‘With the consent of the tribe:’ Marking lands on Tanna and Erromango, New Hebrides

ABSTRACT

It is now something of a cliché to talk about the sale of Indigenous lands for what is seen as a pittance in contemporary terms, and to ask whether ‘the natives’ really understood what was being sold. A variety of sources, from archival to archaeological and oral historical, can be brought to bear on the colonial history of relationships to land. Missionary records from Tanna and Erromango, Vanuatu, provide evidence for the ways that people in the past and the present marked places on the landscape in different media to carve out political, economic, and religious relationships with the islands in which they lived, and the exchanges that took place as part of this process. Reflections on contemporary relationships produced in the context of archaeological fieldwork provide further materials for considering these ongoing dynamics.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous lands
• missionaries
• exchange
• Vanuatu
• Melanesia

Acknowledgements

I thank Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard for inviting me to present a paper at the ‘Material Encounters’ conference in Canberra in February 2015 and to contribute to this special issue. I also thank Anne Naupa and Agustin Tevi in the Nasenol Akaev blong Vanuatu, and the people of Erromango and Tanna who supported this research. My research was funded by an Australian Research Council DECRA (DE130101703) grant, hosted at the Australian National University from 2013–2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DE130101703].