Futuna kava: the island that kept the cup and the cross

Futuna is a small, steep, green island that most of the world has never heard of, sitting near its sister island Alofi in the French collectivity of Wallis and Futuna. And it holds one of the more interesting answers in the whole kava world to a hard question, which is what happens to a sacred drink when an even more powerful faith arrives. Because on a lot of islands, kava lost that fight. On Futuna, somehow, the cup and the cross ended up sharing the same table.

I keep coming back to islands like this because they complicate the simple story. It is easy to tell kava history as kava versus the missionaries, full stop. Futuna does not let you do that.

---

Two kingdoms, one cup

Futuna, for such a small place, has not one customary king but two. The island is divided into two traditional kingdoms, Sigave on one side and Alo on the other, each with its own customary monarch, the Tuʻi Sigave and the Sau of Alo. And as everywhere in Western Polynesia, kava sits at the center of the ceremony that surrounds those kings and chiefs, the formal cup you bring out when rank and relationship and serious matters are in the room. It is the same family of tradition you find in Tonga and on neighboring Wallis, the chiefly, ordered, ceremonial way of holding the bowl.

---

The myth it shares, and how it pours the cup

Futuna belongs to the same Western Polynesian family as Tonga and Samoa, and it shares their kava cosmology, the family of myths in which kava is born from a sacrificed or buried body and bound forever to chiefs and the sacred order. The fullest version is the Tongan story of Kavaʻonau, the sacrificed girl whose grave grew kava and sugarcane, which I told in the Tongan guide, and Samoa's is the tale of the boy split in two and raised again by the kava itself, over in the Samoan guide. Futuna sits right inside that web of meaning.

And like the rest of Western Polynesia, Futuna's cup is the formal, ordered, oratorical kind, traditionally prepared in a wooden bowl and strained through hibiscus fiber, served by rank with the right words spoken over it. It is a world away from the quiet, fast shell of a Vanuatu nakamal. The same plant, held two completely different ways at the two ends of the same ocean.

---

The missionary they killed, and the island that converted

Here is the history that makes Futuna unlike anywhere else.

In 1837 a French Marist priest named Peter Chanel arrived on Futuna to convert the island. He worked there for a few years, and as he gained converts he ran straight into the island's king, whose own son was among those drawn to the new faith, and in 1841 the king had Chanel killed. Clubbed to death. He was the first Christian missionary martyred in the islands, and the Catholic Church later made him the first saint of all of Oceania.

And then the thing nobody expects happened. The killing backfired entirely. Instead of ending the mission, it lit it on fire, and within a short time the whole island converted, and not casually either. Futuna became intensely, devoutly Catholic, the kind of place where the faith is woven through everything, and it built a basilica to the very man it had martyred.

Now sit with the choice Futuna then faced, because it is the same choice that ended kava on the Cook Islands and on Kosrae and nearly ended it in Hawaiʻi. The new faith was in, completely, fervently. And on so many islands that was exactly the moment the old sacred drink got branded as pagan and stamped out. But Futuna did not do that. Futuna kept its kava. It kept its two customary kings and the kava ceremony that surrounds them, sitting right alongside one of the most devout Catholic cultures in the Pacific, and somehow did not experience the two as a contradiction. The cup that the old order ran on and the cross that killed and then conquered the old order, both kept, both honored, on the same few square miles of rock. I find that genuinely moving, because it is a small living proof that a people do not always have to choose, that sometimes they are wise and stubborn enough to hold two sacred things at once and let them learn to live together. Futuna held the cup and the cross. Most places were told they could only have one.

---

The cultivars, and an island that still drinks it daily

Correcting my own first take here, because Futuna does have named cultivars. It shares the same three that Lebot recorded for Wallis and Futuna, hina kata loa, hina leka, and huli kata loa, named by the Western Polynesian system where hina is white, huli is black, leka is short, loa is long, and kata is the internode, the stem segment between joints. So you read them as white-long, white-short, and black-long, color first and then internode shape, the same quick visual sort Fiji and Tonga use.

The real difference from Wallis is the health of the tradition. Where Wallis has had its kava go scarce enough that it imports rootstock from Futuna and Vanuatu to keep ceremonies stocked, Futuna kept growing its own. Islanders there still cultivate kava in their subsistence gardens and still drink it fresh on a daily basis, not just for the formal occasions. So of the two kingdoms, Futuna is the one where the plant never left the everyday, which is part of why I find it the more quietly alive of the pair.

---

Is Futunan kava heady or heavy?

Like the rest of Western Polynesia, Futunan kava sits on the lighter, smoother, more sociable side rather than the deep, sedating end. It is a ceremonial, relational cup.

---

Where to start

I will be straight with you, we do not source Futunan kava. Almost everything we make is Vanuatu noble, with some from the Solomon Islands. But if that balanced, sociable, Western Polynesian character is what draws you, our Raw Epicure is a smooth, easy starting point, Statera holds the balanced ceremonial middle, and Lumina sits on the gentle side. If you are brand new and still finding your lean, the Variety Pack lets you taste across the range first. Futuna makes the most sense next to its family, so read the Wallis and Tongan guides too. New to all of it? Our first timer's guide will walk you in.

I am still learning new things about every origin season to season, but Futuna taught me the kava story does not always come down to a winner and a loser. Sometimes it comes down to two sacred things, kept side by side, by people who refused to give up either one.

From our ohana to yours, mahalo nui.