An introduction to the film series 'We, The Voyagers: Lata's Children' from the directors and executive producers Marianne 'Mimi' George and Heu 'Ionālani Meph Wyeth.

We, the Polynesian voyagers of Taumako, Solomon Islands, share our history, motivations, and skills, through story-telling, canoe building, and wayfinding. We recall our ancestors, who made the greatest of human migrations. We use only the designs, materials, and methods of our culture-hero, Lata, who built the first voyaging canoe (vaka) and navigated to distant islands. When Europeans took over we became isolated. To help us regain sustainability, Chief Kaveia, our most experienced navigator, led us in training new generations to plant gardens, feed workers, make rope from plants, weave and sew sails, protect our trees, adze parts for voyaging canoes, and lash them together. Kaveia also enlisted an anthropologist to help us make this film. After he died in 2009, we built a vaka and Chief Holani, Kaveia’s former crew, became our new Lata and prepared us for the test of an open ocean voyage. The story of Lata teaches us that everyone is welcome in Lata’s crew, and that we can avoid making certain mistakes as we strive to connect with long-lost family and new friends on faraway shores.

In our isolated Polynesian community, we live the story of our ancestral culture-hero, Lata. To make a voyage our living Lata welcomes men, women and children as crew, including hard workers with skills, persons of bad character, and a tame anthropologist. We bless the vessel and sailors, learn how to set the sails, and navigate into challenging seas and weather. We find our way in the open ocean by interacting with patterns of winds, waves, stars, and other signs that ancestors show us when we need them. We arrive at islands and learn what happened to family members since the last voyage some generations earlier. We reconcile, reaffirm our love for each other, and look to our future together.