- IJ, MD & YM
142: Denying the indigenous past
In 2004 a paper was written by Dr Graham EL Holton called : "Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki Theory and the Denial of the Indigenous Past". The paper was written specifically to show that Heyerdahl was some sort of white supremacist in his ideals. It is especially odd when a photo appears on the internet of Dr Graham Holton using a 'white supremacist' closed fist salute; on his own Facebook page! That's freakin hilarious...
Anyway, Holton's paper covers the successful 1947 attempt to float from Peru to Polynesia. Heyerdal believed Peruvian indians could have settled in Polynesia and this is where the legend of the tall white race came from...that is Polynesia; where he heard the legend from a native of Fatu Hiva. Anyway, that alone is a long story and you can read it yourself in the link below the pictures. The point is they tried and successfully drifted to Tuamoto 101 days later.
Although Holton denied the possibility of a Polynesian/South American link, it was proved in 2011 that there was such a link -www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/8582150/Kon-Tiki-explorer-was-partly-right-Polynesians-had-South-American-roots.html
This shows that science and research shifts and changes with time just as our reveal will change current known history. Science has never ever been static; it is always evolving with new discoveries.
Holton goes on speak in his article about the core of the Kon Tiki theory being that a 'white ‘race’ came from the Middle East to the Americas and then on to Polynesia to teach the dark-skinned people the arts of civilisation'. Edward Norbeck attacked the book for Heyerdahl’s assumptions, and asserted that it was ‘difficult for many persons to avoid reading racism from this work’ . Throughout the text, Heyerdahl uses concepts such as ‘racial hygiene’, ‘racial cleansing’, and ‘race wars’. Let's examine those phrases in a different time period to our own.
We once again remind you that Native Americans wiped out previous tall white races (according to their own verbal legends). That is racial cleansing. It is also genocide. We maintain that if our skeletons test to be non-Polynesian, then the same has been done to them because Maori legends talk of a race already here when they arrived.
Yet Heyerdahl only built his theory from discussion with Polynesians and personal observation. The craft from the voyage was named Kon-Tiki, after the mythical Polynesian hero Tiki, who was said in oral tradition to have led the ancestors of the islanders there from the East. Heyerdahl had first heard the legend in the mid-1930s, while he was living in the Pacific on the Marquesas Islands, and had connected this Polynesian story with the Inca tale of Con-Tici, the fair-skinned king said to have fled from Peru across the ocean following the massacre of his race at Lake Titicaca some 500 years before the birth of Christ. It was also on Fatu-Hiva that he heard, from a native, the story of Tiki.
Heyerdahl eventually lead some digs in Peru at some mud-brick pyramids at a place called Túcume. Here they found what you can see in the picture below...birdmen, like on Easter Island; and they are on boats. No wonder his theories (be they right or wrong) were so ingrained.
Birdmen of Peru. Peru also has birdman beads that we have shown elsewhere and show at the bottom of this article
Birdmen of Easter Island
Now while Heyerdahl’s theories are not all correct, it was 1947 and are more correct than Holton was in 2004 about the South American link! But being an academic (Holton) no one is writing an article debunking him are they? Well, no one except me. And just so you know, we at tanagawhenua16 do not think our skeletons are of a tall blonde haired blue eyed race. That's just pure fantasy from a group wanting something to be something that fits their theories.
Holton criticizes Heyerdahl for the same kind of diffusionist theory as that invented by Edward Burnett Tylor to explain the apparent spread of world civilization from a single source. By the 1920s, diffusionism was being used to explain great achievements of the ancient past. Bible believers would explain all civilization is from a single source, but as for others being 'inferior', that is something all races have treated others as in the past. What is in the interpretation is what that inferiority is. Is it in cultural matters, metallurgy, philosophy, construction, arts.....?
In 1937, Thor Heyerdahl and his new bride traveled to Fatu Hiva, in the Marquesas Group of French Polynesia. When he saw the island’s amazing stone structures and sculptures, and heard the legends told by the islanders, he abandoned his botanical studies for anthropology and archaeology. Ongoing disputes over the origins of the Polynesians would fuel his life-long search for the lost white ‘race’. Heyerdahl began research by examining records of the early European sea voyages to Polynesia. In the 1520s, the Spaniards making first contacts with the people of eastern Polynesia noted the presence among them of pale skinned, light-haired individuals. This is something they both saw and recorded. The red-haired individuals called themselves Urukehu and were said to have been directly descended from the first chiefs, thought to have been ‘white gods’. The first chief was Tiki, the sun-god. The other islanders, the majority of the population, were dark skinned with jet-black hair and flattish noses. According to Heyerdahl, eastern Polynesia’s light-skinned population was derived from South America via the white ‘god’, Viracocha, and his followers. Although Heyerdahl never rejected the South-East Asiatic origins of the darker skinned Polynesians, he believed that the lighter-skinned ‘race’ found in eastern Polynesia had originated in the Americas. He maintained these light skinned voyagers had sailed on balsa-log rafts from Peru or in large canoes from the American north-west, and were responsible for the ancient monumental remains found in Polynesia. This was not a new idea; for example, as long ago as 1803 the Spanish missionary, Father Joacquin de Zun˜iga, suggested that Peruvian Indians had long ago migrated to Polynesia. The big difference, however, was that Heyerdahl’s ‘Indians’ were light skinned. Heyerdahl knew that the major obstacle to his theory was an absence of physical proof that the coastal Peruvian Indians possessed ocean-going vessels. Hence the voyage.
Archaeologists Paul Bahn and John Flenley found his arguments flawed because he arrived at misleading conclusions as a result of his selective use of evidence, and concluded that ‘Kon-Tiki showed nothing more than that, by using a post-European-contact kind of sail-raft and modern survival equipment, it is possible to survive a 101-day voyage between Peru and Polynesia’.
Professor Robert von Heine-Geldern attacked Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki theories in the Geographical Journal, a prestigious British publication. Dr E. D. Merrill, a pugnacious adversary of the diffusionists, conceded only the possibility of ‘occasional’ accidental contacts between the Americas and Polynesia. In Paris, after anthropologist Alfred Me´traux labelled Heyerdahl nothing but an adventurer and an inept scientist (‘mauvais savant’), Heyerdahl confronted him when he was with Dr Walter Lehman, a leading archaeologist, and showed them an advance copy of American Indians in the Pacific. According to Heyerdahl ‘My two opponents grew silent and confused’, and went on to ask complicated questions, which he answered. Heyerdahl then gave the two savants a stack of photographs of statues found in South America and Polynesia, asking them to sort them according to location, but both failed this test. ‘I then added that if two of the world’s foremost authorities in the field saw no difference, might they be willing to admit that there was a similarity? They agreed’.
This is why our eventual debates will be live, and not on any other forum where interpretation can be skewed by those clever with words and sidetracking innuendo. On on live TV or radio can arguments be presented and challenged for all to see or hear. Those will also end up on You Tube, should You Tube be brave and open enough to resist the political pressure. After all, You Tube deleted 'Skeletons in the closet' and those video were all just theory and suggestion. Imagine what they might do to physical 8' skeletal evidence?) You might be wondering why we talk this way so adamantly...keep thinking.
Back to the article. The red-haired people of Easter Island, says Heyerdahl, claim descent from a light-skinned people known as the ‘long-ears’ because they wore large plugs that elongated their earlobes. Long ears are seen in Peru as far north as Equador. Their ancestors were the first on the island, and set up a kingdom under Hotu Matu’a. They constructed the stone statues, cutting them in their own image. Heyerdahl concluded that the red ‘hat’ worn by the moai is a topknot made of red scoria because it depicted the colour of their hair. Since the statues showed extended ear lobes, the builders had to have been the light-skinned long-ears, the descendants of the Viracochas from Peru. (Here Holton says of Heyedahl "while ignoring the fact that ear-extension was also a common practice in South-East Asia"). However Mt Holton, did you ever consider ear extension was a common theme of upper Peru, Tumbes, Piura and Lambyeque areas particularly and that birdmen figures were present and a dozen other similarities? No, you just ignored that to fit your own theory. And to be fair we all do that.
But none of what is on Easter Island is provable as the original populations all died out and the rongorongo scripts remain Indecipherable.
Heyerdahl was severely criticized for using quantity of detail rather than empirical analysis as proof. [Empirical analysis is an evidence-based approach to the study and interpretation of information. The empirical approach relies on real-world data, metrics and results rather than theories and concepts]. In a review of Heyerdahl, Norbeck complains that it: is poorly organised and extremely repetitious. "One gets the impression that a mass of notes or the rough draft of a manuscript somehow or another got published...Every straw is seized, bent and twisted to suit the author’s purposes. Tenuous evidence is pushed beyond reasonable limits; conflicting data are given scant attention or omitted, and the manuscript abounds with incautious statements. Heyerdahl’s system of analysis is faulty because he compares item by item, whereas differing cultures are best compared holistically, as complete assemblages, to avoid putting too great an emphasis on what may be merely coincidence—like problems produce like solutions."
After combing through the records of the Spanish chroniclers, Heyerdahl found no less than forty two historians who made reference to Viracocha. Pizarro described the Guancas, Chachapoyas, and Can˜ares Indians of Peru in 1571 as ‘white but of a tawny hue, and among them the Lords and Ladies were whiter than Spaniards’. Heyerdahl argued that, since Pizarro saw these people before they ‘could be suspected of post-Columbian impurity of blood’, his observations were correct, but also that they were a ‘particular minority of the Inca nation consisting of the upper aristocracy and the superior physical and intellectual types’. The ruling Inca families called themselves orejones, or ‘long ears’, in commemoration of the Viracochas, in contrast to their subjects, the ‘short ears’. This is the basis of the legends of the long ears in Rapanui.
Heyerdahls other claims are far fetched and unprovable yet legends of tall red haired white skinned giants also appear in native American legends and in Aotearoa as well as many other countries. If in legends of races that had no contact, where did these people come from?
Heyerdahl’s pioneering work, which has been largely ignored for the racial undertones which it carries (in todays terms), shows very clearly that, drawing upon the existence of the red haired South American mummies; the red haired descendants living on Easter Island...are a large group of White Nordic racial types, very possibly linked to Canary Island Gaunches, who swept across the Atlantic Ocean, settled and built cities and civilisations in South America, and then even spread out into the Pacific Islands. Not very likely but?
Denying the Indigenous Past
Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki Theory is seen as a pseudo-scientific Nordic cult of a Great White Race as the originator of the civilisations of the Americas and Polynesia is similar to those expressed in the Nazi archaeological literature of Hans Reinerth and Gustaf Kossina. Race classification and racial intelligence are important to Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki thesis. He accounts for ‘Negroid traits’ amongst Polynesians as deriving from Melanesian slaves or labourers carried back by the Polynesians.
In 1944, Polish scholar and attorney Raphael Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’, meaning ‘the disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion and the economic existence of national groups’. Included in his ‘techniques of genocide’ were the prohibition on and the destruction of cultural institutions and activities. In the case of indigenous peoples, genocide is ‘the destruction of the personal security, liberty, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups’ (is this not what happened to the MoriOri by Maori?) Now that isn't racist as some will claim it to be as it does not build up a superior white race in the least - but the fact is the fact. It also applies to Nga Puhi's raids up and down the length of Aotearoa with the musket, wantingly killing and eating as they went - although they claimed no lands as a result of the many raids.
The end of Holtons paper is very revealing. He suggests (and sometimes quite rightly) that 'conquering' European colonizers have often denied indigenous pasts in order to disenfranchise indigenous peoples as landowners. Since a sense of its own past is integral to a people’s cultural identity, any denial of this by the ruling elite and its institutions is a factor in cultural genocide. Our history defines who we are as a people and as individuals. Removal of that history leaves a people rootless and open to exploitation by the dominant ethnic group, which then legitimates the resulting social inequalities. The culture of the colonized becomes subordinate and hidden. Their history becomes repressed and denied, and their voices unheard and silent.
I love that section because it applies directly to Europeans...and ignored by Holton that it applies to Maori as well. This process of disenfranchising indigenous people can apply to the MoriOri by 'conquering' Maori and to the tangata whenua by 'conquering' Polynesians. All those mentioned in these two examples are non-white. It isn't generally classed as 'colonialism' because it was brown on brown. But that's just a diversion...it was still conquering, it was still disenfranchising, it was still genocide, and it (in the case of Ngai Tahu, Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama) was still 'colonialism'. A Maori tribe still claim ownership of part of the Chatham Islands even though it wasn't their traditional land before the 1835 invasion... and the Waitangi Tribunal support this invasion!
We are going to be unpopular in the future for these comments, but we want to bring the reproach off Maori for their hypocrisy. The only way to do that is confront it head-on.
One of Holtons sections was called "Denying the indigenous past". He uses that phrase when Heyerdahl attempts to change the origins of the Polynesian to a white race. We will use that same phrase "Denying the indigenous past" ourselves one day; and in that regard I can thank Dr Holton.
Holton writes - "Conquering European colonizers have often denied indigenous pasts in order to disenfranchise indigenous peoples as landowners. Since a sense of its own past is integral to a people’s cultural identity, any denial of this by the ruling elite and its institutions is a factor in cultural genocide. Our history defines who we are as a people and as individuals. Removal of that history leaves a people rootless and open to exploitation by the dominant ethnic group, which then legitimates the resulting social inequalities. The culture of the colonized becomes subordinate and hidden. Their history becomes repressed and denied, and their voices unheard and silent."
Holtons conclusion is that few academics now accept Heyerdahl's arguments. Maybe Heyerdahl was racist and maybe simply by an unintentional production of his upbringing and the era in which he lived, but questions and theory should always be considered. To ignore the possibilities of something based on perceived or real racism; and worse - to hide behind the phrase, can miss an important point.
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Why do we even bother to mention this? It that not obvious? Some will attempt to divert the significance of our find by playing the race card. I hope we can do that on live TV because they will be slaughtered by their own words. Especially when the evidence is presented (assuming we gain entry) it will enable us to accuse detractors of "denying the indigenous past" and that the denial is in itself a form of racial superiority both in the ending of the race, and the consistent and orchestrated denial of it. We already know some archaeologists agree there were pre-Polynesians here before Maori, but you will not hear them say it publicly or publish their belief (which is based on actual visual evidence now covered up).
It will be hard for those trying to accuse us of racism to settle in their own minds that we are supporting the existence of a non-white race before a conquest by another non-white race. It's like trying to accuse a white person of racism after that white person points out the wrongs of the genocide between Hutu and Tutsi. There will be some very confused people trying to find ways to discredit us. We might lose a few arguments, they will lose many times more. It should be fun all round.
The United Nations Economic and Social Council (1957) defines indigenous populations as: the existing descendants of the peoples who inhabited the present territory of a country wholly or partially at the time when persons of a different culture or
ethnic origin arrived there from other parts of the world, overcame them and, by conquest, settlement or other means, reduced them to a non-dominant or colonial situation.
