Abstract
Examines how the Vula'a people of southeastern Papua New Guinea document their history since their settlement in the vicinity of Hood Point in the early 19th century by using a complex amalgam of myth, history, and Christianity. The Vula'a embraced some apparent contradictions in presenting multiple versions of significant local stories. They viewed myths as belonging both to the past and to the present and accepted Christianity without a wholesale rejection of their pre-Christian cosmology. Vula'a representations of the past are best understood not in terms of a simple distinction between history and myth but by employing Martin Heidegger's idea of "essence," or as something that retains its essential meaning through time.