1 The Nukuoro text was later translated by the primary author, working with Rudolph during a field trip to Pohnpei in June 2016.The narrative identifies three distinct creation events within the Nukuoro cosmology: the creation of the circular coral reef, the creation of the islets which sit on top of the reef, and the arrival of human settlers on the atoll.The first of these stories, which describes the formation of the coral reef after a pearl is planted in the ocean, is not widely known in the Nukuoro community and does not appear in the collected canon (Carroll 1980).The Nukuoro creation myth employs motifs and plot elements found in myths throughout the Pacific, which we survey in Section 3 to provide context for the narrative, which appears in Section 4. Analysis of these myths as a collective body of knowledge can provide evidence for the migration patterns, land settlement, and material culture of prehistoric Polynesians.In Section 5, we offer a cursory analysis of the linguistic, discourse, and narrative features of the text.The presentation of this narrative, along with its thematic contextualization and linguistic and ethnopoetic analysis, supplements a growing collection of Nukuoro materials carefully preserved by the community with the support of linguists and anthropologists outside the community.
Authors: E. Drummond, J. Rudolph, K. David Harrison
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3002624672