6 - Conversion and consolidation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 January 2010
Summary
… we proceeded to a small island at no great distance, and climbed the hill to a place where there were four well-built tombs, surrounded by skulls, each with the death blow in evidence. There was a momentary hesitation, – it is not a particularly cheerful business to defile your grandfather's grave, and to burn his bones, even for a brown man, – but it was only momentary, and the stones were rolled down the hill into the sea, and the bones in them made into a heap with the skulls of the victims who had been sacrificed to the dead man and a huge bonfire lighted over them. It is only a beginning; it will be a work of time to get rid of them all for the tombs are scattered all over the mainland.
Henry Welchman (Melanesian Mission), Southern Cross Log (1908: 45–6)With the Tindalos [ancestor spirit, na'itu] the power of the chiefs has greatly declined. This was inevitable: a chief was powerful because he possessed a powerful Tindalo. I do not speak of this as a benefit. Were it not that in Christian unity at least an equivalent can be found, I should consider it a loss.
Alfred Penny, Ten Years in Melanesia (1888: 216–17)Even missionaries espoused some degree of ambivalence regarding the ancestor spirits they sought to subvert.
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- Identity through HistoryLiving Stories in a Solomon Islands Society, pp. 103 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991