Polynesian Quotes

The mai tai got its name when two Polynesian alcoholics got in a fight over some neckwear.

TV sounds are all the same; there's no difference between the sound of the wind in Northern Ireland and the wind on a Polynesian island.

Strange as it may seem, there is nothing in which a young and beautiful female appears to more advantage than in the art of smoking.

Sleepy pulled the car to a stop in front of this paved entranceway, which was flanked on either side by these enormous palm trees, kind of like the Polynesian Resort at Disney World. In fact, the whole place had kind of a Disney feel to it. You know, really big, and kind of modern and fake.

One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.

Yet, after all, insensible as he is to a thousand wants, and removed from harassing cares, my not the savage be the happier man..?

Guess what? The Nazis didn't lose the war after all. They won it and flourished. They took over the world and wiped out every last Jew, every last Gypsy, black, East Indian, and American Indian. Then, when they were finished with that, they wiped out the Russians and the Poles and the Bohemians and the Moravians and the Bulgarians and the Serbians and the Croatians--all the Slavs. Then they started in on the Polynesians and the Koreans and the Chinese and the Japanese--all the peoples of Asia. This took a long, long time, but when it was all over, everyone in the world was one hundred percent Aryan, and they were all very, very happy. Naturally the textbooks used in the schools no longer mentioned any race but the Aryan or any language but German or any religion but Hitlerism or any political system but National Socialism. There would have been no point. After a few generations of that, no one could have put anything different into the textbooks even if they'd wanted to, because they didn't know anything different. But one day, two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo. Both were handsome in the usual Aryan way, but one of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy. That was Kurt. His friend said, "What's wrong, Kurt? Why are you always moping around like this?" Kurt said, "I'll tell you, Hans. There is something that's troubling me--and troubling me deeply." His friend asked what it was. "It's this," Kurt said. "I cannot shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about." And that's how the paper ended.' Ishmael nodded thoughtfully. 'And what did your teacher think of that?' 'He wanted to know if I had the same crazy feeling as Kurt. When I said I did, he wanted to know what I thought we were being lied to about. I said, 'How could I know? I'm no better off than Kurt.

Do you ... still believe?' 'Our very presence here, a Polynesian goddess sitting next to a Zulu thunder god, listening to the song of a Greek siren, should be proof enough that religions can and do coexist.' He looked back at the cross over the entryway. 'And I still do not know.

They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry - like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles.

I had no mind then for anything except Sebastian, and I saw him already as being threatened, though I did not yet know how black was the threat. His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palm of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the golden slope that had never known the print of a boot there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary and tourist – only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles.

There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules ... intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? ... Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?

Some Austronesian words borrowed into English include ‘taboo’ and ‘tattoo’ (from a Polynesian language), ‘boondocks’ (from the Tagalog language of the Philippines), and ‘amok,’ ‘batik,’ and ‘orangutan’ (from Malay).

The word 'Indonesia' was first manufactured in 1850 in the form 'Indu-nesians' by the English traveler and social observer George Samuel Windsor Earl. He was searching for an ethnographic term to describe 'that branch of the Polynesian race inhabiting the Indian Archipelago', or 'the brown races of the Indian Archipelago'.

Despite widespread misconceptions in the United States today that the institution of slavery was based on race, for most of the thousands of years in which slavery existed around the world, it was based on whoever was vulnerable to enslavement and within striking distance. Thus Europeans enslaved other Europeans, just as Asians enslaved other Asians and Africans enslaved other Africans, while Polynesians enslaved other Polynesians and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. The very word “slave" derived from the word for Slavs, who were enslaved by fellow Europeans for centuries before Africans began to be brought in chains to the Western Hemisphere. Africans were not singled out by a race for ownership by Europeans, they were resorted to after the rise of nation-states with armies and navies in other parts of the world which reduced the number of places that could be raided for slaves without great costs and risks. Slave-raiding continued in Africa, primarily by Africans enslaving other Africans and then, in West Africa, selling some of their slaves to whites to take to the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, the growing range of ships and the growing wealth of nations eventually made economically feasible the transportation of vast numbers of slaves from one continent to another, creating racial differences between the enslaved and their owners as a dominant pattern in the Western Hemisphere. Such a pattern was by no means limited to Europeans owning non-Europeans, however. There were many examples of the reverse, quite aside from vast regions of the earth where neither the slaves nor their owners were either black or white.

History teaches us many things. Most importantly, the things that made us who and what we are.

In another place was a vast array of idols—Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that particularly took my fancy.

You idolize peasants. You look up to island savages living “at one with Nature,” I ask you to see what happened to Margaret Mead, and how the Polynesians punked her—most of the things she wrote about their views on life, about their sexual freedom, was nonsense they made up to make her look foolish. In same way the fools like Gimbutas and others who believe that mankind at some remote point lived under a benevolent matriarchy, again, “at one with Nature,” in balance with the needs of the soil and such: sheer nonsense. Everywhere historians, archaeologists find what we thought was matriarchy was really no such thing.

Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.

In the Pacific Ocean, the main wave of extinction began in about 1500 BC, when Polynesian farmers settled the Solomon Islands, Fiji and New Caledonia. They killed

and their implication for southeastern Polynesian prehistory

Polynesians were both the most closely related and the most widely dispersed people in the world. Seven’s

This is what is meant by the Polynesian Triangle, an area of ten million square miles in the middle of the Pacific Ocean defined by the three points of Hawai‘i, New Zealand, and Easter Island.

Why, they are cannibals!’ said Toby on one occasion when I eulogized the tribe. ‘Granted,’ I replied, ‘but a more humane, gentlemanly and amiable set of epicures do not probably exist in the Pacific.’ But,

Ho’oponopono.” “The Ho’popo…what?” “It’s a Polynesian tradition of forgiveness and healing. Very old, very profound, but very simple. One only need focus on the object of discord and say: I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you.

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian water do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they have yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their pelty wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs gives robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the birch canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

How often is the term ‘savages’ incorrectly applied! None really deserving of it were ever yet discovered by voyagers or by travellers. They have discovered heathens and barbarians whom by horrible cruelties they have exasperated into savages. It may be asserted without fear of contradictions that in all the cases of outrages committed by Polynesians, Europeans have at some time or other been the aggressors, and that the cruel and bloodthirsty disposition of some of the islanders is mainly to be ascribed to the influence of such examples. But

The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere.

Like colonisers elsewhere, the East Polynesian ancestors and their immediate descendants had learned, by trial and error and committing some major mistakes, to turn New Zealand’s natural and environmental conditions to human advantage (how many people perished, one wonders, in the search for a safe

The term 'Savage' is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed, when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.

If popular mythology is to be believed, the discoverer of New Zealand was a Polynesian voyager named Kupe. Oddly, this myth was Pakeha in origin rather than Maori. Maori came to embrace it solely as a result of its widespread publication and dissemination in New Zealand primary schools between the 1910s and the 1970s.

His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palms of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the slope that had never known the print of a boot, there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary, and tourist—only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles. And

The biological anthropologist Stephen McGarvey has speculated that the people who survived these voyages tended to have a higher percentage of body fat before the voyage began and/or more efficient metabolisms, allowing them to live longer on less food than their thinner companions. (McGarvey theorizes that this is why modern-day Polynesians suffer from a high incidence of obesity.)

There is scarcely anything when a man is in difficulties that he is more disposed to look upon with abhorrence than a rightabout retrograde movement—a systematic going over of the already trodden ground: and especially if he has a love of adventure, such a course appears indescribably repulsive, so long as there remains the least hope to be derived from braving untried difficulties. It

I ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that custom which only a few years since was practised in enlightened England:—a convicted traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and suchlike heinous crimes, had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men! The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth. His

Whoever they were, the so-called Lapita people appeared to be the first people on the scene in these places, and this, in turn, meant that not only were they the true pioneers of the remote Pacific—the first people to sail over the horizon to islands that were too far away to see—but they were also the first people to reach the Polynesian Triangle. And this meant that they were the immediate precursors and ancestors of the Polynesians.

The islanders, while employed in erecting this tenement, reminded me of a colony of beavers at work. To be sure, they were hardly as silent and demure as those wonderful creatures, nor were they by any means as diligent. To tell the truth they were somewhat inclined to be lazy, but a perfect tumult of hilarity prevailed; and they worked together so unitedly, and seemed actuated by such an instinct of friendliness, that it was truly beautiful to behold. Not

When the Professor is told by the Polynesian that once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true, he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and stars in a box, unless he clasps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a child would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter.

Barbara and I had arrived early, so I got to admire everyone’s entrance. We were seated at tables around a dance floor that had been set up on the lawn behind the house. Barbara and I shared a table with Deborah Kerr and her husband. Deborah, a lovely English redhead, had been brought to Hollywood to play opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters. Louis B. Mayer needed a cool, refined beauty to replace the enormously popular redhead, Greer Garson, who had married a wealthy oil magnate and retired from the screen in the mid-fifties. Deborah, like her predecessor, had an ultra-ladylike air about her that was misleading. In fact, she was quick, sharp, and very funny. She and Barbara got along like old school chums. Jimmy Stewart was also there with his wife. It was the first time I’d seen him since we’d worked for Hitchcock. It was a treat talking to him, and I felt closer to him than I ever did on the set of Rope. He was so genuinely happy for my success in Strangers on a Train that I was quite moved. Clark Gable arrived late, and it was a star entrance to remember. He stopped for a moment at the top of the steps that led down to the garden. He was alone, tanned, and wearing a white suit. He radiated charisma. He really was the King. The party was elegant. Hot Polynesian hors d’oeuvres were passed around during drinks. Dinner was very French, with consommé madrilène as a first course followed by cold poached salmon and asparagus hollandaise. During dessert, a lemon soufflé, and coffee, the cocktail pianist by the pool, who had been playing through dinner, was discreetly augmented by a rhythm section, and they became a small combo for dancing. The dance floor was set up on the lawn near an open bar, and the whole garden glowed with colored paper lanterns. Later in the evening, I managed a subdued jitterbug with Deborah Kerr, who was much livelier than her cool on-screen image. She had not yet done From Here to Eternity, in which she and Burt Lancaster steamed up the screen with their love scene in the surf. I was, of course, extremely impressed to be there with Hollywood royalty that evening, but as far as parties go, I realized that I had a lot more fun at Gene Kelly’s open houses.

At the Sandwich Islands, Kaahumanu, the gigantic old dowager queen—a woman of nearly four hundred pounds weight, and who is said to be still living at Mowee—was accustomed, in some of her terrific gusts of temper, to snatch up an ordinary sized man who had offended her, and snap his spine across her knee. Incredible as this may seem, it is a fact. While at Lahainaluna—the residence of this monstrous Jezebel—a humpbacked wretch was pointed out to me, who, some twenty-five years previously, had had the vertebrae of his backbone very seriously discomposed by his gentle mistress. The

The first is that the relationships among all forms of matter are ones of kinship; everything that exists is, in a fairly literal sense, related to everything else. The stone that is the ancestor Raukawa is also, in its own right, an ancestor, being part of the same continuum of creation as the man and the ancestral hero. The second is that the mechanism of creation for everything in the world—not just humans, animals, and gods but even things that we would describe as inorganic, like sand and stones—is a form of sexual reproduction. Creation in traditional Polynesian myths is, fundamentally, a matter of procreation.

According to many Polynesian creation stories, the origin of the universe begins in something known as Te Pō. Typically described as a period of chaos or darkness or a kind of night, Te Pō is what existed before any gods, sky, land, sea, plants, animals, or humans had come into being. It is associated not just with the dim beginnings of the world but with the time before birth, the time after death, and the mysteries of the spirit world. In the dualistic philosophy of the Polynesians, it is opposed to Te Ao, the world of light and ordinary human endeavor. We live in Te Ao, but it is from Te Pō that we come, and to it that we ultimately return. The

Be it determined, however, that each one this records is given by means of a man who, in line with his personal assertion, become only at one of the islands, and remained there however two weeks, slumbering every night on board his ship, and taking little child-glove excursions ashore within the sunlight hours, attended by an armed birthday celebration.

In real life, a group of boys actually were shipwrecked on a remote Polynesian island in 1965, as Rutger Bregman described in his book Humankind. What happened in this true story? The kids hollowed out tree trunks to catch rain water. They worked in pairs, drawing up a schedule of chores to ensure that gardening, cooking, and guard duty all got taken care of. They started a fire and kept it going for 15 months, until they were rescued. How did they manage such remarkable cooperation? Whenever they got into conflicts, they had a ritual. Each boy would go to opposite ends of the island to calm down. They created time and space, in other words. Then, after about four hours apart, they’d come back together and apologize.

The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris—cannibal banquets—groves of cocoanut—coral reefs—tattooed chiefs—and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with bread-fruit-trees—carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters—savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols—HEATHENISH RITES AND HUMAN SACRIFICES. Such

Every evening the girls of the house gathered about me on the mats, and after chasing away Kory-Kory from my side—who nevertheless, retired only to a little distance and watched their proceedings with the most jealous attention—would anoint my whole body with a fragrant oil, squeezed from a yellow root, previously pounded between a couple of stones, and which in their language is denominated ‘aka’. And most refreshing and agreeable are the juices of the ‘aka’, when applied to ones, limbs by the soft palms of sweet nymphs, whose bright eyes are beaming upon you with kindness; and I used to hail with delight the daily recurrence of this luxurious operation, in which I forgot all my troubles, and buried for the time every feeling of sorrow. Sometimes

The expedition for the occupation of the Marquesas had sailed from Brest in the spring of 1842, and the secret of its destination was solely in the possession of its commander. No wonder that those who contemplated such a signal infraction of the rights of humanity should have sought to veil the enormity from the eyes of the world. And yet, notwithstanding their iniquitous conduct in this and in other matters, the French have ever plumed themselves upon being the most humane and polished of nations. A high degree of refinement, however, does not seem to subdue our wicked propensities so much after all; and were civilization itself to be estimated by some of its results, it would seem perhaps better for what we call the barbarous part of the world to remain unchanged. One

Inside the terminal at Keahole, they sat waiting to board, watching husky Hawaiians load luggage onto baggage ramps. Arriving tourists smiled at their dark, muscled bodies, handsome full-featured faces, the ease with which they lifted things of bulk and weight. Departing tourists took snapshots of them. 'That's how they see us', Pono whispered. 'Porters, servants. Hula Dancers, clowns. They never see us as we are, complex, ambiguous, inspired humans.' 'Not all haole see us that way...'Jess argued. Vanya stared at her. 'Yes, all Haole and every foreigner who comes here puts us in one of two categories: The malignant stereotype of vicious, drunken, do-nothing kanaka and their loose-hipped, whoring wahine. Or, the benign stereotype of the childlike, tourist-loving, bare-foot, aloha-spirit natives.

The officer argued that even if they managed to find “a desert island,” they would certainly perish from starvation or thirst. Emory pointed out that Polynesians had been managing just fine for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and that there was food and water to be had on even the smallest islands if you knew where to look. Coconuts alone provided food, water, containers, and fuel for a fire; the problem was that most American servicemen had no idea how to husk one. Asked if he could teach them, Emory replied, Of course—all that was needed was a pointed stick. And so began his stint as survival instructor to the U.S. military in the Pacific theater. Emory compiled a little manual of the basics, entitled South Sea Lore (known in its first incarnation as the Castaway’s Baedeker to the South Seas).

The Easter Islanders’ isolation probably also explains why I have found that their collapse, more than the collapse of any other pre-industrial society, haunts my readers and students. The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the Internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter’s dozen clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space. When the Easter Islanders got into difficulties, there was nowhere to which they could flee, nor to which they could turn for help; nor shall we modern Earthlings have recourse elsewhere if our troubles increase. Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future.

Finally, there was the formidable difficulty of navigation. Making extraordinarily complex spherical trigonometry calculations based on figures taken from a crowd of instruments, navigators groped over thousands of miles of featureless ocean toward targets or destination islands that were blacked out at night, often only yards wide, and flat to the horizon. Even with all the instruments, the procedures could be comically primitive. “Each time I made a sextant calibration,” wrote navigator John Weller, “I would open the escape hatch on the flight deck and stand on my navigation desk and the radio operator’s desk while [the radioman] held on to my legs so I would not be sucked out of the plane.” At night, navigators sometimes resorted to following the stars, guiding their crews over the Pacific by means not so different from those used by ancient Polynesian mariners. In a storm or clouds, even that was impossible.

The traumatic aspect of drinking ayahuasca is that in order to heal yourself, you must first confront the wound; by forcing you to deal with your own inner garbage, ayahuasca shows you things about yourself that you might not want to see. I wish that a whole country could drink ayahuasca—not merely every individual citizen of a country, but the country itself, the spirit of the country. I wish that a flag could drink ayahuasca, that we could just fold the Stars and Stripes into the shape of a cup, pour in the tea, and transport Uncle Sam into another dimension. He’d have to fight his way out of some nightmares, but he’d be cleansed. What would he find? William S. Burroughs wrote that when you drink ayahuasca, “The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized—pass through your body.” When Burroughs drank, he actually saw himself transformed into both a black man and a black woman. What if some freedom-hating narcoterrorists snuck into the Fox News studios and put ayahuasca in Sean Hannity’s coffee, just before he went live? What would be the day’s fair and balanced news for America? If America drank ayahuasca and then withdrew into the filthy pit of its own heart, confronting all its fears and hate and finally purging itself of that negative energy, maybe America would come out Muslim: sucked through a black hole by the Black Mind, young Latter-Day Saint crackers with smooth cheeks, short-sleeved white shirts, and name tags confront nightmarish visions of getting swallowed whole by giant grotesque “Jolly Nigger” coin banks and then find themselves vomited back up as Nubian Islamic Hebrews in turbans and robes selling incense on the subways. The “God Hates Fags” pastor, eyes wild with a new passion for Allah, boards a helicopter to drop thousands of Qur’ans upon the small towns below. I want to see ayahuasca’s vine goddess clean out America’s poison. But what would happen if a religion could drink the vine? What if I poured ayahuasca into my Qur’an?

They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; the furnish long maritime approaches to out numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wig-wams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forest, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartart Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

Then one day, as he was watching one of his workers sift a shovelful of earth, something among the rocks and sand caught his eye, “a flat fragment of some brick-red substance,” which appeared briefly and then disappeared. It looked, thought Suggs, exactly like a piece of pottery. But that couldn’t be—pottery was found throughout Island Southeast Asia and much of Melanesia, but it had never been seen east of Samoa. And yet, there it was: an unmistakable potsherd from the lowest level of the dark band of sand that indicated human habitation. Almost immediately, a second, larger fragment emerged, then a third: a piece of an ancient pot rim with a grooved and rounded lip and marks on the inner and outer surfaces, “from the hand of the potter who had smoothed this vessel in the dim past.” In all, five fragments of pottery were discovered, belonging to just three vessels: a poorly fired, crumbly brown pot with a coarse temper; a well-fired reddish-brown bowl with a flared rim; and a fine-tempered fragment, also reddish brown, with marks that showed it had been polished using some kind of tool. Modest though they were, these ceramic tidbits changed “the complexion of Polynesian prehistory”—though, as was so often the case, it was not immediately clear in precisely what way.

I feel very sorry for the professionals whenever they find another confusing skull, something that belonged to the wrong sort of people, or whenever they find statues or artifacts that confuse them—for they’ll talk about the odd, but they won’t talk about the impossible, which is where I feel sorry for them, for as soon as something becomes impossible it slipslides out of belief entirely, whether it’s true or not. I mean, here’s a skull that shows the Ainu, the Japanese aboriginal race, were in America nine thousand years ago. Here’s another that shows there were Polynesians in California nearly two thousand years later. And all the scientists mutter and puzzle over who’s descended from whom, missing the point entirely. Heaven knows what’ll happen if they ever actually find the Hopi emergence tunnels. That’ll shake a few things up, you just wait. “Did the Irish come to America in the dark ages, you ask me? Of course they did, and the Welsh, and the Vikings, while the Africans from the west coast—what in later days they called the slave coast or the ivory coast—they were trading with South America, and the Chinese visited Oregon a couple of times: they called it Fu Sang. The Basque established their secret sacred fishing grounds off the coast of Newfoundland twelve hundred years back. Now, I suppose you’re going to say, but, Mister Ibis, these people were primitives, they didn’t have radio controls and vitamin pills and jet airplanes.

Just beyond the pi-pi, and disposed in a triangle before the entrance of the house, were three magnificent bread-fruit trees. At this moment I can recap to my mind their slender shafts, and the graceful inequalities of their bark, on which my eye was accustomed to dwell day after day in the midst of my solitary musings. It is strange how inanimate objects will twine themselves into our affections, especially in the hour of affliction. Even now, amidst all the bustle and stir of the proud and busy city in which I am dwelling, the image of those three trees seems to come as vividly before my eyes as if they were actually present, and I still feel the soothing quiet pleasure which I then had in watching hour after hour their topmost boughs waving gracefully in the breeze.

The archaeologist attached to the Bayard Dominick’s Marquesan team had reported in 1925 that the Marquesas offered “few opportunities for archaeological research.” But in 1956, a new expedition set out to reexamine the possibilities in these islands at the eastern edge of the Polynesian Triangle. An energetic Columbia University graduate student named Robert Suggs was sent ahead to reconnoiter, and he quickly discovered that the previous generation had gotten it all wrong. Everywhere he looked, he saw archaeological potential. “We were seldom out of sight of some relic of the ancient Marquesan culture,” he writes. “Through all the valleys were scattered clusters of ruined house platforms. . . . Overgrown with weeds, half tumbled down beneath the weight of toppled trees and the pressure of the inexorable palm roots, these ancient village sites were sources of stone axes, carved stone pestles, skulls, and other sundry curios.” There were ceremonial plazas “hundreds of feet long” and, high on the cliffs above the deep valleys, “burial caves containing the remains of the population of centuries past.” The coup de grâce came when Suggs and his guide followed up on a report of a large number of “pig bones” in the dunes at a place called Ha‘atuatua. This windswept expanse of scrub and sand lies on the exposed eastern corner of Nuku Hiva. A decade earlier, in 1946, a tidal wave had cut away part of the beach, and since then bones and other artifacts had been washing out of the dunes. Not knowing quite what to expect, Suggs and his guide rode over on horseback. When they came out of the “hibiscus tangle” at the back of the beach and “caught sight of the debris washing down the slope,” he writes, “I nearly fell out of the saddle.” The bones that were scattered all along the slope and on the beach below were not pig bones but human bones! Ribs, vertebrae, thigh bones, bits of skull vault, and innumerable hand and foot bones were everywhere. At the edge of the bank a bleached female skull rested upside down, almost entirely exposed. Where the bank had been cut away, a dark horizontal band about two feet thick could be seen between layers of clean white sand. Embedded in this band were bits of charcoal and saucers of ash, fragments of pearl shell, stone and coral tools, and large fitted stones that appeared to be part of a buried pavement. They had discovered the remains of an entire village, complete with postholes, cooking pits, courtyards, and burials. The time was too short to explore the site fully, but the very next year, Suggs and his wife returned to examine it. There

No sooner did the plan let them off at New Caledonia, than Barby found another friend. He was a Kanaka taxi driver, over six feet tall and muscled like a blacksmith, with sooty skin and hair turned yellow from many applications of lime, a standard native treatment for lice. He chewed betel incessantly, which Barby thought was fascinating, since it turned his tongue and lips the color of a ripe tomato. His name, he said in wonderfully bad English, was Henri. He pronounced it 'On-ree.

God damn you!” Alfred said. “You belong in jail!” The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drip on the sheets below. “Seems to me,” it said, “you anal retentive type personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put ’em in the slammer! And Polynesians, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail ’em! And how about ten to twenty, while we’re at it, for every horny little teenager, I mean talk about insolence, talk about no restraint. And Negroes (sore topic, Fred?), I’m hearing rambunctious shouting and interesting grammar, I’m smelling liquor of the malt variety and sweat that’s very rich and scalpy, and all that dancing and whoopee-making and singers that coo like body parts wetted with saliva and special jellies: what’s a jail for if not to toss a Negro in it? And your Caribbeans with their spliffs and their potbelly toddlers and their like daily barbecues and ratborne hanta viruses and sugary drinks with pig blood at the bottom? Slam the cell door, eat the key. And the Chinese, man, those creepy-ass weird-name vegetables like homegrown dildos somebody forgot to wash after using, one-dollah, one-dollah, and those slimy carps and skinned-alive songbirds, and come on, like, puppy-dog soup and pooty-tat dumplings and female infants are national delicacies, and pork bung, by which we’re referring here to the anus of a swine, presumably a sort of chewy and bristly type item, pork bung’s a thing Chinks pay money for to eat? What say we just nuke all billion point two of ’em, hey? Clean that part of the world up already. And let’s not forget about women generally, nothing but a trail of Kleenexes and Tampaxes everywhere they go. And your fairies with their doctor’s-office lubricants, and your Mediterraneans with their whiskers and their garlic, and your French with their garter belts and raunchy cheeses, and your blue-collar ball-scratchers with their hot rods and beer belches, and your Jews with their circumcised putzes and gefilte fish like pickled turds, and your Wasps with their Cigarette boats and runny-assed polo horses and go-to-hell cigars? Hey, funny thing, Fred, the only people that don’t belong in your jail are upper-middle-class northern European men. And you’re on my case for wanting

The Polynesian traditions of the War in Heaven, the Creation, the Fall of Man, the story of Cain and Abel, the Flood, the eight persons who were saved from the flood in a large canoe, etc., all agree so closely with the Bible story that it would be preposterous to say that they are the result of mere chance or coincidence.

My family taught me an alternate perspective. Greek mythology was completely borrowed from Polynesian and Pacific Island folklore.

I recently visited New Zealand and learned that it has a very diverse ecosystem. Until the arrival of humans, it was populated almost entirely by birds. They occupied every niche in the food chain, from tiny ɻightless things to predators so enormous they could snatch a hundred-pound prey for dinner. For millions of years, birds dominated their man-less, mammal-less world, a universe of feathers, beaks, and talons, knowing of no other form of higher life. The birds acquired a host of abilities and natural defenses optimal for their environment. But then in the thirteenth century, while the Europeans were still busy with their crusades, Polynesian explorers came, and with them came rats—with fur instead of feathers, teeth instead of beaks, and tiny paws instead of fearsome talons. The defense mechanisms that worked well against other birds failed against the rats. Small ɻightless birds who, when sensing danger, would remain perfectly still to avoid being spotted by predators ɻying overhead, would do the same when encountering a rat. Fighting for its life, in its passive way, the little bird focused its every eʃort on not moving a single muscle—only to be gobbled up where it stood. The scientific term for animals like the little bird who had not encountered rats or humans is naïve. I find this charming, as if the little bird existed in a moral universe of which his New Zealand was a kind of Eden, its inhabitants living a peaceful existence disrupted only by the victimization of a cunning intruder, preying on their relative innocence. I often think the people I encounter are naïve, but only because they may never have encountered someone quite like me. Sociopaths see things that no one else does because they have diʃerent expectations about the world and the people in it. While you and observer from certain harsh truths, the sociopath remains undistracted. We are like rats on an island of birds. I have never identified with the little bird, trapped by fear and an instinct for passivity, the wide-eyed victim of circumstance. I have never pined for an Eden of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. I am the rat, and I will take every advantage I can without apology or excuse. And there are others like me.

There are some 170 languages in the Philippines, almost all part of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family. I would assume most of the 170 are focal points within a language continuum. Tagalog was the name given to the focal point spoken in the Manila area.

Despite the passage of close to a million years since Homo erectus first sailed to Flores, however, what archaeology does not concede is that the human species could have developed and refined those early nautical skills to the extent of being able to cross a vast ocean like the Pacific or the Atlantic from one side to the other. In the case of the former, extensive transoceanic journeys are not believed to have been undertaken until about 3,500 years ago, during the so-called Polynesian expansion. And the mainstream historical view is that the Atlantic was not successfully navigated until 1492--the year in which, as the schoolyard mnemonic has it, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Indeed, the notion that long transoceanic voyages were a technological impossibility during the Stone Age remains one of the central structural elements of the dominant reference frame of archaeology--a reference frame that geneticists see no reason not to respect and deploy when interpreting their own data. Since that reference frame rules out, a priori, the option of a direct ocean crossing between Australasia and South America during the Paleolithic and instead is adamant that all settlement came via northeast Asia, geneticists tend to approach the data from that perspective.

International. Facing it from Kalakaua, I looked at the totem poles on my left, garishly painted, contorted faces carved upon them. Farther left, and extending from the Avenue into the grounds, was Don the Beachcomber’s Bora Bora Lounge, in which — according to a sign outside it — was the famous Dagger Bar. On my right was the first of many little stores and shops. This one was Polynesian, crammed with idols, wood-carvings, jewelry in glass cases, a model outrigger canoe in the front window. Beyond it, all around and in the Market Place,

the captain's sadism became directed at other members of the ship until a ring of Polynesian sailors

How often is the term 'savages' incorrectly applied!

Our life force bioenergy has been known by a multitude of names around the world. For instance: Ki is the Japanese equivalent of chi or life energy; Prana is the Hindu term for Life force, or Life energy. Lung is a Tibetan word meaning inner ‘winds’ of life force; Ruach Ha Kodesh is Hebrew for Breath of God; Nafs and Ruh is the Islamic terms for a kind of ‘soul breath’; Spiritus Sancti is the Latin (Catholic) term meaning 'Holy Spirit’; Pneuma is Greek for 'vital breath’; Élan vital is the term for 'vital life-force' in classical European Vitalism; Orgone was the revolutionary psycho-biologist Wilhelm Reich's term for vital life force; nilch'i is the Navajo term for ‘sacred life-giving wind or life-force’; ni is the Lakota Sioux term for life-force; Mana is an Oceanic-Polynesian term (and more recently also adopted as the term for life-force by several fantasy role-playing games); ha, or the more-specifically Hawaiian (Huna), is the term for ‘breath’ or sacred life force; Ka is the Ancient Egyptian idea of a vital essence or life energy; and, of course, the classic term for bio-energy that George Lucas adopted for his modern classic Star Wars is ‘the Force.

At a bit over two meters tall, she was only slightly above average height for a Martian male, but thanks in part to her Polynesian ancestry, she weighed in at over a hundred kilos at one g. None of it was fat, but her muscles seemed to get bigger every time she even walked through a weight room. As a marine, she trained all the time.

The early Greek tribal society resembles in many respects that of peoples like the Polynesians, the Maoris for instance. Small bands of warriors, usually living in fortified settlements, ruled by tribal chiefs or kings, or by aristocratic families, were waging war against one another on sea as well as on land.

Anthropologist John Greenway has observed, Never in the entire history of the inevitable displacement of hunting tribes by advanced agriculturalists in the forty thousand generations of mankind has a native people been treated with more consideration, decency, and kindliness than the American Indians. The Mongoloids in displacing the first comers to Asia, the Negroes in displacing the aborigines in Africa, and every other group following the biological law of the Competitive Exclusion Principle thought like the Polynesian chief who once observed to a white officer, “I don’t understand you English. You come here and take our land and then you spend the rest of your lives trying to make up for it. When my people came to these islands, we just killed the inhabitants and that was the end of it.”[3]

Hawaii was defined by its isolation. Its first settlers, probably Polynesians from islands to the south, are thought to have arrived roughly around the time of Christ. Over the centuries, Hawaiians had little contact with anyone else because almost no one could cross the vast expanse of ocean that surrounded their islands. Thousands of unique plants and animal species evolved, more than almost anywhere else on earth.

Hawaii is said to have been named for Hawaiʻiloa, the legendary Polynesian navigator who first discovered it.

Patrick Kirch concludes: “By the time of initial contact with Europeans, Hawaiians had taken the older Polynesian concepts of chiefship and rank, and subjected them to a form of hypertrophy, the logical extension of which was that their rulers, their kings, were now held to be divine. This was not simply a quantitative extension of the Ancestral Polynesian ranking system; it was truly a qualitative change by which Hawaiian society had entered a new realm.”138 It appears that nearly all other archaic states experienced the same qualitative change to the extreme forms of inequality that Kirch describes for the Hawaiian kingdoms. Based on his survey of seven early civilizations,

The transition from egalitarian small-scale societies to archaic states did not happen as soon as people settled down in farming villages. Polynesians colonized Hawaii around 800 CE, and it took around eight centuries for archaic states to emerge.144 What’s more, the Polynesians already had a lot of the cultural elements needed to develop a centralized, hierarchical society. Because agriculture arrived on the Pacific islands around 1500 BCE,145 the overall period of “gestation” for archaic states seems to be something like 3,000 years. In other areas of the globe the period between the adoption of agriculture and the rise of the first states was even longer. The

That’s what I like about Polynesians. They wear their hearts on their sleeve knowing that, for adults, there are better games to play than hiding their emotions from each other

The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal'ia'iou'amaa'aaa'eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night.

The Polynesians, she pointed out, were able to voyage thousands of miles and locate the tiny speck of Easter Island centuries before Columbus sailed. It hardly seems possible that they never continued on to find the entire west coast of the Americas.

Destiny is a funny thing. Once I thought I was destined to become Emperor of Greenland, sole monarch over its 52,000 inhabitants. Then I thought I was destined to build a Polynesian longship in my garage. I was wrong then, but I've got it now. I'm the destined protector of this place. I'm this city's superhero.

In December of 2007 human bones including skulls, which have been radiocarbon dated back to between 1304 and 1424, were found in a museum in Concepción, Chile. These skulls were originally discovered on Isla Mocha, which is located 25 miles off the south-central coast of Chile. Since some of them have definite telltale signs of being Polynesian, the strong suggestion is that there was a pre-Columbian interaction between the local Mapuche people and the Polynesian seafarers. This contact is further supported by forensic evidence found near the Chilean site of “El Arenal,” which is a sandy dune approximately 3 miles inland from the coast. Pottery found in Ecuador, predating the arrival of Columbus in America, have markings similar to pottery found on the southernmost island of Kyushu, Japan. Radiocarbon dating has determined the date of organics in the clay that survived the firing, or from food or liquids stored in the pottery, to be 4500 years old with a possible variance of 200 to 500 years, thus predating Columbus by a wide margin. There is no reason to doubt these findings, which indicate that Asians and Polynesians sailed to all parts of the Pacific Ocean, including the vast continents of North and South America that border it on its far eastern side. It was always assumed that Spaniards introduced Chickens to the new continent; however the chicken bones found at the site also dated back to this era, proving that it was the Polynesians that first brought this edible bird with them! The proof is conclusive…. America was discovered prior to Columbus!

Taboo comes from a Polynesian word that means “sacred or holy” rather than simply “prohibited.

One of my uncles grew up in New York and he used to tell me about diving for condoms in the Hudson. There was one stretch where you could dive down, holding your breath like a Polynesian pearl diver, and pick them off the river bottom. They’d dry them out, put them on broomsticks, dust them with talcum powder, roll them up, and sell them for a nickel. This was during the war and there were plenty of sailors in the market.

There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules … intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? … Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?

Kaepernick’s historical illiteracy frames the whole Black Lives Matter narrative. It is useful to remind ourselves of the facts. As African American scholar Thomas Sowell explains, [a] cliche that has come into vogue is that slavery is “America’s original sin.”… Today the moral horror of slavery is so widely condemned that it is hard to realize that there were thousands of years when slavery was practiced around the world by people of virtually every race. Neither Africans, Asians, Polynesians, nor the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere saw anything wrong with slavery, even after small segments of British and American societies began to condemn slavery as morally wrong in the 18th century. What was special about America was not that it had slavery, which existed all over the world, but that Americans were among the very few peoples who began to question the morality of holding human beings in bondage. That was not yet a majority view among Americans in the 18th century, but it was not even a serious minority view in non-Western societies at that time. Then how did slavery end? We know how it ended in the United States—at a cost of one life lost in the Civil War for every six slaves freed. But that is not how it ended elsewhere. What happened in the rest of the world was that all of Western civilization eventually turned against slavery in the 19th century. This meant the end of slavery in European empires around the world, usually over the bitter opposition of non-Western peoples. But the West happened to be militarily dominant at the time.99

Oh! Trash!” he cried. “Words, it’s the mechanics again! It’s tiring at first to speak—and then it’s caught by the Others, the savage Others! The poor Me—and Magne is a Me whereas you are a pig, a miscreant Other— the poor Me—there’re maybe 500 of us total on this foul earthly globe!— why can’t they communicate together without straining their larynx!” Nigeot agreed with Kmôhoûn. “And then everything’s…mechanics, effort, on this dung pile of a planet! You have to get dressed and undressed. You can never stay in a state, you always have to change states! Idiots, pigs that we are! You’re comfortable in bed, aren’t you? Oh well, crack! You have to get up! You’re okay when you’re up? Oh well! Bang, bing, bang! You have to go to bed! Get dressed, get undressed! Trash! Mechanics! We lost our fur, our hair, rubbing against it and scraping it with these damn costumes! Look at the monkeys! A lot prettier than us; they look better and have no mechanics to wear. Mechanics, you know, is everything that is against thinking and good old lassitude: movement, stupid moving of arms, arduous stupidity of being a well raised human, no revolt against the stupidities tolerated by the cowardly mob, who’s happy to tyrannize itself when it’s already pestered by the padishahs. Yes, look at the monkeys, the pretty monkeys! No mechanics to wear, lucky devils, good old monkeys! Nothing to do but chuck water on themselves whenever they feel like it!... And when they’re ready! Oh! Real world! Pile of crap where you have to work, even just to button up your shirt! Oh! When will we be in a higher world where they won’t have these appalling paws? Nothing but little things to fly in the warm blue—warm! You know? Little… mechanics… oh! bing! bang! No mechanics—infamy! —little feathery things like the little… things that chuck turds on our heads from up in the trees and after cry out tweet! tweet! in the air, the… what do you call them, the… birds, totally, yes!” And this Mongol who spouted his Polynesian or Gabonese opinions was originally from Saint Etienne, a city that was so busy it was like industrial epilepsy! But, in fact, it was very simple! He was “tired from birth,” as one of my friends used to say who felt the same way, but had nothing to do with Saint Etienne.

Robert Allington Ayers, whose progenitors were said to have sailed to America on the Mayflower, thus making them eligible for inclusion in the Polynesian tradition of pioneer seafaring,

Around the world today are millions living in the Marxist reality-tunnel, the vegetarian reality-tunnel, the Buddhist reality-tunnel, the nudist reality-tunnel, the monetarist reality-tunnel, the Methodist reality-tunnel, the Zionist reality-tunnel, the Polynesian totemistic reality-tunnel etc.

These islands and the seventy or so other Tuamotus host about 15,000 inhabitants now, who in addition to some French speak their own discrete branch of the Polynesian language, Pa‘umotu. There are pearl farms, resorts, and local communities sustained by the traditional resources of reef and garden, all pressed between the lagoon’s green lens and the open ocean. I have yet to visit very many of these places, but in this aspect they recall to me the words of the author Mark Vanhoenacker—a pilot who writes elegantly of unwalked landscapes sensed instead by overflight. It is a notion he credits to the Alaskans, who may cross broad reaches of their trackless state from above, borne aloft in tiny planes to their own personal corners of the wilderness. I feel this way about the Tuamotus, which for now are like the rings of Saturn passing in the window of my spaceship—unexplored but captivating, if not entirely inviting in their presence.

In imagining the Polynesians and their adventurous leaps across the Pacific, I consider the more recent voyages that have brought our own ship back and forth across these same waters—a modern steel vessel a hundred times more robust, connected by satellite and surrounded by a sense of the known. My scientist friends tell me of all the ways that the ocean and climate have changed since people first put to sea, but for a sailor on an open deck these transformations remain largely an abstraction. The flashing cursor and keyboard aside, it is hard here not to feel some connection with all the others who have crossed this ocean previously. Pacific voyagers, captains of discovery, the traders and mapmakers—surely all marveled at the same endless show of light and clouds. No doubt many were at times as cold and wet as us, and just as baffled by the unexpected.

Sometimes we hear pronouncements from scientists who confidently state that everything worth knowing will soon be known – or even is already known – and who paint pictures of a Dionysian or Polynesian age in which the zest for intellectual discovery has withered, to be replaced by a kind of subdued languor, the lotus eaters drinking fermented coconut milk or some other mild hallucinogen. In addition to maligning both the Polynesians, who were intrepid explorers (and whose brief respite in paradise is now sadly ending ), as well as the inducements to intellectual discovery provided by some hallucinogens, this contention turns out to be trivially mistaken. __Carl Sagan

Indians, Javanese, Malays and Polynesians frequently sailed to Africa. Around 400, Malay sailors started colonizing Madagascar, the last major landmass, other than Iceland and New Zealand, to be settled.

Madagascar became a uniquely Afro-Polynesian society, where the Merina, a Malay elite, crushed earlier settlers, the Vazimba, hunted to extinction the giant animals (including lemurs the size of gorillas) and imported African slaves to work for them there in a singular caste system that lasted into the late nineteenth century.

In the face of overwhelming evidence, many anthropologists now believe that primitive cultures began with a belief in one supreme God.1 The Polynesian people have shown this to be true in their culture.

In Hawai‘i, most of the corruption seems to have occurred after the arrival of Pa‘ao (an ancient Hawaiian priest) 700 - 900 years ago. Fortunately, in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, several historians recorded what was left of the ancient oral histories of the Polynesian people. Although embellished and corrupted over time, many of the ancient accounts reflect the basic story that is found in Genesis 1-11.

Many of the very ancient accounts of Polynesian peoples were much alike. This indicates that they were common to the Polynesians before they separated and spread to their various islands. The Polynesian people—the Hawaiians, Tahitians, Samoans, Tongans, Marquesans, and Maori, to name the major people groups—are very close “cousins.

There is another reason little is known about ‘Io; the name of this God of the Polynesians was too sacred to be mentioned openly. This was also true of the Israelites’ God, Yahweh. This is why the Israelites also called their God by periphrases, like Elohim (God Almighty) or Adonai (Lord). This is not unusual. The ancient name of the One True God of Aneityum (New Hebrides), Nigeria, the Yezidis (Turkey), the Incas, the Navaho and other ancient cultures also were not openly mentioned.16 The priests of Polynesia were under oath not to tell of the most sacred things, and the penalty for breaking this oath was death. The Polynesian authority, E. Handy, says that it is doubtful that the common folk were even allowed to know the true name of the Supreme Being.17 This was not an unusual situation. In ancient Babylon at one time, the priests were monotheistic and the people were polytheistic as it was in Polynesia.18 This was also the situation with the ancient Chinese, Nigerians, Incas, and other peoples. It is easy then to understand why there is only a vague knowledge of the Supreme God in Hawaii.

The next in-depth historical account, in both the Hebrew and Polynesian traditions, is the story of the Great Flood. The hero of the Great Flood in Polynesia was called Nu‘u and his wife, Lili-Noe. The name, Nu‘u, is very similar to the Hebrew and Arabic names for this man, Nuh or Noah.

There is no known Polynesian account of the Tower of Babel and the scattering of mankind upon the face of the earth. However, Fornander recounts a legend of the Fiji Islands concerning this event. This account states that in former ages men built a large tower to find knowledge of astronomy. The tower had risen far skyward and the ambitions of the builders seemed near to fulfillment. Suddenly the lower fastenings broke and scattered the workmen over every part of Fiji.

It is not clear when all the Polynesian people left for the Pacific. It seems that some left at the time of the scattering at the Tower of Babel. The legends indicate that some of them did not separate themselves at this point, but may have been a part of the people who later became the nation of Israel.*

As mentioned previously, Kalani-mene-hune was the progenitor of the Mene-hune people. The Mene-hune (the people of Mene) were the first Polynesian voyagers and settlers of the Pacific Islands. Beckwith says that they were a numerous and powerful race from whom the present race of Hawaiians are descended.4 This first group of people probably arrived in Hawai‘i before A.D. 400 from the Marquesas. They may have been semi-isolated here for 900 years until the next wave of voyagers came from Tahiti.

Fornander says that from ancient times, the three genealogies he lists were considered as equal in authority and independent of each other. He considered them the most accurate of the many he received. The Kumuhonua and Pa‘ao genealogies were of the priests and chiefs of Hawai‘i. The Kumu‘uli genealogy was of the chiefs of Kaua‘i and O‘ahu. It is interesting that all three record the first man and his three sons, and Nu‘u (Noah) and his three sons. The Kumuhonua and the Pa‘ao genealogies both continue to include Lua Nu‘u who corresponds to Abraham and his two sons, Kū Nawao (corresponding to Ishmael) and Kalani Mene Hune (corresponding to Isaac). They also include the two sons of Kalani Mene Hune, Aholoholo (Esau) and Kinilau-a-Mano (Jacob), and Kinilau-a-Mano’s twelve sons. These genealogies end with Papa Nui, the legendary female progenitor of the Polynesian people. These genealogies are from the later comers to Hawai‘i, the people who came from Tahiti. The genealogy of Kumu‘uli includes Nu‘u (Noah) but does not include Lua Nu‘u (Abraham) or his descendants. This genealogy ends with Wakea, the legendary male progenitor of the Hawaiian people.29 One could speculate that the Hawaiian people are the joining of two different groups of Proto-Polynesians in the marriage of Papa and Wakea. One line, the line of Wakea, splitting off towards the east at the time of the Tower of Babel, and the other splitting off toward the east sometime after the Israelites entered Canaan.*