Spread across nearly 2,000,000 square miles of the South Pacific, in an area as large as the continent of Europe, lies the Territory of French Polynesia and its principal island, Tahiti.
Settlers from Southeast Asia are thought to have first arrived in the Marquesas Islands, in the northeastern part of what is today called French Polynesia, around 300 AD and in the Society Islands, including Tahiti, to the west by about 800 AD. Prior to the first European contact, the islands were ruled by a hierarchy of hereditary tribal chiefs.
The first Europeans to visit the area were the English explorers Samuel Wallis in 1767 and James Cook in 1769. French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville arrived in 1768 and claimed the islands for France. In the late 1700s occasional ships arrived in the islands, most notably the H.M.S. Bounty in 1788, captained by William Bligh.
The first missionaries, from the London Missionary Society, arrived in the islands in 1797. By 1815, with the support of the most powerful ruling family in the islands, the Pomares, the British missionaries had secured a strong influence in much of the Society Islands, doing everything possible to eliminate traditional Polynesian culture by barring traditional dance and music as well as destroying carvings and temples associated with native religion.
The French continued to hold influence over the Marquesian Archipelago and eventually were successful in expelling the British and securing influence over much of what today constitutes French Polynesia, leaving the ruling Pomare family as little more than figureheads.
In 1880, King Pomare V was forced to abdicate, and a French colony was proclaimed. By 1901, the colony included the Austral Islands, the Gambier Archipelago, the Marquesas Islands, the Society Islands and the Tuamotu atolls to the southeast. The first half of the twentieth century saw periods of nationalistic protest in the colonies which were by then called the Établissements français d'Océanie (French Pacific Settlements).
It was not, however, until after World War II, when Tahitians who had served France returned home, that pressure forced the French government to extend French citizenship to all islanders. The first territorial assembly was established in 1946, and by 1949 the islands obtained representation in the French Assembly.
In 1957, the territory was officially renamed the Territory of French Polynesia. The Republic of France is represented in the territory by a high commissioner appointed by the Republic. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, limited autonomy was granted to the territorial government to control socioeconomic policy but not defense, law and order, or foreign affairs.
A small company of thirty-four New England missionaries came to Hawaii between 1820 and 1930, were the first modern immigrants. (Lind p.59) Missionaries were powerful agents of cultural destruction, coming to Hawaii to settle and teach their ways and beliefs. Bloodthirsty priests and despotic chiefs had ruled one reason for missionaries arriving and settling in Hawaii, due to the fact that they believed ancient Hawaiians. (Trask p.14) Bringing along cultural havoc by establishing a western style educational system, which included the first textbook as the Bible. The most critical change was in the use of language as a tool of colonization. Language had once been inseparable from the Hawaiians and their history by communicating their heritage between and among many generations, now came to be used as the very vehicle of alienation from their habits of life.
In the beginning, Hawaii was unknown to any humans. Polynesians eventually came across its islands, and decided to make it their home. In the early days, each island was ruled by a chief, and many times the islands were in conflict with each other. Centuries like this passed, but then "in 1782, [Queen Lili'uokalani's] cousin Kamehameha set out to conquer and unite the islands". Thirteen years later, in 1795, Kamehameha finally fulfilled his vision of a unified Hawaiian state, and he became king. The nation was then to be ruled by Kamehameha's sons. (Guzzetti 10)
The territory finally became a state in 1959, just ahead of Hawaii. Now, Hawaii is an archipelago, a chain of islands, located in the Central Pacific. Unlike Alaska, annexing Hawaii was due to United States imperialism. Around the middle 1800s, American began to migrate to the islands of Hawaii to start businesses, especially with sugarcane and pineapple. At that time, the islands were ruled by Queen Liliuokalani in a monarchy.
In order for the reader to understand how colonization affected Ocean Island, the reader needs to understand the history of the Island. In Pearl Binder’s book, Treasure Islands: The Trials of the Banabans, she tells of what Ocean Island first looked like. Ocean Island, or Banaba, is one of the many islands in the Pacific. It is situated almost exactly on the equator. The whole island is three miles long and two and a half miles wide. The highest point of Banaba is 270 feet. The island was rocky but had quite a bit of land for growing crops. After living peacefully by themselves for a long time, the Banabans allowed travelers to enter their land, which changed their lives forever. Blackbirders, who are labor recruiters, came to Banaba in 1862 as a result of the Civil War happening in the U.S. (Binder). The need for cotton was in high demand so they needed workers to harvest it all. The blackbirders came and kidnapped strong young men from the villages to use them for working in Fiji, Honolulu, South America, and Queensland where enterprising planters had started cotton plantations. While slavery was ending in the U.S., it was just starting in the Pacific (Binder). At the end of the nineteenth century...
Before the Europeans sailed between the two regions (1000 AD) Squash and sweet potatoes were present in both South America and Polynesia. There is also biological evidence supporting this theory. Scientists discovered and ran tests on chicken bones from Samoa and from Southern Chile. They found that the bones consisted of the same DNA sequence which suggests that Polynesian chickens were introduced in the fourteenth century in South America. That being said, there has been no evidence showing that Polynesian people stayed for extended periods of time in South America or vice versa. This suggests that the meetings between the two regions were brief and did not take place all that often. (Imagina Easter
The Portuguese were the first European settlers to arrive in the area. They were led by adventurous Pedro Cabral, who began the colonial period in 1500.
They were more interested in installing the advanced democratic principles. Western power was keen on acquiring the island because of its rich coaling station and a promising naval base. The native population became an ethnic minority by 1891 due to western diseases, cholera, smallpox and leprosy, they were vulnerable to. America used the imperial force to attain Hawaii (Thurston, 1897). Imperialism, as it is defined, is an extension of a country’s ideals and values over another nation, and primarily acts upon the less developed countries....
Political institutions drastically changed after independence of French rule. The most obvious variation between French ruled St. Domingue and Haitian ruled Haiti is that Haitians now ruled their own land that they had forcibly labored on for almost one-hundred years. After autonomy and freedom from the French, native-born occupants of the island and native-Africans could finally rule themselves. This is a major institutional change because now the rulers of Haiti could cater to their own needs and they proved that blacks could form a working government. Another significant transformation to the government was that it became an empire, not a colony under the Republic of France. As an independent empire the country now answered to itself and its emperor, rather than a king in a country 4,500 miles away. This allowed for the new empire to develop its own culture instead of trying to adapt
For at least 5,000 years before Christopher Columbus "discovered" America for the Europeans the island, which he called Hispaniola, was inhabited by Amer-Indians. Anthropologists have traced 2 major waves of immigration, one from the West in Central America (probably Yucatan) and the second from the South, descendant of the Arawakan Indian tribes in Amazonia and passing through the Orinocco valley in Venezuela. It is from this second source that the ancestors of the Taino Indians who welcomed Columbus on his first voyage originated.
The pioneering exploration of the Caribbean Islands, by Christopher Columbus led to the first European contact of the Taino Indians in that region. This encounter resulted in the Taino Indians being traded, yet opened the South Atlantic and Caribbean for future exploration and eventual colonization.
The Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint Domingue were very important to the French economy due to its high sugar trade and increasing its profits through slavery. After the Fall of Louis XVI The National Assembly was considering the question of rights for free men of color. Saint Domingue had 40,000 whites and 30,000 free people of color along with 500,000 slaves. In 1790 the free people of color sent a delegation to Paris to be seated, accentuating that they are property owners and some even of European descent. The assembly later refused to seat them sparking a rebellion among free people of color, which spoke of an independence from France. French colonial authorities suppressed the first rebellion quickly and brutally killed Vincent Oge, a member of the Delegation to Paris and leader of the first rebellion and most of his followers.
Today most experts believe that Easter Island was first settled by Polynesians looking for a new homeland. About 1680 A.D, the quality of life on the island began to decrease. At this time, clan rivals erupted in a bloody battle between long ears and shorts ears. This destruction of the islands natural resource undoubtedly contributed to its decline.
Though there had already been a widely accepted theory on how the Polynesians had arrived in Polynesia, Thor Heyerdahl dared to test this theory, backed by his many years of research. Originally, it was thought that the Polynesians had arrived by canoe from Asia. This had been the accepted belief for years, so when Heyerdahl introduced his new theory into the world, it was thought by the scientists to be implausible. Heyerdahl hypothesized that the Polynesians arrived by a balsa wood raft from Peru. He believed the ancient civilizations had arrived from the coast of South America far before Columbus ever set foot there. Knut Haugland, a crew-member, recounted scientists’ doubts: “It was also argued that [a] low deck of an open raft would be unprotected in the high sea, and furthermore, that the balsa raft would dissolve as soon as the big logs started chafing on the rope lashing that held the craft together” (www.kon-tiki.no). It was also believed that the balsa wood would ...
In 1975 a replica of a Polynesian voyaging canoe called the Hokule'a made a thirty day voyage to Tahiti under the navigation of Mau Piailug.... ... middle of paper ... ... As long as people care about what's going on in the Polynesian revival of culture, there will be growth. There will be energy left for people to search out the answers to our questions and the lost secrets of these amazing people who found these islands over 1,500 years ago.
Jamaica's recorded history began before the birth of Christ when Indians arrived from South America. Arawaks were not very well prepared to absorb the impact of the Spanish under Christopher Columbus on May 4, 1494. When an English force of 5,000 men invaded the island in 1655, the Spanish offered little resistance and within a few years abandoned it as a colony. The English then ruled Jamaica uninterrupted for more than 300 years.