The Polynesian Problem and Its Genomic Solutions

In what consists the ever constant interest in the handful of people that comprises the Polynesian race? . . . The answer is, no doubt, the mystery that surrounds their origin, their intelligence, their charming personality, and—one likes to think—their common source with ourselves from the Caucasian branch of humanity, which induces in us a feeling of sympathy and affection above that felt toward any other colored race.

—S. PERCY SMITH, “POLYNESIAN WANDERINGS”

MARTINICAN POSTCOLONIAL THEORIST Edouard Glissant has reminded us that the “West is not in the West. It is a project, not a place.”¹ This essay can be similarly described as a study of how Polynesia is a project, not a place, in the eyes of Western scientists. As a project of the West, Polynesia’s origins can be traced to the imaginations of European imperialists and scientists conveniently dividing the “almost white,” friendly Polynesians from the decidedly more savage and hostile “black” Melanesians.² The French writer Charles des Brosses has been credited with the first use of the term “Polynesia” in 1756 (in French, “Polynésie”), having derived it from the Greek “polloi,” meaning “many.”³ For des Brosses, “many” signified many islands. While Micronesia marked a geographic contrast to Polynesia (signifying in Greek “the area of small islands”), and was at times understood linguistically and ethnologically as a related subset of Polynesia, the division between Polynesians and Melanesians was explicitly racial.⁴ Indeed, the label Melanesian derived from “melas,” meaning “black” in Greek.⁵

Today, the term “Polynesian” holds a debatable value to scholars and Indigenous Pacific Islanders themselves, especially as it has been used alongside the labels “Micronesian” and “Melanesian” to mark what are now understood to be rather spurious ethnic/racial divisions between Indigenous Pacific Islanders.⁶ Yet, the “ever constant interest” in (and white identification with) “the Polynesian race,” as put in 1911 by S. Percy Smith in the epigraph above, then president of the Polynesian Society (a New Zealand–based “learned society” focused on the study of Māori and other Pacific Island peoples), continues to fuel Western scientific knowledge production about Polynesia and Polynesians today.⁷ While this abiding interest is often naturalized and depoliticized, it is actually an articulation of settler colonial power. In particular, this power, what I term “possession through whiteness,” is manifest as feelings and practices on the part of white settlers of entitlement to Polynesian resources and identities, because of an assumed racial identification between white settlers and Indigenous Polynesians. As I explain below, possession through whiteness is a framework within which to understand that the goal of settler colonialism is to make whiteness Indigenous. In this process, Indigenous peoples are not made white exactly, but they become possessed by whiteness. This means that white settlers are able to claim that their whiteness is Indigenous to a place, while Indigenous peoples, who are interpellated as almost white, become the feminized, exotic possessions of whiteness, rather than gaining a secure power to possess whiteness or identify as white themselves.

This essay uses the framework of possession through whiteness to conceptually link the “Polynesian Problem”—the historical nickname given to social scientific studies of that interesting “mystery” of Polynesian origin, intelligence, and charm, as S. Percy Smith put it—to understandings of race and Indigeneity in contemporary genomics. As I show in the second part of this essay, contemporary scientific interest in Polynesians replicates some of the same problems embedded in the historical Polynesian Problem and its underlying concern with racial classification and the construction of Man as that universal, transcendent subject of the European Enlightenment.⁸ Attention to the history of the Polynesian Problem is therefore instructive and important for those scholars interested in engaging issues of race and Indigeneity in the Pacific.⁹ Indigeneity in my usage, as particularly informed by the Kanaka Maoli context, refers to the condition of being genealogically related to specific lands/oceans, which determines particular kinds of relationships between a people and a place, where the place is often understood as an ancestor for whose welfare the people are responsible.¹⁰ Settler colonialism often disrupts the abilities...