Read "Polynesian Star Stories: Unifying the Scattered Islands of the Pacific"
The night sky has long fascinated humanity, and that preoccupation sparkles in Red Wertheimer’s “Polynesian Star Stories: Unifying the Scattered Islands of the Pacific.” The essay was written for my Fall 2023 Perspectives on the Humanities course, which examined cultural astronomy and its expressions in art and literature, and it was during the inevitable first-week icebreakers that I had an early inkling of Red’s deep connection to the natural world. She shared an experience that left probably all of us there present a touch envious—three months spent exploring the wild Rockies, sleeping beneath a vast, open sky with endless stars. In our windowless basement classroom over the following semester, even as we examined the supernova rendered in Giotto’s Adoration of the Magi with its conflation of religion and cosmology or the existential dissonance this provokes in Clarke’s “The Star,” for those who have never seen a jewelled night sky—something the bright lights of Shanghai, though not without their own beauty, preclude—that kind of lived, reverent familiarity exists just beyond reach.
But, as Red so ably demonstrates, it was precisely the lived familiarity of ancient Polynesians that led to the embedding of star knowledge within cultural mythology. In examining the myths of the Mānaiakalani constellation (Scorpius) and the Makali’i/Matariki star cluster (Pleiades) across different Polynesian cultures, specifically Māori and Hawaiian, she traces both convergences and divergences, ultimately positing a connection between celestial mythology and wayfaring that underpins both the extent of the Polynesian diaspora and the unifying hallmarks of these myths across oceans. It is that proposition, something I witnessed evolve through outlines and drafts and conferences, that delights me so much about her essay. Although the connection has been noted in academia, I was wholly satisfied and impressed at the ability of a sophomore to engage deeply with Hawaiian and Māori celestial traditions, to examine them through an animistic and historico-cultural lens, and to persuasively argue their influence on Polynesian navigation. Her conclusion was independently developed, her research thorough—spanning oral tradition, literature, and scholarship—and her voice articulate in its intellectual inquiry.
Ultimately, Red’s essay invites us to consider more deeply the practical ways that stellar mythology manifests within ancient cultures, and in so doing, inevitably asks us to reflect on our own relationship with the natural world. To think about the connections that time and city lights have dimmed and to brave the wild, the darkness and the wide, open oceans of the unknown.
—Jay Ludowyke, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Writing Program