Pollinating Polynesian ties.

• Author: Durbin, Paula
• Position: Hawaiian high school students travel to Easter Island

LAST JUNE, a multifaceted science field trip took eighteen Hawaiian high school students to Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. They are the youngest participants in the efforts to unravel the mysteries of Easter Island's fabulous stone culture, its deforestation, and the original navigation route to the tiny speck that calls itself "the center of the earth."

The students were members of Hui Lama, the hiking and environmental science club of Kamehameha School, which Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the last of the Hawaiian royal line, endowed for children of Hawaiian ancestry. All last year they prepared for the trip, raising money and working to restore Oahu's Kawainui Marsh ecosystem under the supervision of Dr. Chuck Burrows, biology teacher and Hui Lama advisor.

"Our overall mission is to establish a Polynesian kinship with students and community groups in Rapa Nui through scientific and cultural exchanges," Burrows announced before the group's departure.

Also on the flight to the center of the earth was Nainoa Thompson, executive director of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, who has logged eighty thousand miles on the Hokule' a, a replica of the double-hulled canoes Polynesians navigated among the islands of their huge aquatic continent using techniques perfected centuries before Christopher Columbus. Thompson returns to Easter Island in October to study the stars in preparation for the Hokule'a's approach and arrival set for the same month in 1999.

The Hawaiians and theft Easter Island colleagues easily communicated in their respective, mutually intelligible Polynesian languages as they worked together. The sandalwood and other seeds collected, prepared, and sent months before from Honolulu had germinated by May, and the young people transplanted the fragile seedlings to Ranu Kan National Park, careful to shelter them against raw temperatures and merciless winds. On hikes, they collected cave insects not yet thoroughly inventoried and researched. Hauling sixty-to-eighty-pound beach stones up a steep incline for reconstruction of the hango pito...