(also rendered as in the

Cook Islands The Cook Islands is an island country in Polynesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It consists of 15 islands whose total land area is approximately . The Cook Islands' Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) covers of ocean. Avarua is its ...

, Hawaiki in Māori, in Samoan, in Tahitian, in Hawaiian) is, in Polynesian folklore, the original home of the

Polynesians Polynesians are an ethnolinguistic group comprising closely related ethnic groups native to Polynesia, which encompasses the islands within the Polynesian Triangle in the Pacific Ocean. They trace their early prehistoric origins to Island Sout ...

, before dispersal across

Polynesia Polynesia ( , ) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians. They have many things in ...

. It also features as the

underworld The underworld, also known as the netherworld or hell, is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions and myths, located below the world of the living. Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underworld. ...

in many Māori stories.

Anne Salmond Dame Mary Anne Salmond (née Thorpe; born 16 November 1945) is a New Zealand anthropologist. She was New Zealander of the Year in 2013. In 2020, she was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, the highest honour in New Zealand's royal honour ...

states ''Havaii'' is the old name for Raiatea, the homeland of the Māori. When British explorer

James Cook Captain (Royal Navy), Captain James Cook (7 November 1728 – 14 February 1779) was a British Royal Navy officer, explorer, and cartographer famous for his three voyages of exploration to the Pacific and Southern Oceans, conducted between 176 ...

first sighted New Zealand in 1769, he had on board Tupaia, a Raiatean navigator and priest. Cook's arrival seemed to be a confirmation of a prophecy by Toiroa, a priest from Māhia. At Tolaga Bay, Tupaia conversed with the ''

tohunga In the culture of the Māori people, Māori of New Zealand, a tohunga (tōhuka in Southern Māori dialect) is an expert practitioner of any skill or art, either religious or otherwise. Tohunga include expert priests, healers, navigators, carvers, ...

'' associated with the school of learning located there, called Te Rawheoro. The priest asked about the Māori homelands, 'Rangiatea' (Ra'iatea), 'Hawaiki' (Havai'i, the ancient name for Ra'iatea), and 'Tawhiti' (Tahiti).

Etymology

Linguists have reconstructed the term to Proto- Nuclear Polynesian ''*sawaiki''.Polynesian Lexicon Project Online
/ref> The Māori word figures in traditions about the arrival of the Māori in Aotearoa, present day

New Zealand New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of isla ...

. The same concept appears in other Polynesian cultures, the name appearing variously as ''Havaiki'', ''Havaii'', or ''Avaiki'' in other

Polynesian languages The Polynesian languages form a genealogical group of languages, itself part of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family. There are 38 Polynesian languages, representing 7 percent of the 522 Oceanic languages, and 3 percent of the Austr ...

. ''Hawaiki'' or the misspelling "Hawaiiki" appear to have become the most common variants used in English. Although the

Samoans Samoans or Samoan people () are the Indigenous Polynesian people of the Samoan Islands, an archipelago in Polynesia, who speak the Samoan language. The group's home islands are politically and geographically divided between the Independent S ...

have preserved no traditions of having originated elsewhere, the name of the largest Samoan island preserves a

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the s ...

with the word ''Hawaiki'', as does the name of the Polynesian islands of (the denoting a

glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...

that replaces the "k" in some Polynesian languages). On several island groups, including New Zealand and the

Marquesas The Marquesas Islands ( ; or ' or ' ; Marquesan: ' ( North Marquesan) and ' ( South Marquesan), both meaning "the land of men") are a group of volcanic islands in French Polynesia, an overseas collectivity of France in the southern Pacific ...

, the term has been recorded as associated with the mythical

and death. William Wyatt Gill wrote at length in the nineteenth century recounting the legends about Avaiki as the underworld or

Hades Hades (; , , later ), in the ancient Greek religion and Greek mythology, mythology, is the god of the dead and the king of the Greek underworld, underworld, with which his name became synonymous. Hades was the eldest son of Cronus and Rhea ...

of Mangaia in the

.Gill, William Wyatt, 1876. ''Myths and Songs from the South Pacific.'' Henry S. King, London, pp 152–174. Gill (1876:155) records a proverb: ''Ua po Avaiki, ua ao nunga nei'' – 'Tis night now in spirit-land, for 'tis light in this upper world." Tregear (1891:392) also records the term Avaiki as meaning "

" at Mangaia, probably sourced from Gill. The proposed origin of Hawaiki being both the ancestral homeland and the underworld is that both are the dwelling places of ancestors and the spirits. Other possible cognates of the word ''Hawaiki'' include ("spirits" in Samoan) and ("chiefs" in Tongan). This has led some scholars to hypothesize that the word ''Hawaiki'', and, by extension, and , may not, in fact, have originally referred to a geographical place, but rather to chiefly ancestors and the chief-based social structure that pre-colonial Polynesia typically exhibited. On

Easter Island Easter Island (, ; , ) is an island and special territory of Chile in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. The island is renowned for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, ...

, the name of the home country in oral tradition appears as . According to

Thor Heyerdahl Thor Heyerdahl KStJ (; 6 October 1914 – 18 April 2002) was a Norwegian adventurer and Ethnography, ethnographer with a background in biology with specialization in zoology, botany and geography. Heyerdahl is notable for his Kon-Tiki expediti ...

, was said to lie east of the island. Sebastian Englert records: : : Translation: "The island towards the sun, above! Go, see the island where King Hotu Matua will go and live!" Englert puts forward the claim that lies to the West of the island. The name is found in the

Marquesas Islands The Marquesas Islands ( ; or ' or ' ; Marquesan language, Marquesan: ' (North Marquesan language, North Marquesan) and ' (South Marquesan language, South Marquesan), both meaning "the land of men") are a group of volcano, volcanic islands in ...

, in the names of several islands: , and (although in the element may be a different word, ). It is also notable that in the

Hawaiian Islands The Hawaiian Islands () are an archipelago of eight major volcanic islands, several atolls, and numerous smaller islets in the Pacific Ocean, North Pacific Ocean, extending some from the Hawaii (island), island of Hawaii in the south to nort ...

, the ancestral homeland is called , a cognate of

Tahiti Tahiti (; Tahitian language, Tahitian , ; ) is the largest island of the Windward Islands (Society Islands), Windward group of the Society Islands in French Polynesia, an overseas collectivity of France. It is located in the central part of t ...

, where at least part of the Hawaiian population came from.

Legends

According to various

oral tradition Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.Jan Vansina, Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (19 ...

s, the Polynesians migrated from Hawaiki to the islands of the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five Borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean, or, depending on the definition, to Antarctica in the south, and is ...

in open canoes, little different from the traditional craft found in Polynesia today. The

Māori people Māori () are the Indigenous peoples of Oceania, indigenous Polynesians, Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand. Māori originated with settlers from East Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of Māori migration canoes, c ...

of New Zealand trace their ancestry to groups of people who reportedly travelled from Hawaiki in about 40 named waka (compare the discredited Great Fleet theory of the Polynesian settlement of New Zealand). Polynesian oral traditions say that the spirits of Polynesian people return to Hawaiki after death. In the New Zealand context, such return-journeys take place via Spirits Bay, Cape Reinga and the

Three Kings Islands 3 (three) is a number, numeral (linguistics), numeral and numerical digit, digit. It is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4, and is the smallest odd prime number and the only prime preceding a square number. It has religious and cul ...

at the extreme north of the

North Island The North Island ( , 'the fish of Māui', historically New Ulster) is one of the two main islands of New Zealand, islands of New Zealand, separated from the larger but less populous South Island by Cook Strait. With an area of , it is the List ...

of New Zealand. This may indicate the direction in which Hawaiki may lie.

Modern science and practical testing of theories

Until the early 21st century, many

anthropologist An anthropologist is a scientist engaged in the practice of anthropology. Anthropologists study aspects of humans within past and present societies. Social anthropology, cultural anthropology and philosophical anthropology study the norms, values ...

s had doubts that the canoe-legends described a deliberate migration. They tended to believe that the migration occurred accidentally when seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores. In 1947

sailed the '' Kon-Tiki'', a balsa-wood

raft A raft is any flat structure for support or transportation over water. It is usually of basic design, characterized by the absence of a hull. Rafts are usually kept afloat by using any combination of buoyant materials such as wood, sealed barre ...

, from

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

into the Pacific in an attempt 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 Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of al ...

, linguistic, botanical, and archaeological evidence all indicate that the

Austronesian-speaking peoples The Austronesian people, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples who have settled in Taiwan, maritime Southeast Asia, parts of mainland Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesi ...

(including the Polynesians) probably originated from islands in eastern Asia, possibly from present-day

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

. From there they gradually migrated southwards and eastwards through the South

. The

sweet potato The sweet potato or sweetpotato (''Ipomoea batatas'') is a dicotyledonous plant in the morning glory family, Convolvulaceae. Its sizeable, starchy, sweet-tasting tuberous roots are used as a root vegetable, which is a staple food in parts of ...

, which is of South American origin, is widely cultivated in Polynesia. This suggests that some interaction between the Polynesians and the

indigenous peoples of South America In South America, Indigenous peoples comprise the Pre-Columbian peoples and their descendants, as contrasted with people of European ancestry and those of African descent. In Spanish, Indigenous peoples are referred to as (), or (). The term ...

may have taken place. No Polynesian crops were introduced into the Americas, and there is possible evidence of Polynesian contact only in Chile. Austronesian and Polynesian navigators may have deduced the existence of uninhabited islands by observing migratory patterns of birds. In recent decades, boatbuilders (see

Polynesian Voyaging Society The Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) is a non-profit research and educational corporation based in Honolulu, Hawaii. PVS was established to research and perpetuate traditional Polynesian voyaging methods. Using replicas of traditional double-hul ...

) have constructed ocean-going craft using traditional materials and techniques. They have sailed them over presumed traditional routes using ancient navigation methods, showing the feasibility of such deliberate migration that make use of prevailing winds.

Footnotes

References

{{wikisource, Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori *Buse, J., Taringa, R., ''Cook Islands Maori Dictionary With English Finderlist'', edited by Biggs, B. and Moeka'a R. (1996), 90. Canberra: The Australian National University. * M. Taumoefolau, "From *Sau 'Ariki to Hawaiki". ''

The Journal of the Polynesian Society The Polynesian Society is a non-profit organisation based at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, dedicated to the scholarly study of the history, ethnography and mythology of Oceania. History The society was co-founded in 1892 by Percy ...

'', 105(4), (1996), 385–410. * E. R. Tregear, ''Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary'' ( Lyon and Blair: Lambton Quay), 1891.

External links