Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey (review)

Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey, 60 minutes, 1998, 16 mm and NTSC-VHS. Writer/Producer/Director: Gail Evenari. Distributor for 16 mm: Maiden Voyage Productions, PO Box 3285, Half Moon Bay, California 94019. Distributor for video: PBS Home Video, $19.98. Curriculum guide, $25 plus $3 shipping, available from Maiden Voyage Productions.

Polynesians throughout the Pacific are embarked on an epic voyage to rediscover and revive their past. As Gail Evenari's new film--Wayfinders: A Pacific Odyssey--shows, this is a voyage both literal and metaphoric, partly but powerfully by the rediscovery of ancient seafaring arts. At the heart of the movie is the story of the voyage of a fleet of ancient canoe replicas from the Marquesas to Hawai'i--the first time that such a fleet has assembled in over a thousand years. The film's dramatic culmination is the canoes' safe arrival in Hawai'i, all of them navigated by men and women who use only the stars, waves, and flight of birds to find their way across thousands of miles of trackless ocean. But a far more important drama, woven throughout the film's story, is the passing on of ancient skills to instill pride in a Pacific people that Captain Cook once called "the most extensive nation on earth."

Although this film is Evenari's first hour-long documentary, she has produced films for which she has been awarded a cine Golden Eagle, a blue ribbon at the American Film Festival, and an Award for Creative Excellence at the American Industrial Film Festival. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1974 and received a master's degree in education from San Francisco State University in 1980. While working on her first film in Hawai'i--The Adze of Tane: The Building of Mauloa--Evenari became fascinated with the canoe Hokule'a. She was later invited to sail from Tonga to Samoa as a crew member on the Voyage of Rediscovery in 1986. In 1988, Evanari and Dr Ben Finney from the University of Hawai'i wrote a grant together to the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund Wayfinders, so it might be said that Evanari has been making the film for thirteen years.

In Wayfinders, Evanari has set an ambitious goal for herself--to tell a wide-ranging saga that weaves together anthropology, archaeology, noninstrumental navigation, and Pacific history with the personal stories of the men and women who created and sailed the canoes. She succeeds admirably, creating a film that will be both exciting viewing for a general television (it debuted on the American Public Broadcasting System in May 1999), and extremely useful in the classroom.

Wayfinders presents Cook's voyages, recreated through skillful use of still images and Cook's own words, to provide an introduction to both the staggering geographical extent of Polynesia and to the first formulation of the film's central question by Cook himself--"how shall we account for this Nation having spread itself to so many detached islands?"

In the 1940s, theories abounded, including Thor Heyerdahl's hypothesis that the Polynesians were drifters, not sailors, who rode prevailing winds and currents on primitive rafts from South America. Later, when the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence pointed to a Polynesian origin in the archipelagoes of Southeast Asia, Andrew Sharp could not slough off his own ethnocentric vision of the ability of Polynesian sailors, calling them "orphans of the storm." For Sharp, Polynesia was settled by castaways, lost and at the mercy of gale-force winds from the west that occasionally replaced the normal easterly trades.

But how did the Polynesians manage to purposefully navigate over such vast distances? The rest of the film answers this question, a pathbreaking one in Polynesian research, by demonstrating ancient navigational techniques, such as the use of the star compass and the waves to set a course and an understanding of other natural signs to find land. Wayfinders also clearly demonstrates the sea-keeping...