This Hawaiian canoe navigates by the sun, moon and stars. What its mission says about global diplomacy
That vessel is Hōkūleʻa, a traditional Hawaiian voyaging canoe that helped spark a revival of Polynesian navigation after it was painstakingly constructed in the 1970s
Mai’a Cross was catching some rays at the beach in Kaʻiona Beach Park, Hawaii, when serendipity struck.
It was 2024, and Cross, Northeastern University’s dean’s professor of political science, international affairs and diplomacy, was visiting her family in Hawaii. She had just received a prestigious grant to further explore her geopolitical work on international cooperation.
Then, out of the blue — quite literally — a long double-hulled vessel began to make its way shoreward from the horizon. The vessel has ochre decking and burgundy sails, its two hulls joined by a broad wooden platform.
That surprise visitor was Hōkūleʻa, a traditional Hawaiian voyaging canoe that helped spark a revival of Polynesian navigation after it was painstakingly constructed in the 1970s as a replica of an ancient seafaring craft — one used by Indigenous peoples across the Pacific for millennia. And Cross, who grew up in Hawaii and is Native Hawaiian, was planning to research Hōkūleʻa for an upcoming article.
The encounter gave her all the more reason to do so.
“A few months later, when I returned to Hawaii to interview the crew, they actually invited me on board,” Cross said of the Polynesian navigators manning the craft. “I was one of the last people to get to go on board before they set off on their voyage the next day.”
The Polynesian Voyaging Society, a Honolulu-based nonprofit organization, is primarily responsible for reconstructing the ancient watercraft. The effort behind Hōkūleʻa, Cross said, was to showcase to newer generations the traditional wayfinding techniques that enabled Polynesian voyagers to reach the Hawaiian Islands through “purposeful, skilled ocean navigation,” about 1,000 years ago.
Those techniques made use of the surrounding environment — the stars, currents, winds and even sea life — to traverse the vast Pacific Ocean without relying on modern navigational instruments.
Editor’s Picks
In addition to the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s efforts, these maritime traditions can be seen in the context of what Cross calls “wayfinding diplomacy,” a framework for thinking about international cooperation.
This kind of diplomacy isn’t just built on words and negotiations between government officials seated around a table, but on direct encounters that allow people to experience another culture, its knowledge and its values firsthand. In this case, the physical presence of Hōkūleʻa and its crew.
It can be thought of as a form of cultural diplomacy, where “practices, symbols, and people-to-people interaction shape international relations and even pave the way for new areas of international cooperation,” Cross said.
“Unlike traditional forms of transnational influence that rely primarily on persuasion, bargaining or socialization through discourse, wayfinding diplomacy operates through the material presence of the canoe itself, creating experiential encounters with the canoe and crew that transform how people understand their relationship to the ocean,” Cross wrote in her case study on Hōkūleʻa, titled “The Transnational Network of Polynesian Ocean Voyagers: Hōkūleʻa & Ocean Conservation.”
The work will be featured in an upcoming issue of Global Studies Quarterly, an academic journal of international studies associated with the U.S.-based International Studies Association, an organization of scholars.
The case study on Hōkūleʻa was part of a larger proposal Cross submitted to the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports work on international peace and global affairs, that resulted in a grant and a broad range of publications exploring “transnational political networks.”
Those networks, Cross said, are “groups of individuals who transcend national boundaries” and exert influence over the global order in surprising ways. When it comes to Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia, her sister canoe, that influence has helped carry Polynesian approaches to the ocean beyond the Pacific, contributing to a broader shift in how the world thinks about ocean conservation.
That is the stated mission of Polynesian Voyaging Society, which aims is to inspire “10 million voyagers” all over the world to become involved in understanding the ocean, with the goal of “sparking breakthroughs in protecting the ocean,” according to published information about the group.
The effort reflects a growing international consensus about the need to recognize the value of Indigenous and local knowledge alongside Western science in understanding and protecting marine ecosystems, researchers who study Indigenous knowledge and marine ecosystems say.
One example of that is U.N.’s Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement, or High Seas Treaty, adopted in 2023 and in force since January 2026. It explicitly calls for the use of relevant traditional or Indigenous knowledge in the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national borders.
Hōkūleʻa was built in 1975. A year later, its maiden voyage took it from Hawaiʻi to Tahiti and back. Some 300,000 nautical miles later, the watercraft has visited hundreds of ports around the globe, inspiring millions, Cross said.
The revival of Polynesian voyaging has also helped spark a rejuvenation of Hawaiian history and culture, Cross said. The language, once suppressed and endangered, has been dramatically reclaimed by new generations.
Nearly 40 years ago, fewer than 50 children in Hawaiʻi spoke Hawaiian. Today, more than 4,000 students now learn and speak Hawaiian daily through immersion education, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, the U.N.’s agency for education, science and culture. The organization said there is a “resurgence” of the language in homes and communities.
