Tagata Tangata 3 - Papalagi / Heaven Breakers (Episode Three)

For Polynesians, the sails of the Papalagi pierced the womb of our horizon, ending our certainties and leading to our bloody entry to the world.

– Narrator Ramona Papali'i

...some other people hid in a little cave. And it’s a tiny little hole. And there were four islanders inside the cave. As they wouldn’t come out of the cave, then the captain of one of the ships, he went there and shot those that were inside the cave.

– Rapa Nui expert Edmundo Edwards tells the story of Rapa Nui locals hiding from slave ships

...one man had the foresight to think that if the country was not united, it would be colonised. So there was a great incentive for him to try to win the wars.

– Bishop Patelisio Finau on the decision made by then King Tāufa'āhau Tupou the First to stop civil disputes

They were like many who, all over the Pacific, grew up without fathers, for the slave ships targeted the smaller islands, whose remoteness left them vulnerable.

– Narrator Ramona Papali'i describes a lost generation, from the targeting of small island communities to find slaves

The missionaries needed a lot more than theology to get our attention, and they knew it.

– Tagata Tangata narrator and co-writer Ramona Papali'i

Our ways were in sharp contrast to the European. Our women, for example, were considered equal to our men. When John Williams arrived, he was sent a delegation of highborn women to welcome him. He was outraged. Women were not accorded the same status as men in European society so he saw this delegation as an insult.

– Narrator Ramona Papali'i on contrasting attitudes to gender when English missionary John Williams arrived in the South Pacific

We survived the disease and the Peruvian slave trade, and we probably could’ve survived the missionaries; the trouble is each wave was more devastating than the last, and the missionaries opened the door to the final wave from the west — the colonialists.

– Tagata Tangata narrator and co-writer Ramona Papali'i

The marriage of convenience between chiefs keen to use the goods of the missionaries and the missionaries' greed for souls was to occur all over the pacific.

– Tagata Tangata narrator and co-writer Ramona Papali'i