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By Root 1896 0

smallpox around 1836. Again as on other Pacific islands, “black-birding,” the kidnapping of islanders to become laborers, began on Easter around 1805 and climaxed in 1862-63, the grimmest year of Easter’s history, when two dozen Peruvian ships abducted about 1,500 people (half of the surviving population) and sold them at auction to work in Peru’s guano mines and other menial jobs. Most of those kidnapped died in captivity. Under international pressure, Peru repatriated a dozen surviving captives, who brought another smallpox epidemic to the island. Catholic missionaries took up residence in 1864. By 1872 there were only 111 islanders left on Easter.

European traders introduced sheep to Easter in the 1870s and claimed land ownership. In 1888 the Chilean government annexed Easter, which effectively became a sheep ranch managed by a Chile-based Scottish company. All islanders were confined to living in one village and to working for the company, being paid in goods at the company store rather than in cash. A revolt by the islanders in 1914 was ended by the arrival of a Chilean warship. Grazing by the company’s sheep, goats, and horses caused soil erosion and eliminated most of what had remained of the native vegetation, including the last surviving hauhau and toromiro individuals on Easter around 1934. Not until 1966 did islanders become Chilean citizens. Today, islanders are undergoing a resurgence of cultural pride, and the economy is being stimulated by the arrival of several airplane flights each week from Santiago and Tahiti by Chile’s national airline, carrying visitors (like Barry Rolett and me) attracted by the famous statues. However, even a brief visit makes obvious that tensions remain between islanders and mainland-born Chileans, who are now represented in roughly equal numbers on Easter.

Easter Island’s famous rongo-rongo writing system was undoubtedly invented by the islanders, but there is no evidence for its existence until its first mention by the resident Catholic missionary in 1864. All 25 surviving objects with writing appear to postdate European contact; some of them are pieces of foreign wood or a European oar, and some may have been manufactured by islanders specifically to sell to representatives of Tahiti’s Catholic bishop, who became interested in the writing and sought examples. In 1995 linguist Steven Fischer announced a decipherment of rongo-rongo texts as procreation chants, but his interpretation is debated by other scholars. Most Easter Island specialists, including Fischer, now conclude that the invention of rongo-rongo was inspired by the islanders’ first contact with writing during the Spanish landing of 1770, or else by the trauma of the 1862-63 Peruvian slave raid that killed so many carriers of oral knowledge.

In part because of this history of exploitation and oppression, there has been resistance among both islanders and scholars to acknowledging the reality of self-inflicted environmental damage before Roggeveen’s arrival in 1722, despite all the detailed evidence that I have summarized. In essence, the islanders are saying, “Our ancestors would never have done that,” while visiting scientists are saying, “Those nice people whom we have come to love would never have done that.” For example, Michel Orliac wrote about similar questions of environmental change in Tahiti, “... it is at least as likely—if not more so—that environmental modifications originated in natural causes rather than in human activities. This is a much-debated question (McFadgen 1985; Grant 1985; McGlone 1989) to which I do not claim to bring a definitive solution, even if my affection for the Polynesians incites me to choose natural actions [e.g., cyclones] to explain the damages suffered by the environment.” Three specific objections or alternative theories have been raised.

First, it has been suggested that Easter’s deforested condition seen by Roggeveen in 1722 was not caused by the islanders in isolation but resulted in some unspecified way from disruption caused by unrecorded European visitors before Roggeveen.