Vatican known examples of this practice.17 Two are included in the de Young exhibition. A multitude of gods were worshipped in the Gambier Islands prior to widespread conversion to Christianity in the nineteenth century. One of the Vatican’s wooden Gambier figures (fig. 8) represents a manifestation of the god Tu, who was worshipped on te kehika marae (sacred grounds) on the island of Mangareva. With its thick torso and four legs, this representation of Tu is unique among the fewer than a dozen Mangarevan figures that still exist today. The Catholic mission on the island was established with the arrival of Father François Caret and Father Honoré Laval in 1834 and conversion was swift. Dramatic cultural and social changes followed that involved the deliberate destruction of sacred sites and religious objects. Caret reserved ten pieces from the fires. In April 1836, he wrote “N. 1” in black ink on the torso of the Tu image before sending it to the headquarters of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and of the Adoration (generally abbreviated as Picpus, after the street in Paris where their first headquarters was located), then in Braine-le-Comte, Belgium, along with the other works and a list detailing the pieces by their numbers. It was subsequently added to the collections of the Museum of Propaganda Fide in Rome and then included in the Vatican Universal Missionary Exhibition of 1925. A photograph from that installation shows Tu with a Tongan vala (overskirt, which is also still in the collection) added to conceal his genitalia. 18 Another figure, one of just two of its type remaining (fig. 9), which once held streamers used when evoking Tu, was also included in the group sent first to Belgium and then on to the Vatican in 1925. While almost completely abstracted and reduced to a linear form, the body has small legs at the bottom that appear slightly flexed at the knees. Barkcloth strips, called eketea, were attached to the long arms that extend upward. Laval attributed the same name, eketea, to these figures and documented their use on Akamuru Island—a possible place of origin for this figure.19 He also recorded the evocations that linked the figures and their barkcloth offerings with the natural and supernatural worlds.
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