There is an island in the middle of the South Pacific named Aitutaki.
Just a six mile speck of land in a vast and lonely ocean, it's ringed by long coral reefs hugging azure lagoons full of bountiful life to it's coconut palm shores. The fish are plentiful and the land is rich, and with few worries, the locals lived happily for thousands of years - left alone with everything they needed, and nothing the rest of the world wanted.
The islanders shared everything amongst themselves. They had no need to acquire anything so they concentrated on enjoying life. Because of the abundance of resources, only one person per seven households had to fish or gather plants on any given day. In the evening the day's catch would be brought to the meeting hall, and meals would be prepared and eaten together.
This kept the community bonded, but also allowed the other six families to play all day. As long as the responsibility for collecting the food rotated among the seven households, the system worked perfectly.
Then came missionaries looking to convert souls to christianity, and with them they brought the 'civilized' concept of personal ownership, and it's ugly cousins - commerce, ambition, and shame.
They convinced the locals that - as in the image of their own god - each patriarchal head of household must rule and provide for his family exclusively. To share was a sin, unless you were giving directly to the church.. whose priests were more qualified to distribute god's riches.
This was a political construct, designed to take autonomy away from extended families, and give authority to the priests. They used the fear of hell, and shiny metal coins to sway the islanders towards their world view. When mass shipping and refrigeration was introduced, the last infrastructure was in place to transform the sharing-subsistence economy into hoarding and servitude based on acquiring arbitrary bits of colorful paper with pictures of far away kings and presidents.
Instead of seven houses living together and sharing food and responsibility, and thus making light work with many hands, now every household had to have a refrigerator to stack the fish up in.
Each man of the house was responsible for keeping the fridge stocked and the larder full, and so he had to fish every day and get another job besides to keep up with the demand for canned provisions and sugar lollies shipped in from New Zealand. Plus he needed more money to gas his scooter, which was a must-have if he didn't want to feel less than his neighbor.
Jealousies and worries piled up, and people began to steal from each other, necessitating the building of a jail, and taxes to pay for the courts and police. Because it was so hard to provide for a nuclear family in this new demanding way, society began to suffer from stress, unemployment, and poor health.
By the mid 1970's the people of Aitutaki were migrating in droves to New Zealand as refugees. Their traditional way of life was gone, and they were at the bottom of the economic ladder, taking the worst factory jobs with the least pay to send back home to their 'poor' families.
"What went wrong?" the government asked, and they sent my anthropologist parents to live on the island for a year to research how the fundamental sharing and altruistic nature of the Cook Islanders had been broken down.
This was the year I turned five and I began school on Aitutaki. I learned Cook Islands Maori as my first reading and written language, and I learned something else that I keep to this day.
To share with your neighbor is the way back to heaven on earth.
We have plenty enough to go around, if we learn again to pitch into the pot instead of banking on fear. If we remember that seven fish go farther feeding your friends than sitting in your fridge.. If we trust in our people and our island to give back to us - we could possibly learn not become sick and deranged, just trying to survive.
In a world (or a neighborhood) of communal abundance rather than individual scarcity, we could spend up to six days a week playing and being grateful, instead of just one.
What a sin and a shame that would be!
#oneisland #oneworld #onefamily #onelove
#wailukufarms #kahalawai #maui #aitutaki
#remember #share #alohasunday
