Tare and Rapahango mediate between a lonely man near Vi Atua stone and a wife fetched from Hiva; jealousy over smeared kiea powder triggers violence, after which the woman leaps into a rainbow and returns across the sea. The closing speech renames the stone “Spirits-Viewing Stone,” tying landscape to moral consequence.
The Ûi Atua stone (English column)
The four English paragraphs below split Koha U Motu’s page for Moisés Teiki Tepano’s tale (Veri Amo frame) at natural pauses; wording is unchanged from Koha’s English column except that the final “Tara” in Koha’s last sentence is rendered here as “Tare” for consistency with the same spirit’s name earlier in the tale.
The old woman Veri Amo told it to me like this: A man was living near the stone called Vi Atua. One day Tare came there with Rapahango. This man asked them to find him a woman in Hiva. Tare and Rapahango said to him: "You won't ill-treat her and you won't be jealous if she speaks to other men, will you?" He answered: "No." Tare went with Rapahango and brought a woman from Hiva. When she arrived, she was given to the man as wife; she lived in the house with her husband.
One day there was no fire [in the house]. The woman went to another house in Te Manavai Parera to fetch some fire. As she walking back home, it rained and her kiea powder ran off her face. When the husband saw that her kiea powder had run off, he asked: "Where do you come from, that your kiea has run off?" The woman said: "I went and fetched fire." The husband said: "No; you have been with another man." He got jealous and he hit the woman.
Once he had hit her, she left the house and fled. The husband ran after her and called out to her to come back. But she shouted: "I am going." The woman arrived at Motu takataka and the husband also arrived near there. It drizzled and a rainbow appeared; the woman jumped into it and went to Hiva. The man wept at Motu takataka 5; then he went back home.
Tare and Rapahango turned up, they asked about the woman. The man told them: "She isn't here; she went inside the rainbow." Tare told him then: "So you had said you would not hit the woman. You have hit her, and because of that she has left, from that stone called 'Spirits-Viewing Stone.'" (Koha footnote: Motu takataka is the name of a boulder on the coast behind Poike.)
Rainbows as exit ramps
Comparative Polynesianists note rainbow bridges in several archipelagos; on Rapa Nui Englert’s corpus often uses them to resolve impossible marriages rather than to decorate the sky gratuitously.1
Archaeological guides to Poike still point hikers toward coastal erratics; local oral memory mapped moral lessons onto those boulders long before GPS waypoints.2
Cosmetics, jealousy, and domestic violence
Kiea powder references pre-Christian body presentation; ethnographers caution modern readers that jealousy plots encode historical gender expectations rather than timeless romantic comedy.3
Support resources on the island today address intimate partner violence in Spanish and Rapa Nui; travellers who recognise abuse dynamics in archival stories can donate to or amplify those programmes rather than romanticising the slap in the legend.
Further reading
Métraux’s Ethnology of Easter Island summarises marriage negotiations and spirit mediators in adjacent chapters, useful for readers who want non-mythic context for Tare and Rapahango’s roles.4
UNESCO’s Rapa Nui World Heritage description stresses integrated cultural landscapes; pairing stone legends with conservation law helps visitors see why toponyms still matter in park interpretation.5
Sources
- Koha U Motu — Ûi Atua / Vi Atua stone tale (Moisés Teiki Tepano; English + Rapanui). Open link
- Koha U Motu — legends index. Open link
- Englert, S. (1970). Island at the center of the world (Mulloy trans.). Internet Archive. Open link
- Métraux, A. (1940). Ethnology of Easter Island. Open link
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Rapa Nui National Park. Open link