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Ethnology of Tokelau Islands

Nature Spirits

Nature Spirits

Two bands of spirits, tupua maiuta (spirits from inland) and tupua maitai (spirits from the sea), inhabited all the islands and the neighboring sea. The tupua maiuta were friendly spirits of the Tokelau people and page 62 waged a continual war upon the foreign spirits (tupua maitai). When the tupua maitai were victorious, troubles multiplied for the people.

Another group of elfish and mischievous spirits (ngaveve or kaufiola) lived among the trees outside the village boundaries and in the plantations of the other islets. They spent their lives in merriment, laughing, dancing, and playing pranks on human beings. Their greatest sport and chief danger to mortals was their custom of running away with men's souls. Their thefts were temporary, but the soulless bodies of men talked wildly and incomprehensively and were apt to go mad. These irresponsible sprites also ran off with children to bewilder their parents. Tito, who is now an old man on Atafu, related his experience with the ngaveve when he was a small boy:

His parents had left him in the middle of the long islet on the eastern side of Atafu while they went torch fishing. Tito remembers being carried by the ngaveve to the northern end of the islet and then down to the southern end of the islet, where they left him. During all this time he was unable to move his body but was conscious of where he traveled. His parents found him where the ngaveve had deposited him.

There is another well-known tale of a girl who was carried from her house to one of the windward islets of Nukunono. For several months her captor played with her and fed her on the food of the ngaveve. One day the spirit carried the girl back to her house and placed her by a bowl into which a woman was cutting up fala pandanus fruit. The woman did not see the child eating the fruit from the bowl and cut off one of the girl's fingers while she had her hand in the wooden bowl. The ngaveve immediately flew back with the girl to the windward islet, where he made his home, and left her by herself. Some people from the village of Nukunono found her with a finger lost from her hand.