We speak in the past tense, but there are plenty of other such abuses, ongoing.
Lawrence Krauss is calling out just such an abuse. It is not the only one. Each has to be fought, in detail, on its own ground; this one, on this ground.
Throughout the author keeps dodging the relationship between science and scientists, insisting on the purity of science itself. But that's precisely the point. It's an ideal. Not a bad ideal, but a process to get to. And it means scientific organizations and science as an academic and so on have to take responsibility for the history and their roles in it.
What has been demonstrated is that these particular oral traditions do not carry factual information about geology. Treating them as factual information about geology would be abuse.
They are legitimate facts about Pacific anthropology.
I always get bristly when this sort of idealisation of indigenous knowledge/systems/religion etc is used. The consequences of religion/mythsticism were/are almost always worse than science. In case of the Maori, they were used to justify genocide (the first thing tribes from the north island did when they acquired guns was to go south and wipe out other tribes for some perceived offence from the far past).
It seems likely the same thing happened to the Marquesans who first discovered Hawai'i, once people from Fiji or Samoa or someplace arrived. The latter's descendants still talk about "menehunes", small people who come out only at night.
Brits, not long after, hunted Tasmanians for sport.