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.
