Raiatea: The Navel of the Polynesian World

The island was called Havaiʻi before it was Raiatea.

This name — Havaiʻi, Hawaiki in the Māori tradition, Sawai’i in the Samoan, Hawaiʻi in the Hawaiian — is the name of the ancestral homeland across all of Eastern Polynesia. Every Polynesian tradition has a version of the name and a tradition of origin from that place. The island that was called Havaiʻi in the Society Islands is likely one of the primary sources of the actual historical migrations — the point of departure for the voyages that settled Hawaii, New Zealand, and much of the rest of the eastern Pacific over a period of roughly five hundred years.

At its southern tip is the marae Taputapuātea.

A marae is a sacred temple complex — an open-air court of coral-block platforms and standing stones where the gods are present and ceremonies are conducted. Taputapuātea is not the only marae in Polynesia, but it is the most sacred and the most connected. Its name means the international gathering place of the gods. Representatives came to it from islands across the Pacific — from Hawaii, from New Zealand, from Easter Island, from the Marquesas. They brought sacred objects. They received the fire of ʻOro, the war god whose cult was centered at Taputapuātea. They had their titles confirmed by the most senior priestly authorities in the Pacific world.

The coral-block wall of Taputapuātea contains, according to oral tradition, stones from marae across the Pacific. Each stone is a political and genealogical statement: the marae that contributed it recognizes Taputapuātea’s primacy. The wall is a physical map of the network — a monument built from the distributed sacredness of all the places that acknowledged one center.

The voyaging that spread Polynesian civilization across the Pacific was not aimless. It operated within a religious and political framework. When a chief set out to settle a new island, he carried with him the fire of ʻOro from Raiatea — sacred fire that connected the new settlement to the center. When the new settlement established its own marae, the marae’s pedigree traced back to Taputapuātea. The network was the civilization.

The stone platform at Taputapuātea that faces the ocean — the side facing north and east, toward Hawaii and New Zealand and the rest of the Pacific — faces the world that came from it. The chiefs who launched their canoes from that shore were departing from the center of everything they knew. They were not discovering new worlds; they were extending an existing one.

UNESCO inscribed Taputapuātea as a World Heritage Site in 2017. The inscription describes it as one of the most important cultural landscapes in the Pacific — a place where the physical stones of the temple and the oral traditions about what they mean are both intact enough to read. The wall is still there. The platform faces the ocean. The ocean faces back.

The navigators who left from here — who sailed northeast to Hawaii, southwest to New Zealand, east to Easter Island, south to the Marquesas — were not fleeing a homeland. They were distributing a civilization, planting versions of Taputapuātea across the Pacific, creating a network of sacred centers all connected back to the stone on Raiatea that is the navel of the world.