On the tiny island of Taumako in the Solomon Islands' remote eastern province of Temotu live about 500 Polynesians who may be the only ones who still know how to build and sail traditional voyaging canoes in the way their ancestors did. Even their fellow Solomon islanders regard nga Taumako (the Taumako people) as exotic and mysterious; to outsiders they are all but unknown. Dwelling outside the so-called Polynesian Triangle, a construct of the 19th-century French explorer Dumont D'Urville which in no way comprehends the realities of Pacific settlement, they have received little attention in high-profile modern studies of ancient voyagers.

Lying far off major shipping lanes, their small (about 2.5 x 5 km.) island home has few of the conveniences and distractions of twenty-first-century life. Taumako has no roads, airport, telephones, or electricity. Contact with outsiders comes by battery-powered marine radio and the occasional cargo ship. Of necessity residents live much as Oceanic people have for millennia, by subsistence farming and fishing. Natural materials and survival skills that Polynesians in more developed regions have lost remain part of most people's repertoire. Many of these materials and skills, such as those required for manufacture of plant fiber ropes and sails, and understanding of natural phenomena such as weather patterns, are vital to building and sailing the kinds of canoes that enabled Oceanic voyagers to settle the Pacific's remotest islands long before Europeans and modern navigational techniques arrived in the region.

Until recently, however, nga Taumako were in danger of losing the canoe building and sailing knowledge of their ancestors, and with it the spiritual underpinnings of their culture. Although hundreds of voyaging canoes, most if them constructed on Taumako, plied Temotu's waters in the early decades of the twentieth century, by 1960 a centralized colonial government had supplanted an ancient network of autonomous communities linked by trade and kinship, and steamships had replaced sailing canoes. Yet these ships and the cash economy they served neither provided efficient transport nor helped people remain self-sufficient. In fact, encouraging use of modern transport also meant creating dependence on an alien technology and imported materials such as machine parts and fuel oil. Not only did these imports drain cash from an already poor nation, they also brought a battery of new environmental problems to fragile island ecosystems. Meanwhile, magnificent stone-age vessels, like those which had enabled the ancient Polynesians to colonize one of earth's most demanding environments, and to become the boldest seafarers in human history, lay rotting on shore.

Then in 1996, something wonderful happened. Nga Taumako began building voyaging canoes again. Inspired by the few old men and women who still remembered how to construct and sail these craft, young islanders started learning ancestral seafaring skills. They also began to learn modern ways of recording them and sharing them with people in the outside world.

The Vaka Taumako (A Canoe for Taumako) Project was started by Paramount Chief and Master Navigator Koloso Kaveia to document and teach voyaging skills for a new generation eager to learn and live the ways of old. This means not just the crafts of canoe construction and navigation, important as these are, but the entire traditional Oceanic way of life. In the Solomon islands, as elsewhere in the Pacific, indiscriminate adoption of the worst parts of modern urban culture, casino gambling, vapid entertainment, alcohol and drug abuse, tinned food etc, has badly damaged town-dwellers' moral and physical health. Yet ambitious young people gravitate to towns like the provincial capitals of Lata and Auki or the national capital Honiara because their villages have little to offer in the way of wage employment, and few outlets for their talents.

By reviving a traditional economy based on trade and social networks established by generations of their ancestors, Chief Koloso hopes to generate culturally-rooted sustainable jobs for young Taumako and other islanders that will allow them to reap the benefits of modern life, while remaining physically and spiritually at home. As they retrace the old searoads, today's young Taumako have the opportunity not only to preserve the riches of their forebears' science and technology, but to increase them by sharing their traditional knowledge with people the world over.

The Vaka Taumako Project

Contact Dr. Mimi George, Principal Investigator
Mailing address:
Dr. Mimi George and Paramount Chief K. Kaveia
P.O. Box 712, Capt. Cook, HI 96704 USA
e-mail:  george.mimi@gmail.com
(Phone 001 808 936 8462)


H. M. Wyeth, Permanent Secretary
(Phone 001 808 822 0647, FAX 001 808 823 6741)


Larry Williamson, President, The Pacific Traditions Society