What do the islands in Micronesia have in common with those just a stone’s throw from our own shores? Stars and currents, said Mainer Aylie Baker and her partner Miano Sowraenpiy, who hails from Micronesia. Boothbay Region Land Trust hosted a talk Aug. 24 at Oak Point Farm in Boothbay Harbor. The talk by the two summer stewards of Damariscove was called, “Where Our Oceans Meet.” 

Baker grew up in Yarmouth and traveled to Micronesia as part of her study of storytelling.

“Miano on the other hand— if you were to bore a hole through the center of the Earth,” said Baker as she and the audience shared laughs, “you will come down quite close to where Miano grew up.”

Sowraenpiy is from an island called Satawal, roughly halfway between Guam and Papua New Guinea. Baker and Sowraenpiy met on Palau, an island about 650 miles from the southern tip of the Philippines.

Baker explained that around 4,000 years ago, there was a slow migration, by canoe, from places in the Western Pacific like Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, all the way to Hawaii.

“As they traveled, they brought with them the breadfruit tree,” said Baker. Breadfruit is important on all of the islands across the Pacific, as a drought food or a typhoon food, she said.

But the widespread importance of the canoe and the breadfruit tree would not reconnect the routes of Oceania in such a meaningful way without the navigation of these ancient passages. Sowraenpiy’s mentor and uncle, Mau Piailug, became one of the Pacific’s most celebrated navigators when he voyaged to Hawaii in 1976 to navigate a classically crafted canoe, the Hōkūle‘a, all the way to Tahiti.

“He took a really big leap because he broke tradition by sharing outside of his culture, but he was able to navigate 3,000 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti retracing one of the most important migration routes,” Baker said.

Baker and  Sowraenpiy’s canoe was built by the Hawaiians as a gift to Mao Piailug and his son, Sesario Sewralur, who picked up where his father left off, continuing to mentor Miano and other students.

“It’s the navigators which Miano comes from that were some of the most important people in the Pacific because they were guiding whole communities out into the islands,” said Baker. “Even today there are lots of… connections between different places that may speak different languages, but the navigators are the ones who kind of do that work in between.”

Despite global positioning satellites and other forms of modern-day technology, Sowraenpiy’s mission is to revive the art of navigating in Micronesia where it has barely survived.

“He has kind of the hardest journey of bringing it home and trying to revive it,” said Baker.

“We have 32 stars that we use to navigate as well as ocean patterns,” Sowraenpiy said. “The shape of the ocean patterns is how we know where to travel, watching all the movements.”

Sowraenpiy said the ocean currents and the star positions in, say, Hawaii, will be quite different than in Tahiti— such will be true at any given leg of the journey. This means he must memorize star positions and ocean currents as other people show or tell him and to learn them by trial and error. He is finally tasked by teaching as many of the future generation everything he has learned.

“You can build a star compass wherever you are,” said Baker. “The ocean is so immense and we are just so embedded in it, it makes you recognize just how integral it is because you’re never just one little part of the ocean.”