“This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own mind, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”
There is a truth in these words that our ancestors would have understood immediately. Before the ships arrived, before the hymns were translated, we did not search for the sacred. We lived within it. Our mind, our heart, our land, our sea—that was the temple. And kindness was not a doctrine; it was how we fished, how we planted, how we forgave, and how we mourned together.
And then came the missionaries.
For most Pasifika island states, religion arrived hand-in-glove with colonialism. Western missionaries did not simply offer a new faith; they declared our old one vakatevoro—devil worship. They painted our ancestors as lost, our chants as evil, our connection to Vanua and Qoliqoli as primitive superstition. They rewrote the very skin of divinity: Jesus, born in Bethlehem under the Middle Eastern sun, was rendered white. White was pure. White was saved. We were told that our blackness was a stain only their God could wash away.
Generations internalized this. We burned our carvings. Our Tabua even. We learned to kneel and recite and look outward—to Jerusalem, Rome, to Canterbury, to Salt Lake City—for a holiness we had always carried in our own breath. The temple within was boarded up. The search became external, desperate, and colonial: to be good meant to be like them.
But here is what we are finally remembering: our traditional spirituality was never devil worship. It was environmental wisdom in sacred form. Our protocols for when to fish and when to rest the qoliqoli were not superstition; they were sustainable marine resource management. Our cycles for planting and harvesting certain crops aligned with lunar patterns and soil regeneration. Our reverence for Vanua—land, people, and spirit as one—is now being rediscovered by climate scientists as “community-based adaptation.” We were not primitive. We were prescient.
The great tragedy is that we spent centuries searching for the wrong reasons—to earn a white God’s favor, to escape the label of heathen, to fill a void that colonialism carved into our identity. But the void was artificial. The temple was never destroyed; only ignored.
Now, across the Pasifika, we are returning home. Not to reject faith, but to reclaim the ground under our feet. We are learning again that kindness is not a sermon but an action: caring for the reef so our children can eat, sharing the harvest because veilomani is the law and, sitting in the quietness of our own hearts where no missionary ever had the keys.
There is no need for foreign temples. Our mind, our heart, our Vanua, our Qoliqoli—that is enough. The philosophy was always kindness. We just had to stop searching everywhere else long enough to feel it beating inside us, where it had never left.
Pasifika Talanoa by a traveled ITaukei Fijian 