Pius Mau Piailug was born in 1932 in Micronesia on the island of Satawal. Mau first came to Hawaii in 1973.
There was a group based at the East West Center and they were thinking about building Hokuleʻa to prove that Hawaiians used stars for wayfinding. Mike McCoy, a friend of Mau, had taken Mau to one of their meetings in which was about finding a navigator for the Hokuleʻa. Mau had told them that they needed to go through the voyaging of Hokuleʻa and he said “How could Polynesians live without sailing?” Mau agreed to navigate Hokuleʻa to Tahiti.
Mau would only navigate in the traditional ways using only his knowledge of the heavens and the ocean. Mau was not from Hawaii and he never sailed in that part of the ocean from Hawaii to Tahiti. He used only what he had known about navigating to navigate the voyage and they made it to Tahiti. When Mau successfully guided Hōkūle‘a to Tahiti in 1976, the voyage launched a reawakening of cultural pride and unity throughout the Pacific.