In January of 2024, the Rapa Nui council of elders (Te Mau Hatu) asked Friar Francisco NAHOE, a member of the Province of St. Joseph of Cupertino in the USA, and a member of that ethnicity, to assist them with the recovery and repatriation of ancestral remains in the United States. In July of 2024, Friar Francisco and his cousin, Susana NAHOE, an archaeologist who is also the founder of the Rei Mata Puku Center for Rapa Nui Studies, traveled through the midwestern United States recovering the remains of their Rapa Nui ancestors at three American universities.
Rapa Nui, also known by its exonym Easter Island, lies 2,612 km [1,620 mi] east of Mangareva [an island of French Polynesia], 4,261 km [2,643 mi] southeast of Tahiti [French Polynesia], and 6,000 km [3,728 mi] west of South America. The island is best known for its many archaeological sites and especially for its thousand monumental Neolithic statues called “moai.”
A common motif in Euro-American rhetoric about Rapa Nui focuses on the idea of collapse. American social geographer and best-selling author, Jared DIAMOND, showcased Easter Island as the perfect example of self-inflicted ecocide. However, new and highly specialized studies in archaeology, biological anthropology, human genetics, agricultural prehistory and coastal geology, paint an entirely different picture. More recent research shows that the primary causes of the decline of the Rapa Nui civilization can be squarely attributed to European contact, which resulted in slavery and colonialism.
The encounter with the outside world began on Easter Sunday in 1722, when a fleet of the Dutch East India Company, commanded by Jacob ROGGEVEEN, arrived at the island. Over the course of a few days interacting with the indigenous Polynesian population, the Dutch shot and killed more than a dozen Rapa Nui islanders. Subsequent European visits to the island in the 18th and 19th centuries brought social disruption, disease, and death.
From 1860-1862, Peruvians and Chileans conducted slave raids on the island. This resulted in the capture of more than 1,500 Rapa Nui islanders who were carried off and forced to work in the guano deposits of the Chincha Islands, 21 km [13 mi] off the southwest coast of Peru. The missionary Bishop Étienne JAUSSEN, SS.CC., Vicar Apostolic of Tahiti, and King Kamehameha V of Hawaii, lobbied the Peruvian government to repatriate the Rapa Nui slaves. Likewise, the French government of Napoleon III, which had just installed the imperial couple Maximilian and Carlota to rule over Mexico, threatened to do the same in Peru. Such international pressure, however, could not save the Rapa Nui slaves. Nearly all of them died in captivity including the last Ariki [chief] capable of reading the indigenous writing system known as Roŋoroŋo [Rongorongo]. Fewer than fifteen Rapa Nui islanders were eventually returned to the island. Moreover, they had been infected with smallpox. One of the few survivors of the Peruvian slave raids to return was Pakomio MĀ’ORI, the great-great grandfather of Friar Francisco and his cousin.
Although the first missionary efforts began in 1864, a French gambler and former naval officer, Jean-Baptiste DUTROU-BORNIER, seized control of the island in 1870, drove off the Sacrés Cœurs Fathers [Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary], and ruled despotically until his death in 1876. By 1877, the population of the island was down to 111 islanders. All Rapanui persons alive today are descended from them.
Rapa Nui was annexed by Chile in 1888. The Chilean government then leased the entire island to a series of private Anglo-French, Franco-Chilean, and Scottish livestock franchises who introduced thousands of sheep for wool production. It was during this period of private colonialism that visitors to Rapa Nui began to expropriate human remains of the ancient matamu’a [ancestral people] from the island. Today, these remains may be found in museums of natural history and university departments of anthropology in Oxford, London, Glasgow, Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Washington D.C., and New York, among other locations.
In 1990, the United States passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) into law. This legislation both protects the graves of indigenous peoples in U.S. territories and requires the repatriation of human remains to their respective American Indian tribes. In 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) further specified that indigenous peoples have a right to the recovery and repatriation of their human remains and funerary objects.
To bring themselves up to date on the newly revised NAGPRA regulations and best practices, Friar Francisco and his cousin attended a training workshop at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana on July 8-12, 2024. On July 13, they traveled to Bloomington, Indiana, to recover six crania that had been removed from the island in 1886 by the chief medical officer of the USS Mohican.
On July 19, they went to the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. There, they took possession of a cranium and several long bones that had been removed from the island by the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition led by Thor HEYERDAHL and financed by the Royal Prince, Olav, son of King Haakon of Norway. Unlike previous explorers, however, HEYERDAHL and his senior researchers signed a repatriation agreement signaling their intent to study and return the human remains found in the course of their 1955 expedition. Probably by accident, the materials in Minnesota were omitted from the repatriations of the mid-1960s and remained there until today.
Finally, on July 22, the NAHOE cousins recovered another set of human remains from Rapa Nui located at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. In between the scheduled recovery events, Friar Francisco and his cousin Susana have been working on the bio-anthropological inventory of these items at the friaries in Marytown (Province of St. Bonaventure in the USA) and Prior Lake (Province of Our Lady of Consolation in the USA). There, the friars have both hosted them and given them laboratory space to prepare the ancestral remains for transport back to Rapa Nui in 2025.
Friar Francisco has identified many other U.S. museums and universities with ancestral remains from Rapa Nui and has committed himself to assist in repatriation efforts until all these remains have been recovered and reburied on the island. The project will certainly take years.
Friar Joseph WOOD
