And if the Vu were placed at our head ... there would be no still births and Fiji would then be indeed a people increasing rapidly, since our conforming to our native customs would combine with progress in cleanly living at the present time. Now, in the past when the ancients only worshiped Vu Gods and there was no commandment about cleanly living, yet they kept increasing. Then if ... this were also combined with the precept of cleanly living, I think the villages would then be full of men. Or what, sir, is your conclusion?
A few more excerpts, taken here and there, will reveal the interesting mind of this Fijian:
If this is right, then it is plain how far removed we are from certain big countries. How wretched they are and weak, whose medicines are constantly being imported and brought here in bottles.[1] As for me, I simply do my duty in saying what appears in my mind when I think of my country and my friends who are its inhabitants; for since it wants only a few years to the extinction of the people it is right that I reveal what has appeared in my soul, for it may be God's will to reveal in my soul this matter. Now it is not expedient for me to suppress what has been revealed to me, and if I do not declare what has appeared from forth my soul, I have sinned thereby in the eyes of the Spirit God: I shall be questioned regarding it on the day of judgment of souls; nor is it fitting that one of the missionaries should be angry with me by reason of my words; it is right that they should consider everything that I have here said, and judge accordingly. It is no use being ashamed to change the rules of the Church, if the country and its inhabitants will thereby be saved.
[1] The translator says in a footnote: "Whites pity Fijians, but they find reasons to pity us. That is what white men generally fail to realize; they put down to laziness or stupidity their reluctance to assimilate our civilization, whereas it arises from a different point of view; and that point of view is not always wrong or devoid of common sense. Is Fijian medicine more absurd than our patent medicines, or as expensive?"
There is great hope for a people with such thinkers among them. And if there are such hopes for the Fijians, there are still greater possibilities for the Maories, Samoans, Tahitians, and Hawaiians.
5
Politically, as separate island races, they are no more. The little Kingdom of Rarotonga is one of the last to remain independent. The European war, oddly enough, in which Maories and Fijians fought for "the rights of little nations," has sold them out completely, just as it did Shantung in China. No one thought that a war in a continent fifteen thousand miles away would play such havoc with the destinies of these people. The "mandates," yielded with such cynical generosity, put the seal upon their fate, and opened new international sores.
Pessimistic as this may sound, there are evidences of resuscitation in the working out of these mandates, as will appear in the chapter on Australasia. The Polynesians are becoming conscious of unity, and talk of leadership under the New Zealand mandate is rife in Parliament. "Nothing would hasten the depletion of the race more than the loss of hope and confidence in themselves," says the Hawaiian "Friend." That hope seems to be flickering into new life.
No people have suffered more, directly, from contact with the "civilized" white races than the Polynesians. Morally undermined, politically deprived of powers, physically subjected to scourge after scourge of epidemic introduced by white men, their own standards of living brushed aside as vulgar and infantile,—these heliolithic people with their neolithic culture approached the very verge of extinction. Then the white race began to sentimentalize over them, and sincere scientific people to deplore their evanescence. Some of these latter have earned the eternal gratitude not only of the natives but of the whole world. Some of them I have mentioned in other connections. Two others decidedly deserve recognition. Mr. Elsdon Best, the curator of the Wellington Museum, is a tall, thin individual who has roamed all over the Pacific. He has worked his way for years in the interests of the Amerindians, Hawaiians, and Maories. Now he has one of the finest museums in the South Seas—excepting that, of course, in Honolulu—in which he treasures anything and everything that will help throw light on the history of these interesting people. The other is Mrs. Bernice Bishop, a part-Hawaiian woman, who established the museum in Honolulu which bears her name. These are the centers round which we white folk shall be able to gather for the preservation of this other type of the human species. In the summer of 1921 a Scientific Congress under the auspices of the Pan-Pacific Union and the immediate directorship of Professor Gregory of Yale was held to devise ways and means of furthering the study of these races, and its work is proceeding apace.
Museums and "models" of native architecture are the modern white man's diaries, recalling the acts of ravishment and destruction which his development and expansion entailed. Let us hope that out of the efforts of scientists will spring a new consciousness of worth, which early missionaries and scheming traders did everything to destroy. Yet it must not be forgotten that much of our knowledge of these races comes from those missionaries who were broad-minded enough to recognize the value of recording customs and beliefs, even if their purpose was the more effectively to counteract them.