The Neverver-speaking people of Malekula Island in Vanuatu tell and retell their nossorian lele 'small stories' through conversational interactions. These small stories almost always focus on narrative events that involve known individuals, many of whom are related through blood or marriage. In a culture where name avoidance is practiced, small stories provide a window into diverse linguistic expressions of identity, particularly third person reference strategies. An examination of small stories in the Neverver conversation corpus reveals that in addition to using personal names as permitted, speakers commonly choose to locate their narrative characters in relation to their conversational recipients. This strategy, known as altercentric association, relies on implicit knowledge of each individual's social connections, and its use in conversational narratives highlights the centrality of relational identity in this Pacific Community.