your
mind? He became calm, and realized that he had already
found the island. It was the
Hokule’a
, and he had everything he
needed on board the sacred canoe. Suddenly, the sky brightened and a beam of
warm light appeared on his shoulder. The clouds cleared and he followed that
beam directly to the island of Rapa Nui.
I found it an extraordinary experience to sail
with Nainoa on the Hokule’a along with the crew from the Polynesian Voyaging
Society. As important as Mau was to him as a mentor and guide, Nainoa
Thompson has become an icon for an entire generation of young Polynesians,
an immensely important cultural figure, publicly more admired than anyone
else in Hawaii. There is a strong sense throughout the islands that as long
as the Hokule’a sails the culture of the navigators will survive.
Nainoa’s entire mission in life is to ensure that this happens. He refers to Hokule’a as both a sacred canoe and the spaceship of the
ancestors. To me, this is a fitting choice of words. Indeed, if you took all
of the genius that has allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to
an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.
I AM DRAWN TO the story of Polynesia because it reveals so
much about the issues and misconceptions that both inspire and haunt us to
this day: the sheer courage that true exploration implies, the brilliance of
human adaptation, the dark impact of conquest and colonialism. It reminds
us, too, of the need always to be skeptical about the tenacious grip of
academic orthodoxy. Knowledge is rarely completely divorced from power, and
interpretation is too often an expression of convenience.
Anthropology, as we saw in the first lecture,
grew out of an evolutionary model in which nineteenth-century men such Lewis
Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer envisioned societies as stages in a linear
progression of advancement, leading, as they conceived it, from savagery to
barbarism to civilization. Each of these phases of human development was
correlated, in their calculations, with specific technological innovations.
Fire, ceramics, and the bow and arrow marked the savage. With the
domestication of animals, the rise of agriculture, and the invention of
metalworking, we entered the level of the barbarian. Literacy implied
civilization. Every society, it was assumed, progressed through the same
stages, in the same sequence. Thus the technological sophistication of a
people placed them on a particular step on the ladder rising toward
evolutionary success. The Polynesians and the British may have been
contemporaries, but the lack of guns and cannon implied that the former were
at an earlier juncture in their evolution, while the sailors of Captain Cook
represented a later and more advanced stage.
Such a transparently simplistic and biased
interpretation of human history, though long repudiated by anthropologists
as an intellectual artifact of the nineteenth century, as relevant today as
the convictions of Victorian clergy who dated the earth at a mere 6,000
years, has nevertheless proved to be remarkably persistent, even among
contemporary scholars. A recent Canadian book,
Disrobing the Aboriginal
Industry
: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural
Preservation , ridicules the notion that indigenous inhabitants
of the Americas had anything of interest to offer the world at the time of
first European encounter. “Never in history,” the authors write, “has the
cultural gap between two peoples coming into contact with each other been
wider. It doesn’t mean,” they add helpfully, referring in a phrase to tens
of millions of people speaking perhaps as many as three thousand languages,
“that [indigenous people] are stupid or inferior. We all passed through the
stage of Neolithic culture.” That such a sentiment could be expressed by a
university professor, and then seized upon by the national media as proof of
the hoax of the aspirations of First Nations peoples today, is disturbing.
The
mind? He became calm, and realized that he had already
found the island. It was the
Hokule’a
, and he had everything he
needed on board the sacred canoe. Suddenly, the sky brightened and a beam of
warm light appeared on his shoulder. The clouds cleared and he followed that
beam directly to the island of Rapa Nui.
I found it an extraordinary experience to sail
with Nainoa on the Hokule’a along with the crew from the Polynesian Voyaging
Society. As important as Mau was to him as a mentor and guide, Nainoa
Thompson has become an icon for an entire generation of young Polynesians,
an immensely important cultural figure, publicly more admired than anyone
else in Hawaii. There is a strong sense throughout the islands that as long
as the Hokule’a sails the culture of the navigators will survive.
Nainoa’s entire mission in life is to ensure that this happens. He refers to Hokule’a as both a sacred canoe and the spaceship of the
ancestors. To me, this is a fitting choice of words. Indeed, if you took all
of the genius that has allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to
an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia.
I AM DRAWN TO the story of Polynesia because it reveals so
much about the issues and misconceptions that both inspire and haunt us to
this day: the sheer courage that true exploration implies, the brilliance of
human adaptation, the dark impact of conquest and colonialism. It reminds
us, too, of the need always to be skeptical about the tenacious grip of
academic orthodoxy. Knowledge is rarely completely divorced from power, and
interpretation is too often an expression of convenience.
Anthropology, as we saw in the first lecture,
grew out of an evolutionary model in which nineteenth-century men such Lewis
Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer envisioned societies as stages in a linear
progression of advancement, leading, as they conceived it, from savagery to
barbarism to civilization. Each of these phases of human development was
correlated, in their calculations, with specific technological innovations.
Fire, ceramics, and the bow and arrow marked the savage. With the
domestication of animals, the rise of agriculture, and the invention of
metalworking, we entered the level of the barbarian. Literacy implied
civilization. Every society, it was assumed, progressed through the same
stages, in the same sequence. Thus the technological sophistication of a
people placed them on a particular step on the ladder rising toward
evolutionary success. The Polynesians and the British may have been
contemporaries, but the lack of guns and cannon implied that the former were
at an earlier juncture in their evolution, while the sailors of Captain Cook
represented a later and more advanced stage.
Such a transparently simplistic and biased
interpretation of human history, though long repudiated by anthropologists
as an intellectual artifact of the nineteenth century, as relevant today as
the convictions of Victorian clergy who dated the earth at a mere 6,000
years, has nevertheless proved to be remarkably persistent, even among
contemporary scholars. A recent Canadian book,
Disrobing the Aboriginal
Industry
: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural
Preservation , ridicules the notion that indigenous inhabitants
of the Americas had anything of interest to offer the world at the time of
first European encounter. “Never in history,” the authors write, “has the
cultural gap between two peoples coming into contact with each other been
wider. It doesn’t mean,” they add helpfully, referring in a phrase to tens
of millions of people speaking perhaps as many as three thousand languages,
“that [indigenous people] are stupid or inferior. We all passed through the
stage of Neolithic culture.” That such a sentiment could be expressed by a
university professor, and then seized upon by the national media as proof of
the hoax of the aspirations of First Nations peoples today, is disturbing.
The
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