The Tahitian Chiefdoms

The Tahitian Chiefdoms. The Tahitian chiefdoms (c. 1000-1815) ruled the largest and richest island of eastern Polynesia. Settled from islands to the west in the last great wave of Polynesian voyaging, Tahitian society grew around the ariki, hereditary chiefs who traced their descent from the gods and whose power was displayed at the marae, open-air temples of stone where priests conducted the rituals that bound chiefs, gods, and people. District chiefs ruled the valleys and coasts of Tahiti, bound together and divided by kinship, alliance, and war.

Tahitian society was elaborate and strongly ranked. Great chiefs commanded war canoes and armies, collected tribute in food, cloth, and prized red feathers, and patronized the famous arioi, traveling companies of performers dedicated to the god Oro, whose cult spread from island to island. Life centered on the districts, each with its marae and its ruling family, and European visitors in the eighteenth century, from Wallis to Bougainville and Cook, described a fertile island of breadfruit, coconut palms, and a populous, sophisticated people.

The age of the independent chiefdoms ended in the era of European contact. One district family, the Pomare line, rose above the rest with the help of European guns: Pomare I unified much of Tahiti and its neighbors in the 1790s, and his son Pomare II, converted by Protestant missionaries, completed the conquest and in 1815 founded the Kingdom of Tahiti, a Christian monarchy that ruled until the French protectorate of 1842.

The chiefdoms left Tahiti its language, its chiefly families, and its marae, many of them still standing. Their history captures the whole arc of Polynesian experience, from the first settlement of the islands through the flowering of chiefly civilization to the shock of European arrival, when old rivalries and new weapons and religions together transformed the Pacific world.

To read more about this topic:

Wikipedia: Pomare Dynasty University of Hawaii Press: Ancient Tahitian Society: The Emergence of the Pomares Wikipedia: Kingdom of Tahiti Routledge: Pomares of Tahiti