Sea People by Christina Thompson

Sea People by Christina Thompson is a history of Polynesia written through the lens of historical tactics rather than a recitation of history as it’s known today. Part of the reason for this is that not much is really known about Polynesia, its people, or their migration patterns. Migration is a key part of Polynesian history; it is both the biggest question for outside historians and the root of identity for most Polynesian cultures. As we (non-Polynesians or non-seafarers) look to answer questions about Polynesia’s history, we often end up writing questions that don’t fit within the Polynesian paradigm: “Why leave their home? Where did they come from? Why did they go?” Understanding Polynesian history is also a quest to understand Polynesian culture. 

The furthest stretches of the Polynesian triangle are Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island. Thousands of miles of open water and a variety of small, large, wet, or dry islands. The broad consensus is that modern Polynesians descend from the Lapita People who reached Tonga & Samoa from the west approximately in 900 BC. It is thought that none of the archipelagoes of central and eastern Polynesia (Society Islands, Marquesas, Hawaii, Easter Island, Cook Islands) is thought to have been settled before the end of the first millennium AD and the discovery and settlement of New Zealand is thought to be AD 1200 (p308). A critical piece of context for how large the Pacific Ocean truly is: if you were to look at the Pacific Ocean from space, you would not be able to see both sides of it at the same time (p17).

Nevertheless, Polynesian cultures are defined by their seafaring nature.  In a classically European intolerance for uncertainty or myth, European historians spent hundreds of years trying to answer ‘the Polynesian question’ through means that ironically didn’t really answer it. With more modern research tactics available, the prevailing history of Polynesia largely lines up with the traditional oral history, once doubted by nearly all non-Polynesian historians. To quote Thompson, “the new science, having displaced the old science, agrees surprisingly well with the pre-science,” (p310). 

When Europeans began to sail around the world, some eventually stumbled upon Polynesia, most often where the wind took them, to the small Tuamotus. Modern Polynesian history (that is, one of voyagers), begins about 4000 years ago in 1000 BC. This history begins in Tonga & Samoa at the western edge of the Polynesian Triangle. However, in more recent history, around the 1600s, Tahiti was considered the heart of Polynesia, due to its large population. Tahiti was within the island group known as the Marquesas. At the time of arrival of Abraham Fornander, a “viking anthropologist”, the population in the Marquesas summited from 50,000 before European contact to 2,225 by 1926 (p154). When Europeans arrived and became intrigued with Polynesia, they worked to fit Polynesian culture into European constructs: they transliterated ancient oral traditions, populated and diseased communities, and, in an effort to categorize, they racialized Polynesian communities particularly against Melanesia, which was generally darker skinned.  

Quote from Maori scholar Tipene O’Regan: “My [ancestors] may be dead but they are also in me and I am alive…The past is not a dead thing to be examined on the post-mortem bench of science without my consent…I am the primary proprietor of my past” (p315).