Re-Teaching Rapa Nui

by Ellen C. Caldwell
see the complete lesson plan here

In January of 2020, just before the world would be unalterably impacted by COVID-19, I had the great fortune of traveling to Rapa Nui. Having taught art history surveys with an emphasis on Polynesian and Oceanic art for over a decade, I had dreamt of this trip for a long time. 

The trip did not disappoint. Seeing the moai in person was breathtaking and awe-inspiring. Getting to know the small island and ahu sites (sacred platforms and burial sites upon which the moai stand or stood) over my short time there has stuck with me and sustained me over this past year of lockdowns and isolation. Through photographs, films, books, journals, and discussions with my students, I have joyfully continued to revisit my trip to Rapa Nui, but in a different way than I could have predicted when I began planning the trip a few years prior.

Something that struck me before I left, while I was there, and upon my return, is the very different way that people in the United States (and Europe) tend to look at and talk about Rapa Nui. We can start with the fact that very few people (friends, family, colleagues, and the like) did not know where I was going until I called the island by its foreign name of “Easter Island” (as opposed to its modern Polynesian name Rapa Nui). As its foreign name indicates, Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen stumbled upon Rapa Nui in 1722 on Easter Sunday. Declaring this long-inhabited island as “discovered” and henceforth renamed, Roggeveen’s name has unfortunately stuck for many outsiders to Rapa Nui. (A Chilean territory since 1888, Rapa Nui is also called by its Spanish name of the same translation “Isla de Pascua.”)

Through journal articles and books, I also gathered another incongruity that seemed to be adopted by outsiders to Rapa Nui: it is hard to come across media—whether television specials, documentaries, books, or articles about Rapa Nui—without also encountering the word “mystery.” As American archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo put it, “[m]ention Easter Island to just about anyone and ‘mystery’ immediately comes to mind.”¹ Or as Rapanui filmmaker Sergio Mata’u Rapu puts it in Eating Up Easter, “[o]utsiders named our island Easter and said our past was a mystery, bringing millions of visitors to our shores.”  

Much of this has been popularized and perpetuated by BBC, PBS NOVA, and National Geographic specials—such as The Lost Gods of Easter Island, Mystery of Easter Island, and Lost Empire of Easter Island—often narrated by an over-enunciating, deep voice touting the “MYSTERIES OF THE MOAI” over a soundtrack dripping with mysterious and adventurous undertones. There is a shock value inherent in these specials that shift the alleged subject of the documentaries (the moai) to something outside of them entirely. Instead of focusing on the monumental carving of the volcanic tuff, the talent of those carvers, the skill of those who moved them, and the fact that the moai depict protective and omnipresent ancestors, the subject instead shifts to unsolvable mystery and intrigue.

There is another immediate reaction to Rapa Nui that many Americans tend to have—that of sadness and shock about an “avoidable” environmental collapse. Popularized by American geographer and historian Jared Diamond in his 2004 book aptly titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, much of the American media frenzy surrounding Rapa Nui focuses on the environmental collapse of the island, both in terms of its steep population decline and its disastrous shortage of natural resources.

In 1999, Anishinaabe and Chippewa scholar Gerald Vizenor coined the term “survivance” in his book Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Vizenor articulates indigenous survivance as “an active sense of presence over historical absence, deracination, and oblivion.”² Pit against seemingly unsurmountable obstacles of genocide and violent cultural and religious assimilation, survivance outlines a narrative of resistance that celebrates a continued presence in defiance of such odds and brutal histories. Instead of focusing on Rapa Nui’s “mystery” and so-called “chosen” collapse, there should be a much greater celebration of the survivance of the Rapanui descendants who still live there and continue to care for both the island’s lands and the moai, who are considered great ancestors.

Due to a deadly combination of infectious diseases brought by Europeans, Peruvian slave traders who abducted and enslaved a large population of Rapanui people, deforestation of the island’s once-lush palm trees, and an invasive and overpopulated rat species, data tragically shows that by 1872, the population of Rapa Nui had dwindled from 15,000 to 111. However, this somber history speaks even more presciently to Vizenor’s concept of survivance. There is much to celebrate in how expert Polynesian voyagers were able not only to navigate over 2,000 miles to find and inhabit the island, but also to live through and survive such devastation, continuing life and their lineage to this day. Of the approximate 7,600 inhabitants on Rapa Nui today, roughly half are said to be descendants of the original Rapanui people.

While on tours of the various sites on Rapa Nui, many visitors would ask our local Rapanui and Chilean guides the same question (ad nauseum), “But how do you think the moai moved?” (The fascination with this question of course stems from the “mystery” narrative that most foreigners are enthralled with.) In my experience, most of the Rapanui guides were not very interested in engaging with this question (or with the American fascination with “mystery”) and instead would smile and simply say, “they walked” or “my ancestors walked with them.” Made famous to the greater world outside of Rapa Nui, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo popularized this theory of the walking moai by surveying the island and testing a unique theory based on similar oral tradition of Rapanui elders and descendants. 

Hunt and Lipo’s theory of the walking moai stands in contradiction to Diamond’s theory of collapse, which posited that the Rapanui people had deforested their small island in order to construct log-rolling mechanisms for transporting the moai around the island. Diamond had not come up with this canoe-ladder rolling theory himself, and indeed Jo Anne Van Tilburg, a longtime and well-respected archaeologist of Rapa Nui and director of the Easter Island Statue Project, postulated and tested this theory in 1998. To be sure, Hunt and Lipo’s ideas have been both celebrated and contested by many well-established historians and anthropologists of Rapa Nui. 

However, in teaching Rapa Nui (especially in the context of such post-colonial, patchwork surveys as my course “History of African, Oceanic, and Native American History”), I find it extremely important and relevant to share with my students Hunt and Lipo’s “walking moai” theory because it melds oral history and science. There is a term neke neke in Rapanui that translates to “walking without legs” and it is this phrase and such oral histories that Rapanui elders and descendants recall in answering how the moai were moved across vast distances without any machinery. And it is this phrasing that inspired Hunt and Lipo’s theories. In studying the land of Rapa Nui, the angles of the hills on which the moai were moved, the “road moai” that lay abandoned on the sides of some roads from the island’s quarry Rano Raraku, and the moai themselves, Hunt and Lipo determined there must be a reason for the oral tradition saying the moai walked, and they hypothesized that the science could back this up. (To learn more about this, I encourage you to read their book The Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island and watch the PBS NOVA documentary Mystery of Easter Island.)

Yet still I digress here, as it is so easy to fall down the rabbit hole of the “mystery” narrative of how the Rapanui moved the moai. I have fallen victim to this myself, allowing excited student debates about the “walking moai” theories to subsume all other discussions of Rapa Nui. Ultimately, though, the “mystery” narrative is not the most important part of the many topics and themes we can discuss, teach, and grow in our art history surveys.

When I returned from Rapa Nui, I was thinking about all of this as I began putting together a unit for a new, larger survey called World Art and Visual Culture (in addition to wanting to drastically alter an existing unit in my History of African, Oceanic, and Native American art course). I am using Open Educational Resources (OER) for the course and I rely heavily on SmartHistory for much of the readings. But whenever I come across OER on Rapa Nui and the moai, it is almost always written from a colonial and Western perspective rather than a local Polynesian one (with much of SmartHistory’s writing about Polynesian art as well as Khan Academy’s coming directly from the British Museum which refuses to return one of the most sacred moai, called Hoa Haka Nanaʻia, to Rapa Nui). 

In his documentary Eating Up Easter, Sergio Mata’u Rapu observes, “[e]ver since outsiders first saw our moai, they have tried to write our story.” I am not Polynesian nor Rapanui, so I cannot offer the local perspective directly nor do I want to be another outsider writing Rapa Nui’s story. I am a cis, white art historian, in a position of power as an educator, and as such, I feel that it is extremely important to continually make anti-racist decisions in revisiting and revising how these histories are told. In the field of art history, there is much work to be done in both OER and textbook-writing. What I hope to offer here are some imperfect solutions that incorporate more Rapanui and Polynesian perspectives. And I will continue to grow, tweak, and edit this curriculum for as long as I am teaching.

What I came up with was a plan for teaching about Rapa Nui in a different way, by piecing together various online resources and OER materials, in addition to some of my own photographs and videos. I took themes that consistently came up in readings, documentaries, and discussions about Rapa Nui, but I moved them in different directions, integrating more Rapanui and Polynesian perspectives throughout, and challenging consistent themes with more nuanced discussions and debates for students to consider. 

Some of these themes include the following shifts:

• From Rapa Nui to “Easter Island” back to Rapa Nui: Why Names Matter;
• From Ecocide and Collapse to Survivance;
• From the Perils of Climate Change to Cultural Conservation and Healing; 
• From Archaeology to Multifaceted Approaches and Integration of Oral Culture; and
• From Colonial Collections to Repatriation.

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My students watch this documentary and consider a handful of guiding discussion questions I give to them prior. They also watch a short clip of one of the more typical American documentaries that aims to highlight only “the mystery” of the island. After watching both, students compare narration, tone, storytelling, and protagonists of each film. I also assign readings that give them more views to consider. For instance, after watching Te Keuhane O Te Tupuna, I ask them to explore this immersive Google Arts & Culture page entitled “Can You Find the Moai at the British Museum?” In viewing this page after watching Te Keuhane O Te Tupuna’s documentation of the emotional and frustrating quest to try to save and return the lost moai Hoa Haka Nanaʻia, students immediately recognize that this page is culturally insensitive and careless at best, and deeply offensive at worst. It is as if the page taunts viewers to go on a virtual scavenger hunt³ for a missing ancestor who the Rapanui are so desperately trying to bring home.⁴

I am excited to share the lesson plan Rapa Nui: Thematic and Narrative Shifts in Curriculum with the Art History Teaching Resources community, and I welcome your feedback, critique, and input. I have also included anonymous student reflections and feedback about the new lesson plans from the Fall 2020 semester. I am always looking to change and improve my teaching efforts, so I do not claim perfection, but I do try to present a working improvement, based upon my own research, experience, and first-hand observations. To me, it is important to acknowledge my position of privilege and power as a white educator, and the parallel obligation I have to use that privilege towards the necessary action of decolonizing my teaching—action that will hopefully shift historical narratives towards stories that contain greater accuracy and cause less harm in their retelling.

NOTES:

¹ Hunt and Lipo p. 1.

² This summary of Vizenor’s articulation of survivance comes from his edited volume Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, 2008.

³ At the bottom of the page, viewers are in fact encouraged to “dig deeper” with the full British Museum scavenger hunt.

⁴ Based on the Google Arts & Culture credits for this page, it is unclear who made this, as it states: “The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content [British Museum and CyArk].”