The Pandanus People

We have already seen this tale, under a rather different guise, in the Little Makin series Appendix 1 , for it is there related Section 1 how Auriaria stole from Taranga in the underworld not a wife indeed, but a tree which nevertheless became an ancestress. The essential myth-fabric—the victim, his name Taranga, the theft, its result the birth of ancestors—is the same in both cases; only externals vary, 23 and the story has been localized in the Tabiteuea account: The names of Na Areau's progeny by Taranga's wife on Tabiteuea are given as Au-te-rarangaki, Au-te-venevene, and Au-te-tabanou, which signify respectively: Au-the-continually-overturned, Au-the-continually-reclining, and Au-the-skull.

The same context links them together in a single religious category by stating that their anti was Auriaria. Their names obviously belong to the same family as that of Au-riaria, which signifies Au-continually-rising-over-the-horizon, 24 and it seems pretty - 69 clear that in the god and his three eponyms who are certainly not human ancestors we have but four different personifications or attitudes of a single central identity named Au, who was the object of the Karongoa cult.

Having thus defined his groups by reference to their socio-religious indices, the native historian proceeds to describe the migration from Tabiteuea to Samoa, making Au-the-skull now the inclusive index of the movement: The day of voyaging came. Au-the-skull with his people voyaged to Samoa. In the next paragraph 22 , dealing with the settlement of the immigrants in Samoa, the Tabiteuea history links itself directly with the Little Makin tradition through the name of Batuku. The only differences are that, in this version, Batuku is presented not as a god or a skull, but as the king of the tree of Samoa and the progeny of Au-the-skull; while Koururu the brow appears as his brother, not his offspring as the Little Makin story [Appendix 1, Section 2 9 ] makes him.

As far as the practice of human sacrifice is concerned, the text from Tabiteuea tersely confirms the more detailed Little Makin account by recording that the food of the kings of the tree was human heads. Such, upon the evidence of the Tabiteuea tradition, is the tale of migrations implied in those few opening words of Section 2 in the Little Makin text: Section 6 of the Tabiteuea version deals with that event in semi-mythical language, stating - 70 that the progeny of Au-the-skull were flung by their anti Auriaria northward from Samoa to Tabiteuea Island.

The Little Makin version interlocks perfectly with this account, in that it also brings a child of the skull, one Rairaueana, from Samoa to Tabiteuea; after which, in its closing paragraph 53 it shows how the line of Rairaueana migrated still farther northward, up to Butaritari, there to produce the ancestors of three high-chiefly dynasties in the Gilbert Group, and of another in Mille of the Marshalls.

Traced backwards into history, therefore, upon the evidence of the texts examined, the lineage of, say, the high-chiefly dynasty of Butaritari takes us first southward to Tabiteuea, and thence southward again into Samoa. Looping back northward, the line passes once more through Tabiteuea; thence, up to Tarawa; thence, westward to the land called Kai-n-tikuaaba; and finally, back to the earliest fatherlands called Abaiti and Abatoa.

According to the Tabiteuea account, it was in those very ancient homes of the race that Auriaria, the god of the head-hunting rituals of Samoa, first dwelt with his tree, a pandanus, whose name was The Ancestress-Sun. To quote now from the Beru text:. Batuku and Kanii are said to have been kings beneath the tree of Samoa, and their food was the heads of the first-born, the eldest. The heads of the first-born children of the people of Nikumaroro were taken to be the food of those kings. And in the men Kanii and Batuku appeared the breed of Samoa, the breed of red men, who were called the people of Matang, the people of the tree Kai-n-tikuaaba: Matang, as will be remembered from the preceding section, is in popular belief the far-western paradise where the fair-skinned ancestral deities—Auriaria, Nei Tituaabine, Tabu-ariki, and others—forever feast upon the red food called te renga.

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The inference has been drawn that this land was one of the early fatherlands of the Gilbertese ancestors. It is almost unnecessary to point out how greatly such an inference is strengthened by the independent evidence from Beru and Tabiteuea that the race of Auriaria was still called, long after it had migrated out of the west into Samoa, the breed or people of Matang.

The concrete nature of such evidence clearly sets the land of Matang within the category of material realities. As a piece of cultural information, the direct connection of Batuku and his breed with Matang is of first-rate importance, for it brings their practice of head-hunting, allied with the cult of an ancestral skull, into immediate concatenation with the chewing of the red food called te renga. The close original association of the betel-chewing habit with the practice of head-hunting and a highly developed cult connected with the skulls of relatives has been demonstrated by Rivers.

Rivers has stated that there is no evidence of headhunting in Polynesia as an organized and habitual practice, having the social or religious importance which attaches to the habit among the head-hunting peoples of Melanesia. The evidence of Gilbertese tradition just examined is therefore of a somewhat sensational nature, and if, as it seems to show, a numerous head-hunting folk with memories of the betel-chewing habit did indeed penetrate, by way of the Gilbert Islands, as far as Samoa, it will be necessary to explain why the vestigia of the betel-culture now traceable in Polynesia are—if any at all—so slight as to be almost unrecognizable.

A sufficient explanation will, I think, disclose itself when certain other aspects of the culture of the tree-people shall have been examined. The remainder of this section will be devoted to a review of some further traditions of cannibalism in the Gilbert Group, obtained from social groups other than the Karongoa clan. The first of these, whereof the vernacular text and an interlinear translation appear in Appendix 3, emanates from the clan of Keaki, which claims the tropic-bird as one of its totems 30 and Nei Tituaabine as its ancestral deity.

The free translation of the story here follows:. After this point, the narrative describes the voyages of the tropic-bird people, under the leadership of Koura, down the Gilbert Group, and their colonization of the four islands of Butaritari, Abaiang, Tarawa, and Beru. This carries the tradition beyond the scope of the present subject, but it is worth while to point out in passing the evident criss-cross of immigrant currents that was set up in the Gilbert Islands by the return of the Samoan branch of the race to Micronesia.

While the Karongoa clans of the two texts first examined are seen to have entered the group at Tabiteuea in the south, and to have proceeded thereafter up to the extreme northerly islands of Little Makin and Butaritari, the tropic-bird groups of the tradition now presented took the diametrically opposite course of invading the group at Little Makin, and working their way thence down to Beru, an island as far to the southward as - 76 Tabiteuea.

This single example must suffice at present to illustrate the restless and complex swirl of clan-movements that vexed the group during the period immediately succeeding the incursion from Samoa. Regarding now the technique of the Keaki tradition, we have in this narrative a good example of the method common to many clan-histories in the Gilbert Islands. The tale is fundamentally a record of facts, the central event being the immigration of a certain man-eating group from Samoa into Little Makin; but, instead of naming the actual ancestors who took part in the invasion, the historian uses the clan-deity and totem-creature—Nei Tituaabine with her tropic-bird—as social indices, and attributes to them the historic acts of the whole Keaki group of immigrants for which they stand.

Setting aside the myth-fabric, and rationalizing the account of facts, the tradition may be read as follows: When the ancestors of the Keaki clan were obliged to leave Samoa, they fled northward until they came to Little Makin. There they landed, having secured their first foothold in the neighbourhood of the bathing-pool called Tengare-n-nao.

From that centre, they proceeded to attack the local population, their victims being killed and eaten. The practice of cannibalism, however, ceased for a very definite reason, which is made apparent in the prayer to Nei Tituaabine put into the mouths of the victimized people paragraph 3 of text: The passage means that Nei Tituaabine was the ancestral deity not only of the invaders, but of the invaded: This is, of course, valuable support to the conclusion dictated by the Tabiteuea text Appendix 2 , that the immigration from Samoa into the Gilbert Group was nothing more that the return of a race—or part of a race—along an ancient migration-route to one of its earlier homes.

The intent of the historian, in the passage quoted above, is to explain that the incoming tropic-bird folk, though first obliged to fight their own ancestral kin for a foothold upon Little Makin, nevertheless ceased to practice cannibalism upon them because they shared with them the cult of a single clan-deity, Nei Tituaabine. This naturally raises the question why the people of the Keaki clan are not, to this day, high chiefs of the island.

The answer is implied in the final paragraph of the Little Makin text Appendix 1 which we have examined. While the tropic-bird group was invading the extreme northerly Gilbert Islands, that branch of the Karongoa group which was led by Rairaueana the Man-of-Matang, child of Batuku the skull, was immigrating into Tabiteuea.

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The genealogical details supplied in the closing sentence of the text show that, in a later generation, the Karongoa clan moved northward, in the person of Rairaueana's descendant Teietoa, to Butaritari. By that time, the tropic-bird folk must have been well established as overlords of Little Makin, and probably also of Butaritari, but such was the sacred prestige of Karongoa among the Samoan immigrants that it is very doubtful whether the tropic-bird folk withstood—or even desired for a moment to withstand—the prerogative of Rairaueana's group to supersede them.

But perhaps the clearest evidence of the racial identity of the tropic-bird clans with the breed of Matang 38 is contained in the intimate relationship of their ancestral beings, Koura and Nei Tituaabine, with that very index of the Karongoa-Matang culture, the ancestral pandanus of Auriaria called Kai-n-tikuaaba, the tree of the sacred mountain. Out of - 79 that tree, according to the Little Makin text in Appendix 1 paragraph 4 , sprang not only the Karongoa god Tabuariki, but also every other great clan-deity of the head-hunting people, including Nei Tituaabine, who grew from one of the branches, and Koura, child of the first bloom.

The inference is that all the social groups who believed themselves descended through their gods from the tree were, equally with Karongoa, of the breed of Matang. The following very explicit passage from the Beru text already quoted confirms the conclusion: The tree of Auriaria may thus be regarded henceforth as the index, not only of Karongoa, but of a whole congeries of red i. But the full lore of the tree—its myth, its history, its head-hunting rituals—was peculiar to Karongoa.

Only such fragments of that lore as Karongoa passed for circulation were permitted to subsist in the traditions of other social groups, and these were so cryptically presented that, in the course of time, their meaning was lost to the uninitiate clans who purveyed them. Examples of such morsels of occulted truth are to be seen in the Keaki text. In paragraph 1, the man-eating tropic-bird of Nei Tituaabine is pictured as having settled at Little Makin upon the branch of a pandanus-tree, whereof one of the three recorded names is Ara-maunga-tabu Pandanus-of-the-sacred-mountain.

In paragraph 6, the ancestral being Koura is shown to have grown from this same tree. The pandanus of the tropic-bird on Little Makin is but a projected shadow of the ancestral pandanus of Auriaria, the parent of the Keaki deities, the mother-tree of a cannibal race, where of Keaki was a member, and whose kings once received sacrifice of human heads on the slopes of a sacred mountain.

A tradition of the social group called Karumaetoa 41 concerning an ancestor named Tewatu or Towatu links itself usefully with the Keaki text, and emphasizes the association of cannibalism with the land of Matang. A free translation of the Karumaetoa narrative appears in Appendix 4, and will now be very shortly analyzed. The first five paragraphs of this story form an effective digest of the Keaki tradition concerning the invasion of Little Makin by the tropic-bird people, and confirm the account of their man-eating habits duly inhibited by Nei Tituaabine which we have already examined.

The text indeed adds somewhat to our knowledge of the invaders' movements before their onset upon the Northern Gilberts, by describing in figurative language paragraph 1 what seems to have been their unsuccessful attempt to establish themselves first upon the island of Beru.

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But as far as the mythical content of the narrative is concerned, it is interesting to note the Karumaetoa historian's complete silence as to the association of Koura and Nei Tituaabine with a pandanus tree. The reason is, that the origin of the Keaki ancestral deities is no concern of Karumaetoa's: From paragraph 6 onward, the narrative is purely Karumaetoa history.

The tropic-bird invasion, leading to the establishment of a Keaki dynasty upon Little Makin, caused the flight of one of the vanquished autochthones, named Tewatu, to Tabiteuea. In other words, Tewatu fled to Matang because he was descended from ancestors to whom that land had once been home, which is to say, he was of the breed of Matang. The same conclusion as to this personage's race may be reached from another angle, for we recognize his deity Tabu-ariki as one of the principal clan-gods sprung from the ancestral tree of the Samoan invaders who, as we have seen, called themselves the breed of Matang.

There can thus remain little doubt as to the validity of our previous finding upon the Keaki text paragraph 3 that the immigrants from Samoa were of the same ancestral stock as the people—including, as we now know, Tewatu—whom they found established upon Little Makin; and this again lends support to the evidence of the Tabiteuea text, first, that the Gilbert Group was colonized by the tree-folk en route from a western fatherland into southern Polynesia, and second, that the invasion from Samoa was nothing but the reflux along its old migration-track of that part of the race which had passed into the South Pacific.

It was Tewatu's descendant and namesake, Tewatu-of-Matang, who paragraphs 8 and 9 of text came back from Matang to Beru two generations after the flight from Little Makin. We cannot take the text too literally as to the number of generations passed in Matang, but the return to the Gilbert Group is dated for us with some accuracy by the reference made in paragraph 11 to - 82 Taane-n-toa the second, a famous high chief of Beru, with whom Tewatu had dealings.

According to the best Beru pedigrees in male lines, Taane-n-toa flourished 19 generation ago, so that probably not less than and not more than years have elapsed since the immigration described in the Karumaetoa history. Paragraph 9 makes a particular point of the transport by Tewatu of his parents' skulls from Matang to Beru.

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In another version of this story which I possess, it is declared that the hero used the two skulls as his drinking vessels, but paragraph 13 of the text exhibited indicates that, on his arrival at Beru, he buried them near the boua 42 stone pillar at which he practised the cult of his ancestral deity. As we have seen, the cult of an ancestral deity together with an ancestral skull was the basis upon which rested the head-hunting and cannibal rituals of the tree-folk in Samoa, who called themselves the breed of Matang.

The texts which have made this fact apparent, however, belong to the secret lore of Karongoa, and are confined to a narrow circle; futhermore, though they give rise to the plain inference, they fall short of furnishing the direct statement, that the cult of god and skull emanated from Matang or, indeed, from any land in the west; thus, the concrete evidence of the Karumaetoa text that Tewatu came direct from Matang with his cult of one of the best-known tree-gods linked with that of his parents' skulls, plus the habit of cannibalism, is of high value, inasmuch as it is of a domestic rather than a sacerdotal kind, and concatenates in a single stroke all the main features of the Matang-religion with which this section is chiefly concerned.

The honour with which he was treated by the chief—including the ascription to him of a sitting-room in the maneaba at Tabiang—plainly indicates that he was a person to be placated rather than opposed: What, then, prevented it from continuing to pursue its cannibal habits on the island? It was seen in paragraph 3 of the Keaki text that the tropic-bird invaders of Little Makin ceased to prey upon the local population because both immigrants and autochthones practised the cult of the same ancestral deity, Nei Tituaabine.

Paragraph 13 of the Karumaetoa story now provides us with an exactly parallel situation, the historian using the same oblique or allusive method of conveying his facts as that observed in the former instance. Thou shalt not after this eat the people of Beru. This accords perfectly with the evidence of the Little Makin text Appendix 1 , which shows the children of Batuku-the-skull organizing their head-hunting raids, not against the people of the tree in Samoa, but against the inhabitants of Nikumaroro Nieue , Futuna, and Tonga, about miles overseas.

Typically, the fruit changes from green to bright orange or red as it matures. The fruits can stay on the tree for more than 12 months. Pandanus trees are of cultural, health, and economic importance in the Pacific, second only to the coconut on atolls. They propagate readily from seed, but popular cultivars are also widely propagated from branch cuttings by local people. Species growing on exposed coastal headlands and along beaches have thick 'stilt roots' as anchors in the loose sand. While pandanus are distributed throughout the tropical and subtropical islands and coastlines of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, [17] [18] [19] they are most numerous on the low islands and barren atolls of Polynesia and Micronesia.

The tree is grown and propagated from shoots that form spontaneously in the axils of lower leaves. Pandanus fruits are eaten by animals including bats , rats , crabs , and elephants , but the vast majority of species are dispersed primarily by water. Pandanus leaves are used for handicrafts. Artisans collect the leaves from plants in the wild, cutting only mature leaves so that the plant will naturally regenerate.

The leaves are sliced into fine strips and sorted for further processing. Weavers produce basic pandan mats of standard size or roll the leaves into pandan ropes for other designs. This is followed by a coloring process, in which pandan mats are placed in drums with water-based colors.

After drying, the colored mats are shaped into final products, such as placemats or jewelry boxes. Final color touch-ups may be applied. Pandan leaves from Pandanus amaryllifolius are used widely in Southeast Asian and South Asian cuisines to add a distinct aroma to various dishes and to complement flavors like chocolate. Because of their similarity in usage, pandan leaves are sometimes referred to as the " vanilla of Asia.

Dried leaves and bottled extract may be bought in some places. Pandan leaves are known as daun pandan in Indonesian and Malay ; dahon ng pandan lit. In Southeast Asia, pandan leaves are mainly used in sweets such as coconut jam and pandan cake. In Indonesia and Malaysia , pandan is also added to rice and curry dishes such as nasi lemak.

In the Philippines , pandan leaves are commonly paired with coconut meat a combination referred to as buko pandan in various desserts and drinks like maja blanca and gulaman. In Indian cooking , the leaf is added whole to biryani , a kind of rice pilaf , made with ordinary rice as opposed to that made with the premium-grade basmati rice.

The basis for this use is that both basmati and pandan leaf contains the same aromatic flavoring ingredient, 2-acetylpyrroline. In Sri Lanka , pandan leaves are a major ingredient used in the country's cuisine.

Aboriginal significance of the Pandanus tree celebrated

Kewra also spelled Kevda or Kevada is an extract distilled from the pandan flower, used to flavor drinks and desserts in Indian cuisine. Also, kewra or kevada is used in religious worship, and the leaves are used to make hair ornaments worn for their fragrance as well as decorative purpose in western India. Species with large and medium fruit are edible, notably the many cultivated forms of P.

The fruit is eaten raw or cooked. Throughout Oceania , almost every part of the plant is used, with various species different from those used in Southeast Asian cooking. Media related to Pandanus at Wikimedia Commons. The dense, leafy canopy, in a healthy grove of Pandanus, naturally provides shade and rain resistant shelter for us humans and other critters. With Mount Coolum and Mudjimba Island in the background, serendipity saw whales, dolphins, sooty oystercatchers and osprey, pass the morning's gathering. Resources are now being sought through community group proposals to continue Pandanus dieback monitoring and mitigation works in the months to come for the coastal areas between Noosa National Park and Bribie Island.

Free access to and sharing of the Pandanus history booklet is available through www. Weather STORM warnings were issued across the state and heavy rains affected several coastal areas ahead of a forecast wet weekend. News Parts of Queensland to see deluge by Sunday. News If you're proud of your results, let the Sunshine Coast Daily know.