Land, People, and Progress in the Cook Islands

Abstract

T > IHE Cook Islands are located in the southwest Pacific more than 1500 miles northeast of New Zealand, 1200 miles east of Fiji, and 600 miles west of Tahiti. Totalling 100 square miles of land, the 15 islands of the group are widely dispersed over 850,000 square miles of ocean (Fig. 1). Annexed to the colony of New Zealand in 1901 they were incorporated within the Dominion on its proclamation in 1907. Today, this tropical province constitutes one of New Zealand's major territorial responsibilities in the Pacific. The islands lie near the southern margin of the vast triangular, islandstudded, and oceanic area of Polynesia. The communal subsistence economy of the traditional Polynesian way of life was everywhere dominant until their discovery and initial settlement by Europeans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During succeeding decades the tide of western civilization swept over the island peoples, but, isolated in a backwater of the main stream, the Group has had a relatively uneventful history compared with that of many other Pacific islands. Yet the impact of modern civilization has followed the common pattern; navigator, explorer, missionary, trader, blackbirder, planter, and administrator have all played their diverse roles. The period of dominant missionary influence from 1830 to 1880 was a momentous era of economic, social, and religious change. During these years whaling vessels frequently revictualled at Rarotonga; later came traders in search of timber, pearls, and coconut oil. Numerous legacies of this early period remain in the present landscape. Dating from these years are many of the burnt lime dwellings which, partially in some islands and almost completely in others, have replaced the native type. The important citrus industry traces its origin to missionary plantings. Moreover, it was at this time that the native villages were attracted to the coast and divorced from their original sites on terraces and slopes inland of the swamps. The organization of settlement around the mission and its churches was associated with the disruption of the tribal system. The culmination of the introduction of new ideas, new habits, new weapons, new foods, and new diseases was a sharp decline in native population, a characteristic feature in the demographic history of all Pacific islands. To these years of onslaught and exploitation must be attributed the origin of many of the vexatious problems which now confront the administrator, doctor, teacher, agriculturalist, and minister in this insular region. The native people, who form well over 90 per cent of the total population, are poised between two civilizations, a disturbing situation which is recognized as a prime cause