Never passive imitators, the Kaliai as Andrew Lattas portrays them actively incorporate and transform western beliefs and practices into their own narratives of life, sexuality, and death. The consequences are new myths and histories, new relationships with the ancestral dead -- an alternative world of power and knowledge through which the Kaliai accommodate the dominant white culture and its institutions. Lattas examines the racial conflict that has riddled the recent history of the cargo cults. He also describes the cults' demonization by the New Tribes missionaries from the United States, who disapprove of the villagers' unorthodox miming of European symbols and practices. His book allows us to see behind the villagers' ambivalence toward "waitskin" (white-skins) as they continue to reinvent their social world.