The registry rewrote what it filed

Claim (verbatim)

Fiji's oral histories were fixed by a land registry that paid for convergence. From the 1880s the Native Lands Commission took sworn narratives of origin — the tukutuku raraba — from every landowning group, recording them as the legal basis of title; the corpus, held today by the iTaukei Land and Fisheries Commission and still access-restricted, is the largest body of fixed Fijian tradition in existence. Peter France's The Charter of the Land (1969) reconstructed what the recording process did on the way through: between the Commission's procedures, mission schooling, and the essay contest run by the government Fijian-language paper Na Mata in 1892–93, one migration narrative — the Kaunitoni story, with its landing at Vuda — hardened from one tradition among many into the orthodoxy groups then testified to, because testifying to the recognized story was how land got registered. Fixation as standardization: the registry did not photograph the tradition, it renormalized it — and the before/after gradient should still be visible in the record, because the early independent recordings (Fison's collections from the 1860s–80s, Hocart's fieldnotes made outside the Commission's frame) barely know the story that late Commission narratives treat as ancestral bedrock. The knowledge lost here was not a text but a variance — the plural traditions the filing system flattened. Prediction: partitioning recorded Fijian origin narratives by date and instrument, tukutuku raraba recorded after 1905 will carry the Kaunitoni/Vuda descent frame in over 60% of yavusa narratives, while independent pre-1900 recordings will attest it in under 10% — a gradient aligned with the registry's consolidation rather than with region or confederacy (primary clause: the paired 60%/10% split; the verdict follows it). Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a narrative-frame census over the tukutuku raraba held by the iTaukei Land and Fisheries Commission (access-governed), with Fison, Tales from Old Fiji (1904), Hocart's Fiji notebooks, and France, The Charter of the Land (1969) fixing the pre-standardization baseline.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: partitioning recorded Fijian origin narratives by date and instrument, tukutuku raraba recorded after 1905 will carry the Kaunitoni/Vuda descent frame in over 60% of yavusa narratives, while independent pre-1900 recordings will attest it in under 10% — a gradient aligned with the registry's consolidation rather than with region or confederacy (primary clause: the paired 60%/10% split; the verdict follows it).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill (not yet built, from real sources): a narrative-frame census over the tukutuku raraba held by the iTaukei Land and Fisheries Commission (access-governed), with Fison, Tales from Old Fiji (1904), Hocart's Fiji notebooks, and France, The Charter of the Land (1969) fixing the pre-standardization baseline.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

France's The Charter of the Land (1969) is precisely the argument that the Native Lands Commission, mission schooling and the 1892–93 Na Mata contest hardened the Kaunitoni/Vuda migration story into registrable orthodoxy while early independent recordings (Fison, Hocart) barely know it — so the before/after direction and mechanism are France's published findings, making this the wave's nearest-to-leaked item. But the primary clause is a specific quantified split (above 60% of post-1905 yavusa narratives versus under 10% of pre-1900 records), and that census over the access-restricted tukutuku raraba has not been run; France reconstructs the gradient qualitatively rather than tabulating the shares. Materials and direction in print, the arithmetic un-run. Adjacent.

• Peter France, The Charter of the Land: Custom and Colonization in Fiji (Oxford University Press, 1969)
• Lorimer Fison, Tales from Old Fiji (London, 1904)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.