Tupaia’s Endeavour by Lala Rolls

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tupaia’s Endeavour by Lala Rolls David Lipset Lala Rolls, Producer/Director. Tupaia’s Endeavour. Random Films, New Zealand, Island Productions, 2019. 1:59 minutes. Color. Their land claims having been contested, lost, but lately reinstated in some cases, during the past several decades, Pacific peoples living in settler colonial states have sought to re-assert and reclaim nothing less than the legitimacy, authority, and moral agency of their indigenous identities. Cultural sovereignty movements promoting the teaching of Polynesian vernaculars and dances, the reinvention of technologies, such as outrigger canoes, and the restoration and protection of sacred sites, have been strong voices in broad opposition to political subordination and exploitation. However sympathetic cultural anthropology should and must be to them, particularly in light of their long history of land alienation, racism, disease, and violence to which they respond, as an integrated ideology, sovereignty movements like this constitute centripetal voices, rather than outwardly oriented, synthetic ones. They feature and privilege voices of a cultural self speaking to a restricted audience, rather than to a more cosmopolitan one. “Tupaia’s Endeavour,” Lala Rolls’s video about the Tahitian navigator who joined James Cook as he voyaged south, is part of this political discourse. As such, its achievement and flaws both stem from the primary audience to which it seems to be addressed, namely, its Polynesian peers in Tahiti and Aotearora/New Zealand. On the one hand, the movie offers fascinating insights into the southern voyages of the HMS Endeavour from the perspective of Tupaia, a Tahitian nobleman, navigator, and Arioi Society initiate. But, on the other, the narrative, although rich and intricate, is hard to follow. It juxtaposes gorgeous reenactments by Polynesian actors with voiceovers read from journals of Cook and other British on board the Endeavour. It tracks the making of the [End Page 201] film. It weaves emotional discussions among the actors with poignant interviews, and performances by, contemporary Polynesian artists, singers, and painters. And, not least, the renowned anthropologist and historian, Dame Anne Salmond, among many others, provides commentary. The portrait of Tupaia that emerges is one of a contradictory prophet, brilliant, vastly knowledgeable, yet marginalized. As an Arioi Society initiate, he lived in the constant presence of Oro, the war god. Moreover, as a navigator who read and communicated with the stars, he also lived with these astral manifestations of the ancestors. Being in the company of other Arioi initiates, he knew of the prophecy one of them had made six years before predicting that a great canoe “without an outrigger” would arrive and spell the “end of custom.” Thus, when the HMS Dolphin arrived in 1767, under the command of Samuel Wallis, Tupaia stood with the chiefess, Pudea, to greet the ship, perhaps with the prophesy in mind, Anne Salmond suggests. Tupaia had been living in exile on Pudea’s land in Tahiti, having been driven from his home village and land by neighboring islanders who had conquered it and desecrated his temple. Cook arrived two years later; when several Tahitian men were killed, Tupaia paddled out to the Endeavour with a chief to restore order and impressed the great British explorer with his knowledge and intelligence. In Salmond’s view, he was a “courageous man, who took big risks.” One of Cook’s goals in the Pacific was to track Venus and the solar system. As a star navigator, the new arrivals must have struck a chord with Tupaia. Along with Taiapu, a young Arioi Society acolyte, he made his intentions to accompany Cook upon the departure of the Endeavour. One of his living descendants claims that the reason he wanted to go along had to do with his belief that he had kin living in New Zealand, who had sailed there at some point in the past. A contemporary Tahitian tattoo artist discloses a family secret: among them, Tupaia was regarded as a “traitor” who left with the British and gave them intelligence they then used to defeat and conquer the islanders. On board, Tupaia bonded with the botanist, Joseph Banks, learned to paint from Sydney Parkinson, the natural history artist, spent time with the other foreigners aboard, and amused himself by...