Polynesian

Polynesia is a heading over many peoples across an ocean, and the atlas treats it as one. The differences between Hawaiian, Maori, Tahitian, Samoan and Tongan traditions are real and are the responsibility of the communities that hold them.

What the traditions share is genealogy as the organising principle. Descent is the framework in which gods, ancestors, chiefs and the natural world are all placed, and a recitation of whakapapa or of the Hawaiian Kumulipo is a cosmology and a legal claim at the same time. The pantheon is not a court but a line.

Several major atua recur across the region with departmental spheres, forests, sea, cultivated food, war, and no one of them presides everywhere. Which is greatest depends on where you are.

The best attested succession narrative is the separation of the primordial parents. Rangi and Papa lie together in an embrace that leaves their children in darkness, and the children force them apart, one of them opposing the act and warring against his siblings afterwards. The present world exists because a generation acted against its parents.

The line between ancestor and god is deliberately continuous. Distinguished ancestors receive cult, and in Hawaii the aumakua are family gods who are also forebears.

These are living traditions. Some names and some knowledge are tapu and held by particular people, and the atlas does not repeat what is held.

Polynesian religious knowledge was transmitted orally, with precision, by people trained to hold it, and the schools that trained them were among the first institutions to be disrupted by conversion and colonisation.

The nineteenth century produced the bulk of the written record, and it was produced under pressure. Missionaries collected in order to replace. Colonial officials collected in order to administer. And in several islands, indigenous scholars wrote down what they held, sometimes because they judged it was about to be lost. The Hawaiian and Maori manuscript traditions of that period are the single most valuable body of material, and they are also products of a moment in which the tradition was being fought over.

That produces a specific distortion. Some accounts were shaped by their collectors toward a tidy single mythology, occasionally with a supreme creator inserted to make the tradition look more respectable to Christian readers, and arguments about how far that happened, particularly with the Maori figure of Io, are long-running.

The tradition's own carriers were also selective, and legitimately so. A recitation belongs to a line, and some of it was not given to collectors at all.

Archaeology, linguistics and the study of navigation have since supplied an independent frame, tracing settlement across the Pacific and confirming relationships between traditions that comparison of names alone could only suggest.