It remains one of the most extraordinary welcomes I have experienced anywhere. Yet the entrance was only the beginning. Over the hours that followed, dance led into fire making, fire into plant knowledge, and plant knowledge into a wider understanding of kava, kastom and the relationships through which community life is carried.
A banyan does not grow like a standard tree. It sends roots down from its branches, and when those roots reach the ground they thicken into living columns, so that over time a single tree can become an architecture of trunks, openings and shadow. At Etapu Kastom Village on Tanna Island, the ancient banyan was large enough for people to move through it rather than simply around it. A natural passage disappeared into the root system, dark against the clearing beyond.
Then someone stepped out.
Another person followed, then another. The people of Etapu began emerging in single file through the living structure of the tree. Within moments the quiet around the banyan had changed completely. Feet met the earth, voices carried through the clearing, and an entire village seemed to have stepped out from inside the tree.
A village emerged from an ancient tree to welcome us.
We arrived at Etapu in December 2025 during an ethnobotanical journey across Tanna with Mia and Jaxson. The ancient banyan stood at the centre of our arrival, its roots creating a natural chamber of wood and shadow. As the line came out from inside the tree, the formation widened and the dancing began.
Men held the centre while women moved around them. The sequences changed in pace, footwork and structure, some steady and repetitive, others gathering energy quickly. What gave the welcome its power was not any one dancer. It was the collective rhythm: feet meeting the ground, voices carrying through the air and an entire group maintaining its timing together.
The local name for the dances we witnessed was not recorded, but Tanna has a rich world of named dance and exchange traditions that helps explain why collective movement can carry much more than entertainment. Historical documentation describes male Toka and Nao dances performed during Nekowiar, a major ceremonial gathering in which village groups exchange kava roots, pigs and laplap while renewing social and clan relationships. That does not identify the dances at Etapu. It does show the wider cultural world in which dance, exchange and relationship can be bound together on Tanna.
We had arrived watching a welcome. The people in front of us were moving within a world far deeper than anything a visitor could absorb in a single afternoon.
ORIGINAL FIELD RECORDINGS
Mia and Jaxson were the first of us to make friends. While the adults were still finding our place, the children had already begun crossing the distance between visitor and host. There was no need to manufacture a dramatic turning point. The space simply softened as the children connected and the village opened around us.
The decisive shift came after the dances. We had asked how fire was made at Etapu, and instead of answering only with words, the chief stepped forward to show us. A skill that had belonged to the people we were watching was about to be placed directly into our hands.
The chief prepared the materials, positioned the fire stick against the wood and began working it steadily. His hands settled into a controlled rhythm. At first there was only movement, then the first visible thread of smoke appeared at the contact point. It thickened, an ember formed, and the ember was transferred into kindling until flame took hold.
From only a few feet away, the sequence seemed remarkably economical. Nothing was hurried. The movements were practised and precise, each stage arriving at the right moment. The principle of friction fire is simple enough to explain, but the practice lives in details that are harder to put into words: the material, its dryness, the preparation of the wood, pressure, speed, rhythm, the moment an ember is ready to move and the amount of air needed to turn it into flame.
Then the chief handed the materials to us.
I tried. Mia tried. Jaxson tried. The same pieces of wood that had looked almost effortless in the chief's hands immediately became more demanding in ours. The teaching happened close up through demonstration, correction, repetition and encouragement rather than a long explanation.
When Jaxson managed to bring the fire forward, the response around him was immediate. People watched, encouraged him and shared in the achievement. Mia was given the same patience when it was her turn. What had begun as a question about making fire had become something more important: knowledge moving from practised hands into inexperienced ones through attention, repetition and generosity.
The lesson was about fire, but the method of teaching would repeat itself with plants.
Knowledge moved because somebody was willing to place the materials in another person's hands.
ORIGINAL FIELD RECORDINGS
During our time at Etapu we were given what I can best describe as a crash course in Tanna bush medicine. The plants were not somewhere distant in a specialist garden. They were around us, sometimes only metres apart, and a few steps could move from one use to another.
We were shown what particular plants were used for, how material might be prepared or applied and the circumstances in which people would use them. The lesson happened beside the plants themselves. Someone would point one out, explain its role, then move to another. What had first appeared to us as undifferentiated vegetation began resolving into a landscape of distinct uses and relationships.
The important thing was not a list of plant names. It was the practical structure of the knowledge: where a plant grew, which part mattered, how it was prepared, how it was applied and when its use was appropriate. That is ethnobotany in its most literal form. Not plants on one side and people on the other, but knowledge created through the relationship between them.
Etapu itself is recognised in Vanuatu's national biodiversity planning in connection with culture and forest. On the ground, that relationship did not feel like an abstract category. We were walking through it.
Kava was central to what the people of Etapu taught us about life on Tanna. They spoke about it not simply as a drink, but as something woven into ceremony, marriage, community decision making and social life. It belongs to gathering, exchange and the relationships through which communities organise themselves.
Across Tanna, kava drinking is closely associated with communal grounds known in parts of the south as imwarim, in western Tanna as yimwayim, and more widely in Bislama as nakamal. These are often large open clearings framed by great banyan trees. Men commonly gather there in the afternoon as the working day gives way to kava, conversation and community affairs.
The relationship reaches deeper still. In one recorded Tannese nagé, elder Kaha Iahwa of Lamanamileg recounts how the culture hero Kalpapen brought the “real kava” and helped establish the cycle of day and night. In that account, kava is placed between daylight and darkness, connecting the evening ritual with gardens, ancestors, the setting Sun and the spirit world. It is a powerful reminder that a plant familiar to outsiders as a beverage can occupy an entirely different depth of meaning within the culture that carries it.
That particular account comes from elsewhere on Tanna, not from Etapu, but it illuminates the wider cultural landscape surrounding the same plant the people of Etapu were teaching us about. Kava can connect gardens with ceremony, evening with conversation, marriage with exchange and community deliberation with a particular place and time.
The exact formal status of Etapu's ancient banyan was not recorded, but across Tanna the relationship among banyans, gathering grounds, dance and kava is well established. Once that becomes visible, a giant banyan no longer looks like scenery. In many communities it helps give social life a physical centre.
What stayed with me at Etapu was that very little of what we were shown existed as a relic. The dances were being danced. Fire was being made by hand. Plants were still recognised through use. Kava was spoken about through ceremony, relationship and decision making. Children were present around the adults carrying those practices.
That is closer to kastom as we encountered it. The English word “custom” can make it sound like a collection of inherited habits, something old that survives because it has been preserved. On Tanna, kastom reaches much further into land, family, authority, gardens, exchange, ceremony, knowledge and obligation. Its continuity does not depend on freezing life in the past. It depends on people continuing to practise, teach and adapt what matters.
At Etapu, that process was visible without needing to be explained first. The chief could make fire and then put the materials into Jaxson's hands. Plant knowledge could be taught while standing beside the plant itself. Children could move through the same social space in which adults danced, taught and talked.
The important thing was not that these practices looked old.
It was that they remained alive enough to be used and generous enough to be shared.
Before we left, the chief spoke to us in perfect English. There was no uncertainty about what he wanted us to understand. He asked us to tell people about Etapu, to share their story, and to come back.
That request changed the responsibility attached to everything we carried away. A photograph or video can preserve what something looked like, but telling another community's story asks for a different kind of care. The temptation is always to make the unknown more dramatic, to give an unnamed dance a famous name, to identify a medicinal plant because the story feels incomplete without it, or to turn an extraordinary banyan into something more ceremonial than the people themselves told us it was.
Etapu does not need any of that.
The real story is already strong enough. A village emerged from an ancient tree to welcome us. People danced together. A chief made fire and then taught us to try. Plants growing only metres apart carried distinct uses. Kava opened into a much larger conversation about ceremony, marriage, decisions and community life. The children made friends. And before we left, the chief asked us to carry their story beyond the village.
The people in these photographs did not become characters when our cameras came out, and Etapu did not stop when we left. The village continued in the lives of the people who belong to it. Our responsibility is simply to make sure the story travels without pretending to know more than we were given.
When I think about Etapu now, I return to the first movement inside the banyan. A figure appeared from the shadowed passage, then another, then another, until the village filled the clearing. The scale of the tree made the entrance unforgettable, but everything that followed gave that first image its weight.
Over the course of the visit, knowledge kept moving. It moved through the timing of the dances, through the chief's hands as smoke became ember, through Jaxson and Mia learning the same fire making movement, through plants recognised by use and place, and through the cultural world surrounding kava. None of it belonged to a display case. It existed because people continued to carry it.
Hours after the people of Etapu emerged from the ancient banyan, their chief asked us to carry something too.
Their story.
That is the promise behind this Field Journal: to tell people about Etapu as carefully as we can, and to honour the final part of his request.
One day, return.
Written and photographed by Stevan Sipka
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