Mangarevans

## Country of Origin

Gambier Islands (French Polynesia): 1,600

## Related Ethnic Groups

Polynesians Austronesians

**Mangarevans** (*magareva*, IPA: [ma.ŋa.re.va]) are a Polynesian people inhabiting the Gambier Islands of French Polynesia (especially the largest island Mangareva).

## History (A'amu)

There is archaeological evidence that the islands of Mangareva, Taravai, Agakauitai, Akamaru, Aukena and Kamaka were colonized by Polynesians in protohistoric times. The social form was a strictly stratified tribal society, with constant inter-clan warfare, intermittent food shortages and not unknown cannibalism. There is evidence that, shortly before European influence, unrest was taking place that led to turmoil and civil war between the social classes. This social upheaval may have greatly facilitated the conquest of the archipelago by King Pomaré II of Tahiti in the early 19th century. Until the second half of the 19th century, the archipelago remained in the sphere of influence of the Pomaré royal dynasty of Tahiti.

Mangareva and its dependencies in the Gambier Islands were ruled by a line of kings – and, later, regents.

In 1834 the missionaries of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts Honoré Laval and François Caret arrived in the islands to found the first Catholic mission in Polynesia, after the failed attempt of the Spaniards in Tahiti in 1775. The two priests ended up being protagonists of the French union of Tahiti. At first, King Maputeoa, the last king of Mangareva, resisted, but after attributing the recovery from a serious illness to the new god, he increasingly submitted to the influence of the Christian missionaries and was baptized in 1836.

King Maputeoa requested a French protectorate on 16 February 1844, but the French government never ratified it.

Meanwhile, the Gambier Islands suffered a strong earthquake and tsunami in 1837. Laval and Caret returned to the archipelago and established a theocratic regime. But, most notably, they taught the inhabitants of the islands to read and write, and protected them from European traders and whalers. According to a phrase of Father Laval, "civilization leads to contentment".

On the other hand, religious zeal led them to systematically replace all the idols and temples, and in their place they ordered the construction of more than a hundred stone buildings: churches, chapels, convents, seminaries, cemeteries, vicarages, triumphal arches. The cathedral of St. Michael in Mangareva alone could accommodate more than 2,000 people. The population, which was over 2,000 when Laval and Caret left, dropped to 500 at the end of the 19th century due to disease and emigration. Many laborers were sent from Mangareva to Tahiti to build the cathedral of Papeete in 1856.

On 4 February 1870, the Mangarevan government and its prince regent, Arone Teikatoara, formally withdrew the protectorate request and asked the French not to intervene in the kingdom's affairs. However, after Father Honoré Laval was removed to Tahiti, the native government changed its stance: On 30 November 1871, Prince Regent Arone and the French colonial authority in Tahiti signed an agreement reaffirming the islands’ protectorate status. The Gambier Islands were finally annexed on 21 February 1881 under Prince Regent Bernardo Putairi, and the annexation was approved by the President of France on 30 January 1882.

## Religion (Ha'apaora'a)

The majority of the islands' population follows Christianity, mostly the Catholic Church and various Protestant groups, a legacy of the missionary activity that began with the arrival of Europeans to the region. According to 1991 data, between 5 and 6% of the population belonged to a Protestant Christian group.

Recently restored after years of closure, the former cathedral of St. Michael of Mangareva, in the Gambier archipelago, bears witness to the time when the first Catholic missionaries settled there in the 19th century. It is a building protected as a historical monument of France. The structure is considered one of the centers of Catholicism in Polynesia.

The activity of the Catholic Church was boosted by the Missionary work of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary of Picpus.17 The Catholic missionaries quickly converted almost the entire population. They constructed many religious buildings and had the marae, the places of worship of the ancient local gods, destroyed.

## Resources (Rave'a)

Today, pearl farming is practiced in the numerous pearl farms in the Gambier lagoons, whose relatively cold waters allow the production of quality pearls. There are 129 farms, including fourteen companies. In recent years, although far from the large population centers of French Polynesia, the archipelago has seen its population increase thanks to pearl farming and the exploitation of mother-of-pearl.

Local production in the Gambier Islands is limited to a few productive sectors, such as subsistence farming and fishing, and most consumer goods are transported by a cargo service operated by two schooners, which rotate every three weeks.

The inhabitants are self-sufficient. They grow yams, taro and breadfruit, as well as all kinds of tropical fruits and, to a lesser extent, coffee for export.

## Mathematics (Numera)

The Mangarevan people developed a binary number system centuries ahead of Europeans. In 2013, the islanders were discovered to have developed a novel binary system that allowed them to reduce the number of digits involved in binary counting: for example, representing 150 requires eight digits in binary (10010110) but only four in the Mangarevan system (VTPK, where V (*varu*) means 80, T (*tataua*) is 40, P (*paua*) is 20, and K (*takau*) is 10). As binary counting is unknown in other Polynesian societies, it most likely developed after Mangareva was settled (which was sometime between 1060 and 1360 AD). Since Gottfried Leibniz would not invent the modern binary number system until 1689, the Mangarevan binary steps prefigured the European invention of binary by as many as 300 to 600 years.

In 2020, Mangarevan binary counting was shown to be an extension of a traditional Polynesian method of counting. Polynesian societies are known to count specific types of objects differently, and they count objects both singly (one by one) and collectively (by twos, fours, or eights). In each case, counting remains decimal (one, two, three…), though the unit counted varies (one, two, four, or eight). In Mangareva, counting collective items decimally produced productive terms for ten (*takau* or ten singles), twenty (*paua* or ten pairs), forty (*tataua* or ten groups of four), and eighty (*varu* or ten groups of eight). Given the availability of these terms and their associated numerical values, binary counting was then a simple adaptation of traditional Polynesian counting, which set aside every tenth item to mark ten of the items being counted (in New Zealand, this method was misunderstood by Europeans as undecimal or base-11 counting). In the traditional method, the pile of set-asides would then be counted the same way, with every tenth item marking a hundred (second round), thousand (third round), ten thousand items (fourth round), and so on. In Mangarevan binary, in the first round items were counted as before, but in the second round and thereafter they were grouped into eights (*varu*) and then fours (*tataua*), twos (*paua*), and singles (*takau*). Once counting had shifted to binary units in the second and subsequent rounds, the method was no longer decimal, suggesting an explanation for the upper limit of 800 (for items counted singly) observed for the counting system.

## Language (Reo)

At the 2017 census, only 24.8% of the population age 15 and older in the Gambier Islands still reported that Mangarevan was the language they spoke the most at home (down from 38.6% at the 2007 census), while 62.6% reported French as the main languages spoken at home (up from 52.3% at the 2007 census), 4.9% reported Tahitian (down from 6.4% in 2007), and 4.6% reported some Chinese dialects (predominantly Hakka) (up from 3.5% in 2007). On the islands of Tahiti and Moorea, the number of people age 15 and older who reported that the language they spoke the most at home was Mangarevan rose from 50 at the 2007 census to 53 at the 2017 census.

Speakers have some bilingualism in Tahitian, in which there is a 60% lexical similarity, and usually with French, as well. It is a member of the Marquesic subgroup, and as such is closely related to Hawaiian and Marquesan.

According to the *Endangered Languages Project*, Mangarevan is considered endangered with less than 900 speakers out of an ethnic population of 1,491. The larger portion of the population in the Gambier Islands speak French.

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