Futuna

The Futuna are a Polynesian people of the southwestern Pacific, whose home islands are Futuna and Alofi, the Hoorn Islands, with nearby Uvea, also called Wallis; their Futunan speech gives its name to the Futunic group of Polynesian languages, related tongues also spoken by outlier communities on Vanuatu's Futuna, Aniwa and Emae.

Lapita seafarers left the first traces of settlement on the islands between 850 and 800 BC, and the islands long served as waystations between Fiji and Samoa. Tongan invaders reached them in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Futuna kept older custom while Uvea changed more deeply.

Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire put Futuna on European maps in 1616, naming it the Hoorn Islands, and Samuel Wallis passed Uvea in 1767. French missionaries landed on Futuna in 1837 and began its conversion to Catholicism.