Rapa Nui (People)

*Not to be confused with the Island itself;*

## Taŋata Rapa Nui

* Flag
* Emblem

## Language And Script

Rapa Nui: 1,000with Latin Script, formerly Rongorongo

## Related Ethnic Groups

Polynesians Austronesians

The **Rapa Nui** are the Polynesian people indigenous to Rapa Nui, the island. The easternmost Polynesian culture, the descendants of the original people of Easter Island make up about 60% of the current Easter Island population and have a significant portion of their population residing in mainland Chile. They speak both the traditional Rapa Nui language and the primary language of Chile, Spanish. At the 2017 census there were 7,750 island inhabitants—almost all living in the village of Hanga Roa on the sheltered west coast.

As of 2011, Rapa Nui's main source of income derived from tourism, which focuses on the giant sculptures called moai.

Over the past decade, Rapa Nui activists have been fighting for self-determination and sovereignty over their lands. Protests in 2010 and 2011 by the indigenous Rapa Nui on Easter Island, objecting to the creation of a marine park and reserve, have led to clashes with Chilean police.

## Etymology

Rapa Nui means 'big island' in the Rapa Nui language, as well as most Polynesian languages.

## History (Aamu)

### Time of Peace (Matahiti Pava)

Oral tradition states the island was first settled by a two-canoe expedition, originating from Marae Renga (or Marae Toe Hau), and led by the chief Hotu Matu'a and his captain Tu'u ko Iho. The island was first scouted after Haumaka dreamed of such a far-off country; Hotu deemed it a worthwhile place to flee from a neighboring chief, one to whom he had already lost three battles. At their time of arrival, the island had one lone settler, Nga Tavake 'a Te Rona. After a brief stay at Anakena, the colonists settled in different parts of the island. Hotu's heir, Tu'u ma Heke, was born on the island. Tu'u ko Iho is viewed as the leader who brought the statues and caused them to walk.

The Easter Islanders are considered to be South-East Polynesians. Similar sacred zones with statuary (*marae* and *ahu*) in East Polynesia demonstrates homology with most of Eastern Polynesia. At contact, populations were about 3,000–4,000.

By the 15th century, two confederations, *hanau*, of social groupings, *mata*, existed, based on lineage. The western and northern portion of the island belonged to the Tu'u, which included the royal Miru, with the royal center at Anakena, though Tahai and Te Peu served as earlier capitals. The eastern portion of the island belonged to the 'Otu 'Itu. Shortly after the Dutch visit, from 1724 until 1750, the 'Otu 'Itu fought the Tu'u for control of the island. This fighting continued until the 1860s. Famine followed the burning of huts and the destruction of fields. Social control vanished as the ordered way of life gave way to lawlessness and predatory bands as the warrior class took over. Homelessness prevailed, with many living underground. After the Spanish visit, from 1770 onwards, a period of statue toppling, *huri mo'ai*, commenced. This was an attempt by competing groups to destroy the socio-spiritual power, or *mana*, represented by statues, making sure to break them in the fall to ensure they were dead and without power. None were left standing by the time of the arrival of the French missionaries in the 1860s.

Between 1862 and 1888, about 94% of the population perished or emigrated. The island was victimized by blackbirding from 1862 to 1863, resulting in the abduction or killing of about 1,500, with 1,408 working as indentured servants in Peru. Only about a dozen eventually returned to Easter Island, but they brought smallpox, which decimated the remaining population of 1,500. Those who perished included the island's *tumu ivi 'atua*, bearers of the island's culture, history, and genealogy besides the *rongorongo* experts.

### Time of Danger (Matahiti Mataku)

By the time of European arrival in 1722, the island's population had dropped to 2,000–3,000 from a high of approximately 15,000 just a century earlier."

By that time, 21 species of trees and all species of land birds became extinct through some combination of over-harvesting, over-hunting, rat predation, and climate change. The island was largely deforested, and it did not have any trees taller than 3 m (9.8 ft). Loss of large trees meant that residents were no longer able to build seaworthy vessels, significantly diminishing their fishing abilities. One theory is that the trees were used as rollers to move the statues to their place of erection from the quarry at Rano Raraku. Deforestation also caused erosion which caused a sharp decline in agricultural production. This was exacerbated by the loss of land birds and the collapse in seabird populations as a source of food. By the 18th century, islanders were largely sustained by farming, with domestic chickens as the primary source of protein.

As the island became overpopulated and resources diminished, warriors known as *matatoa* gained more power and the Ancestor Cult ended, making way for the Bird Man Cult. Beverly Haun wrote, "The concept of mana (power) invested in hereditary leaders was recast into the person of the birdman, apparently beginning circa 1540, and coinciding with the final vestiges of the moai period." This cult maintained that, although the ancestors still provided for their descendants, the medium through which the living could contact the dead was no longer statues but human beings chosen through a competition. The god responsible for creating humans, Makemake, played an important role in this process. Katherine Routledge, who systematically collected the island's traditions in her 1919 expedition, showed that the competitions for Bird Man (Rapa Nui: *tangata manu*) started around 1760, after the arrival of the first Europeans, and ended in 1878, with the construction of the first church by Roman Catholic missionaries who formally arrived in 1864. Petroglyphs representing Bird Men on Easter Island are the same as some in Hawaii, indicating that this concept was probably brought by the original settlers; only the competition itself was unique to Easter Island.

The *huri mo'ai* – "statue-toppling" – continued into the 1830s as a part of fierce internal wars. By 1838, the only standing moai were on the slopes of Rano Raraku, in Hoa Hakananai'a in Orongo, and Ariki Paro in Ahu Te Pito Kura. A study headed by Douglas Owsley published in 1994 asserted that there is little archaeological evidence of pre-European societal collapse. Bone pathology and osteometric data from islanders of that period clearly suggest few fatalities can be attributed directly to violence. Research by Binghamton University anthropologists Robert DiNapoli and Carl Lipo in 2021 determined that the island experienced steady population growth from its initial settlement until European contact in 1722. The island never had more than a few thousand people prior to European contact, and their numbers were increasing rather than dwindling.

A series of devastating events killed or removed most of the population in the 1860s. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing around 1,500 men and women, half of the island's population. Among those captured were the island's paramount chief, his heir, and those who knew how to read and write the rongorongo script, the only Polynesian script to have been found to date.

When the slave raiders were forced to repatriate the people they had kidnapped, carriers of smallpox disembarked together with a few survivors on each of the islands. This created devastating epidemics from Easter Island to the Marquesas islands. Easter Island's population was reduced to the point where some of the dead were not even buried.

Tuberculosis, introduced by whalers in the mid-19th century, had already killed several islanders when the first Christian missionary, Eugène Eyraud, died from this disease in 1867. It ultimately killed approximately a quarter of the island's population. In the following years, the managers of the sheep ranch and the missionaries started buying the newly available lands of the deceased, and this led to great confrontations between natives and settlers.

### Chilean Annexation (Ma'u i Chile)

Easter Island was annexed by Chile on 9 September 1888 by Policarpo Toro by means of the "Treaty of Annexation of the Island" (Tratado de Anexión de la isla). Toro, representing the government of Chile, signed with Atamu Tekena, designated "King" by the Roman Catholic missionaries after the paramount chief and his heir had died. The validity of this treaty is still contested by some Rapa Nui. Officially, Chile purchased the nearly all encompassing Mason-Brander sheep ranch, comprised from lands purchased from the descendants of Rapa Nui who died during the epidemics, and then claimed sovereignty over the island.

Until the 1960s, the surviving Rapa Nui were confined to Hanga Roa. The rest of the island was rented to the Williamson-Balfour Company as a sheep farm until 1953. This exemplified the introduction of private property into Rapa Nui. The island was then managed by the Chilean Navy until 1966, at which point the island was reopened in its entirety. In 1966, the Rapa Nui were colonized and given Chilean citizenship.

### Indigenous Rights (Taŋata Mata'u)

Starting in August 2010, members of the indigenous Hitorangi clan occupied the Hangaroa Eco Village and Spa. The occupiers allege that the hotel was bought from the Pinochet government, in violation of a Chilean agreement with the indigenous Rapa Nui, in the 1990s. The occupiers say their ancestors had been cheated into giving up the land. According to a BBC report, on 3 December 2010, at least 25 people were injured when Chilean police using pellet guns attempted to evict from these buildings a group of Rapa Nui who had claimed that the land the buildings stood on had been illegally taken from their ancestors.

In January 2011, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, James Anaya, expressed concern about the treatment of the indigenous Rapa Nui by the Chilean government, urging Chile to "make every effort to conduct a dialogue in good faith with representatives of the Rapa Nui people to solve, as soon as possible the real underlying problems that explain the current situation". The incident ended in February 2011, when up to 50 armed police broke into the hotel to remove the final five occupiers. They were arrested by the government, and no injuries were reported.

## Music (Iŋoa)

Traditional music from the island consists of choral singing and chanting, similar to Tahitian music. Families often performed as choirs, competing in an annual concert. They were accompanied by a trumpet made from a conch shell and a percussive dancer jumping onto a stone which is set over a calabash resonator. Other instruments include the kauaha, the jaw bone of a horse, upaupa, an accordion, and stones, which are clapped together for percussive effect.

Due to ongoing contacts with Chile and elsewhere in South America, Latin American music has had influences on the music of Easter Island. Tango, for example, has spawned an Easter Island style called tango Rapanui, characterized by a simple guitar accompaniment instead of the frenetic bandoneon.

The first music school on the island was opened in 2012 by Mahani Teave, and teaches piano, cello, ukulele, and violin.

## Rongorongo (Roŋoroŋo)

In 1770 the Spanish annexed Easter Island under Captain González de Ahedo. A signing ceremony was held in which a treaty of annexation was signed by an undisclosed number of chiefs "by marking upon it certain characters in their own form of script." (Reproduction at right.)

Several scholars have suggested that rongorongo may have been an invention inspired by this visit and the signing of the treaty of annexation. As circumstantial evidence, they note that no explorer reported the script prior to Eugène Eyraud in 1864, and are of the opinion that the marks with which the chiefs signed the Spanish treaty do not resemble rongorongo. The hypothesis of these researchers is not that rongorongo was itself a copy of the Latin alphabet, or of any other form of writing, but that the *concept* of writing had been conveyed in a process anthropologists term trans-cultural diffusion, which then inspired the islanders to invent their own system of writing. If this is the case, then rongorongo emerged, flourished, fell into oblivion, and was all but forgotten within a span of less than a hundred years.

However, known cases of the diffusion of writing, such as Sequoyah's invention of the Cherokee syllabary after seeing the power of English-language newspapers, or Uyaquk's invention of the Yugtun script inspired by readings from Christian scripture, involved greater contact than the signing of a single treaty. The glyphs could be crudely written rongorongo, as might be expected for Rapa Nui representatives writing with the novel instrument of pen on paper. The fact that the script was not otherwise observed by early explorers, who spent little time on the island, may reflect that it was taboo; such taboos may have lost power along with the *tangata rongorongo* (scribes) by the time Rapanui society collapsed following Peruvian slaving raids and the resulting epidemics, so that the tablets had become more widely distributed by Eyraud's day. Orliac points out that Tablet C would appear to predate the Spanish visit by at least a century.

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