杏吧传媒

Wayfinders opens by telling the story of the spread of people out of Southeast Asia throughout the Pacific over thousands of years. They discovered thousands of islands and learned to move between them using only the signs of the natural world around them, including the stars. Eventually they reached the islands of Hawai鈥檌 and sailed vast distances back and forth from other islands. Around 600 years ago these long ocean crossing voyages to and from Hawai鈥檌 had all but stopped as the populations became self-sustaining. The knowledge and skill built over thousands of years faded from cultural memory into only legends and stories.

Fast forward to the 1970鈥檚, when the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance was building after nearly 200 years of suppression by colonial powers. It was at this time that the Polynesian Voyaging Society was founded by native Hawaiian artist Herb Kane, sailor Tommy Holmes, and anthropologist Ben Finney in 1973. They designed and built a replica double-hulled canoe in the spirit of those used hundreds of years before. Their intention was to sail it to Tahiti and back in the wake of their ancestors, without modern navigation instrumentation. They named their wa鈥檃 (canoe) H艒k奴le鈥檃 after the star of joy, also known as Arcturus. They asked Mau Piailug of the island of Satawal in Micronesia to be their navigator and he agreed, recognizing that the traditional art of wayfinding was in danger of disappearing entirely. In 1976, he successfully navigated H艒k奴le鈥檃 across 2,600 miles, from Hawai鈥檌 to Tahiti without using modern instruments.聽Show length: 24 minuteswa