Haleakalā

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Before dawn, in the cold thin air at the lip of the great crater, the demigod lay in wait. He had climbed the mountain in the dark, and now he crouched among the stones with his cords coiled and ready, watching the eastern rim of the pit where the light would come. In those days the sun ran across the sky like a startled thing, too fast for anything to be finished beneath it: crops would not ripen, and the kapa his mother Hina beat from bark and spread on the grass could not dry between one dawn and the next dark. So Māui had come to catch it. As the first ray reached over the edge — a limb, in the telling, one of the many limbs the sun puts out as it rises — he threw a cord and held it. Then another, and another, snaring the sun by its legs one after the next until it could not move, and he beat it and bound it fast, and would not let it go until it swore to travel more slowly and give the day its proper length.

The name of the mountain is the record of that morning. Haleakalā — hale, a house; a ka lā, of the sun — is the House of the Sun, the address of the place where the sun was caught and made to keep its hours, and where, in the reckoning of the people who named it, it still rises each day into the journey Māui taught it. It is not a metaphor laid over a peak. It is a deed fixed to a place a person can stand in.

The house and its name

Haleakalā is the whole of East Maui: a single enormous shield volcano whose flanks are the eastern two-thirds of the island, its summit lifting to 10,023 feet — 3,055 meters — at a cinder cone called Puʻu ʻUlaʻula, Red Hill, the highest point on Maui. That summit is a threshold in the doubled sense the tradition gives such places. It is the physical roof of the island, above the clouds and the reach of easy travel; and it is the seam where the human world touches the world of the akua, the gods, whose acts the land itself remembers.

The moʻolelo of the sun-snaring is old and widely told, and Māui is the figure who carries it. He is the trickster demigod known across the whole of the Polynesian world — from Aotearoa in the far south to Tahiti to Hawaiʻi — the clever last-born who fished up islands, stole fire, and died attempting to defeat death itself, and whose deeds shift from one people to the next the way a story does when an ocean’s worth of tellers keep it. The Hawaiian island of Maui bears his name, and Haleakalā is where his most famous act is anchored. The written versions that reached the nineteenth-century record fixed the details that travelers now repeat. In the account gathered by W. D. Westervelt in his Legends of Maui, a Demi-God of Polynesia (1910), Māui’s mother sends him first to his grandmother, who keeps the great crater and who cooks the sun’s bananas at the rim each day; the cords with which he snares the sun are braided from the hair of his sister, and the motive throughout is Hina’s kapa, which the short day would not let dry. That the snaring ropes are a woman’s hair is a detail of the written tellings, one thread among many, and other tellers give the cords and the kin differently; the tradition never pretended to a single fixed script.

The sun-snaring is not a Hawaiian invention but a Hawaiian localization. Across Polynesia the same feat is told of Māui — in Aotearoa he beats the sun with the jawbone of an ancestress at the pit in the east, in other islands the ropes and the weapon change — and everywhere it does the same work: it makes the day long enough for human life. What Hawaiʻi added was an address. The deed that elsewhere happens at “the pit out of which the sun rises,” a place of story with no map coordinate, here has a summit a traveler can climb, a rim to crouch behind, a crater whose eastern lip is the exact place the light comes over. The moʻolelo did not merely reach Maui; it came home to a mountain, and the mountain took its name from it. That is a particular kind of belief — not that a marvel happened somewhere long ago, but that it happened here, at this stone, in this cold, and that the sun keeps the bargain still.

Nor does Māui hold the mountain alone. Other akua walk this ground, and which akua a given place belongs to is one of the things that varies from district to district and from teller to teller, as it always does in the Hawaiian sacred world. In one Maui tradition the volcano goddess Pele made her first home high on Haleakalā, in a cinder cone said to bear her name, before the long southward pull that carried her at last to the crater-house at Kīlauea on Hawaiʻi Island; and it was here, in this telling, that Pele and her youngest sister Hiʻiakaikapoliopele met their end, torn apart in the struggle with their elder sister Nāmakaokahaʻi, their iwi — their bones — scattered through the crater and remembered in a hill along the coast below called Ka Iwi o Pele, the bones of Pele. In that account it is Pele who raised the cinder cones that stud the crater floor, the fire-work of a goddess looking for a home. This is one island’s version, and it sits beside others; the point is not to reconcile them but to hear that the mountain is thick with gods.

The cinder cones (puʻu) on the floor of the summit depression, some rising hundreds of feet, in a tradition the fire-work of Pele. Photo by Eric Tessmer, 2015, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The House of the Sun

Within the tradition Haleakalā is a wahi pana — a storied, sacred place, one of the named landmarks whose history is holy and whose ground is treated accordingly. Its sacredness is not only the sun-snaring. The summit and rim carry the physical signature of centuries of reverence: numerous burials, ahu (stone altars and shrine-cairns), and heiau, the platform temples of the old religion, set in a landscape that few could reach and none reached lightly. The high, cold, oxygen-thin air over three thousand meters made the place difficult by its nature, and difficulty was part of what reserved it — for prayer and offering, for burial, and for the gathering of the dense fine-grained basalt of the summit, prized above lesser stone for the making of adzes. To climb it was already to enter a place set apart.

The mountain is also an axis, a center from which an order radiates. On the northeastern rim stands Pōhaku Pālaha, the Broad Stone, remembered as the piko — the navel, the center point — of East Maui: the fixed place from which the eight moku, the great land districts, spread outward across the mountain’s flanks, among them Kaupō and Koʻolau, Kīpahulu and Kahikinui. Tradition credits the high chief Piʻilani with setting this reckoning, so that the whole map of eastern Maui is understood to begin at a single stone near the summit and open out from it like the sections of a fruit. To stand at Pōhaku Pālaha is to stand at the island’s middle point, the place where its parts are joined.

That word — piko — carries a second, more intimate binding. It names the navel, and it names the umbilical cord, and in the Hawaiian world the two are one continuous thing: the cord that ties a child to its mother, and to the place, and to the line of the ancestors. There is a tender tradition of carrying a newborn’s own piko, the dried umbilical cord, up onto the mountain to be placed in its ground, so that the child is bound bodily to this axis of the island, joined to the House of the Sun at the start of a life. A person’s own beginning is deposited at the center; the mountain holds it. It is the kind of act that says, without argument, what the place is for.

To the Kānaka Maoli — the Native Hawaiian people, the Kānaka Maoli who are living now, whose language ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi carries every one of these names and keeps them exact — Haleakalā is not a monument to a closed past but a place of continuing ceremony and reverence. Prayer, offering, and burial go on. The National Park Service, which now administers the summit, works with Native Hawaiian practitioners to keep areas of the mountain reserved for ongoing ceremonial and mortuary use. The specific words of its prayers and the interior conduct of its rites belong to the practitioners and to no one else; they are described here only at the distance of the public record, which is where they should be described. What can be said plainly is that the reverence is present-tense. The sun is still received into its house.

Around this sacred summit stand the other great sanctuaries of the tradition, each fixed to its own deed: the crater-house of Pele at Kīlauea, where the goddess is served at the fire even now; the walled refuge of Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau, where a wall turned a death sentence into absolution; the war-temple of Puʻukoholā Heiau, raised to win an archipelago. Haleakalā is the sun’s place among them — the high threshold, the House of the Sun, where the day itself was set in order.

The mountain read twice

The documented history lies on top of the living one, and it tells the same mountain over again in another register. Haleakalā is a shield volcano, built by the slow piling-up of fluid basaltic lava along three rift zones, and it makes up more than three-quarters of the island of Maui. Its building began roughly two million years ago; the older lavas that raised the shield are overlain by younger eruptions that continued into recent centuries. Geologists no longer call it extinct. The U.S. Geological Survey classifies Haleakalā as dormant — quiet, but not finished — and expects it to erupt again, whether five hundred years hence or within a lifetime, which is why a continuous GPS instrument and a seismometer keep watch near the southwest edge of the summit depression.

The date of its last eruption was itself revised by patient work. For a long time the mountain was said to have last erupted about 1790, an estimate resting largely on the disagreement between maps drawn during the voyages of La Pérouse and George Vancouver. Radiocarbon dating overturned it. Field and laboratory work by USGS geologists, first reported in 1999 and set out in full by David Sherrod and colleagues in 2006, placed the youngest lava flows — the ones that reached the coast at what is now called La Pérouse Bay — at some time between about 1480 and 1600, two to three centuries earlier than the old figure and comfortably before any European saw the island. The mountain last spoke, in other words, within the era of the chiefs whose names the moʻolelo keeps.

Its most famous feature is a lesson in reading the land twice. The great “crater” at the summit — some seven miles long and nearly eight hundred meters deep, wide enough to hold a small city, floored with the ash and cinder cones that make it look for all the world like the mouth of a furnace — is not a crater at all, and not a caldera. No single great eruption blew it open. It was carved by water. Two large valleys, eroding headward into the mountain from opposite sides over long ages, cut back until their upper walls met at the summit and merged into one enormous depression; the two breaches in its rim, the Koʻolau Gap to the north and the Kaupō Gap to the southeast, are the throats of those valleys. Later eruptions partly refilled the hollow with cinder cones, laying a volcanic floor inside an erosional bowl. So the pit where Māui waited for the sun is, in the geologist’s account, a place made by rain and river and then dressed again in fire — sacred history and physical history describing, from their different doors, the same vast room.

The mountain’s modern life as a park began in 1916, when the summit was folded together with Kīlauea and Mauna Loa on Hawaiʻi Island into a single Hawaiʻi National Park — the year the National Park Service itself was created. In 1961 the Maui summit was set apart as its own Haleakalā National Park, and it now runs to something over thirty thousand acres in two districts, reaching from the cold summit down through the Kīpahulu valley to the sea. The park shelters life that exists nowhere else. The ʻāhinahina, the Haleakalā silversword, a rosette of silver-furred sword-leaves that flowers once in a long life and then dies, grows on this mountain and on no other ground on Earth; and the nēnē, the Hawaiian goose, the rarest of its kind, walks the high slopes under protection.

The ʻāhinahina, the Haleakalā silversword, which flowers once and grows nowhere else on Earth; here in the high summit landscape of the mountain. Photo by Laurascudder, 2000, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Not all of the modern additions have been welcome. On the summit, near Puʻu ʻUlaʻula, stands a cluster of astronomical and defense observatories long known as “Science City,” and its presence on ground the tradition holds sacred has been contested by the Native Hawaiian community for decades — the buildings raised, and enlarged, on a place kept for burial and prayer. It is a quieter version of the larger and separate struggle over the telescopes proposed for the summit of Mauna Kea across the channel, but it is the same argument: whether a sacred summit is a rare and neutral platform for instruments or a place already given to other uses that have prior claim.

And there is the sunrise. The House of the Sun draws crowds before dawn to watch the light break over the rim, so many of them that the park now requires a reservation to enter the summit in the pre-dawn hours — the ancient morning turned into a scheduled vista, the deed made into a photograph. It would be easy to leave the mountain there, as scenery. The people who named it do not. The park keeps stretches of the summit reserved for the ceremony and the burials that continue, and the practitioners go on carrying up what they carry up and saying what they say. So the two histories hold the mountain together, and morning after morning the sun still climbs into the house that was built to keep it.

→ Related: Pele · Kane · Ku Hawaiian · Lono · Kanaloa · Kilauea · Puuhonua O Honaunau · Puukohola Heiau · The Marquesans · The Tahitians · The Kanaka Maoli