The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

The Hokule’a is a working replica of the “great seafaring canoes of ancient Polynesia” (35-36). Named after the Hawaiian word for Arcturus, “the sacred star of Hawaii” (35), the Hokule’a is “a double-hulled open-decked catamaran 62 feet long, 19 feet wide, lashed together by some 8 kilometres of rope, with a fully loaded displacement of some 24,000 pounds” (36). This vessel was first launched in 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society and has since “criss-crossed the Pacific, visiting over the course of some 150,000 kilometres virtually every island group of the Polynesian triangle” (36). Navigated by Nainoa Thompson and his protégé Ka’iulani, the vessel is a symbol of cultural revivalism in Polynesia. For Thompson, the vessel is “both a sacred canoe and the spaceship of the ancestors” (63). In the lectures of The Wayfinders, it is a symbol of cultural revivalism and the incredible technological advancement of ancient cultures. Incised with eight marks along each railing, creating 32 bearings corresponding “to the thirty-two directional houses of the [Polynesian] star compass” (58), the vessel is itself a navigational tool, governed by the metaphor that it “never moves. It simply waits, the axis mundi of the world, as the islands rise out of the sea to greet her” (58).

More literally, the vessel is simultaneously modern—produced in the modern world—and ancient. This vessel symbolizes the constancy and immobility of ancient wisdom, as such shares space in the symbolic world of The Wayfinders with San arrowheads; Kogi, Arhuaco, and Wiwa weaving; Australian Aborigine Dreamtime; and Tibetan Buddhist enlightenment. These are all technologies that reveal the lasting essence and genius of the cultures that produced them.

The Barasana longhouse, called the maloca, is “both a physical space in which the people live and a cosmic model of the entire universe” (103). The maloca can be understood as a form of Amazonian monumental architecture, equal to “the stonework of the Inca, the temples of the Maya” (103). These structures are generally 40 meters in length and 20 abreast, with vaulted ceilings and a dirt floor. Here Davis describes the longhouse’s relationship with the landscape:

“The roof of the maloca is the sky, the house posts the stone pillars and mountains that support it […] The smaller posts represent the descendants of the original serpent. The ridgepole is simultaneously the path of the sun, the river of the sky, the Milky Way, the artery that separates the living from the limits of the universe. The floor is the earth, and beneath it runs the River of the Underworld, the stream of death and sorrow” (104).

As a domestic structure that recapitulates the order of the universe, the maloca connects living people who dwell and act within it with the cosmological drama they see governing all beings. This is perhaps best exemplified by the interment of the dead beneath the maloca’s floors, situated both close to the living and in the symbolic underworld.

For Davis, the maloca demonstrates indigenous cultures’ incredible ability for metaphorical understandings of space and landscape. Such thinking, also present among the aborigines of Australia, imbues entire local geographies with sacred agency and therefore motivates these cultures to be good stewards of these places. Finally, the maloca symbolizes the need, as Franz Boas states, to “realize [the indigenous] vision of [the] world” (69) when engaging with them. While perhaps not impressive to the naked eye, the maloca is a watershed of metaphor and cultural history, an example of how the genius of indigenous cultures may elude lazy or biased analysis.