Carmen Cardinali Paoa Carmen Cardinali Paoa Carmen Cardinali Paoa (born 21 June 1944) is a Chilean professor. She served as the Governor of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the government of president Sebastián Piñera, between 2010 and 2014. A native of the island, Cardinali hasworked as a professor in Santiago and also in Easter Island's tourism industry. Cardinali's predecessor, former Governor Pedro Edmunds Paoa, resigned in early August 2010 following the occupation of six buildings by protesters who demanded the return of land to the descendents of the island's indigenous Polynesian inhabitants. Lawyer Jorge Miranda was appointed as interim Governor until a replacement
Easter Island explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who encountered it on Easter Sunday (5 April) in 1722, while searching for Davis or David's island. Roggeveen named it "Paasch-Eyland" (18th-century Dutch for "Easter Island"). The island's official Spanish name, "Isla de Pascua", also means "Easter Island". The current Polynesian name of the island, "Rapa Nui" ("Big Rapa"), was coined after the slave raids of the early 1860s, and refers to the island's topographic resemblance to the island of Rapa in the Bass Islands of the Austral Islands group. However, Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl argued that "Rapa" was the original name of Easter Island and that