from letters written by the missionaries to their religious superiors. Only eight artifacts from the pre-European period from the Gambier Islands remain in the world, including a carved deity of the type described by Beechey in the above text in the in Paris. The wooden figure, about a meter high and only remotely human, represents the god Rao, supposedly the "god of inequity" according to Father Caret's description, the third most important deity in the Mangareva pantheon. A four-armed stand, like the one described in the text fragment above, is on display at the in Paris. Another naturalistic statue, approximately one meter high, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is believed to represent the god Rogo, the sixth son of Tagaroa and Haumea, the mythical founders of Mangareva. Rogo was the ancient deity of peace and hospitality and was revealed as a rainbow. His cult was associated with the cultivation of turmeric. Languages At the 2017 census, only 24.8% of the population age 15 and older in the Gambier Islands still reported that Mangarevan was the language they spoke the most at home (down from 38.6% at the 2007 census), while 62.6% reported French as the main language spoken at home (up from 52.3% at the 2007 census), 4.9% reported Tahitian (down from 6.4% in 2007), and 4.6% reported some Chinese dialects (predominantly Hakka) (up from 3.5% in 2007). In the Gambier Islands, the number of people age 15 and older who reported that the language they spoke the most at home was Mangarevan declined from 300 at the 2007 census to 270 at the 2017 census. In the entire French Polynesia, the number of people age 15 and older who reported that the language they spoke the most at home was Mangarevan declined from 424 at the 2007 census to 332 at the 2017 census. Most of the people who spoke Mangarevan at home outside of the Gambier Islands at the 2017 census lived in Tahiti. Speakers have some bilingualism in Tahitian, in which there is a 60% lexical similarity, and usually with French, as well. It is a member of the Marquesic subgroup, and as such is closely related to Hawaiian and Marquesan. According to the Endangered Languages Project, Mangarevan is considered endangered with less than 900 speakers out of an ethnic population of 1,491. The larger portion of the population in the Gambier Islands