Forget the Word 'Novel': 'The Wayfinder' Weaves Indigenous Polynesian Tales Into an Epic

"He was in Auckland to give a reading for his novel The Orphan Master's Son, a literary journey into the shadows of North Korean dictatorship that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. On the island, where the Indigenous Polynesian people known as Māori are the second-largest ethnic group, he learned how ancient tradition could persist and co-exist with the modern world. The local Māori community welcomed him onto the University of Auckland's marae, a Māori meeting space."

"A subsequent trip to another Polynesian island, the Kingdom of Tonga, deepened his fascination. "I don't know if that was the first place I'd been to that hadn't been colonized," he recalls, but the experience stirred his imagination. "I wanted to know much more about both places," he explains, "and the way I learn about things is by writing about them." A particular oral history from a Māori storyteller confronted him with "real storytelling," and changed how he wrote and taught moving forward."

"Johnson demonstrates the gravity of the situation and the island's insularity with choice details, like how Kōrero only knows of the onetime existence of dogs from the remains of bones. Johnson encountered variants of that Tongan legend over time, and was surprised by its longevity. "That's a story that hadn't died, even after Christianity and after the missionization of Tonga had removed a lot of stories," he says."

Adam Johnson traveled to New Zealand and Tonga and returned with a deepened engagement with Indigenous Polynesian cultures and oral traditions. In Auckland he was welcomed onto a marae and observed Māori language recognition across official documents and signage. A Māori storyteller's oral history introduced him to modes of "real storytelling" that altered his approach to narrative and teaching. In Tonga he encountered enduring variants of a local legend and noted how stories persisted despite Christianity and missionization. He emphasizes honoring those oral histories by adapting and preserving them rather than repeating them unchanged.

Read at Kqed