How Art Almost Killed An Entire People

By Jeffrey the Barak

At times, we wander the galleries and see pieces of art that look as if they could hurt someone, or kill someone, but in a way this has actually happened.

I refer to a place commonly known as Easter Island. This is it’s modern name, given to the place by Christian explorers from Holland in 1722 when they happened to come across this land on their Easter Sunday.

For most of history, This place had no name, and no inhabitants, but at sometime between 400 and 600 C.E. a human civilisation, the Polynesians, found it, and it became known as Rapa Nui.

We know from the surviving Polynesian people here and across Oceana that for at least two thousand years, their relatively advanced society was capable of trans-oceanic explorations by canoe that no modern sailor in their right mind would dare attempt. By contrast, the people of the nations that would later become the world’s explorers, the Britons, the French, The Spanish, The Portuguese, The Dutch were by comparison, quite behind in terms of long-distance seafaring.

Even the Mediterranean traders of the day would have been amazed at the voyages back and forth that the ancient Polynesians embarked upon.

So art came to Rapa Nui with its first people. It is generally accepted that they came from either the Marquesas Islands or Mangareva, which like everywhere else, are very far indeed from Rapa Nui.

The oral history tells us they brought plants, food animals and tools and their mission was colonization. The climate on Rapa Nui was certainly not the tropical paradise they were used to so they had a lot of adaptation to do in order to survive and thrive.

Rapa Nui was covered in trees, palms and other types, and drinking water was naturally gathered in volcanic craters, despite the island’s absence of rivers or streams. The island also had obsidian, great for making cutting tools and weapons, and it had lot of special rock which we call lapilli tuff.

Some say the islanders employed slash and burn techniques to clear land for farming, and others say, they used up all the wood in order to make and transport the huge stone statues that Rapa Nui is now famous for.

With the forest cover gone, the rain and weather eroded the topsoil and famine ensued. But let’s take a step back and focus on the art.

The art of Rapa Nui is divided between two periods. The Moai period and the Birdman period. On other islands in Polynesia, there were statues, (Moai), atop shrines, (Ahu). which were representations of chiefs (living and dead) and the gods in which they believed.

Dead chiefs were sacred, and after their life passed, their representative Moa remained. Rapa Nui has around 900 such moai, either standing, toppled or partially completed, still in the quarry or partway to their final site. There are about 360 ahu. The moai did not look out to sea, as commonly assumed, but they faced away from the sea, towards the villages. Some completed and erected statues had white coral eyes and wore stone hats or top knots called pukao, carved from a rock that was more red (scoria).

There is much debate as to exactly how the heavy statues were moved, assembled, erected etc. They are so heavy, that engineering on a grand scale was definitely needed, but the methods used have passed from memory.

It seems clear that at some point, the statues were worshiped as gods, and were a means of control for the ruling society, called the “Long Ears”. Everyone else, lived as subjects of the ruling Long Ears. However they were not slaves, but simply lowly subjects of the rulers, who would eventually rebel aginst the Long Ears and topple the very statues that generations suffered to construct.

It is said that so much wood was expended on the statue making that the islanders could no longer build canoes, so they became unable to travel to and from other parts of Polynesia. However, it is possible that the forests were burned to clear land, without any understanding of the long term environmental consequences. Without canoes, there was little opportunity to fish offshore, and without the lush vegetation, farming was all that was left.

So in isolation, with the natural resources of the island being eroded, burned and used for making statues, the people sealed their fate. Numbering as high as seven thousand in it’s heyday, the society on Rapa Nui became unsustainable with the resources at hand, and they were unable to leave or go for help.

Eventually, out of this declining situation, a powerful warrior class emerged, called Matato’a. And a change of power and leadership ensued. This also heralded the second art movement. All of the statues were toppled, some face up, some face down, and a new, even sillier religion began to dominate.

This was the birdman cult, (Tangatamenu). Once a year on a small island off the coast of Rapa Nui, migrating birds laid eggs. It was a bountiful annual harvest. The young warriors would hold a swimming race across the rough, shark-infested straits between the main island and bird island. The first man back holding an intact egg became absolute ruler for exactly one year, until this was repeated.

In the time after the upright moai, the art consisted of carvings and drawings on rock, depicting a bird-man character. Again the sheer quantity of this art in the virtual absence of all other, shows us that life at the time was all about the birdman. And a new monotheism emerged, coincidentally featuring a single, creator god, not the Jewish-Christian-Moslem one, but one with the name Makemake.

If the Western sailing ships had never found Easter Island, the natives may or may not have survived to this day, but considering what the sailors did to them, it is amazing that any have survived. The so-called advanced civilizations from Europe murdered, enslaved, kidnapped and infected the people with diseases such as smallpox and syphilis, and those few who survived these horrors were later subjected to forced Christianization.

As a result of the missionary subjugation, at this point there was no more art for a long time. The island was culturally dead until relatively recently when inhabitants of Polynesian decent began to nurture their cultural heritage, which amazingly still has much in common with other far way parts of Polynesia. And so through dance, costume, cuisine and the tatoo, the art of the island survives, but this time it won’t kill them, it may save them, from us.

Louis the Scooterer’s last ride

By Jeffrey the Barak

Louis the Scooterer 1935-2009

Since 2004, Louis the Scooterer, Louis Scop, has contributed to the-vu, and his readers number in the thousands. Sadly, I have just learned from his daughter that Lou passed away on July 26th 2009, and was buried in the Netanya cemetery, Israel, on 31st July.

Lou’s last input was a comment on June 15th, and his last email to me was on June 26th, in which he mentioned he had not been feeling good for several weeks, but would soon be writing another chapter. Some followers of Lou will no doubt learn of his passing with these words. I will be reading his writings again in order to celebrate his life, but of course he did more than he wrote about, and for a lot longer.

The hazards of imagining countries

By Jeffrey the Barak

Nomadic tribes move independently of each other and occasionally come together to interact through trade, war, sport, cultural exchange, intermarriage, murder etc.

In the dense jungles of South America and Africa and Asia, the boundaries formed by geographical features such as ridges and valleys are all it takes to keep two nomadic cultures apart in language and traditions, until they either form non-nomadic civilizations or continue to roam independently of their neighbors. Then there is fate. One tribe may come into contact with, and survive contact with, outsiders and end up with new lifestyles and technology such as outboard motors and clothing, whereas their immediate neighbors may escape detection for decades afterwards.

Tribes evolve into societies and eventually countries. We have seen it in today’s Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and surrounding areas and due to the fact that so many people have been exposed to the Old Testament of the Bible, and therefore have some awareness of nations and ethnic groups of the last two or three thousand years, it is easy to see how more modern politics and assumed differences can evolve into borders drawn on the map.

If just one or two things had happened differently in history, the map of the Middle-East might be totally different, because in all that famous history, recorded in the world’s best selling loosely-historical book, there were only a few hundred or a couple of thousand people involved in most of those old conflicts.

If you have a chance to find a map of the region that is now Afghanistan and Pakistan, a map made in the early or mid 19th century, you will see numerous regions defined by the make-up of the nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes and their leaders of those days.

Today in the United Nations, you will never see little signs naming Tribes of the Turkmens, Buhara, Pamir, Darwaz, Roshan, Shignan, Badakhshan, Kunduz, Khulm. Chitral, Maimana, Herat, Kafiristan, Dir, Kohistan, Svat, Buner, Shinaki, Punjab and more.

But these were names of regions, if not countries, on the maps of the day. Most are now either part of Pakistan or Afghanistan. The people of these regions are not necessarily Afghanis or Pakistanis, but the modern map tells them that’s what they are.

There are seven main ethnic groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and many more obscure groups, some extremely small and hardly known to this day.

And a failure to understand who these people are, who they were, where they came from and where they live now, means that occupying armies really do not have any clear idea who they are defending or who they are trying to kill.

Add the complication of different religions, most of which are opposing or slightly differing views from within the Islamic umbrella, and the complications deepen.

Shift West a few miles and look at Iraq. Like Pakistan, it is a modern country created not very long ago by outsiders. (The British, if you want to name names). Until the start of the current war, it held it’s violence and hate simmering below the surface, united by the common fear of their evil national dictator. But how many of those who voted to approve the invasion of Iraq had even a glimmer of understanding about the basic differences between the various peoples in the region? How many even knew anything about Sunni’s Shi’ites and Kurds, as they stood on the floor of the House and painted a picture of Iraqis cheering for parading American liberators marching triumphantly into Baghdad a few weeks after the Air Force blew it to bits for the good of the people.

Perhaps it is too late to swap the Iraq on the map for numerous ethnic regions, and too late to swap the Pakistan and Afghanistan of today into the little countries and regions that existed before. But on the other hand, perhaps these people can never be unified into countries. The very model of a country may not be applicable to people such as these. They remain tribal and separate, in culture and language.

Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, all examples of relatively new countries, each with their own set of problems. Without ever understanding much about the people within, outside military forces jump in to help, and end up killing or displacing thousands and thousands of people either directly or indirectly

Surely a little research would be advisable?