Polynesian Peoples

The Polynesian Triangle, the vast stretch of the central and southern Pacific bounded by Hawaii in the north, Aotearoa New Zealand in the southwest and Rapa Nui, Easter Island, in the southeast, was settled by a single closely related population of Austronesian-speaking voyagers whose ancestors had already crossed enormous distances across the Pacific before reaching the Polynesian islands specifically. Archaeological and linguistic evidence generally places the settlement of the more remote eastern Polynesian islands, including Hawaii, the Society Islands and Rapa Nui, within roughly the last two thousand years, a comparatively late chapter in a much longer history of Pacific voyaging.

What makes this migration remarkable to historians is not just its geographic scale but the method behind it: Polynesian navigators crossed open ocean between islands sometimes thousands of miles apart using wayfinding, a navigation system built on reading wave patterns, star positions, wind and cloud formations, and the behavior of birds and marine life, without magnetic compasses, written charts or any of the instruments that later European navigators considered indispensable. The double-hulled voyaging canoe, capable of carrying settlers, livestock and crop plants across these distances, and the navigational knowledge required to sail it accurately, represent one of the most sophisticated pre-industrial maritime technologies documented anywhere, and modern voyaging societies in Hawaii and elsewhere have worked since the 1970s to revive and demonstrate these techniques using replica vessels sailed without modern instruments.

The peoples this entry groups together, Maori, Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Tongans, Tahitians and others, share deep linguistic and ancestral kinship but built distinct societies once settlement spread them across the Pacific, developing separate political structures, social hierarchies and, in many cases, separate ceremonial traditions specific to each island group's own history and environment. Treating them as a single grouping is a linguistic and genealogical statement, that they descend from a common ancestral population and speak closely related languages, and not a claim that Maori tikanga and Native Hawaiian practice, for instance, are interchangeable or that a description of one would stand in for the other.

That distinction is why this entry names but does not describe the ceremonial and tapu material this atlas has registered as restricted. Polynesian Religion covers material Kanaka Maoli, Maori and other Pacific peoples hold and govern separately, each setting its own terms for what may be shared outside the community and what may not, and the same rule applies here as elsewhere: record that the restriction exists, name which register entry it falls under, and stop there. A reader wanting to understand who the Polynesian peoples are, where they came from and how they are related to one another will find that here; a reader wanting the specific content of any people's closed ceremonial practice will not, because that content belongs to the communities that hold it and not to an outside reference work.