Category · not a tradition
Polynesian Traditions
A geographic shelf, not a tradition. The filed line says names and sequences differ by island group, and that a Tahitian account is not a Māori one. Māori, Hawaiian, and Tahitian are separate records. No other archipelago is filed.
Records
How we know
Where the evidence comes from, and how far it is from the people it describes. The labels are not a score. They do not rank traditions. A manuscript year, a tradition’s own claim, and a date from the ground are kept apart on the timeline.
Extended writing begins with foreign contact: explorers in the late 18th century, missionaries in the 19th, and Indigenous authors in the same era. George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology (1855) is a collector’s English book of Māori tradition. David Malo wrote on Hawaiʻi in the early 19th century; publication came later.
Chant and genealogy are older than those books by an unknown span. Each archipelago is its own chain. A Tahitian account is not a Māori one. Archaeology and star-compass knowledge do not decode a myth by themselves. The tradition may be old. The surviving evidence for the stories is contact-era and after. No common BCE date is assigned.
Original evidence → transmission / copy → translation / documentation → modern interpretation
01
Original evidence
Recorded oral tradition
The stories and genealogies were oral. Nothing in the oldest layer is a manuscript from the composers.
02
Transmission / copy
Outside account
Ship logs and mission reports are outside accounts. Grey, Malo, Kamakau, and others are recorders with different relations to the material. They must not be averaged into one Polynesian book.
03
Translation / documentation
Recorded oral tradition
English translations of Māori, Hawaiian, and other languages are documentation. A name translated once and reused for another island is already a distortion.
04
Modern interpretation
Modern scholarly reconstruction
“Polynesian religion” is a geographic shelf used by modern writers. It is not an Indigenous category. This chart uses it only with that limit stated in the cells.