Hawaiki
Polynesians give the name
Hawaiki to the
mythical land to which they trace their origins. It also commonly refers to the
underworld in many
Māori stories, and in
Mangaia in the Cook Islands,
Avaiki is always the underworld (Tregear 1891:392).
The
Māori language name
Hawaiki figures in legends about the arrival of the
Māori in
Aotearoa (
New Zealand). The same concept appears in other Polynesian cultures, the name variously appearing as
Hawaiki,
Havai‘i, or
‘Avaiki in other
Polynesian languages, though
Hawaiki appears to have become the most common variation used in
English. Even though the
Sāmoans (themselves forming one of the oldest communities in Polynesia) have preserved no traditions of having originated elsewhere, the name of the largest Sāmoan island
Savai‘i is cognate with the word
Hawaiki, as is the name of the Polynesian islands of
Hawaii, written
Hawai‘i in
Hawaiian (the diacritical mark
‘ denoting a glottal stop that replaces the "k" in some Polynesian languages).
The word "Hawaiki" is also cognate with the words
sauali'i ("spirits" in Sāmoan) and
hou'eiki ("chiefs" in Tongan). This has led some scholars to hypothesize that the word
Hawaiki, and, by extension,
Savai'i and
Hawai‘i, may not, in fact, have originally referred to a geographical place, but rather to chiefly ancestors and the chief-based social structure that was typical of pre-colonial Polynesia (Taumoefolau 1996).
Legend has it that the Polynesians migrated from Hawaiki to the islands of the
Pacific Ocean in open canoes, little different from the traditional craft found in Polynesia today. The
Māori people of
New Zealand trace their ancestry to groups of people who reportedly travelled from Hawaiki in about forty named
canoes (
waka). (Compare the discredited
Great Fleet theory of New Zealand settlement)
Polynesian legends say that the spirits of Polynesian people return to Hawaiki upon their death. In the New Zealand context, such return-journeys take place via
Spirits Bay,
Cape Reinga and the
Three Kings Islands at the extreme north of the
North Island of New Zealand " giving a possible pointer as to the direction in which Hawaiki must lie.
Until recently, many
anthropologists had doubts that the canoe legends described a deliberate migration, preferring to believe that the migration occurred accidentally when seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores. In
1947 Thor Heyerdahl sailed the
Kon-Tiki, a
balsa-wood
raft, from
South America into the Pacific in order to show that humans could have settled Polynesia from the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean, with sailors using the prevailing winds and simple construction techniques.
However,
DNA evidence indicates that the Polynesians likely ultimately originated from islands in eastern Asia, possibly from
Taiwan, and moved southwards and eastwards through the South
Pacific Ocean. The common ancestry of all the
Austronesian languages, of which the
Polynesian languages form a major subgroup, also supports this theory. This evidence indicates that at least some of the migration occurred against the
prevailing winds, and hence deliberately rather than just accidentally. Proto-Polynesian and Polynesian navigators may have predicted the existence of uninhabited islands by observing migratory patterns of birds.
In recent decades, boatbuilders (see
Polynesian Voyaging Society) have constructed ocean-going craft using traditional materials and techniques, and have sailed them over presumed traditional routes using ancient navigation methods, showing the definite feasibility of such deliberate migration.
*
Hawaiiloa*
Kupe*
Stephenson Percy Smith*
Hawai'iki - The Ancient Land - Hawaiian Legend.
*M. Taumoefolau, From *Sau 'Ariki to Hawaiki.
The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 105(4), (1996), 385-410.
*E.R. Tregear,
Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary (Lyon and Blair: Lambton Quay), 1891.
