Pacific Indigenous storytelling linked to water and knowledge

By Ron Rocky Coloma

When Meré Tari Sovick asked participants to lift a glass of water during a recent virtual session, the moment was quiet and unassuming. It was also intentional.

Before speaking about storytelling, Sovick invited everyone to acknowledge water first. Not as a resource or a topic of study, but as something living and shared.

“We’re in this space of talking about water,” she said. “Water is very sacred, not just to Indigenous people, but to human beings. Our bodies are made of water.”

Sovick, an Indigenous Pacific Melanesian woman from North Pentecost, Vanuatu, serves as the interim executive director of the Pacific Peoples’ Partnership and as the executive director of Melanesian Women Today. Speaking during a session focused on water, culture and knowledge systems, she framed storytelling as something far broader than narrative structure.

“For me, story is life,” she said. “It’s in my DNA. I have to tell a story in order to live.”

Sovick has lived in the United States for nearly 30 years and grew up partly in Aotearoa, New Zealand, where she spent time on the marae, traditional Maori communal spaces. Living across cultures, she said, shaped her understanding of responsibility.

“As a Pacific Islander, when the calling comes, you take the role,” Sovick said. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. Everybody has a role in the village.”

She asked participants what storytelling meant to them and invited responses through the chat and open discussion. The answers ranged from connection and memory to culture, family and the passing of knowledge across generations.

One participant recalled listening to stories from a grandfather before bed, stories that connected childhood to family history. Another described storytelling as a way to understand and connect across time. Sovick paused to acknowledge each response.

“To me, it’s just like water,” she said. “It’s flowing.”

Sovick explained that Indigenous storytelling does not follow a linear beginning, middle and end. Instead, it moves in cycles, reflecting seasons, planting and relationships with the land. In her culture, age and time are often marked not by calendar dates but by agricultural cycles.

“You’re born when the yam is planted,” she said. “When the yam matures, that’s when you turn that age.”

Water, she added, is understood as the bloodstream of the land. “Without water, the land cannot exist,” Sovick said. “Just like a human body without blood.”

She introduced participants to sand drawing, a traditional practice in parts of Vanuatu known as batuli. Using a single unbroken line traced in the sand, storytellers draw symbols as they narrate their meanings aloud. When the story ends, the drawing is erased.

“The finger never leaves the sand,” Sovick said. “The line always returns to its starting point.”

The practice, she said, reflects how stories are meant to live through people rather than permanence.

Sovick also shared a creation story from her home island of Raga. In the story, land rises from the sea, and all beings once shared a common language. Harmony is eventually broken, boundaries are created and humans are appointed stewards of creation rather than rulers.

“Nature itself is the revelation,” she said. “It’s the living library of the ancestors.”

Participants responded by sharing creation stories from other Indigenous cultures, including flood stories that emphasize water as memory and identity.

Sovick noted the similarities, even across distant geographies.

“There are so many connections,” she said. “We carry them in the elements.”

She said these perspectives matter, particularly in research and education involving Indigenous communities. Knowledge, she explained, is not always delivered directly or verbally.

“They’re not going to tell you straight what you want to hear,” Sovick said. “Sometimes they tell you a story, or a song, or they draw.”

For Sovick, storytelling is not separate from learning or science. It is a method of understanding the world and adding to it over time.

“With Indigenous stories, there’s no ending,” she said. “Just like research, you’re always adding to it.”

She ended the session by returning to the image of water, not as an object of study, but as a shared presence.

“When we tell stories,” Sovick said, “we’re remembering how everything is connected.”

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