URU KEHU

Legend Maori

“The ancient seas roared under the influence of the moon and the stars and the Uru Kehu o Nga Tupuna finally disembarked. Our ancestors with the red and golden hair arrived to our island. Most of them perished in the cold ocean when the sea broke their ship into a thousand pieces. Not all perished; some men and women were saved together with their children. This was the arrival of those of whom our old ones have spoken. According to them, We are the children of different colors, descendants of different currents and we travel over different seas to find each other… “

Many Polynesian legends tell of the arrival of white-skinned, red-headed people. One of them is from the traditional lore of the Waitaha tribe of New Zealand, in which, 67 generations ago, there were three peoples with different colored skin and different traditions who lived and mixed peacefully on Easter Island. Three navigators are mentioned: Hotu Matua, of the Maoriori people (dark skin, brown eyes and black hair), Kiwa, of the Uru Kehu (white men with blond or red hair) who came from the east with the rising sun, and the Kiritea people, men of the stone (also with light skin, short of stature, with green eyes and black hair) who came from northern Asia. From their union and peaceful cooperation a new culture was born which gave the impulse for migration to New Zealand in search of new lands to cultivate. The message gleaned from this legend is that the inhabitants of Rapa Nui could have originated in a mix of diverse racial groups or biological human communities, becoming one cultural and linguistic community.

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The Rapanui language of today does not recognize the term URU KEHU. There is only the ancestral term URU MANU, which indicates a person not of the aristocratic clan, the Miru. According to the dictionaries of S. Englert and the Commission for the Rapanui Language, URU KEHU could be translated as “person apart from the Rapanui, of unknown descendance.” This could imply that in all the Rapanui there are genes of Uru Kehu, a blond or red-headed white man. Perhaps that is the reason that white skin was once considered a mark of beauty and distinction in the ancient Rapanui traditions.

As Manuel Tuki confirms;

… “many of the ancient people on Easter Island were tall and white. This comes from their ancestors. They aren’t dark; they are blond, red-haired; they have lots of freckles on their faces. Felipe Pakarati shares that opinión. “The reality is that there were many European ships which visited the Island a long time before it was seen by the Dutchman Rogeveen and there were certainly enough men among them to reproduce.”

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