the next. The cycle began with the burning of a fire stick,
and until the ceremony was completed, there was a ban on
noise and much secular activity. Each ritual cycle concluded
with the lifting of the taboo in a ceremony known as “freeing
the land” that was emphasized by deliberate loud noise in
contrast to the previous peace. Children ran about shrieking,
and men whooped and yelled from the hills as they went
about their daily work, making hollow booms by beating the
buttresses of giant Tahitian chestnut tree trunks. A detailed
description of the rituals is in Firth’s The Work of the Gods
in Tikopia (1940/1967).
CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY. Tikopia’s relative isolation,
as mentioned above, protected the small island from early in-
trusions by colonizers, traders, and missionaries (who initial-
ly contacted the Tikopia in 1858), but the Tikopia them-
selves discouraged outsiders from settling on their island.
This kept missionaries at bay until 1907. Where much of the
rest of both Polynesia and Melanesia was missionized by Eu-
ropeans, Tikopia’s first resident missionary was a man from
the Banks Islands, a Melanesian. This probably muted to
some degree the impact of a new religion. Where the techno-
logical superiority (including guns) of Europeans in other
parts of the Pacific led to some fairly rapid conversions, in
Tikopia the first missionary was not white and not particu-
larly well equipped. The Tikopia gave him a Tikopian name,
Pa Pangisi (after Banks), and married him to a Tikopian
woman. He spent his whole life with the Tikopia, and his
sons underwent the manhood ceremonies of all Tikopia
boys.
Pa Pangisi was a missionary for the Melanesian Mission,
the Anglican Church in Melanesia. He settled on the leeward
side of the island, where one of the four chiefs lived, the Ariki
Tafua. This chief converted to Christianity, and a number
of commoners belonging to his clan followed him. Pa Pangisi
instituted some changes to traditional practices: he discour-
aged the young men from growing their hair long and join-
ing in the pagan dances. He also insisted on marriage be-
tween young people who were in sexual relationships. In this
matter, his interpretation, through a Christian lens, of sex
outside of marriage failed to take into account the pragmatic
Tikopia thinking underlying human relationships. On a
small island the necessity to control the population had been
recognized in the exhortations of the Work of the Gods. To
this end only the eldest son was allowed to marry, “marriage”
involving the production of children. Younger sons were al-
lowed to have sexual affairs, but they could not produce off-
spring, something ensured through abortion or infanticide.
Pa Pangisi’s insistence on marriage for all sexually active cou-
ples led to a population explosion. In about thirty years the
population increased 50 percent and led to deaths after a cy-
clone, when the island’s carrying and recuperative capacity
was overextended.
The Work of the Gods had also involved the participa-
tion of most of the population in the rituals. By 1955 only
one of the chiefs, Tafua, had become Christian, but many
commoners had converted and were therefore prohibited
from joining in the rites of the old beliefs. This meant that
the remaining three pagan chiefs did not have sufficient ma-
terial and human support to carry out the rituals in a manner
they thought appropriate. The unity of the people for the
good of the land was central to Tikopia belief, and the pagan
chiefs, always pragmatists, met and decided that for the good
of the land they should convert to Christianity. There are
two accounts of the decision to convert.
The first comes from the ethnographic records of Firth
and James Spillius, who carried out fieldwork in Tikopia in
1952 and 1953. They recorded that one chief was baptized
by Pa Pangisi, who had married into this chief’s family, but
the other two chiefs insisted that their reception into the
Church of Melanesia should be performed by the bishop. A
radio message was therefore sent to Honiara asking the bish-
op to come to Tikopia, and the mission ship, the Southern
Cross, set out. The two remaining chiefs and nearly all of
their clans were thereupon baptized as Anglicans. Only one
old woman refused, saying that her husband had died a
pagan and she would too. The degree to which there was a
deeply felt doctrinal understanding is unknown, although it
has been noted that the Ariki Taumako did not intellectually
reject his old gods; he just decided not to worship them any
longer. Nonetheless the old temples were left to decay, the
ritual adzes were destroyed or buried, and new church build-
ings were constructed in the centers of several villages. The
chiefs no longer led the rituals; they were simply members
of the congregation. The first priest was the Melanesian Pa
Pangisi, but the Tikopia quickly arranged for the education
of some of their men as Anglican priests or brothers of the
Franciscan order. Priests and catechists in Tikopia have since
been largely Tikopian.
The second story of the island’s final conversion is con-
sistent with a society taking control of its own history and
rewriting it to some degree. This version, recorded in 1980,
suggests that, rather than the historical accident of being mis-
sionized by Anglicans, a deliberate choice was made. In this
version the chiefs looked at all the religions then practiced
in the Solomon Islands. They rejected Roman Catholicism
on the grounds that the prohibition on priests marrying was
an unnatural practice. They rejected Seventh-day Advent-
ism, to which the people of two other Polynesian outliers in
the Solomons (Rennell and Bellona) had converted, on the
grounds that the dietary restrictions of this religion were un-
realistic. The chiefs considered, it was said, that Anglicans
were the least trouble and that the island would therefore be-
come Anglican.
With one priest on the island but several churches, the
priest moved around the various parishes, named by Angli-
can tradition after saints. Catechists or senior men of rank
could conduct prayer services in the other churches in the
priest’s absence. The mission ship came once a year for the
confirmation of the young, and the priest and other church
functionaries were taken off the island once a year for synod.TIKOPIA RELIGION 9197