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A professional sailor, in 1870 Policarpo Toro Hurtado arrived with the corvette "O'Higgins" to Easter Island or Rapa Nui, being amazed by the culture and history of its long-suffering people whose culture had been on the verge of disappearing at the mercy of corsairs, slave hunters and internal conflicts, which had reduced its population at ...
But there are two words pronounced pito in Rapa Nui, one meaning "end" and one "navel", and the phrase can thus also mean "The Navel of the World". Another name, "Mata ki te rangi", means "Eyes looking to the sky". [18] Islanders are referred to in Spanish as pascuense, but members of the indigenous community are commonly called Rapa Nui.
Rapa Nui is a minority language, as most Rapa Nui people speak Spanish as their first language. Spanish is the most widely spoken language on Easter Island and the primary language of education and administration. It is believed that Rapa Nui is currently undergoing a shift toward more Spanish sentence structure.
The Rapa Nui people were devastated by raids of slave traders who visited the island in 1862. Within a year, the individuals who remained on the island were sick or injured, and lacking leadership. The survivors of the slave raids had new company from missionaries, who converted the remaining populace to Christianity.
He was born around 1850 as an extended member of the Miru clan, traditionally associated with the native kingship (ariki mau). [3]Due to Peruvian slave raiding and the decimation of the native Rapa Nui population by introduced diseases, the population of Easter Island had dropped to 110 individuals by 1877.
This was largely due to the loss of the island's last trees and the Peruvian and Chilean slave raids in the early 1860s. The literate ruling classes of the Rapa Nui people (including the royal family and the religious caste) and the majority of the island's population were kidnapped or killed in the slave raids. Most of those taken died after ...
DNA sequence analysis of Easter Island's current inhabitants indicates that the 36 people living on Rapa Nui who survived the devastating internecine wars, slave raids and epidemics of the 19th century and had any offspring, [6] were Polynesian. Furthermore, examination of skeletons offers evidence of only Polynesian origins for Rapa Nui living ...
Easter Island is one of the youngest inhabited territories on earth, and for most of the history of Easter Island it was the most isolated inhabited territory on Earth. Its inhabitants, the Rapa Nui, have endured famines, epidemics, civil war, slave raids, and colonialism; have seen their population crash on more than one occasion.