Polynesia was settled by deliberate voyaging against prevailing winds over some two thousand years, and Patrick Kirch's synthesis of the archaeology sets out the sequence: west Polynesia first, then a long pause, then rapid expansion east to the Societies, the Marquesas, Hawaii, Rapa Nui and finally Aotearoa around 1250. The marae at Taputapuatea on Raiatea was a ceremonial centre for that eastern network, and canoes carried stones from it to found new marae elsewhere, which is a religious mechanism as much as a navigational one.
Conversion to Christianity was rapid once it began. Missionaries arrived from the 1790s, and in several societies a paramount chief converted and the population followed, since religion and rank were the same structure. In Hawaii the traditional system of tapu was abolished by the ruling family in 1819, before the first missionaries landed, in a decision taken from inside. Suppression followed in most places: sites were dismantled, chants suppressed, dance banned, and languages written down by missionaries in orthographies that are still in use.
Recovery has been substantial and specific. The revival of long-distance voyaging from the 1970s, using traditional navigation learned partly from a Micronesian navigator, reconnected communities to a practice that had lapsed almost everywhere, and Polynesian Christianity now coexists with restored ceremonial and with active claims about land and sacred sites.