The Ancestral Homeland and Destination of the Dead
Hawaiki is the homeland held in common memory across Polynesia. Every Maori tribal tradition of migration begins there: the ancestral canoes — Te Arawa, Tainui, Aotea and the rest — set out from Hawaiki across the ocean to New Zealand, and each tribe's whakapapa genealogy counts down from someone aboard. Hawaiki also closes the circle of life: the spirits of the dead travel north along the North Island to Te Rerenga Wairua, the "leaping place of spirits" at Cape Reinga, slide down the roots of an old pohutukawa tree on the cliff into the sea, and return the way the ancestors came.
The name is scattered across the whole ocean. Samoa's largest island is Savaii; the Hawaiian archipelago and its biggest island bear the name; Havaiki in the Marquesas and Tuamotus doubles as the underworld, as does Avaiki in the Cook Islands. Raiatea in the Society Islands was anciently called Havaii, and in the Tahitian traditions recorded by Teuira Henry it was the hub of the East Polynesian religious and voyaging network: its great marae Taputapuatea, center of the cult of Oro, supplied foundation stones for daughter marae across the islands, and the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017.
The ethnologist Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck), in Vikings of the Sunrise (1938), read the Hawaiki narratives as the memory of real voyaging history, and linguistics, archaeology and the traditional genealogies broadly agree, pointing to an expansion outward from central East Polynesia. Hawaiki thus exists twice over: as the starting point of genealogy and destination of souls, and as a route home that can be roughly redrawn on a chart.
