The Polynesian Triangle, or Polynesia, is a cluster of over 1,000 islands located in the central Pacific Ocean. Its corners consist of the Hawaiian Islands in the north, Easter Island in the east, and New Zealand in the west. Inhabitants of Polynesia share close ties of genetic heritage, language, and culture, tracing their ancestry back to the island of Taiwan in Southeast Asia. Polynesians mastered the art of maritime navigation — reading stars, ocean currents, cloud formations, and bird movement to traverse the open seas in specialized canoes. Today, there are some two million ethnic Polynesians inhabiting the independent Polynesian countries of Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tonga, and Tuvalu, and forming minority communities in adjacent countries such as Australia, Chile, and the United States, as well as Pacific territories belonging to the United Kingdom and France.
Polynesian history
Archeological, linguistic, and genetic evidence shows that somewhere between 3000 and 1000 B.C.E, speakers of Austronesian languages from the island of Taiwan began spreading into Island Southeast Asia. Making their way through the Philippines and eastern Indonesia to New Guinea and Melanesia, these seafaring people are believed to have been the first to settle Polynesia around 900 B.C.E. The process of settling the islands was gradual, taking place all the way through to the end of the first millennium C.E.: Hawai’i was reached in about 400 C.E.; Easter Island perhaps a century later; Tahiti, around 600 C.E.; and New Zealand, the most isolated of them all, was reached at around 800 C.E.
Historically, the archipelagos of Samoa, Fiji (technically considered part of Melanesia), and Tonga maintained intimate sociocultural and genetic ties, with oral traditions — supported by archaeological records — recounting native genealogies that connect the islands of Polynesia through bonds of intermarriage between Samoans, Fijians, and Tongans. As early as the tenth century, familial dynasties such as Samoa’s Tui Manu’a and the Tuʻi Tonga of the Tonga archipelago were able to amass significant political and cultural power. In the year 950, the Tu’i Tonga started to expand outward, establishing an empire that successfully brought most of the Western Pacific within its sphere of influence. The success of the Tu’i Tonga dynasty was central to the consolidation of region-wide customs and language.
In the eighteenth century, during a period known as the “Second Age of Exploration,” the maritime empires of Europe sent numerous expeditions tasked with discovering the remote islands lurking in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean. Dutch, French, and English vessels came into contact with most of Polynesia by the end of the century. Easter Island and Samoa were reached by the Dutch in 1722, and Tahiti by the English in 1767. Between 1774 and 1778, the famous Captain James Cook (after whom the Cook Islands were named in the 1820s) was the first European to see the islands of Hawai’i. Following the trailblazing efforts of explorers, another group of Europeans — Christian missionaries — soon turned their eager attention to the islands’ inhabitants. The first to arrive in the Pacific was the London Missionary Society, with an expedition to Tahiti in 1797; later, American missionary societies would play a significant role. Like other regions in the world would discover, however, the early work of explorers and missionaries proved to be a prelude to exploitative plantation societies and a division of the region between European colonial powers.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the European powers — namely the United States, France, Britain, and Germany — annexed the Polynesian islands to constitute the Pacific arm of their empires. Tahiti became a French protectorate in 1834; New Zealand came under British rule in 1840; Hawai’i’s annexation to the United States began in 1898; and in 1899, Samoa was divided between Germany and the United States. Colonial rule was disrupted by the outbreak of World War I; by the war’s conclusion, Germany had been ousted from its territories. During the 1930s, the ramifications of the Great Depression were felt throughout Polynesia, with fluctuations in world markets for copra, sugar, and other products of the region. During World War II, Polynesia played a central role in the Pacific Ocean theater between the Allies and the Empire of Japan — most notably in the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Hawai’i.
After the war, under the increased influence of the United Nations, the colonial powers accepted that independence or self-government was the aim of their rule. In the 1950s and 60s, colonial governments were reorganized to accommodate increased indigenous participation in governance. Samoa (then called Western Samoa) was the first to gain independence in 1962. In 1970, Tonga became independent of Britain, followed by Tuvalu in 1978. In 2011, after several years of discussing a potential regional grouping, Samoa, Tonga, and Tuvalu, together with five self-governing but non-sovereign territories, formally established the Polynesian Leaders Group: a cooperative body to present joint regional responses to local and global issues, including culture and language, education, climate change, and trade and investment.
Polynesian culture
One of the principal characteristics of traditional Polynesian cultures has been their effective adaptation to and mastery of their surrounding ocean environment. Accordingly, Polynesian cuisine offers a wide variety of seafood specialties: among the ocean fish, the most popular species are tuna, mahi-mahi (dolphinfish), opah (moonfish), and swordfish. Sweetwater lagoons also offer a wide variety of fish such as parrotfish, scad, and red mullet. Dishes tend to use relatively few spices, and often feature coconut milk, ginger, lime, vanilla, or tamarind. The hot and humid tropical climate is particularly well-suited to growing vegetables such as taro, cassava, and sweet potato, as well as an abundant variety of tropical fruit, including mango, papaya, and uru (breadfruit).
Polynesian societies practiced similar forms of animism, believing that all animate and inanimate things are endowed with a power called mana, which could be either good or evil, beneficial or dangerous. The concept of tapu (which entered English as “taboo”) was an important religious idea in all Polynesian societies, referring to anything forbidden due to sacredness. Polynesian religion changed dramatically with the coming of European missionaries in the early nineteenth century: today, most Polynesians are Christians, although some traditional beliefs and mythologies have been incorporated into Christian ideology.
Polynesian societies developed rich and variegated artistic traditions, including wooden carvings, decorated bark cloth, and leatherworking. Perhaps the most famous example of Polynesian art is the mo’ai of Easter Island: monumental stone sculptures of human figures featuring large, broad noses and strong chins, along with rectangle-shaped ears and deep eye slits. While artistic features and styles varied from culture to culture, several geometric decorative elements — such as a toothed pattern, units of diagonally sloping lines, and floral and animal elements — are common to all Polynesian societies. Human-like figures with bulging eyes and a protruding tongue appeared in all types of sculpture in eastern Polynesia. Body tattoos have been a central feature of all Polynesian societies (the word itself derived from the Samoan word tatau, meaning “to strike”). Tattoos were means to express aspects of local identity and personality, indicating status in a hierarchical society, sexual maturity, genealogy, and more. In traditional Polynesian societies, nearly everyone was tattooed.
Polynesian languages
Polynesians speak one or more of approximately forty languages which make up the Polynesian language family. The most common among these are Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan, Maori, and Hawaiian, all sharing strong grammatical similarities and common words in their vocabularies. As these languages had no written tradition before the arrival of the Western colonists, Latin script was introduced as the basis of Polynesian writing systems by European and American missionaries and scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In many Polynesian countries and territories, English or French are official languages alongside the indigenous language of their inhabitants.
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