You have no idea how excited I get seeing stuff like this.
#RepresentationMatters
I’ve said it before and I will say it again: the colonization of Pacific Islands is the greatest human adventure story of all time.
People using Stone Age technology built voyaging canoes capable of traveling thousands of miles, then set forth against the winds and currents to find tiny dots of land in the midst of the largest ocean on Earth. And having found them, they traveled back and forth, again and again, to settle them —all this, 500 to 1,000 years ago.
But one huge mystery, sometimes called “The Long Pause” leaves a gaping hole in this voyaging timeline.
Western Polynesia—the islands closest to Australia and New Guinea—were colonized around 3,500 years ago. But the islands of Central and Eastern Polynesia were not settled until 1,500 to 500 years ago. This means that after arriving in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, Polynesians took a break—for almost 2,000 years—before voyaging forth again.
Then when they did start again, they did so with a vengeance: archaeological evidence suggests that within a century or so after venturing forth, Polynesians discovered and settled nearly every inhabitable island in the central and eastern Pacific.
Nobody knows the reason for The Long Pause, or why the Polynesians started voyaging again.
Several theories have been proposed—from a favorable wind caused by a sustained period of El Niño, to visible supernovas luring the stargazing islanders to travel, to ciguatera poisoning caused by algae blooms.
Enter Moana, the latest Disney movie, set in what appears to be Samoa, even though most American audiences will see it as Hawaii.
Moana—pronounced “moh-AH-nah,” not “MWAH-nah” means “ocean,” and the character is chosen by the sea itself to return the stolen heart of [the island goddess] Te Fiti. An environmental catastrophe spreading across the island makes the mission urgent. And despite admonitions from her father against anyone going beyond the protective reef, Moana steals a canoe and embarks on her quest.
Moana’s struggle to learn to sail and get past the reef of her home island sets the stage for her learning of true wayfinding. It also shows traces of Armstrong Sperry’s stirring, classic book Call It Courage, and Tom Hanks’s Castaway.
But it is at the end of the film that a different and powerful angle of the story is revealed: Moana’s people had stopped voyaging long ago, and had placed a taboo—another Polynesian world—on going beyond the reef.
With the success of Moana’s mission and her having learned the art of wayfinding, her people start voyaging again.
And so the Long Pause comes to an end, Disney style, with a great fleet of canoes setting forth across the ocean to accomplish the greatest human adventure of all time. I admit to being moved by this scene.
As someone who lectures on traditional oceanic navigation and migration, I can say resoundingly that it is high time the rest of the world learned this amazing story.
I was six the first time I went to disney world. It was also the first time I met my step family in florida. See, my grandfather had three wives in his lifetime, and the third wife was the only one I ever met. She had five kids when they married, and moved to Hawaii from the Phillipines. Now jump forward, my dad’s step siblings have families of their own, including my uncle Jett, who married a native hawaiian woman, and had two beautiful daughters.
Back to that first trip to disney. I was six, my sister was ten, and our smack in the middle of that age difference was my cousin Malia at age eight. She, and her younger sister Bella, both took hula classes, because their mother wanted them to stay close to their roots, despite the distance of having moved to florida. We were all pretty young, but we knew enough that the princesses at disney world were actresses in costume.
“How cool would it be to play a princess at one of these parks?” I had said after a long day in the magic kingdom. “I wanna do that one day.”
“Who would you play?” Bella had asked.
“I don’t know. Belle maybe. She’s the only one with brown hair other than snow white, and mulan, and I could never play either of them.”
“Yeah, but you don’t really look like Belle either. Your noses are to different.” Malia had cut in, and I shrugged it off, knowing It’d never happen anyway.
“What about you guys? Who would you play?” I asked them, unaware that there was no answer to that.
“We don’t look like any of them either. There are no princesses from where we’re from.” So we all settled on the sad belief that none of us would ever get to be disney princesses.
Years pass, and I decide that one day I would help write a movie for a princess from either the phillipines, or the polynesian islands, so my cousins could become princesses. Because they held on to that dream. It might have been harder for them to let go of it, because they lived so close to disney.
Now it’s 2014, and Malia has just been hired as a dancer, at the polynesian resort at disney. She started as a swing, and in two years worked her way up to a featured dancer. It helped that she was of polynesian decent.
About a year ago it was announced that disney would be releasing a movie featuring their first polynesian princess, and my cousins & I were all excited, but none of us had high hopes. We all figured they’d make her look more like Rapunzel, the way Anna and Elsa had.
Fast forward a few months. They have just released the first look at moana.
I text my cousin as soon as I see it.
“Did you see Moana?”
“No, why?” I send her the picture above, and a minute later I get a call. “SHE LOOKS LIKE ME! I LOOK LIKE HER!” Malia is screaming into the phone with unabashed enthusiasm. She couldn’t believe that a disney princess bore such a resemblance to her.
Yesterday, 11/16/16, my cousin began her new job at disney world, and I couldn’t be happier that her dream of ten years had been realized.
This is why representation matters. This is one of many reasons why Moana is so important.
Congratulations Malia. I can’t wait to come down and say Mahalo
Steel Phoenix Studios 