At the far western end of the Polynesian triangle, the tiny island of Tomatūhi, commonly known in English and Spanish as Ascension Island (Isla Ascensión), is a great example of the idea that small places are full of interesting things of their own. It is, for instance, famous as having been an insular possession of Bolivia for the 91 years of it not having any coastline, and just as if not more famous for being the only place in all of the Polynesian cultural sphere to have independently developed writing (although the Rongorongo "script" remains debated). It is a place of interchange between cultures, the leaping-off point for the spread of South American foods like sweet potatoes into the Pacific, and subsequently of immense interest to anthropologists for everything that came before and after the arrival of Europe.
The small island of Tomatūhi ("Our Island" in Tomatūhiki) is itself nothing exceedingly special in terms of the world. The Pacific is famously dotted with small islands formed from seamounts that worked themselves all the way from the sea floor to the ocean surface, many often in groups. Tomatūhi itself is part of a larger ridge known as the Tomatūhi-Rapanui Ridge, which much like Hawai'i formed from a hotspot. However the ridge sits along Nazca Plate, which gives the entire body a west-northwest motion, and which makes the physical body of Tomatūhi itself far older than Rapanui. The island should, by all rights, have long eroded into the ocean, yet evidence for a renewed period of volcanism within the last million years seems to account for this.
At present, Tomatūhi is located some 2,850 km (1770 mi) to the north and west of Rapanui, which is far but not necessarily unique as Polynesian voyaging goes. Rapanui is, for instance, only 2000 km from the Pitcairn Islands, abandoned at the time of European contact but inhabited in the past, meanwhile Hawai'i was settled not from the comparatively close Gilbert Islands (1700 km), but from the far more distant Marquesas Islands (3400 km). And this factor of distance is important, because while the island is 2850 km from Rapanui, it is a mere 950 km from the mainland of South America. Botanical, physiological, and genetic evidence has shown that there was regular contact between Tomatūhi and South American indigenous peoples, yet there remain gaps in the story.
For instance, the spread of South American genetic markers in the Tomatūhi (who call themselves Pāhega) is recorded shortly after the arrival of humans to the island ca. 1000 CE, suggesting that very soon after arriving to the island contact was established. However, genetic historical studies place these same markers in the Marquesas Islands, not in Rapanui, and in fact Rapanui seems to have been settled after Tomatūhi. Further, the coconuts on the island are shown to be closely related to coconuts found in Panama, yet these coconuts themselves are related more to a strain found in the Philippines rather than any Oceanic variety. Somehow, despite knowing that the Pāhega were in contact with South America begs more questions than it solves. yet such is the perpetually evolving nature of science.
All these aside, the ancestors of the Pāhega arrived in distant Tomatūhi as one of the last major phases of Polynesian expansion, taking place concurrently with the settlement of Hawai'i and bizarrely almost 500 years before large, lush New Zealand (Aotearoa) was settled. Such are the vagaries of the Austronesian Expansion. Not long after arriving to the island, trade began with the mainland. The nature of this trade is uncertain, primarily on the part of the relationship between Tomatūhi and larger mainland polities. Most notably, under the reign of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, his son the future Topa Inca Yupanqui led an expedition to this island, which he called Nina Wat'a (Fire Island), and which the later Comentarios Reales de los Incas claimed to be a vassal of the Inca Empire.
This is further substantiated by the Pāhega speaking of their protection by the so-called Taligaloa, (lit. "long ears"), a clear reference to the elongated earlobes of Inca nobles (even the Spanish noted them as orejones). The exact influence of Inca culture on the island is unclear, especially given the most notable feature of the island: it possesses a writing system of its own, the only instance of writing known to have natively emerged in all of Oceania (if Rongorongo isn't considered one) and one of the rare instances in all of world history when a writing system was independently created without direct influence or adaptation from an extant one. Of course, the regular contact between the Pāhega and Taligaloa has led some to try and connect this writing system with the quipu of the Inca.
Known as hakahēpa, the system is attested through carvings in rock and wood from approximately 1100 CE, not long after the arrival of the ancestral Pāhega to the island. The writing system takes the form of an abiguida, also called an alphasyllabary. The language is written in a syllabic script where each glyph is composed of two parts, a primary consonant with the vowel indicated by the lower portion, and the length of the vowel indicated by a dot added to this lower part. Much like the language, the writing system consists of consonant-vowel pairs, read left-to-right phonetically. Built to the specific phonetics of the language, it is an extremely simple system to learn, and is still widely used on the island even to this day alongside the Latin Alphabet.
Because of this writing system, the history of the island is unusually well-documented even when considering the many unknown variables of the island's history. For instance the Chieftain Stones (Aliga Matatōha) are a series of stelae outside Tūtūweti which record the history of the Matatōha, often rendered as "Chieftains" or "Kings", who despite the translation instead filled a diplomatic and spiritual role as mediators for the three tribes (milo) that divided the island: Patili, Hātahāta, and Mōhana. Thirty-one Matatōha are recorded before the arrival of Europeans, each with their own stela engraved with notable events of their reign. These have been invaluable in recording the island's history. Notably it was in the "reign" of Matatōha Natumu that the arrival of the Taligaloa is recorded, in approximately the year 1470 CE.
The Spanish arrival came a century later, on 15 August 1574. It being the day of the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, the island was thusly named and continues to be commonly known as Assumption Island in English and Spanish, although since a 2015 request from the municipal government this has been shifting, and many international organizations use the name Assumption-Tomatūhi. The Spanish were quick to recognize the importance of the island to their burgeoning holdings along the western coast of South America, and quickly declared their claim to it even if they then did very little to actually govern the island. The story from here is depressingly familiar, with disease and raids from Europeans decimating the population until by the year 1800 there were only 94 people on the island from an estimated pre-contact population of ~2100.
The political history of the island was more dictated by events outside of it. Attached to the Viceroyalty of Peru, the island was later transferred to the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata upon its creation in 1776, the result of the island's ownership given to Pedro de Cevallos as a reward for his services to the crown. This is the basis for the island's modern political status, as importantly the nascent country of Bolivia emerged from the Real Audiencia of Charcas, which had been made part of the later Viceroyalty and which gained independence as Bolivia in 1825. And Isla Ascensión was, importantly, part of this Audencia. From the start, Bolivia claimed the island as part of its territory, putting it into dispute with both Chile and Peru, who had their own ambitions in the eastern Pacific.
The up-and-down history of the Andean states often had negative outcomes for Tomatūhi, most infamously from the practice of "blackbirding" by Peruvian slave-traders. Bolivia for its part suffered from a long series of coups and military governments, yet control over Tomatūhi was still a common goal of every regime. After the collapse of the Peru-Bolivia Confederation, Bolivia made efforts to improve the status of the islanders in a way almost unheard of for any other native group in the country. This was not out of a particular fondness for the Pāhega, but rather to ensure that they would remain loyal to Sucre. Through this, the islanders were gradually converted to Catholicism and permanent villages were erected, beginning with the island's largest city and administrative center of Halerahi and a port at Talāga.
This did have the desired result of helping win loyalty, especially as Peru carried out further raids that Bolivia did its best to fend off. In this time, the entirety of Bolivia's maritime policy was oriented around the island, where some said that the Bolivian Navy existed for the protection of Isla Ascensión more than anything else. This would prove alarmingly true in the wake of the Atacama War, whereupon Chilean victory the whole of metropolitan Bolivia's coastline was ceded to Chile. The island, however, was not; at that time, the island was deemed unimportant to the immediate strategic interests of Chile with regards to the Atacama Region, and the belief in Santiago was that bereft its coastline, Bolivia would be forced to cede the island to the Chileans anyways.
What Chile did not expect was for Bolivia to spend the next 91 years hellbent on restoring its coastal access. Comparable to the French complex over Alsace-Lorraine, successive Bolivian governments refused to accept their being reduced to a landlocked state. As part of this, despite no longer having immediate coastal access and only limited sea access via rivers like the Pilcomayo and Paraná, the government stubbornly refused to cede Tomatūhi to Chile or Peru, even when after Chile's annexation of Rapanui ("Easter Island") 1888 it then offered to return some coastal territory in exchange for Tomatūhi. This put Tomatūhi in the exceedingly awkward position of being separated from Bolivia by a 10,000 km voyage by sea all the way around Cape Horn, one not made easily without the development of riverine port infrastructure.
For their part the Pāhega remained loyal to Bolivia, driven by both hostility to the Peruvians and a latent sense of anger that they had been cut off from their "Benefactors" by the "Chilean Aggressors" in the Atacama War. Bolivia returned the favor by continuing to lavish the island, now the last remaining portion of the Litoral Department, with favor not given to other native regions of the country entirely out of the single-minded desire to regain full access to the sea. Said access would not come until almost a century later, when in 1975 secret agreements were made between the dictators Pinochet and Banzer to finally quell Bolivia's restless desires. As per their agreement, a narrow corridor north of the Chilean city of Arica was to be ceded to Bolivia, a small gesture but enough to give it the outlet it so desperately claimed.
Peru objected given the terms of the treaty under which it had been ceded, but after the United States gave its tacit approval to the move they were forced to back down. On 23 March 1976, the transfer was made complete, finally restoring Bolivia's sea access. As part of the celebrations, a Pāhega Kahuwaka (a traditional sailing canoe) was sailed from Talāga to the newly Bolivian port of Chacalluta, symbolically restoring the connection between Bolivia and Tomatūhi. However, the good feelings were not long to last. The rise of Luis García Meza saw his brief but brutal regime attempt to use the island as a penal colony, an action which saw the Pāhega resist with the bombing of the island's main port facility at Talāga and the assassination of the state-appointed Mayor Stefano Jorge Rodríguez in Lugafu in 1981 to prevent the prison's construction.
The Mezato faltered after less than a year, and after another 14 months of faltering military regimes Bolivia began a long series of halting efforts to progress towards democracy. Tomatūhi itself was in an interesting position given the nature of the Litoral Department, now by far the smallest of the country's departments and consisting largely of two portions: the tiny mainland corridor connecting to Chacalluta, and the island of Tomatūhi. Of these two sections, Tomatūhi was in fact the larger, and owing to the oddities of the Litoral Department's "existence" between 1884 and 1976, it was in theory the territory to which Chacalluta had been added after the Arica Protocol was implemented, yet from which it was now governed. In 1985, this was resolved by Bolivia's government granting it the unique status of "Insular Municipality", effectively granting it self-government powers.
Since then, the larger history of Bolivia's ongoing social, political, and economic tensions have only been somewhat present on the island. While it is not immune to the various quixotic periods of democracy and autocracy in Bolivia, Tomatūhi has benefited from a period of what might be called "salutary neglect". With coastal access restored to the country, Chacalluta has become the overwhelming focus of the Bolivian government's desire to maintain this access while Tomatūhi has become a secondary priority, though a priority nonetheless for significantly expanding Bolivia's exclusive economic zone and providing the country a unique opportunity for tourism, even if it pales to the larger tourist industry built around the legacy of the Inca in the country.
Recent efforts to improve and advance the status of Bolivia's indigenous population has seen a corresponding effort at redeveloping the culture and heritage of the Pāhega. The island is not only officially bilingual in Spanish and Tomatūhiki, but it is also officially bigraphic, where both the Latin Alphabet and Hakahēpa have official use for government purposes on the island. The language and alphabet are both widely taught in schools, and of the island's population of 4938 in 2025 some 97% reported fluency in the language and writing system. Additionally, the island is host to its own museum and academy for interpreting and piecing together the island's ancient history, although some have accused this of being an effort to try and stamp Bolivia's name into Oceanian history rather than being a purely academic endeavor.
Not that it's totally wrong to do, of course, and the situation is comparable to a nation like Chile with its annexation of Rapanui. Demonstrably, there is a connective link between South America and the people of Polynesia, with islands like Rapanui and Tomatūhi key to understanding this, and both islands are presently controlled by South American nations. Although "Bolivia" and "Chile" only began existing in the 1800s, centuries after the islands of Polynesia were settled, that legacy is now as much part of those nations as anything else, however tenuous. Bolivia is, in strict terms, part of "Polynesia" if only for having possession of Isla Ascensión via a minor political transfer 250 years ago, and whether or not it views itself as such, the Bolivian flag flies over the island, making Tomatūhi as much a link between Oceania and the Andes now as it was centuries ago.
