Canoe making and wayfinding are both parts of the centuries-old tradition of building and navigating long-distance canoes. Communities in Micronesia, especially in Yap State's outer islands, continue to build ocean-voyaging sailing canoes using local materials and find their way without maps or instruments.
Using an indigenous system of direction finding (wayfinding), star-path bearings are used for finding neighboring islands. These bearings vary from island to island. Navigators have to learn a different set of directions for each destination they visit. One example of such a system is how a master navigator knows over 100 systems of bearings, one for every island.
Since the repression of indigenous wayfinding during colonization, the range of indigenous wayfinding has diminished. Micronesian wayfinders are trying to reopen these traditional seaways with each major voyage. The whole community plays an active role in building the canoe, which begins with the selection and felling of a tree, and is then measured using an accurate and verifiable system based on indigenous mathematics.
Almost exclusively, the carving is done with indigenous adzes. It includes an asymmetrical design that facilitates high-speed sailing and can access shallow water. Traditional navigation relies on atmospheric phenomena as well as environmental cues.
Indigenous navigation is based on concepts and procedures that are not western. The tradition has no fixed point in its moving world and only a navigator as a reference point. The way one views one's relation to the world makes 'maps' both unnecessary and irrelevant. Community members are often in a desperate struggle against economic, environmental and social forces that threaten to eradicate this knowledge. In many cases, this knowledge has been lost to dwindling numbers of elderly members.
Their leaders recognize the importance of these traditions for their communities' cultural identities and their livelihoods. Communities in the Federated States of Micronesia concern themselves with the making of canoes and seamanship and are teaching their younger generations about these arts, as well as oral traditions, methods, songs and stories.
It is in fact within this region where a high concentration of the few living knowledge bearers of how to make canoes and learn traditional navigation. These traditions are also found elsewhere in the FSM, including Mokil, Kapingamaringa, and Mortlock.