Palau
A nation of some eighteen thousand people in the western Pacific where land, money, and title pass down through women, and the women choose the chiefs. The complete guide, the forces first.
Palau is a country of about eighteen thousand people on a chain of more than three hundred islands in the western Pacific, and it is one of the last places on earth where a family's land, money, and titles pass down through its women. Senior women hold the clan's wealth and choose the men who serve as chiefs, and can remove them. Nearly everything else in Palauan life, the meeting house, the exchanges of bead money and turtle-shell money, the great first-child ceremony, the funerals that gather a whole clan, grows from this one root: descent reckoned through the mother.
The mother's line
In Palau a person belongs to their mother's clan, and it is through the mother that the things which matter most are handed down: land, money, titles, and a place in the order of the village. A father is loved and important, but a child's name, rank, and rights to land come from the mother's side, and a Palauan traces who they are upward through a line of women. The smallest unit of this reckoning is the telungalek, the people descended from one woman, and above it stands the clan, the kebliil, a larger body of kin who share a common female ancestor. A village is built from a set of these clans, commonly counted as ten, each with its own rank, its own land, and its own titles to fill.
Land is the clearest case. Clan land has long passed through titled women and through first daughters, and a person's right to use a piece of ground comes from their mother's clan rather than their father's. When a clan member dies, they are buried on their mother's family land, unless the senior women decide otherwise. Money and valuables move the same way, entering the clan through its women and held in their keeping. Because descent runs through the mother, a man's heirs in the old reckoning are not his own children, who belong to their mother's clan, but his sisters' children, who belong to his.
This is often described from outside as one of the world's last matriarchies, though the more exact word is matrilineal: the line runs through women, and women hold great authority, while men still fill the visible offices of chief. In Palauan eyes the two fit together rather than pulling against each other, the women holding the land and the wealth and the right to choose, the men sitting in the meeting house and speaking for the clan. The modern world has pressed hard on this, with imported ideas of property passing from father to son, but the deep habit of reckoning through the mother has held, and it remains the one thing a visitor must grasp to understand anything else about how Palauans live.
The women who choose the chiefs
Every village in Palau is governed by a council of its chiefs, who are men, and beside that council sits a second one of senior women, and it is the women who put the chiefs in their seats. A title belongs to a clan, and when it falls vacant the senior women of that clan choose which man will hold it, drawing on a lifetime of watching the men of the family grow up and judging which of them will best speak for the clan's interests. The same women can take the title away again if the man fails in it. A chief therefore holds his place not in his own right but at the word of the women behind him, and he must come from the right bloodline, his mother's, to be eligible at all.
The women's authority is not only over titles but over the clan's land and money, which pass through them and are theirs to manage. Before a high chief agrees to something large, such as the sale or lease of clan land, he is expected to have the approval of the senior women, and where they refuse, the matter stops. Their meetings are held apart from the men and are spoken of as serious and sometimes sharp. One Palauan woman, asked to describe the role, put it plainly: women own the land, hold the clan's money, and place and remove the chiefs, having watched the men closely enough to know which of them can be trusted to represent the clan.
This power is felt in the present, not only remembered from the past. When property developers and hotel chains have come seeking land in recent years, their proposals have reached the senior women, and it is the women who have turned them down. As a woman of high rank grows older, her voice in the clan grows louder and her say the greater. The arrangement gives Palau a balance unusual in the world: the offices that are seen and spoken are held by men, while the deciding, the holding of wealth, and the choosing of leaders rest with women. It is the working core of the matrilineal order, the place where descent through the mother turns into power.
The chiefly order and the bai
The chiefs of a village are ranked, each speaking for his clan, and the highest among them lead the village as the first of the titled men. Above the villages, Palau remembers two great lines that once stood at the head of its old federations: the high chief of Koror in the south, who carries the title Ibedul, and the high chief of Melekeok in the north, who carries the title Reklai, each with a high-ranking chiefess at his side. These titles still carry weight, and the men who hold them are spoken of with the respect once given to kings, though their formal power now runs through advice rather than command.
The seat of the chiefs is the bai, the men's meeting house, and it is the most striking building in Palauan tradition. A bai is a tall house with a steep peaked roof, raised on a stone platform, built of wood and tied together without a single nail, its great triangular gables and inner beams covered with painted figures that record the legends and histories of the village. Each of the village's chiefs has his own place inside, and women do not enter without particular reason. At the doorway of one famous bai, bats are painted hanging upside down, set there to remind each man to lower his head as he comes in, the way a bat hangs head down, out of respect for the chief. At the start of the twentieth century perhaps a hundred bai stood across Palau; most were destroyed in the Second World War, and only a handful remain, the oldest of them, in the village of Airai, said to be more than two hundred years old.
So central is the bai that its gable became the mark of the nation, and the shape appears on the seals of the state and on buildings across the country. The council of chiefs has carried into the modern republic as well, where a national body of traditional leaders sits as adviser to the elected president on matters of custom. The chiefs themselves observe that the power to advise is not the power to decide, and they have complained that their counsel is set aside; yet the meeting house, the titles, and the ranked clans remain a living part of how a Palauan village orders itself.
The two moneys and the exchange
Palauan life is held together by the giving of valuables, and the islands have long carried their own moneys for the purpose. The older and more prized is udoud, money made of coloured glass and fired-clay beads that reached the islands from Southeast Asia centuries ago. Each important piece is named, its owner and its clan known, and its worth measured by the history it has passed through rather than by any face value, so that the story of a clan can be told through the money it holds. Though counted in the old reckoning as men's wealth, udoud is owned and worn by women, strung at the neck, and the highest pieces belong to the highest clans.
Beside the bead money runs a second kind that belongs to women alone: toluk, a small shallow dish cut and shaped from the shell of the hawksbill turtle. Toluk passes between women, given in payment for the work and support that women provide one another at the great events of life, a birth, a funeral, the building of a house, the raising of a title. Where udoud is the money of the men's side, toluk is the money of the women's, and the two move through the same web of obligation from opposite ends.
These valuables, along with food, change hands at every event that matters, and the largest exchange of all is the funeral. When a Palauan dies, the kin gather, and those closest to the dead, above all on the father's side, are expected to give the most, with contributions that can run to thousands of dollars; the funerals of important people have gathered sums in the tens of thousands and beyond. The money meets the heavy cost of feeding the gathered clans and burying the dead, and what is left passes to the children. Today United States dollars move alongside the beads and the turtle-shell dishes, and a family may spend real money to buy old udoud to give again in custom, but the giving itself has not faded: one study counted tens of thousands of toluk passing between families across several hundred funerals in a span of five recent years. To give at the proper time, in the proper measure, is to hold one's place in the web of kin.
The first child
No moment in a Palauan woman's life is marked more grandly than the birth of her first child, honoured in a ceremony that has no equal in the calendar of custom. Some weeks or months after the birth, the new mother, the mlechell, begins a series of hot baths known as omesurech, given by an older woman skilled in the work over five to ten days, the water scooped with a coconut shell and thrown against her body, which has first been rubbed with oil and turmeric so the heat does not scald. The baths are meant to heal and restore her after the birth and to make her strong again for the work ahead. The last of them is a steam bath, and from this the whole ceremony often takes its name, omengat.
On the final day she is prepared for her presentation. Her skin is coated with reng, a mixture of coconut oil and turmeric that turns her a glowing yellow, and she is dressed in her family's grass skirt and adorned with a headdress and ornaments, then brought out to be shown to her husband's family and the gathered kin. A senior member of the husband's side hangs a piece of valuable Palauan money about her neck in public recognition of the wife and her child, and money is exchanged between the two families. The image of the new mother at her first child, standing turmeric-gold before the clan, is one of the deepest symbols Palau holds of the wealth and fertility of the line that runs through women.
The ceremony carries local differences and a living history. On the island of Angaur it is called ngasech, a word meaning to climb up, after the platform the new mother ascends so that she stands raised above the gathering. A woman who has a child without a husband goes through the same baths but is presented with water alone and without the husband's money, a plainer event that the language marks with its own name. The custom faded under Japanese rule and was brought back by younger Palauans who found new pride in it, and today first-child ceremonies are held most weekends somewhere in the islands, complete now with photographs, a band or a singer, and the whole family gathered to feast.
Marriage and the clans
Marriage in Palau joins two clans as much as two people, and it is shaped by the rule that descent runs through the mother. A person may not marry within their own clan, and the bar reaches wide: marriage is forbidden to anyone related through either the father's or the mother's side within four generations, which pushes each match outward to tie one clan to another. In the past, marriages among the high clans were arranged to keep rank and wealth in their proper place; today people choose their own partners, though the joining of the families and their exchanges remains the heart of the event.
A marriage may be set down through the church, through the courts, or through a traditional ceremony, and often through more than one of these together. What makes it a Palauan marriage in the old sense is the exchange of prescribed food and wealth between the two clans, the husband's side and the wife's giving according to custom, so that the marriage stands on a flow of valuables passing between the families. Through this giving the wife's work and her children are recognised, and obligation is spread beyond the mother's clan to bind the father's in as well.
Divorce is common and may be sought by either husband or wife, the more so among younger couples with few children, and a separation unwinds some of the exchange that the marriage set in motion. As with much else in Palau, the older pattern of arranged, clan-minded matches has loosened under modern life, with more people marrying late or not at all and more households made of parents and children alone rather than the older houses of three and four generations. Even so, marriage is still understood, at bottom, as a bond between clans carried by the giving of food and money.
The land, the sea, and the table
The work of feeding a Palauan family has long been divided between the sea and the land, and between men and women. The sea is the men's, who go out in boats to fish, knowing the currents, the reefs, and the phases of the moon that govern where the fish will be; the protein of the Palauan table comes from the water. The land is the women's, who work the taro swamps that lie behind the villages, growing the soft and hard taro that has been the islands' chief starch, along with tapioca and sweet potato. A proper meal sets one against the other, a starch food and a protein food together, taro or tapioca or rice beside a piece of fish.
What is eaten has shifted with the century. Imported rice has become a daily staple beside the taro, and the cooking of Japan, America, the Philippines, and China has entered the everyday table, a mark left by the colonisers and by the many foreign workers now in the islands. Some old foods remain prized: fruit bat, simmered into a soup, is a delicacy that some Palauans treasure and others will not touch. Each clan keeps certain food taboos of its own, and special foods are set aside for titled people and for women who are pregnant or nursing. Between meals, many Palauans chew betel, a green palm nut wrapped with a leaf and a little powdered lime, which reddens the mouth and stains the teeth, a habit as common in conversation as coffee is elsewhere.
Food is never only food in Palau, but part of the same giving as the money. Nearly every weekend, kin gather for the events that bind a clan, a funeral, a first child, the blessing of a new house, and at each the families exchange not only beads and turtle-shell but baskets of rice, taro, fish, and pork. To bring food to the gathering, and to be fed at it, is itself a way of holding one's place among kin, so that even the daily question of what is grown, caught, and cooked stays tied to the order of clan and exchange that runs through the rest of Palauan life.
Belief
Most Palauans today are Christian, a faith brought by the missionaries who followed each colonial power in turn, the Spanish and the Germans bringing Catholics and Protestants, and the churches taking deep root. Around half the country is Roman Catholic and most of the rest belongs to Protestant and evangelical churches, and religious leaders are widely respected, with strong turnout at Sunday worship. Before the missionaries, each village had its own god or spirit, named and honoured, and a chief might stand as that spirit's voice in the meeting house; traces of the older belief survive in custom, in healing, and in the telling of legends.
Palau also keeps a faith of its own making. Early in the twentieth century, under Japanese rule, a Palauan named Temedad founded Modekngei, a religion that joins belief in the Christian God with the old Palauan deities and customs. It grew at a time of upheaval as a way of holding to Palauan identity against the pressures of colonisation, and it keeps no written scripture and few of the sacraments of the imported churches, leaning instead on prayer, song, chant, and gathering. Its followers, a small share of the country, lead a life that stresses purity, family, and community, and in its home village the use of drink and tobacco is forbidden.
This layering, an old village religion beneath a strong Christianity, with a homegrown faith standing between them, is the ordinary shape of belief in Palau. A Palauan may be a churchgoing Catholic and still keep the customs of the clan, mark the first child in the old way, give the old money at a funeral, and hold to the obligations of kin, finding no quarrel between the Sunday faith and the deeper order of descent and exchange that runs through every other part of life.
A small nation between worlds
For all the strength of its custom, Palau is a small and modern republic feeling the pull of forces far larger than itself. About eighteen thousand people live on its islands, governed since the 1990s as an independent nation with a constitution and an elected president, its government modelled on that of the United States. Palau came to independence through a Compact of Free Association with the United States, which gives the islands American aid and the use of the dollar while granting the United States military rights and the duty of defence. The traditional council of chiefs sits beside this modern state as an adviser on custom, but the deciding power lies with the elected government, and the chiefs have felt the difference.
The deepest strain runs through the land. The matrilineal holding of ground survived the Spanish and the Germans, but Japanese rule pressed private ownership and inheritance from father to son onto a people who had always reckoned land through the mother and the clan, and the result has been a long tangle of disputes among clans, families, and the state that the courts still work through. As the dollar economy grew, ground that was once held in common and used by right took on a price, and the movement of people from the villages to the town of Koror, where most Palauans now live, has loosened the hold of the clan and the village on daily life. Foreign workers, many of them from the Philippines, now make up a large part of the population, enough that Palauans have begun to ask whether they will remain a majority in their own country.
Against these pressures the old order has proved tougher than it looks. The senior women still hold the clan land and still refuse the developers who would buy the shoreline, and the custom of exchange still gathers the clans through most weekends of the year. Palau has set much of its sea aside as protected water, and the Rock Islands of its southern lagoon are honoured as a place of world heritage. The country lives, knowingly, between two orders at once: a cash economy, an elected government, and a globalised world on one side, and on the other the mother's line, the meeting house, and the giving of beads and turtle-shell that have ordered Palauan life for far longer. How long the balance holds is the open question of the nation's future.