Geo Quiz

Stone money

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On the Pacific Island of Yap, you can’t exactly keep change in your pocket when dealing in the local currency. It’s stone – and up to twelve feet across. Its origins go back millennia. The money is still used these days, but not to buy groceries. It’s for the bigger things in life – bestowing honor, asking forgiveness, or begging your daughter’s new in-laws to treat her well. The World’s Mary Kay Magistad reports from Yap.

Also, read Mary Kay’s reporter’s journal from Yap

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A long time ago in Yap, the story goes, people were always arguing about trading and doing business, and what to accept as a method of payment. A chief had an idea while looking at the full moon. He said – we should have something large, round and beautiful like the moon for trading, always there like the moon, something that doesn’t break or wear out or get stolen.

So, the villagers of Yap set out in their canoes to find that something. Some traveled almost 300 miles, to the island of Palau, where they found shimmering limestone. They carved disks of it, with a hole in the middle to let people carry it on poles, says John Runman, an oral historian at the Yap State Historical Preservation Society:

“If you look at stone money, it really looks like a full moon, the color of a full moon. And that’s what they say – the people went to get their chief the moon, and they didn’t succeed, so they gave him the next best.
MK: He asked for the moon, and they gave him stone money.”
(He laughs)

But this isn’t just any old money, he says – and not only because it takes 20 strong men to carry each of the heavier pieces.

“Stone money is not used to ask for a wife, for instance. That is something that we use shell money for. Stone money is something we can give to someone to build a house. It is something we can give to another family to ask for forgiveness, or as an apology for a wrongdoing a member of my family has caused onto the other family.”

One of John Runman’s colleagues offers to take me to a stone money bank.

It’s in the middle of a forest. There are no bank windows, no tellers – not even a building – just disks of calcite and limestone, of various sizes, propped along a stone path, leading to a village. I ask Falownug Kenned, also from Yap’s Historical Society, if the big ones are more valuable:

“It depends on the story, of how they got it here on the island. If it cost someone’s life to get it here, it is more valuable than these big ones.”

Sometimes the pieces are named after someone – someone who died, trying to bring it to the island, or someone who did some heroic deed that is retold every time the stone money changes hands. In a culture of just a few thousand people, without a written language, the stories behind the stone money are part of Yap’s living history.

Stone money is still used in Yap. To find out how, I went in search of a village elder, near the stone money bank I’d visited. I found 74-year-old James Lukan sitting on his wooden porch, bare-chested, a skinny black cat purring in his lap.

“Yeah, I have stone money. I had one given to me when I married my wife, and my wife’s family gave it to my father, and they still have it in the village, my wife’s village. And they still know…
MK: That it belongs to you.
James: Yeah.

So it’s kind of a gentleman’s agreement. Rather than getting those 20 strong men to lift stone money and carry it from village to village, the owner of a piece of stone money will just tell someone they’re giving it to them, and why, and what the story is behind that particular piece. It stays in the original village, but ownership passes to someone else. I ask the village elder, James Lukan what happens if future generations forget who owns what. He says, that’s already started to happen:

“Yeah, that’s true with some pieces. No one knows anymore who owns them. As time goes on, we tend to forget who gave them. Just a few, more recently used, we know the history of it.”

It used to be that the story of each piece of stone money, and the record of who owned it and why, was told and retold in the airy, A-frame, bamboo and thatch men’s houses, where men would gather at night to swap tales and teach new generations ancient traditions. But these days, the men’s houses aren’t used so much. The younger generation is instead watching TV, listening to hip hop and hanging out in bars, like this one.

I ask a young guy with an attitude, and multiple piercings in his ears, what he thinks of stone money – whether it matters to him that it be passed on to him. I wonder how close the tradition is coming to just dying out. Twenty-two-year-old Brad Gorong sets me straight. He says, of course it matters:

“Because it’s valuable to us. A family that owns stone money, it’s very helpful to them if they have trouble from other places. They can use it to make peace.”

Yap seems peaceful enough these days – with its 12,000 people on a tiny set of islands, one foot in modernity and the other rooted in tradition. Perhaps the stone money – and the stories and values behind it – are part of what helps Yap keep its balance – however precarious — as it absorbs ever more trappings of the modern world.

For The World, I’m Mary Kay Magistad, Yap.

Photos: Mary Kay Magistad