The rai-na'in, 'owners' or 'lords of the land', are the tutelary spirits that inhabit particular features of the landscape — rocks, springs, great trees, pools and tracts of forest. As the true owners of the ground they must be recognised and propitiated with offerings before land is cleared, a house is built or a field is planted, and they afflict with sickness or misfortune those who disturb their places without leave. Localised and numerous, each bound to its own site, they are distinguished from the single maternal earth of cosmological ritual speech.