The settlement of the Pacific is one of the great feats of navigation, and its explanation was for a long time argued over by people who did not ask the navigators. Nineteenth and twentieth century theories ranged from deliberate voyaging to accidental drift, and Thor Heyerdahl's raft expedition of 1947 argued for settlement from South America, a thesis the linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence does not support.
The answer came from doing it. The Polynesian Voyaging Society built Hokulea, a double hulled canoe on traditional lines, and in 1976 sailed her from Hawaii to Tahiti with the Micronesian navigator Mau Piailug guiding her without instruments, reading stars, swells, wind and birds. The voyage settled the question of capability and began a revival of wayfinding that has since carried Hokulea around the world and trained navigators across the region.
The religious dimension is not incidental to that. Voyaging knowledge was held by specialists, was taught within families, and carried the same weight of restriction as other held learning. The revival has run alongside language revitalisation, the reassertion of land claims and the reopening of ceremonial centres. Niko Besnier's work on gender liminality in the region documents another respect in which Polynesian social categories were flattened by outside observers and are now being reasserted.