Dan Snow's History Hit - First Polynesians

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

In small wooden canoes and with just the stars for navigation, how did the first Polynesians conquer the largest ocean on earth? For centuries this has perplexed scholars and anthropologists. The Polynesian Triangle is drawn by connecting the points of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island and encompasses countries like Samoa, Tonga and Tahiti with each island connected to the others by common traditions of sea-faring, celestial navigation and mythology, all passed down the generations through stories and song.To unravel the mystery, Dan is joined by Opetaia Foa’i, the award-winning composer and singer who wrote the Polynesian music in Moana and whose band Te Vaka had sung the stories of their ancestors on some of the world's biggest stages for years. They're also joined by Christina Thompson, author of 'Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia' whose encyclopaedic knowledge on this fascinating subject fills in all the blanks. Together Dan, Opetaia and Christina weave music and history in this episode to unravel Polynesia's past.Music courtesy of Spirit of Play Productions, with thanks to Julie Foa'i.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

The Pacific Ocean, a vast expanse of water covering one-third of the Earth's surface. A small fleet of handcrafted canoes with their sails billowing in the wind head north, east and south into the boundless horizon, searching for new land. Their voyages will change the world and the shape of human history. They are the mariners. They know how to read the stars and celestial markers in a desert of water. Their canoes are meticulously crafted from wood and woven fibres. They are the lifeline for these bold pioneers. They're able to traverse vast distances, even in turbulent waters, and carrying with them the aspirations and dreams of their people.

waters and carrying with them the aspirations and dreams of their people. They make landfall on several islands, lush, wild, often hostile. They build homes and communities, adapting to the challenges the environment throws at them. They settle from Rapa Nui off the coast of Chile, down to Aotearoa, as the Maori's call it, or New Zealand in English. They build on the isolated reefs and atolls of Tuvalu, Samoa and Hawaii. Their descendants maintain a profound connection with the sea. It isn't just about survival, it's about exploration, a kinship with nature, a respect for its power and an appreciation for their ancestral heritage.

With the help of Opetea Foai, the award-winning composer and singer who wrote some of the music of the hit film Moana, and who also wrote the music you can hear now with his band Te Vaka. and Te Vaka. We're going to delve into the enthralling world of Polynesian wayfinding, the mythology and the traditions that have been passed through generations on these islands

from those early ancestors thousands of years ago. How did people without writing or metal tools conquer the largest ocean in the world? Well, the author of Sea People, The Puzzle of Polynesia, Christina Thompson, is also going to join us and unravel this mystery. It's perplexed scholars and anthropologists for centuries. Really understanding the reflection of wave patterns, really understanding the behavior of sea life and birds. And that's part of what makes them able to do this, this really amazing thing they do.

You're listening to The First Polynesians. Abatea, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's awesome. Thanks for inviting me. You were surrounded by lots of cultural influences, which did hark back to those times of exploring. And growing up in a small village in Alamangoto, we were very, very poor. You know, I was born in a thatched roof house. You know, I've always looked back with those times with fondness

because that's where I got to experience the Samoan siva, the Samoan traditional music and dance. Tuvalu, where my mother comes from, her traditional music and dance, and my father from Tokelau, their traditions of the faateles and the songs. And it really captured my heart. I really came to love them all. How many of those songs do refer back to the sailing, the navigation,

exploring the history of that? Is that kind of a presence in that culture? Very much so. It's the achievements of the original pioneers of the South Pacific that, you know, really, it just leaves me in awe. Christina Thompson has dedicated her work to solving the mystery that's long been called the Polynesian Origins Problem. So first of all, Christina, the basic question, how do we define Polynesia? Because the Polynesians got deep into the Indian Ocean, didn't they? So what is the definition of Polynesia?

So Polynesia is basically a triangle, and it's defined by the points of Hawaii in the north, New Zealand in the southwest, and Easter Island in the southeast. That's a triangle about 10 million square miles, smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And that is technically Polynesia. Now, there are Polynesian peoples outside that triangle. Specifically to the west of the triangle, there are Polynesian outliers, sort of closer to Papua New Guinea, heading in that direction. And there are people who are ancestrally related to Polynesians, indeed, in the Indian Ocean in Madagascar. The extent of their voyaging is extraordinary, from Madagascar right the way across to the Eastern Pacific. Right. So it is the hugest, I mean, I don't know if it's actually the hugest human migration,

the greatest human migration in terms of extent, but it't know if it's actually the hugest human migration, the greatest human migration in terms of extent, but it certainly looks like it on a map. The area is enormous. And the astonishing thing about it is that the area is enormous and has almost no land in it. So it's almost all water. So that's, you know, what makes the story so great. Christina, where did the first people to settle Polynesia come from? They came from Asia, and we can't really track them beyond Taiwan. Taiwan is a sort of a nominal starting point for this journey, this long journey, this human migration, basically because we're able to track them linguistically back to the indigenous languages of Taiwan, Formosan, they're called. So we start there

about 5,000 years ago, but obviously they came from the mainland at some point before that. So these are coastal seafaring Asian peoples, indigenous. They're not related particularly to Han Chinese, but they are in that part of the world. And what happens is that over the course of, say, about 3,000 years, give or take, they migrate down through the islands off the coast of Asia, sort of through the Philippines, the islands of the Philippines, into islands Southeast Asia, sort of what we know as Indonesia and the related area around there. And then they travel north over Papua New Guinea or the north side of Papua New Guinea. They don't go through New Guinea. They don't go past it. They don't get to Australia,

which is kind of interesting because it's right there. They head east, having traveled southward through these islands. They head east. And that is when they begin their amazing long distance journeys. And it happens incrementally. The distances get bigger and bigger and bigger as they moved eastward out into what's known as remote Oceania, which is basically the mid-Pacific. So, Christina, that's so interesting. They cut their teeth on the relatively small hops down this extraordinary island chain, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, kind of almost never going out of sight of land within those archipelagos. And also, not only do they kind of get practice, it's really interesting because those areas are already inhabited, as opposed to the islands that

they reach in the mid-Pacific, which are uninhabited. But in the beginning, they're migrating down through these islands that have people in them already. So one of the things that I think you find about them is that they tend to be these really coastal dwellers. They often live on islands off islands, like Motu, little small islands off the coast of other islands on coral reefs and things like that. And they're really ocean people. They get their food from the ocean. They have like a gardening thing they do. They settle in these areas that are sort of freshwater and a bit of gardening space and then ocean resources, usually on a lagoon with coral and all the food that you get from that. So they've really got this lifestyle that they can transplant from island to island to island, and they keep that going

for a long time. Can we identify a moment when they really start to go offshore? They start to do ocean sailing, navigating, and passage making multi-day. Right. So the other thing I want to say about that, sort of what they call the island nursery of the Western Pacific, sort of island Southeast Asia, is that in addition to practicing this movement with culture, you know, like restarting over and over and over, they also develop the techniques that they're going to use that are going to enable them to make the big jumps, right? And so that's a couple of things. It's like the outrigger, right? Like they pioneer a kind of canoe technology, which is stable on the open ocean. And that's huge. So you've got the hull of the ship, which is like a kind of hollowed out canoe

in a way people can imagine. And then you've got this, like one of the big catamarans that you see flying through the air nowadays in the America's Cup and the Sail GP. There are these narrow joining sections to kind of another little hull almost, and that stops you tipping over, right? Like what is the advantage of an outrigger? Right. So it's a stabilizer. It's exactly what it is. It doesn't tip over very easily at all. Voyaging canoes are actually probably catamarans. They have two hulls, both of them big enough to hold stuff. But the smaller version of that is the single hull with the kind of arms, the two arms that stick out on the side. And then as you say, the small kind of false hull that just is a stabilizer holding you flat on the surface of the ocean. So that's a very important technology

for ocean travel. A narrow canoe is not great on the ocean. And you can take family. I think that's the most important thing. It was a village environment. It's not so much of a solo thing in the Pacific. It's very much a family unit. And when they pack up to prepare for a voyage, they don't think of just going solo.

So they invented this thing where they were able to take lots of people with them, have sort of housing between the two hulls on board and take food and, you know, chickens and, you know, things that they can have along the way and some plants which they can grow along the way. And because they knew it was going to be a very long voyage. And tell me, how did they cover these extraordinary distances in a very particular way? Tell me about these boats and about the way of using the natural world to navigate. Well, I feel it was in between Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa.

That art was perfected. They paused there, and they just sailed to each other and came over the multi-hull and saw how the stars were and they saw how the environment could be used to guide their voyages from one island to another and they got further and further away. So I feel that's how that art came to be. And also they must have figured out a whole bunch of other things, really understanding the kind of reflection of wave patterns, really understanding the behavior of sea life and birds in an island environment. So there's a ton of information that they are obviously grappling with,

learning, figuring out, refining. And that's part of what makes them able, again, to do this really amazing thing they do. This is the stuff,. And that's part of what makes them able, again, to do this really amazing thing they do. This is the stuff, Christina, that's so exciting. Talk to me about the seabirds, because this is important. Some seabirds roost, they go to sleep at night floating about on the ocean. Others head back to land, right? Right. They go back to land. There's a whole set of them that go out in the morning to fish and come back in the evening to sleep. And if you know which ones they are, then you can follow them. There are a lot of disputes about how far out from an island you can see them. Is it 30 miles? Is it 50 miles? Is it 10?

You know, whatever. But definitely, they are a tool. They are a piece of information that you can use if you're in the vicinity of an archipelago or an island. And there's the clouds, anyone who's been on a beach all day and you take a boat offshore and you look back at the shore, you'll often see a particular cloud formation above the coastline where the air does different things because the ground beneath it and those clouds will kind of stop at the water's edge. The Polynesians, they can spot like where islands might be by just looking at the clouds above them, right? Totally. I mean, I remember when I was first doing the research for this and I read this thing, which is actually a very well-known piece of information, which is that over a lagoon, like so over an atoll, which is a ring, a coral ring with like a pond in the middle,

I mean, ocean pond, over an atoll, the clouds will often have a sort of greenish tinge on their sort of underbelly because it's reflecting the light of the lagoon, which is quite turquoise. And, you know, so I was like, oh my God, greenish clouds reflecting the lagoon. That's how you know it's a low island. And of course, a lot of the islands are high islands and they do have quite a significant impact on the wind and the moisture and sort of how that all collects. They're often cloud covered at the top. And Christina, you mentioned reflective waves. I've been sailing all my life. I've sometimes convinced myself that I'm so brilliant, I can spot a reflective wave,

but I don't think I can. And these are waves that are bouncing off a rocky coast and then sending out kind of like a reflection on a pond or a puddle that you guys might be familiar with. Those ripples kind of go out, don't they? And they therefore intersect the incoming waves at a different angle and they would spot that and know that there must be a coastline nearby. Well, I think especially where this comes into play is like, let's imagine an archipelago. You live in an archipelago and say there are 10 islands and those 10 islands are not moving. They are always there. And you have been doing this since you were five years old. And so you have traveled from island A to island B and island C to island D. And you know that between island C and island D, there is a particular place where the surface

does something funny. Because basically, when there's a westerly or, you know, at a certain season, certain kinds of things are sort of routine. I mean, they're obviously changing all the time, but there are some patterns. There's some underlying patterns about which way the current goes, which way the winds are going, you know, how strong they are, and sort of how that water is behaving in relationship to those bodies of land. It's not probably very easy to use in an unfamiliar environment, but I think it can be very informative for people who are, you know, traveling within, say, maybe it's a 300-mile circumference or something like that, that they go in all the time and they know, oh yeah, when I get to there, it's going to do this.

Finally, it's what's almost been described as a kind of inbuilt GPS they would have had using celestial navigation. This is the bit that just blows my mind. They were expert readers of the stars. Yes. Again, the bit that just blows my mind. They were expert readers of the stars. Yes. Again, the stars are different in different places. The knowledge base is based on what you see in your sky. And so the kind of incredible piece of this is thinking about the early explorations where, for example, if you go from Tahiti to Hawaii, you are really traveling into a different sky. Or if you go down to New Zealand, a little bit less there, but the Tahiti to Hawaii is really, really different. So when the Hokule'o, which is the Polynesian Voyaging Society's recreated

voyaging ship, vessel, when they first sailed it from Hawaii to Tahiti, they really had to think about that, about what kind of a star path they could use, because nobody really knew what that would be. They have to figure that out. So there was a sort of reinvention of a body of knowledge that must have existed at some point when people were doing it. But again, it's not like they, you know, got vibes. They really looked at the sky and they knew that this star would rise here and this star would rise here and this star would rise here. And again, depending on the time of year and the latitude that you're at, all of these things change.

So again, it's just a really big body of knowledge of sort of accurate, descriptive knowledge of the physical world which I think underlies all of this activity and is it's very impressive especially when you realize there's no writing nobody wrote anything down this is all orally transmitted from person to person generation to generation yeah I also realized that uh you know the pacific region it's very spiritual the whole village um how can I explain? My upbringing, the spiritualness, it was all part of life. You walk around and something happens. Obviously, there's nobody there. And it's quickly explained to you. Oh, no, that's such and such, that's such and such,

that's this and that. And so I do believe that that's where a lot of, I mean, some of their help came from in their knowledge to navigate. You know, they called upon gods that are represented throughout different islands. When you're from a spiritual environment, that's how you are when you operate. When you look at the sea, when you look at the Congo, when you look at the stars, everything is represented spiritually.

So you mentioned the spiritual dimension. Is that how you describe mana? Yeah, it's spiritual, but it's a sort of power that comes from a certain source. So you can give mana to whatever you're adjudicated to. But it's hard to actually say in words to explain because you can sound like a madman. It's a strange sort of...

But I was brought up with this and I do feel these things. In one of your songs you talk about the god of the sea. Yeah, Tangaloa is the god of the sea and of course it depends on what island you go to. In New Zealand Maori they have Tane, you know, go to there in New Zealand Maori they have a tani you know go to the forest and yeah and of course this is where all the fantastic stories come from stem farm you know maui tiki tiki titi and all those stories come down Thank you. I think Maui has become one of the most famous gods

in the world pantheon at the moment, thanks to the recent movie that you're involved in. Tell me about what stories are told about Maui. Oh, he's a mischievous fellow, you know. So he's a demigod. He's not a full god. So some say he did slow down the sun. It depends on what island you're in.

And on the island of Samoa, they call him Titi. So it's a different name for the same. And so Maui slowed down the sun. What else did he do? Maui is a sort of culture hero. He is maybe like Hercules or something like that. He is wily. He is sometimes a shapeshifter. He is one of many sons sometimes. He's often the youngest. In many of the different

bodies of mythology, he's really widespread. I think he's old in that sense, like he's an early important figure. And he does things like he very famously fishes up the islands. He throws his hook into the sea and hauls up the islands of Hawaii and also the islands of New Zealand. He catches the sun and stops it. He does all kinds of things. He gets in trouble. He's difficult. I didn't find, you know, Moana was fun for me,

but that's not my image of Maui. And I think there were a lot of people who the one thing was like, he was all too comedic for me. Listen to Dan Snow's history hit, The Best Is Yet To Come. Stick with us. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So what period are we at now? When are they starting to settle these outlying islands that are serious multi-day, if not multi-week journeys away from the nearest other inhabited piece of land? The islands are intervisible for a long time, meaning you can see one island from the next. And then there's a point at which they are no longer intervisible. And it's east of Papua New Guinea in the Solomons, basically. And from the Solomons, you start to make a jump to what's called the Santa Cruz Islands. And from the Santa Cruz Islands, you get out to Vanuatu. But there you're starting to make some really big jumps there. And then

it's Samoa and Tonga. And Samoa and Tonga are at the edge of the Polynesian Triangle. They are on the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle. And that's the point at which we sort of call them Polynesians, which is just arbitrary. And they get to Samoa and Tonga at about 3,000 years ago, maybe two and a half. And the funny thing about this is that for a long time, people imagined that they kind of made these big runs to Samoa and Tonga, which is, again, Tonga is a collection of islands and it's, there's a lot there. And Samoa islands are pretty big. So there's a lot, again, lots of resources and, you know, you could just hunker down there for a while. And people thought that they then kind of just kept on sort of steadily proceeding eastward. But it looks now, this is

based on archaeology and, you know, with archaeology, there's always the stuff you haven't found yet. So it looks like there's a big gap in time that they do, in fact, sit down in Samoa and Tonga for a while. And it's another almost a thousand years before they, or several hundreds of years before they then kind of take off again. And so they don't reach the center of Polynesia, which is Tahiti, basically the society islands. And from there, they would then later branch out to all these other really, really, really crazy remote places. But that's a long run. It's not entirely clear why this would be true, or even I think there are possibly other scenarios that we just haven't really figured out yet.

When is everything settled from New Zealand to Hawaii? Right. So New Zealand is the last place that gets settled. Interestingly too, because if you went straight south from where they started, you'd have ended up in New Zealand, but they went all the way out to the middle and then back westward, southwestward before they hit New Zealand. Earliest kind of sure settlement of New Zealand is like 1200 AD. So it's about 800 years ago, which is not that long ago. So it's kind of in that 1000, call it 1000 is sort of the point at which you'd find a lot of dates in Hawaii, in Easter, in Papunui. And Christina, what about Easter Island? Is that the most remote? I mean, how many days will I have to sail from the nearest place to get to Easter Island? You know, I did it recently. I was on a ship that went from Tahiti to Easter Island,

but it was a big ship and it was not an easy haul. I mean, we had some weather, you know, serious weather, and it took days and days and days and days and days. And we went down through the Tuamotus and into the Gambiers and out to Easter Island. And it was really impressive to me. Yes, Easter is probably the most remote piece of this story. Were they just young men and women just setting off and hoping to see what they were going to find? How did they find Easter Island? I don't know. I don't know. There were these wonderful experiments back in the early days of computers. They did a project trying to calculate the likelihood of a landfall in some of these places based on wind and currents.

And some of these places, I mean, you can't drift to them, you know, you cannot drift to them from wherever you were from Tahiti, say. So you had to sail, which was an interesting thing to sort of demonstrate like quantitatively like that. They may have found it by accident. I mean, you sort of have to have found it by accident because they didn't know it was there. So all of these initial discoveries, it's very mysterious. But I think basically the explanation has got to be this. There's a guy named Jeff Irwin who wrote a very good book in which he kind of worked this out.

And he said, this is the way that it's got to be done. You go out and back, out and back, out and back, out and back. And that's an exploration pattern. And you go into the wind and come home with the wind. So you don't get stranded out there. You don't sail out into the unknown with the wind because then you never get home. So you go into the wind and come back, into the wind and come back. And then after you finish exploring that way, you go across the wind and come back, across the wind and come back. That's his idea. And I thought that was probably right. But the nearest piece of land to Easter Island is Pitcairn Island, which is 1,300 miles away.

I mean, and Pitcairn Island is a tiny little speck of land itself. I mean, it's just astonishing. They must have combed this ocean for land. I wonder how many dead men don't tell tales, right? The survivors are the ones that settle. They're the winners. And the losers don't get to tell their story, I guess. And how many of them were there? Right, right, right? The survivors are the ones that settle. They're the winners and the losers don't get to tell their story, I guess. And how many of them were there? Right, right, right. You know,

when I was reading the oral traditions, the voyaging traditions, I was very curious about that. I thought, are there going to be voyaging traditions in which they talk about our uncle so-and-so who sailed away and never returned? And there are a few stories like that of people who sailed away and never came back. There are also some stories of people who went out and came back in distress. Yeah, I'll bet, Christina, I'll bet they're in distress. I'm in distress when I go out sailing with my kids about three hours off the coast. Right, right. Or they come back and half of them are dead. You know, there's a kind of a famous story like that. So there must have been lots of people lost. The other reason we know that it kind

of had to be like that or something, some variant of that, is that there are atolls and even high islands, different islands, little islands all over that are uninhabited but show signs of Polynesian occupation. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings.

Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. And they have not been inhabited within the historical period, but they have tools and they have plants that people obviously brought there. Norfolk Island off of Australia had a bunch of banana palms when the British got there. They're like, huh, who put those here? Once they'd reached Easter Island, were they like then traveling back and trading or did these communities then become sort of isolated from each other? I think the way to think about this that makes the most sense is that there

are sort of regions, areas. So for example, Tahiti, the Tomoto Archipelago, the Gambiers, you know, some islands there that constitute a kind of a region. And they're still traveling back and forth amongst those islands within that region when the historical period begins. So, you know, when we have observers from the outside who come and write stuff down and tell us what they saw. And Samoa Tonga has always, with Fiji, has always remained a closely knit interrelated group. But I think there is a break between the big archipelagos that are widely separated. I think there's a break between New Zealand

and the rest of Polynesia. I think there's a break between Hawaii and the rest of Polynesia. And it's very clear that Easter Island becomes isolated. But Betea, to what extent was there a Polynesian culture right across from, say, Guinea all the way right to Easter Island? You know, although the languages are now, there are a lot of common words.

And so, you know, you can converse with each other. It's not that far apart. But I've just recently had to do a project. I was asked to actually go in there and separate different elements that give them a difference. And this was something I never, ever considered before, because to me, the entire Polynesian group belong under one umbrella, because the ancestors are all the same. You know, they are, to me, the source of it all. So I give them the acknowledgement, you know, in all my writings, my songs, it's always aimed towards them. It's

always to promote them. And Polynesia was colonised late in the game. I've been reading a lot about Captain Cook recently, and very much he was claiming land on behalf of the sovereign. He had no way of enforcing that because he was going to sail back off to Europe, but he was raising a flag and claiming it. Whether or not anyone in that process understood what was going on is unclear. Was it a land grab? Was it a resources thing? Was it a saving souls, evangelical, religious thing? What were the Europeans' ambitions in Polynesia? So all of the above. Certainly in the beginning, it's strategic. It's like control of a port so you can refresh, refit your ship, get some food,

recruit your crew, you know, all that stuff. Also break the journey if you're going to try and cross over that huge distance. Australia is sort of in play, you know, so there's a relationship to Australia. Tahiti becomes a provisioning island for Australia in the early days of Botany Bay and the penal colony there. So that's as we move forward in time a little bit, but it's partly a land grab, Australia, New Zealand, some of the islands. It's partly strategic locations for shipping. And there are some natural resources. A lot of them actually turned out not to really work. Like Norfolk Island was supposed to have spars and masts, but the Norfolk Pine was no good for it as it turned out. There were some Maori who were kidnapped and taken to Norfolk Island so they could work the flax and turn it into rope,

and that didn't go very far either. So there was an attempt to kind of use what was out there. So in the first few decades of the 19th century, there's a huge amount of traffic, and a lot of it's out of America, whaling and sealing, sealing particularly in the lower parts like southern New Zealand and stuff like that. But that was a huge, had a huge impact on the islands. The other thing about the colonial history of, I was just in the Pacific for quite some weeks, and this was again kind of mind-bending to me. Easter Island, Rapa Nui, belongs to Chile. French Polynesia, the whole middle of the Pacific, is French. Hawaii is American. New Zealand is its own thing, but it's sort of got that Australasian Britishy thing going on. That was brought home to me in a way that I knew it,

of course, but to go from one place to another and to realize that you have the lingua franca is changing. And some people can speak to each other in their Polynesian languages, but not all of them are really very easily understood across and not all people speak them anymore. And what about Christianity? Because we've talked a lot about traditional beliefs and how they were transmitted. Are the peoples of Polynesia effectively Christian now? Much of Polynesia is very Christian. The missionaries appeared in the Pacific starting in 1797, so quite early for this colonization period. And it took a while, but when it started to happen, when the conversions of chiefs started to be accomplished, that turned the whole population

pretty darn quickly. And a lot of other things are going on at the same time. Like in Hawaii, for example, you had this kind of influx of outsiders bringing a lot of trade goods, money, stuff, diseases, you know, big impact of imported disease on the population. So people are kind of dying inexplicably. The missionaries are there. Everybody says it's all changing. And, you know, I think if you'd been on the ground at that moment, you'd have said, yes, it's all changing. So the adoption of Christianity was very strong and powerful within a couple of decades. Some parts of Polynesia are still very, very strongly Christian. The places where that's less true tend to be like

the more westernized, you know, Hawaii and New Zealand, for example, where you have a bigger secular culture. So it's more varied in those places. But the islands tend to be pretty religious. So it must have been extraordinary changes. The Europeans arrived, the missionaries arrived. What did your elders tell you about that transition? Well, it was at first, you know, fascination. All of a sudden, white faces turn up, and of course, a lot of them thought they were from the sky, you know, from the gods. But as things went on, you know, there were things like the slave ships arrived to devastate

lots of islands by fooling them and taking them out. So it took a little while for people to reconcile, you know, and bring back that love of mankind. But you've sung about this. Oh, yes. These are things that my elders don't want to talk about. They don't want to discuss these things. They hurt, you know, and also it's been passed down that you do not speak about it. As a songwriter, you know, I make it part of my work that these things are documented because it is documented in writing,

but from a musical point of view, I also am trying to document those things too, because it's very, very important. I like your, when you imagine in response of people to the missionaries and they say, no, we already have our own God. I can imagine that exchange happening again and again. That's another thing. When we're discussing the missionaries, Christianity is very strong in the South Pacific.

But my job is not to be confrontational. My job is just to point out what actually happened. And in the song, especially in Vakatuwa, that's exactly what happened. People arrived with gunboats. You know, the big boom you hear in the song. They are gunboats. It's a demonstration like if you don't accept this religion, this is what we're going to do to you. It doesn't take much to coerce people when you've got that sort of firepower behind you.

What's the future for Polynesia? Despite the work done to kind of recover Polynesian culture, actually, there's a lot of forces pulling in other directions as well. I think it's important to recognize, for example, take the subject of Christianity. It's very indigenized. You know, the Christianity of the islands is very, very island. It's local and people make it what they want it to be. They make what they want of it. So I feel like that's not really a threat to the culture. It's the culture itself. It's what the culture now is. Now, the question of kind of revitalization or recovery or something is still

ongoing. I mean, you know, New Zealand and Hawaii are good examples where the languages were really in peril and they have made massive strides in bringing them back, especially in New Zealand. Just fantastic language restoration effort there. Unbelievable. And there's been a lot of commitment on the part of the government to help that, to make it a bilingual country. And that's super wonderful. So I feel like there are efforts to recover old things. I'll give you another example. Hawaiians started making newspapers in the 19th century in Hawaiian language. Those newspapers were impossible to really access outside of like the University of Hawaii, the Manoa Library, and they've all been

digitized over the past X number of years. So there was this huge corpus of 19th century written Hawaiian now, which is accessible to anybody. I mean, that's massive in terms of what it can do to inspire scholarship, inspire just learning and language learning and everything. So I'm optimistic. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Hupatea. I've always used words, spoken words and written words to tell the story of history.

I've never thought about using song. What is it about music and song that you think is so good at transmitting history? Well, it's, you know, people do sing it. You know, they sing along and they hum along and that carries through. long and that carries through. For example, like the fateles, the traditional songs and dances of the Pacific, they didn't have any written form like the Europeans did. It was all passed down through song and dance. When an event occurred, the songwriters got to work, you know,

and wrote about it, and then they celebrated, and then it was passed down from generation to generation to understand what was going on. You talked about Moana, you know, we know the way. I'm so proud of having written that because it just describes the excitement, the courage, you know, of these ancestors when they first went out to conquer all these islands, you know.

So thank you for the question. Well, Opetai, whenever my kids and I are out on the boat or we're going on an adventure, we sing that song. That's our family song. Oh, that's so nice to hear. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.