I know Chile owns Easter Island/ #RapaNui , but it still seems weird to see " #EasterIsland , #Chile." I suppose it's the same as "Hawaii, USA," but today's so developed and has such a strong white footprint that it doesn't strike me as hard, though I imagine it hits Hawaiians like a club.
A friend of mine who's #Boricua says she and many of her friends prefer independence to statehood for #PuertoRico because they've seen the effect on #Hawaii and aren't interested.
Oral history of #RapaNui (Easter Island 🗿) suggests at least one voyage to #SouthAmerica from the island during early years of its settlement - now analyses of #Obsidian blades with food traces seem to confirm this:
Over the past decade or so, researchers have found genetic evidence for contact between people in eastern Polynesia and those in coastal Peru and Colombia. Now archeologists studying the oldest settlement on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have found physical evidence that islanders traveled to South America at least once and returned with food crops not known in Polynesia.
The indigenous people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have always said that their rongorongo writing was very old, but were generally not believed until quite recently. Researchers have now dated one rongorongo text to 200 years before the island had any contact with Europeans.
These new dates of a #RapaNui 🗿 #Rongorongo tablet (S. Ferrara et al., Sci Rep 14, 2794 (2024) 🔓) - before any known contact with literate societies - seems to suggest an independent invention of writing on #EasterIsland:
"A tablet of wood inscribed with the undeciphered #rongorongo script from the Eastern Pacific island #RapaNui [may be example of] one of the few independently invented #writingsystems.
The wood from one of four rongorongo tablets preserved in a collection in Rome dates to between 1493 and 1509 — +200 years before the first recorded arrival of Europeans on the island in the 1720s."
Saw this Maoi, or statue, today on the south coast of Te Whanganui-a-Tara. It was a gift from the President of Chile on his visit to the capital in 2004. These statues were carved by the Rapa Nui people, on what is also known as Easter Island. According to a nearby plaque, their language and their customs resemble those of Māori. This gift was chosen by Chile to acknowledge the link between Rapa Nui and the tangata whenua of Aotearoa.
Rapanui (Easter Island) invites the world to help it grow Cacao beans (www.teaonews.co.nz)
Rapanui has seen a huge decline in its ecosystem and sees this investment as helping it fund solutions to its climate change issues.