A Tour of Polynesian Culture
The reason we came to Huahine instead of some other island like Bora Bora was that it has major Polynesian archeological sites, marae, more than any other island. So this morning (July 6) we hired a guide, Paul Atallah (ask your hotel for “Island Eco Tours”) to drive us to the village of Maeva, which has the largest concentration of marae on Huahine.
Our guide talks as fast as a New Yorker, but with a California accent. He moved here 15 years ago with his wife, a native, and is quite committed to remaining. I got the feeling from the way he prefaced his sentences with constructions of the form, “contrary to what you may believe…” that many of his clients arrive at Huahine believing things.
The entire trip was a fascinating conversation about Polynesian culture from as early as they can piece it together to the present. Some current thinking puts the origin of the Polynesian people in Indonesia, as indicated by the spread of the pandanus leaf used for thatching roofs and making sails for ocean-going canoes. They spread to Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, Easter Island, and New Zealand, and possibly as far west as Madagascar. Another recent study has discovered chicken bones with Polynesian DNA on an island just off the coast of Chile. I was surprised to learn that New Zealand is thought to be the most recently populated land mass in the world, just 600 years ago.
We toured the marae, which are basically altars like the ones on Easter Island but without giant heads. There has been quite a bit of restoration work in the past few decades. Several altars line the beach around Maeva, and we went on a walk up the hill where many others have been discovered and restored, including a beautiful one which adjoins a very old banyan tree. (There were tons of mosquitoes, but their bites didn’t last long).
We were also accompanied by dogs. The marae are all on private land, whose ownership has passed intact from pre-colonial days. The Europeans introduced the idea of individual ownership, which has replaced clan ownership, but the people planting vanilla on the rubble of a square kilometer have in some sense an unclouded title.
Another sexy tidbit about preconquest Polynesians is that they didn’t necessarily tumble to the idea of a single father. The woman who slept with as many high born boys as she could, was attempting to gather all of their energy into her baby, and if you were to ask who the father was, she would say “all of them”. Inasmuch as the woman’s clan was regarded as a source of land legitimacy as well as those of the fathers, maybe unclouded is not the right word to use about the land titles. But it is a good word to use before eclipses.
He also talked quite a bit about present-day French Polynesia and its challenges. It has hardly any natural resources to export, and it must import almost all of its food and fuel and other supplies. The industry which should be the most promising for it is, of course, tourism. Tahiti, tropical paradise — wait, how much did you say flights and hotels cost? Its high minimum wage, $1500/month, makes it a very expensive place to operate hotels. So they get as much tourism in a year as Fiji gets in three months, or Hawaii gets in nine days. France sends two billion euros per year, but people here wonder whether President Sarkozy will try to find a way to reduce that amount as France deals with the budget shortfalls that are happening all over the world in the last couple years.
Paul Atallah is himself a one-man anthropology demonstration. His father was a red-haired fair skinned Palestinian Christian from Jerusalem. I guess he knows about tribal warfare. He would like to be doing research, like the other Huahine based archaeologist we met on the Paul Gauguin in 2005, Mark Eddowes, but he has a family to support and there isn’t a lot of money in sorting out lava and coral rocks and teasing stories out of them. So he’s a guide. Fortunately a few cruise ships stop here so he has some chances to take people around.
After our tour, we had another delightful lunch with a “trilogy of calamari” (ceviche, fried, and a tajine with raisins over couscous) and mahi mahi in a mostly papaya puree. Mmm. Tropical France.
Now I’m off to the 15 cent per minute internet cafe.