Carlos Teao Tori’s micro-narrative is one of the shortest texts Englert published: a first-person vision of a Makemake-sent woman clothed in cloud-white beside a rainbow stretching between Anakena and Ovahe. It illustrates how dream and meteorological imagery could be reported with the same seriousness as longer migration epics.
The vision (English column)
The English sentences below reproduce Koha U Motu’s page for this oral account verbatim (Carlos Teao Tori). The Rapanui original appears in Englert’s Leyendas de Isla de Pascua (1980 University of Chile edition digitised on Koha).
Old Tori told me: "I saw a woman sent by Makemake. Similar to a cumulus cloud was the whiteness of her dress by the side of a rainbow that went from Anakena to Ovahe."
On another day I returned to see her.
Rapanui as on Koha (Carlos Teao Tori): "Ko Tori korohua i-vânaga-mai-ai: Ku-tikea-á au etahi vî'e a Makemake. Pehe ragi puga te teatea o te kahu, a te tapa hanuanua-mea i Anakena ana-haere i-Ovahe. I toona raá he-tikea-hakaow".
Because the English column is only two sentences, ethnographers usually read this legend alongside longer Makemake and Hotu Matu’a cycles in the same volume rather than as a stand-alone myth.
Geography in the vision
Anakena and Ovahe anchor the rainbow’s ends on Rapa Nui’s north shore—places visitors still photograph daily, which helps ground an otherwise fleeting apparition in known coastal landmarks.1
Rainbows (hanuanua-mea) recur in Englert’s corpus as pathways between visible and invisible orders; compare the Ûi Atua stone legend on this site, where a woman escapes through the rainbow.2
Gendered messengers in oral poetry
Makemake sending a woman parallels other Eastern Polynesian narratives where atua dispatch female omens before navigators commit to a voyage; Englert’s bilingual layout preserves the Rapanui kin terms that English summaries often flatten.3
Mission-era transcription means we rarely know performance context (night prayer, public recitation, or interview answer); caution visitors against treating every paragraph as a script for re-enactment.
Further reading
Use Koha’s table of contents to jump to neighbouring legends about Hotu Matu’a’s homeland and the seven explorers—narratives that historically framed how families explained their rights to specific bays.4
Métraux’s 1940 ethnology still supplies comparative notes on dreams, spirits, and tapu that help readers triangulate Englert’s shorter visions with wider Polynesian patterns.5
Sources
- Koha U Motu — Carlos Teao Tori’s Anakena–Ovahe vision (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
- Wikipedia contributors (ongoing). Anakena; Ovahe (geography articles). Open link