The Ngatik massacre

In 1837 the men of Sapwuahfik Atoll (then called Ngatik) in Micronesia were killed by the crew of an Australian trade ship over a cache of valuable tortoiseshell possessed by the islanders. Using written and oral accounts, Lin Poyer vividly reconstructs the horrific events that nearly decimated Ngatik's aboriginal population, and then examines the modern Sapwuahfik society to determine the role of historical representation in the construction of community identity.

After the massacre, survivors, attackers, and immigrants formed fragile unions that became the foundation of a new biologically and culturally mixed society. Building on recent scholarly work in the symbolism of identity and the cultural construction of history, Poyer shows how the Sapwuahfik people use the memory of the massacre in their effort to maintain a distinctive identity.

The Ngatik Massacre is both a work of ethnohistory - using oral traditions and written documents to uncover the circumstances surrounding the massacre and its aftermath - and a reevaluation of the concept of ethnicity, examining the cultural and sociopolitical factors shaping community identity, as Sapwuahfik people call on traditional identity to validate contemporary political goals.

The book uses cultural, sociological, and historical information, bringing together recent advances in cultural analysis and ethnohistory by applying them to a study of the destruction and reconstruction of the Sapwuahfik community. Lin Poyer is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Cincinnati.