A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1068 entries
wayfinder
A wayfinder is a navigator who works without instruments, holding a course and a position by reading stars, swell, wind, cloud, birds, and the color of the water. The word is used particularly of the Pacific voyaging tradition, in which a navigator carries the whole system in memory: star paths for every route, the behavior of swell around islands, and a running dead-reckoning of where he is.
Etymology
The English word is old and plain, and its modern use in this sense dates from the Hawaiian voyaging revival of the 1970s, when it was adopted as the English term for the practice. It has since spread into design and architecture, where wayfinding means the business of helping people navigate a building, which is a considerable demotion.
Notes
The revival turned on one person. Mau Piailug of Satawal in Micronesia held the system for a large area of the Pacific, and when the Polynesian Voyaging Society built Hōkūle’a and needed someone to navigate it to Tahiti in 1976, no Hawaiian navigator remained. He sailed it there without instruments and afterward broke with tradition to teach outside his own island, which is why the knowledge survived at all.