Transcript
Otago University Maori, Pacific and Indigenous Studies Professor Paul Tapsell says UNESCO is coming to understand that heritage is about people, culture and community as well as landscapes.
He says Taputapuatea is at the very heart and soul of Pacific people, connecting all Polynesians.
Professor Tapsell says they are all part of the Austronesian family that carry the same language, cultural background, and belief systems and have been in the Pacific for around 3000 years.
"A past that we live everyday through our carvings, through our actions, through our language and through our belief systems that make us uniquely the Pacific civilisation, represented by Tahitians or Rarotongans or by Maori and by the Hawaiians or by the Rapa Nui [people]. We are all joined through Taputapuatea. That is our parent marae, our ancestry, that is from where we came."
Cultural ambassador and Tahitian dance expert Poemoana Teriinohorai is excited by the listing, saying Taputapuatea is as important and signficant today as it was to their ancestors.
"Everybody here was quite excited when they got the go ahead to be under the guidance of UNESCO because it is such an important heritage site for us and now we know it will be protected."
Ms Teriinohorai says the site features in many cultural festivals.
"Through all the oral traditions, whether it be speeches or songs or story-telling, Taputapuatea and Raiatea in particular have important parts in those traditions."
Auckland University's Maori and Pacific Studies Professor Dame Anne Salmond says the UNESCO listing is a recognition of the sea-faring history that exists in the region.
Although she says it took nearly two decades for it to be accepted.
"The European scholars found it difficult to believe that the ancestors of Polynesians could have explored and settled a third of the Earth's surface by deliberate means. They thought that these must be accidental voyages and drift voyages and that people went out fishing and got caught in a storm and ended up in another island. They didn't really accept the exceptional skill and sophistication of those voyaging techniques and the star navigators."
However she says it's important the rest of the world understands the feats of the star navigators.
"The Pacific, it's huge. It is a third of the Earth's surface and the fact that the ancestors of Polynesians devised fast, flexible sailing canoes and were able to navigate by the stars and the currents and the birds and do that successfully so that they reached these far-flung islands long before Europeans did and populated this great oceanic domain. It's something the rest of the world needs to acknowledge."
The recognition doesn't seem to spread to the education system with the Taputapuatea's history not included in educational curriculum in the region.
But Poemoana Teriinohorai says the history is still spread organically and by traditional means with families passing on knowledge so that there is a generational transition rather than an educational transition through the schooling system.
This is Koro Vaka'uta.
