ETAK - A SENSE OF PLACE

Shot on digital video and 16mm during the Pacific Arts Festival held in Western Samoa 1996. It explores modes of navigation, personal and social, and the establishment of physiological trigger points.

000:50 Sosthenes Emwalu Traditional Micronesian Navigator from Puluwat.
000:51 David Lewis: Writer, Anthropologist, Navigator.
Sosthenes Emwalu and David Lewis are making a journey. There is a saying: The islands on the right and the left, are Etak - A Sense of place.
003:30 John Pule: Artist.
In the 1960s a young man on board a US Navy ship riding out a hurricane somewhere in the Atlantic, asked the navigator to show him their position. Asked why he wanted to know, his reply was: ‘to see if what he thought was in his head was where his village was.’
The village was in that area. “His sense of place.”