Hanau Momoko

The eastern end of Rapa Nui rises into a broad, bare headland called Poike, and across its neck runs a long, shallow trough in the red earth. Islanders have a name for it. They call it the oven of the Hanau Eepe, and the people who are supposed to have lit that oven, and walked away from it alive, are the Hanau Momoko.

In English they are usually the Short Ears, set against the Long Ears they destroyed. The labels have stuck for well over a century, and they may be wrong. Sebastian Englert, a Capuchin missionary who lived on the island from 1935 and compiled the standard dictionary of its old language, argued that momoko means slender and eepe means stout or thick-set, and that the ear translation came from outsiders hearing what they expected to hear. The linguist Steven Roger Fischer took the same line in 2005. If they are right, the war was between the slim people and the heavy people, which is less romantic and harder to draw.

What the islanders themselves said was gathered twice, a generation apart. In 1886 William Thomson, paymaster of the American warship Mohican, took down the island’s traditions with the help of a resident interpreter, Alexander Salmon, and published them in 1889 in a report for the United States National Museum. In 1914 and 1915 Katherine Routledge and her husband spent seventeen months on the island and questioned the old men who still remembered. Their two accounts do not depend on each other, and they agree on the ending.

In Thomson’s version the Long Ears appear in the story without warning, long after the death of the founding king Hotu Matu’a, as a power already established on the island. The land is split roughly between them and Hotu Matu’a’s descendants, and a feud between the two sides grows so savage that the gardens go to ruin. Routledge heard the beginning differently. Her informants said the two peoples lived mixed together all over the island until one of the Long Ears, a man called Ko Ita who lived at Orongo, was found to have the bodies of thirty boys in his house, killed to be eaten. Seven of them were sons of one man, Ko Pepi. Grief drove Ko Pepi out of his mind. He ran in circles until he dropped. His brothers picked up their mataa, the obsidian spear points of the island, and killed the Long Ears at Vinapu and at Orongo, and the other Short Ears joined them.

The Long Ears fell back to the eastern headland. There they dug a trench right across it and piled it with brushwood, so that when the Short Ears came they could set it alight and burn them as they crossed. The Short Ears came, and drew up in a line facing the ditch, as they were meant to. In the night an old woman led a second party around the end of the trench. At first light the Long Ears found enemies in front and behind, and the Short Ears drove them forward into the pit they had built for someone else. The fire took them. In Routledge’s telling two men got away and hid in a cave near Anakena, but they were dug out and killed, crying a word, Oroini, that nobody she asked could explain. In Thomson’s telling no one survives at all.

The heat would have come off that trench in a wall, the brushwood cracking, smoke rolling west over the grass on the trade wind. Later tellers had a plain word for the place. They called it an oven, the same word used for an earth oven, the pit where food is cooked under hot stones.

Where the two peoples came from is the part nobody could agree on. One of Routledge’s best authorities, an old man named Kilimuti, said that Hotu Matu’a and the people in his canoe were the Short Ears, while the crew of a second canoe under Hinelilu were the Long Ears. When pressed on why two peoples should arrive together, he compared it to the mixed crew of the Routledges’ own yacht. A group of three old men told her instead that the Long Ears came into being on the island through the mana, the sacred power, of the third ariki, or high chief. The argument grew heated until a shrewd woman in the room told Routledge not to bother, because none of them really knew. Routledge thought that was probably the fairest summary of the evidence.

One puzzle she could not get past. The Short Ears were said to be the ancestors of the islanders she was talking to, yet the early European visitors of the 1770s had described long, stretched earlobes as normal among the people, and the island’s great stone figures have long ears too. Routledge found that the custom had lasted among women until the coming of Christianity, and among men until about the end of the eighteenth century. Her informants did not take the name Long Ears to mean people who stretched their ears. They took it to mean people born with long ones. In a footnote she wondered whether the old war might once have been a quarrel between followers of an old fashion and a new one, and then let the idea drop.

The trench has been dug into since. Thor Heyerdahl’s Norwegian expedition of the 1950s took material from it that was dated to the later seventeenth century, and Heyerdahl himself argued that the Long Ears were early migrants from South America, a theory that has not won over archaeologists. Later work found nothing like the burned bone and charcoal that a massacre should leave, and some researchers have suggested the feature held cooking pits for the workers of the quarries nearby. Many specialists now doubt the battle happened as told. The story did not need the archaeology to last.

As a people of legend the Hanau Momoko have no magic of their own. Their strength in the story is numbers, anger, a woman who knew a path in the dark, and the willingness to go around an obstacle instead of through it. Their limits are just as human. The tellings never say who led them, never give them a name for their own side beyond the one their enemies are defined against, and cannot settle whether they arrived with the founding king or rose up long after him. They are remembered mainly for what they ended.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who were the Hanau Momoko?

The Hanau Momoko were one of two peoples in the traditions of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), usually called the Short Ears in English. According to the legend they destroyed their rivals, the Hanau Eepe or Long Ears, in a burning trench on the Poike headland. Islanders interviewed in the 1880s and 1910s named the Hanau Momoko as their own ancestors.

Does Hanau Momoko really mean Short Ears?

The meaning of Hanau Momoko is disputed. The missionary linguist Sebastian Englert argued that momoko means slender and that the rival name eepe means stout, so the names may describe body build rather than ears. The linguist Steven Roger Fischer supported the same reading in 2005.

What happened at the Poike ditch?

At the Poike ditch, according to the legend, the Hanau Eepe dug a trench across the eastern headland and filled it with brushwood to burn the attacking Hanau Momoko. An old woman showed the Hanau Momoko a way around the trench at night, and at dawn they drove the Hanau Eepe into their own fire. Katherine Routledge’s informants said two men escaped to a cave near Anakena but were found and killed.

How did the war between the Short Ears and Long Ears start?

The war began, in the version Katherine Routledge recorded in 1914 and 1915, when a Long Ear named Ko Ita was found to have killed and eaten thirty boys, seven of them sons of a man named Ko Pepi. Ko Pepi’s brothers then attacked the Long Ears at Vinapu and Orongo. William Thomson’s 1889 account instead describes a long feud between the Long Ears and the descendants of Hotu Matu’a that ruined the island’s crops.

Did the battle between the Hanau Momoko and Hanau Eepe really happen?

Whether the battle really happened is doubtful. Material from the Poike ditch was dated to the later seventeenth century by Thor Heyerdahl’s expedition of the 1950s, but later excavations did not find the burned bone and charcoal a massacre would leave. Many specialists now doubt the events took place as the legend describes.

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Hanau epe, Hotu Matu’a, Aku-Aku, Makemake, Manutara, Uoke, Tiki te Hatu