The Last White Canoe of the Lau of Malaita, Solomon Islands By: PierreMaranda, James TuitaDede and BenBurt. Canon Pyon: Sean Kingston Publishing. 2022 pp: 112 Price: <scp>£235.40</scp>

For the seafaring and marine peoples of Oceania, it is hard to imagine a more iconic symbol than the canoe. The large voyaging canoes of eastern Oceania became an early focus of movements for cultural renewal. Less well known have been the large paddling canoes favoured by coastal peoples from eastern Papua New Guinea through Solomon Islands. The plank-constructed canoes of Solomon Islands that once captured the photographic gaze of Europeans have more recently inspired projects to celebrate local tradition (e.g. Binabina: The Making of a Gela War Canoe [1983] or A War Canoe Heading for Christianity [2005]). The Last White Canoe of the Lau of Malaita, Solomon Islands offers the first book-length work exploring the depth and breadth of one such project. It is the product of work by anthropologist Pierre Maranda collaborating with Lau author James Tuita Dede, who grew up in the villages where Maranda worked in the 60s and 70s, and assisted posthumously by Ben Burt, fellow ethnographer also working on Malaita in Solomon Islands. Among Lau speakers the term ‘white canoe’ signifies a particular type of canoe–one that is, yes, ‘white’ in so far as it is adorned with white shells and white cockatoo feathers–but that, more importantly, evokes an entire complex of social and ceremonial practices. As readers of this journal will understand, canoes that are emblematic in this way are not so much about material culture (although that is significant) as they are about social connection, exchange, knowledge and power. And, indeed, The Last White Canoe tells the story of events surrounding the construction of a canoe in 1968 that commemorated the end of a funerary process for a senior priest, extending ongoing cycles of exchange with partner communities. The 1968 project, coming toward the end of a period of Christian conversion, was also the last time a Lau clan constructed and deployed a ‘white canoe’. The events were recorded by Pierre Maranda as part of his decades-long research documenting Lau traditional practices. As Burt explains in his Introduction, by 2010 Maranda had decided to draw together his considerable archive of work on the subject to publish an account of the 1968 events, which he had carefully recorded in notebooks and photographs. To do so he invited Dede to work with him in Canada to produce a bilingual volume in Lau and English that would be available to the Lau community. When Maranda died in 2015, he and Dede had completed about six of the book's ten chapters. It is the good fortune of the Lau community as well as Pacific scholarship that Burt was aware of the project and stepped in to provide the ethnographic and editorial skills needed to complete the book. The end result is a volume that is not only testament to the knowledge and skill of the canoe owners, but also homage to Pierre Maranda and his longstanding ethnographic work in Lau. The structure of the volume reflects the significance of the ‘white canoe’ as social process – one enmeshed in the formation of sacred spaces, gender relations, social status and community prestige. Just one chapter is devoted to canoe construction (Chapter 6, the last one completed by Maranda before his death), while two recount the inspiration and preparation for building a canoe, and four tell of the ‘concluding festival’ and subsequent touring. Once constructed, a ‘white canoe’ becomes a vehicle for community visits and festivities that affirm clan networks and celebrate accomplishments. The book's diary-like tracing of these events is well-suited to representing the project as cultural narrative. The introductory essays by Burt and Dede are crucial in locating the project in broader historical context. Burt's introduction adds a reflexive dimension that illuminates the politics of the project and its ethnography. As Burt observes, the book's singular focus on senior men's perspective – a perspective consistent with a gendered Lau cosmology that excluded women from sacred (tabu) spaces – also circumscribes the ethnography. Readers hear little of women's voices or junior men's views. To this I would add that the absence of Christian voices (except in Dede's introduction) is likely to leave contemporary readers wondering about the broader reception and impact of a kastom project pulled off at such an acute moment of transition. Dede's contribution is particularly compelling as a personal voice that articulates the significance of the last white canoe in a changing society. It is appropriate that the volume begins with his touching reflection about life in the Lau society he grew up in. The somewhat melancholy theme of loss of traditional practices is the dominant trope in his account, underscoring what is (or was) at stake in the ‘white canoe’ project for a largely Christian community. The fact that Pierre Maranda devoted meticulous attention to these events over the course of months of fieldwork reflects his anthropological and scientific interest in preserving and honouring pre-Christian culture. Just as the 1968 project emerged at a precarious time in the transformation of Lau society, so the work carried out by Maranda to document what he saw as a dying culture was also an increasingly precarious project. At the very time that the Lau were abandoning the knowledge and commitments required to implement a ‘white canoe’ project, anthropology was itself self-consciously moving away from primary documentation of non-Western cultures toward a more activist embrace of the intersections of kastom and (post)colonial and global trans-cultures. Indeed, Pierre Maranda was no stranger to the politics of Lau kastom. Burt refers to controversies that Maranda himself had written about elsewhere, conflicts that arose from the loss of kastom, producing suspicions that his ethnographic work amounted to a kind of theft, an accusation not unfamiliar to anthropologists working in similar situations. In Maranda's own memoir-like book Ces Lau Que J'ai Tant Aimés: Un Québécois dans les Iles du Pacificque-Sud [The Lau Who I Loved So Much: A Quebecois in Islands of the South Pacific] he mused on the belief that circulated in the 1980s when a spirit-octopus disappeared from the Lau lagoon leading to speculation that it had been captured and removed to a pool at Maranda's residence in Quebec. (If one sees the Lau spirit-octopus as the embodiment of customary Lau knowledge, it is easy to imagine it alongside the archive of Lau knowledge that indeed resided there prior to being deposited in the Quebec Museum of Civilization.) Burt recounts the manner in which similar concerns about the possession and publication of traditional knowledge emerged in discussions with Lau people about what could be included in this book. In the end, exclusions were made to honour reservations expressed by members of the Lau community. As a bilingual volume with abundant photographs and diagrams, The Last White Canoe of the Lau of Malaita, Solomon Islands offers an impressive example of indigenous language publication. Affirming that the book is published in large measure for Lau readers, publisher Sean Kingston notes in its announcement of the volume that they obtained funding to send ‘a significant number of copies’ to the Lau community. The story of just how the book is being received, read, debated and put to use may itself be a topic for future discussion. In the meantime, the volume makes a unique contribution to writing on Oceanic societies, particularly canoe cultures, as well as to local efforts to celebrate kastom in contexts of cultural transformation. The publisher deserves praise for issuing such a well-illustrated book in large format for an avowedly specialized audience. Readers in Solomon Islands and elsewhere may hope for an affordable electronic version that might assist this canoe in extending its voyage, in Solomon Islands and elsewhere.

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