Island in My Mind

​

The homo sapiens reached Hawaii through Tahiti and became the ancestors of Hawaiians as the closure of the history of the expansion of the sapiens who first originated in Africa. The area of Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia (including Hawaii and Tahiti) widely spread over the vast Southern Pacific Ocean, but have similarities in their cultures and linguistics, and prove that they have had interchanges since the ancient times. Using the Star Navigation which they find directions by looking at stars, and by reading the swelling waving and using only the power of the wind, they have travelled among each other with canoes.

 

Since Hawaii was “discovered” by James Cook in 1778, a huge number of Westerners made their ways to Hawaii. The long battles among the royals had finally ended when King Kamehameha I acquired the latest weapons in his hands, and Hawaii became unified under a single government. The new ideologies introduced by the missionaries that came along with new technologies abandoned the ancient Hawaiian culture such as the Fula and the Hawaiian language, as they appeared “barbarous.”

 

Before too late, the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance occurred in the 1970s as a resurgence of a distinct cultural identity. The symbolic project of the movement was to rebuild the voyaging double-hulled canoe, which was the ship that was used when the homo sapiens first reached Hawaii using only wind as its power, as well as the revitalization of the Star Navigation.

 

The canoe was completed in 1975, and was named Hokule'a. Although the canoe was constructed, the navigation method no longer existed.

 

Nainoa Thompson, the leader of the project, visited Mau Piailug from the island of Satawal in Micronesia, who was one of the only six existing inheritors of the Star Navigation. Master Mau trained Nainoa the various methods, and when the historical moment of the take off to Tahiti from Hawaii had came, Mau asked a question to Nainoa.

 

“Can you see the island?” The question puzzled Nainoa. “I could not literally see the island,” he recalls. “It was twenty-four hundred miles away. But it was a serious question. I had to consider carefully.” Finally, he said, “I cannot see the island, but I can see an image of the island in my mind.”

 

“Good,” said Mau. “Don’t ever lose that image or you will be lost.”

 

This was the final lesson for Nainoa from Mau.*

​

*   *   *

For the series I photographed the Difficult-To-Return zones with the camera that was used on the occasion of Japanese ancestries gathering in a circle upon funerals, I named its title Island in My Mind. The island that appears in the middle of the circle surrounding the person standing in his/her homeland, is a place they could always visualize in their mind, although they may live afar. Landscapes can easily change or disappear within the annals of natural disasters and events. However, if you have the power to believe, you could surely reach that place again. That is the lesson I learned from them.

​

——Ai Iwane