(This post needs some cleaning up....)
Ever since I began reading about Micronesian celestial navigation many years ago, I've read that the cardinal point, so to speak, was East, where the constellation Mailap, "the big bird" rises. The sources cited below all basically asserted this. But I just came across a piece published by these guys - Gary Holton, Calistus Hachibmai, Ali Haleyalur, Jerry Lipka, and Donald Rubinstein - which asserts otherwise. It's found here:
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/oceanic_linguistics/v054/54.2.holton.pdf
I can't read it, nor can I excerpt from it here because it's published on one of these private scholarly sites which require a paid subscription. But I did find a Powerpoint (?) presentation here and captured a bunch of screenshots. This is all I can scrape together but I'd really like to read this thing...
The screenshots here -
