The depiction of Maui the demigod, who helps Moana on her journey, is a heroic figure found throughout much of Polynesia credited with performing a range of feats for the good of humankind. I admit to being moved by this scene.Īs someone who lectures on traditional oceanic navigation and migration, I can say resoundingly that it is high time the rest of the world learned this amazing story.Ī fisherman checks a fish wier off Tanu Beach, Samoa With the success of Moana’s mission and her having learned the art of wayfinding, her people start voyaging again.Īnd so the Long Pause comes to an end, Disney style, with a great fleet of canoes setting forth across the ocean to accomplish the greatest human adventure of all time. It also shows traces of Armstrong Sperry’s stirring, classic book Call It Courage, and Tom Hanks's Castaway.Ī Samoan outrigger canoe at the Kitano Hotel, Apia, Samoaīut the film's story also has a different angle with a powerful revelation: Moana’s people had stopped voyaging long ago, and had placed a taboo-another Polynesian world-on going beyond the reef. Moana’s struggle to learn to sail and get past the reef of her home island sets the stage for her learning of true wayfinding. And despite admonitions from her father against anyone going beyond the protective reef, Moana steals a canoe and embarks on her quest.īut as should be expected whenever Disney ventures into cross-cultural milieus, the film is characterized by the good, the bad and the ugly. An environmental catastrophe spreading across the island makes the mission urgent. The heart of Te Fiti is a greenstone (New Zealand Maori) amulet stolen by the demigod Maui. Moana-pronounced “moh-AH-nah,” not “MWAH-nah” means “ocean”-and the character is chosen by the sea itself to return the stolen heart of Te Fiti, who turns out to be an island deity (Tahiti, in its various linguistic forms, including Tafiti, is a pan-Polynesian word for any faraway place). Several theories have been proposed-from a favorable wind caused by a sustained period of El Niño, to visible supernovas luring the stargazing islanders to travel, to ciguatera poisoning caused by algae blooms.Įnter Moana, the latest Disney movie, set in what appears to be Samoa, even though most American audiences will see it as Hawaii. Nobody knows the reason for The Long Pause, or why the Polynesians started voyaging again. Then when they did start again, they did so with a vengeance: archaeological evidence suggests that within a century or so after venturing forth, Polynesians discovered and settled nearly every inhabitable island in the central and eastern Pacific. Hokule'a arrival in Honolulu from Tahiti in 1976 This means that after arriving in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, Polynesians took a break-for almost 2,000 years-before voyaging forth again. But the islands of Central and Eastern Polynesia were not settled until 1,500 to 500 years ago. Western Polynesia-the islands closest to Australia and New Guinea-were colonized around 3,500 years ago. The general scholarship on migrations seems well established, and most current researches now seek to understand the timing of the various colonizations.īut one huge mystery, sometimes called “The Long Pause” leaves a gaping hole in the voyaging timeline. The Hōkūleʻa voyaging canoe has proved the efficacy of traditional Oceanic navigation since 1976, when it embarked on its historic maiden voyage to recover the lost heritage of this ocean-sailing tradition.
And having found them, they traveled back and forth, again and again, to settle them-all this, 500 to 1,000 years ago.Įver since Captain Cook landed in the Hawaiian Islands and realized that the inhabitants spoke a cognate language to those of the South Pacific islands, scholars and others have researched and theorized about the origins and migrations of the Polynesians.
People using Stone Age technology built voyaging canoes capable of traveling thousands of miles, then set forth against the winds and currents to find tiny dots of land in the midst of the largest ocean on Earth. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: the colonization of Pacific Islands is the greatest human adventure story of all time.