This volume is centered on five stories and two songs from the Polynesian outlier community of West Futuna, Vanuatu, and aims to accomplish three goals: found a secular literature, celebrate and interpret the verbal arts, and connect ancestral discourses with the complex fabric of present-day lives. The volume represents an unusual collaboration between a foreign anthropologist and a Pacific islander. Every facet of the work is shaped by this interaction. Texts were selected and translations emerged in an extended dialogue addressing literacy, audience diversity, and relevance. These issues introduce the volume. The selected texts provide a rare window on personal and social struggles characterizing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cultural geography and the cosmological realm are created in the tales.