Traditional Culture - Miconesia

The Chuukese have a special bond with their land, sea and reefs. This is evident through a spiritual association which encompasses stories and the determined ownership of the land and water by chuukese lineages and clans.

Many landscape features provide deep-seated connections to Chuukese history, mythology and settlement of the islands. These sites and stories are still a powerful and tangible part of Chuukese society.

It has been shown that villages and islands fought over the ownership of land, water and the resources, and different islands owned sections of the barrier reef. It is also known that villages and clans own submerged reefs inside the lagoon and it is enshrined in today's Chuukese Constitution to this effect.

Hall & Pelzer (1946) noted "The Trukese speak of lagoon in the same way that they speak of soil. Property rights to lagoon, like those to fish weirs, are not observed today, at least on Romonum Island. The natives still know who has rights in theory, however, though ignoring them in practice. It is possible that with the renewal of aboriginal fishing techniques, following the recent removal of Okinawan fisherman from Truk, there may be a tendency to start reasserting property rights to lagoon." As of 2005, this has not been asserted.

There are a number of natural sites and archaeological sites that are still considered today as important to the Chuukese. Natural sites that are valued by the local community for their association with traditional history include Mt. Tonaachaw on the island of Weno and the Turtle cave on the island of Pata for example and there are a number of similar sites on other islands. There is at least one petroglyph site on the island of Weno and although little is known about the site, Chuukese regard it as an important.

Petroglyph site on Weno

There are also a number archaeological signatures of the pre-contact period that Chuukese today value because of there association with the early traditional history. They include some of the villages located on the lagoon islands and where archaeological material dates can be found that dates back to 2300 BP, from the village of Iras on Weno (King & Parker, 1984); 2350 to 1650BP from Sapota on Fefan (Rainbird, 2004: 89) and from Mechitiw, the village established by the first Chuukese chief, Sowukachaw (King, 1978). The remains of wuuts as either reconstructed houses (generally re-built in concrete to resist the typhoons) and/or stone platforms can be found on all of the lagoon islands. As Chuukese moved up the hillsides to settle, stone platforms for wuuts and/or defensive sites can be found, such as on Mount Tonaachaw on Weno; Chukienu on Tol; and the most well-known 'fort' site of Fauba on Tol, dated c. 400BP (Rainbird, 2004).

Other significant aspects in the culture of the Chuukese, are their social organisation and the mixture of what western cultures call 'tangible' and 'intangible' cultural heritage and which some of it is passed on to the next generations. Hall & Pelzer (1946) state that "Truk society is divided into three large groups: chiefs, chief's people and common people or low-class people. In the old days status was predetermined at birth. In the chief, his activities and his associates one finds the core of Truk culture." As an individual in a lineage, you had little individual rights, you were governed by the chief and he had control over land (and what grew on it), movable personal property, food and marriages (Gladwin & Sarason, 1953). Lineages formed clans and the chief of the leading clan was the village chief. In pre-European times the hierarchy stopped here, there were no island chiefs unless through expediency villages fought together a common enemy, then once it was finished it quickly reverted (Hall & Pelzer). Wars were therefore fought essentially between lineages. The lineage chief and lineage customs controlled the way Chuukese lived.

In regard to cultural heritage much of what Chuukese value and pass on are the traditional stories, sometimes associated with sites, such as Mount Tonaachaw on Weno, sometimes where there are no or little physical remains. For instance, they have a number of dances which signify stories. Many believe in ghosts and the use of magic. A lot of the Chuukese culture is tied up in their every day traditional lives and this is their heritage that they have passed onto the next generation. "It is safe generalization to say that Micronesians as a whole are less interested in their historic properties than in preserving the integrity of their traditional cultural systems. To the extent that historic properties are important to these systems, they are important to Micronesians. Those that do not figure in their traditional systems are not likely to be of great concern, however interesting they may be to archaeologists and other scholars from outside the islands" (Parker, 1987).

Traditional fishing on the reefs using hand nets