It was largely due to their own excesses and destruction of the local environments that the Polynesians died out. If they had had a stable environment with a sustainable population which wasn’t constantly battling, then they would have fared better against their invaders. Despite that, out of post-colonial guilt, we have projected this retrospective romantic image onto people of them being harmonious with nature. In reality, they were greedy and consumerist. Is it out of fear for ourselves that we do this? We portray the “noble savage” as both fey and strong. His primitive weapons are interesting and amusing to us but we are more advanced than they were. We are too afraid to consider them as they truly were; human, flawed because we hope that if we distance themselves enough from them, we remove responsibility from ourselves having to learn. If we make their existence feel like a dream, maybe the same thing won’t happen again. But in Liberia and the Congo, 9 year olds are smoking heroin and crack cocaine and generals are cannibalising their enemies.
In West Point, people are living in their waste, eating whatever they can find. In Brazil, children are selling their bodies to men there to watch the World Cup matches. An area the size of Wales is deforested in the Amazon rainforest every day. In India, two girls were raped and then hung by their scarves from a mango tree. We are overfishing. There is a huge island of rubbish floating in the Pacific Ocean. It is easy to look at what happened on Easter Island after learning what they did and say “how could they not realise the destruction they were driving towards?” but I believe we need to look at ourselves and slow down.
To conclude, the “noble savage” was no more noble nor savage than any of us today. They were civilised, greedy and selfish, as is human nature. If it is purely out of guilt or pity that we glorify and romanticise them, then why does nobody spare a thought for the birds that the Polynesians made extinct?
"The Europeans merely sped up a process that was already in action"
By Hannah Kessler