Polynesian Wayfinding in Moana’s “We Know the Way”
Teaching students to look for historical details
We are so excited to invite
to be this week’s guest writer on the Lit Think blog. She helps demonstrate that English teachers aren’t the only ones challenging students to use pop culture to better understand their world.Hi Lit Thinkers! Confession time: I’m a history teacher, not a literature teacher. However, I make my students write A LOT. I write a lot too. I listen to LitThink with the belief that we teachers must grab onto any opportunity to make our curriculum relevant and interesting to our students, and so often pop culture provides that avenue.
My 10th grade World History class begins with a unit on World Exploration, but when my students analyze the textbook chapters dedicated to the topic, they find only European explorers.
My students learn the word “eurocentric,” and they learn that historians must look beyond one book or one source when studying history. Then, I teach about the travels of Iba Battuta, Mansa Musa, Zheng He, and Polynesian explorers.
Often ignored by historians and World History curricula, Polynesians navigated the Pacific Ocean long before Columbus. No unit on World Exploration is complete without learning about the navigational techniques and accomplishments of Polynesian Wayfinders
In the 3-4 days we spend learning about Polynesians, students study primary and secondary sources to learn the history of how Polynesian islands were settled, navigation techniques, early contact with Europeans, and the Polynesians cultural resurgence that began in the 1970s and continues today. After learning, students watch a short clip of Moana, a Disney movie set in ancient Polynesia.
Moana knows the way, Lin-Manuel Miranda knows history
Surprising nobody, Lin-Manuel Miranda ensured the details of “We Know the Way,” the feature song in Disney’s Moana, were historically and culturally accurate. Miranda, fellow songwriters Mark Mancina and Opetaia Foa’i, and the team of Disney animators, infused Moana’s anthem with historical details that students will pick up on after learning about Polynesian Wayfinding.
Watching “We Know the Way” with a historical/cultural lens
After students learn about Polynesian Wayfinding from various primary and secondary sources, I show a three-minute clip of Moana that includes the song “We Know the Way.”
Students are instructed to carefully analyze the lyrics and pay attention to the visual details, looking for historical and cultural details that they’ve learned about. We watch the clip three or four times, so students can pick up different details in each viewing.
Armed with their lists of historical details, we have a class discussion. I ask the following questions:
Did you see specific evidence that Moana’s songwriters and animators did their research? What did you observe and how does it connect to something we’ve learned?
What historical and/or cultural details did you observe that we did NOT learn about? Do you trust that they are accurate?
Do you think it’s important for the cultural and historical details in Disney films to be accurate, even if the story itself is NOT based on a true story or true events?
Does knowing some history and culture about Polynesian Wayfinding add to your enjoyment/appreciation of the song?
Analysis: Connecting Moana to Primary and Secondary Sources about Polynesian Wayfinding
Starting with a secondary source helps ground students in what they’ll be learning. The TED-Ed talk by Alan Tamayose and Shantell De Silva titled “How did Polynesian wayfinders navigate the Pacific Ocean?” gives an excellent overview. Students learn how Polynesians sailed the Pacific on double-hulled canoes using clouds, currents, birds, and stars to navigate in lieu of man-made navigational instruments like compasses or GPS systems.
When watching the Moana clip:
Students will see navigators using stars to create mental maps as Lin-Manuel sings “...at night we name every star…”
Students will also recognize the similarity in Polynesian hairstyles depicted in the TED-Ed video and in Moana.
Next, I have my students look at historical and modern primary sources:
Tupaia was Polynesian who traveled with Captain James Cook. While he wasn’t helping to navigate or facilitating trade between Europeans and Polynesians, he drew pictures and maps that ended up in Captain Cook’s records. More of Tupaia’s work can be found in this article.
When watching the Moana clip:
Students will recognize Tupaia’s canoe with the double sail in the Moana video. Tahitian longhouses and coconut trees much like those depicted can also be seen in the movie clip.
The map can also be linked to the song lyric “...to find a brand-new island everywhere we roam…”
Finally, I have my students learn from modern-day primary sources. In the 1970s, the Polynesian Voyaging Society formed, partly to push back on the false belief that Polynesia had been settled accidentally, through a series of maritime mishaps. To disabuse the world of this notion, the Society built a canoe using only ancient techniques. The canoe, Hōkūleʻa, then sailed around the world using only ancient wayfinding techniques. Building on the success of Hōkūleʻa, Polynesian culture has experienced a language and cultural resurgence. This is all celebrated in the video “He Wa`a, He Honua – The Earth is Our Canoe” The video is nearly an hour long, so a condensed video can be found here. I also have students peruse the Hōkūleʻa website to find a final article from a modern-day Polynsian voyager to analyze.
When watching the Moana clip:
In the video, navigator Nainoa Thompson speaks of how navigators must “keep the island in their mind,” a phrase that students will hear again as a song lyric in Moana.
Thompson’s articles on wayfinding feature the importance of using birds and clouds when stars are not visible. Astute students may point out the birds flying among the sails in the video clip, and a moment in the video where clouds and rain do not seem to deter the navigators. The lyrics “we read the wind and the sky” also allude to this.
The confidence in the lyric “we know the way” could be read as a message to those historians and colonizers of the past who didn’t believe that Polynesians could purposefully travel.
After sharing the historical and cultural details that students recognize, a student often points out the language, the clothing, the symbols on the sails, or other historical details that I didn’t teach. This is also a good time to discuss the need for more research or learning. The 2016 Vanity Fair article by Joanna Robinson How Pacific Islanders Helped Disney’s Moana Find Its Way sheds some light on the research that went into creating Moana.
I also ask students if details SHOULD be accurate. Most students will say yes, so long as it doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the movie. Often, this slips into a discussion about video game accuracy as well, where students are much more likely to profess that entertainment should trump historical accuracy.
Finally, I ask my students if knowing the history adds to their enjoyment of the song.
Of course I want my students to say yes. I want them to realize that knowing a bit of history makes everything more enjoyable - even a two-minute animated song about a Disney princess who just wants to explore her world. I want to launch into an impassioned speech about how knowing history not only makes you an informed citizen, but also into someone who can better appreciate songs and movies and books and conversations, and the entire world! I want them to be in awe of the power of historical knowledge.
However, students usually shrug and give a non-committal “sure” to the question.
But I know that someday they’ll be watching some movie about a topic they learned about in my class, and they’ll understand some esoteric bit of background, and they’ll smile.
Thanks for reading!
In addition to teaching World History (and parenting and running and being obsessed with Seattle Mariners baseball), I write the newsletter Jenna Repeats History. Each week the newsletter features a historical book to read, a place to explore, and a lesson to teach. The lessons include student worksheets and teacher slide decks, all available to download for free.
Please “like” by clicking on the ❤ and share this post with your friends, colleagues, and fellow lit thinkers.
 | A guest post by
|
I always learn so much from Jenna Vandenberg’s analyses! This is a great lesson; now I just need to find a way to incorporate into my fifth-grade classroom. 😊