Maretu

Who is Maretu?

Maretu was a Rarotongan convert, missionary, and chronicler who lived through the earliest decades of sustained contact between the Cook Islands and the outside world, from roughly 1802 to 1880. Born before the arrival of Christianity in Rarotonga, he witnessed and later wrote about pre-contact warfare, chiefly rivalry, and the radical social upheaval that followed the destruction of traditional marae and the conversion of the population under London Missionary Society teaching in the 1820s. He went on to serve as a missionary teacher himself, carrying the Christian message to the islands of Mangaia and Manihiki through the late 1850s. Later in life he was encouraged to set down his recollections, producing a manuscript account of Rarotongan history, custom, and the causes of the practices Europeans labeled cannibalism, written in the Rarotongan language. This account was translated and edited more than a century later by the Cook Islands scholar Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe and published as "Cannibals and Converts: Radical Change in the Cook Islands", now regarded as one of the most valuable Indigenous first-hand records of Cook Islands history during its transition from traditional society to Christianity.

Sources: Maretu, "Cannibals and Converts: Radical Change in the Cook Islands", translated and edited by Marjorie Tuainekore Crocombe (Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific) · Internet Archive, "Cannibals and converts: radical change in the Cook Islands" catalog record · Journal of Pacific History, coverage of Cook Islander missionary manuscripts and the Crocombe translation project