“We Will See the Result at the End”

One of the earliest Latter-day Saint missionaries in the Pacific islands, Noah Rogers, stopped on the island of Mangaia on May 23, 1843, but local law prohibited him for staying for longer than a day. There was no sustained Latter-day Saint presence in the Cook Islands until May 1942, when Matthew Cowley called Carl Fritz Bunge-Krueger, a Latter-day Saint from Samoa, to do missionary work. Carl and his wife, Maudina Ngawiki Bunge-Krueger, ran a bakery in Avarua and shared the gospel part-time. In June, Mii Henry, Nooare Glassie, and Samuel Glassie became the first Cook Island residents to be baptized. Others followed, including Josephine Teakapeka Cummings and Manu Aereau Cummings in 1945. In 1946, the Rarotonga Branch was organized.

Local members Tuakana Vahua and Pikika’a Benioni helped Carl start the project of translating the Book of Mormon into Cook Islands Māori. This project was renewed in earnest in February 1963, with the work of Manu Cummings and Temauiarii James Vahua Ezekiela. The Cook Islands Māori translation of the Book of Mormon was published in 1966.

Thereafter, Temauiarii translated Doctrine and Covenants, and Manu translated the Pearl of Great Price. Temauiarii sent her completed manuscript to New Zealand Church offices in 1968. However, work stalled for decades, and sections of the manuscripts (including sections 4, 42, 93, 124, and 134 of the Doctrine and Covenants) were lost.

The project began to advance in 1989, though slowly. Temauiarii had moved to Auckland, New Zealand. She had to retranslate the lost sections of the Doctrine and Covenants, as well as the introductory material, sections 137 and 138, and the explanatory material added to Official Declaration 1 and Official Declaration 2. Manu lived alone in a small house, working on a manual typewriter by the light of a gas lantern.

Revisions to the text were largely carried out by postal correspondence back and forth across the Pacific. Manu eventually traveled to Salt Lake City, where he worked directly with Translation Department workers. Manu’s in-person expertise greatly sped up the process. “Mail correspondence, compared to working with Manu in person, was like driving a wagon compared to driving a Ferrari,” wrote a returned Cook Islands missionary who helped with the translation.

Still, by late 1993, the manuscript had passed through multiple stages of review and copyediting, but the scriptures had not yet been published.

“I think, Brother Munanui, everything is all right with the translation,” Manu wrote to a Translation Department worker in Salt Lake City. “I don’t know; I don’t blame you because I know there are some people with different ideas about this work of translation, but we will see the result at the end.”

Manu passed away in January 1994 at the age of 83. Two years later, in 1996, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price were finally published in Cook Islands Māori, the fruits of decades of labor by dedicated Latter-day Saints.