A Movement Born Under Japanese Rule

Modekngei is an indigenous Palauan religious movement founded around 1915 by a Palauan named Temedad of Babeldaob, during a period of considerable upheaval under Japanese colonial administration of Palau. Temedad's movement combined traditional Palauan belief, including veneration of ancestors and spirits, with elements adapted from Christianity, and its followers have continued since to hold a hybrid position, recognizing the Christian God and Jesus Christ while also honoring the traditional Palauan deities, a synthesis that grew directly out of the movement's founding era rather than being a later blending.

The anthropologist Homer Barnett documented aspects of Modekngei belief and practice during fieldwork in Palau in the 1950s, and that scholarship remains part of the public record on the movement's history and structure. Modekngei itself keeps parts of its practice to its own members, a decision the movement makes for itself about what it shares, and this article respects that decision rather than working around it. What is not in question is that Modekngei survived Japanese rule, the Second World War and Palau's later transition to independence, and remains an active, organized religious movement in Palau today, one of relatively few Pacific religious movements founded entirely within a colonial era that still has living adherents.