When the Protestant authorities were concerned about Kanak evangelization in the early 20th century, Maurice Leenhardt was sent as a missionary to New Caledonia by the Society of Evangelical Missions in Paris. In 1902, he created the Do Neva mission in Houailou. Aware of his responsibilities as a missionary, he spent twenty-five years studying the native ways and customs in their daily lives, in order to understand and describe them in order to introduce new elements from the Christian religion. . These participatory observations allowed him to discover among other things the functioning of the language of the region, the a'jie.