HWST 107: Hawaiʻi: Center of the Pacific

Despite a romantic view of Polynesians as the descendants of "high Asians", free of Melanesian blood, the more likely explanation is that they derive from a mixing between later, long-distance emigrants from South-East Asia and Lapita Melanesians.

This account of Hōkūleʻa's 1980 return voyage from Hawai'i to Tahiti is a chapter from Will Kyselka's Ocean in Mind.

Over 1,000 years ago, the islands of Polynesia were explored and settled by navigators who used only the waves, the stars, and the flights of birds for guidance. In hand-built, double-hulled canoes sixty feet long, the ancestors of today's Polynesians sailed across a vast ocean area, larger than Europe and North America combined.

Documentary about traditional canoe building and wayfinding as connected to Hawai'i today.