Hina

Hina is a female deity of wide importance across Polynesia, linked with the moon, the tides, and the crafts of women, but her name and forms differ so much between island groups that she is best understood not as a single figure but as a family of related goddesses sharing a name. In Hawaii, Hina is associated with the moon and with the beating of tapa (bark cloth), a women's craft, and she is variously the mother or the companion of the culture-hero Maui; in one well-known account she wearies of earthly life and ascends to the moon, where she can still be seen.

In Tahiti and elsewhere she is bound up with the first woman and with the origin of death. Across these traditions she commonly stands as the archetypal woman, set in complementary relation to a male sky- or sun-figure. Because these are living traditions with their own custodians, the details vary by island and community, and no single version should be taken as the whole.

Among the many stories told of Hina across the Pacific, one recurring motif appears, in varying local forms, from Hawaii to Tahiti to other island groups far apart across the ocean: a tale explaining the origin of the coconut palm through Hina's relationship with a giant eel. In widely told versions, an eel desires Hina and pursues her as a suitor, sometimes tricking or overpowering her; Hina, with help from a hero or on her own resolve, ultimately causes the eel's death, and asks that its severed head be buried, from which the first coconut tree is said to grow, the two eye-like marks on a coconut shell explained, in this telling, as the eel's own eyes looking out still. Folklorists studying Pacific oral literature treat the wide distribution of this basic story, told with real local variation in detail, character names and emphasis from one island group to another, as evidence of a shared, very old layer of Oceanic tradition carried by Polynesian voyaging and settlement across an enormous stretch of ocean, rather than a single tale that spread recently from one point of origin.

Because these are living oral traditions maintained by island communities with their own tellers and their own right to shape how a story is told, this atlas describes the existence and the wide distribution of the Hina and eel motif rather than presenting any single version as the authoritative one; communities across Polynesia continue to tell, adapt and pass down these stories today, and the differences between tellings are a feature of a living tradition carried across many islands rather than a problem to be resolved into one correct account.