Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau

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The pursuit ends at the stone. A man has run the coast trail with a death-claim at his back — he has broken a kapu, the sacred law whose breaking is death, and by the breaking has forfeited his life to the akua and to the chief whose law it was — and where a great lava wall stands between the shore and the interior he goes over it, or around its seaward end, into the ground beyond. His pursuers stop at the wall. They cannot follow, because what lies past it is a puʻuhonua, a place of refuge, and the fugitive who reaches it has, from that moment, stepped outside the reach of the debt he owes. A kahuna pule, a priest of the refuge, will say the words of absolution over him, and in a day or two he will walk home noa — free, released, the offense lifted as though it had never been laid to his account.

That is the whole strange work of the place, and it is worth stating plainly before anything else: this is ground on which a death sentence becomes an absolution. The wall is the visible edge of it. On one side is the ordinary world where the kapu holds and its breach is fatal; on the other is the consecrated refuge where the same act can be undone. And the power that draws the line — the tradition is exact about this — is not in the stones. It is in the bones of the chiefs that lie a short way inside them.

A ground set apart

A puʻuhonua is a place made noa in advance, ground on which the ordinary reach of the sacred law is suspended, so that the one who crosses into it is put beyond the law’s claim. Several such refuges existed across the islands; tradition names others on Oʻahu, on Kauaʻi, and elsewhere on Hawaiʻi. The greatest and the best preserved is the one on Honaunau Bay, in the district of South Kona on the west coast of Hawaiʻi Island — a shelf of black lava and coconut grove at the water’s edge, backed by the pali and fronted by the sea, its royal ground the seat of the ruling aliʻi of the district. Today that ground is a federal park of about 420 acres, but the shape it holds is the old one: a walled royal compound, and beyond the wall the refuge itself.

The sanctity of the place is genealogical in the most literal sense. In the Hawaiian understanding, mana — the realized spiritual power that runs through the cosmos and its lineages — is concentrated in the highest chiefs, and it does not leave them at death. It stays with the iwi, the bones. To gather the bones of deified aliʻi into one house was therefore to gather a great charge of mana into one place, and it is that charge, the tradition holds, that makes the refuge a refuge. The pursuing warrior halts at the wall not because a rule forbids him but because the ground beyond is saturated with a power he dare not cross into against.

How the site reaches the record is a matter to keep distinct from what the tradition says about it, and the two do not perfectly agree. The archaeologists and the National Park Service read the great enclosing wall as a work of roughly the mid-sixteenth century, more than five hundred years old, and the burial temple within as later, of about 1650 to 1700; the nineteenth-century Hawaiian accounts and the moʻolelo, the traditional narratives, carry the names and the meanings but vary, as oral traditions of depth always do, on the origin and even the naming of the structures. The tradition-internal claim — that the mana of the chiefs’ bones sanctifies the ground — is not something archaeology confirms or denies; it is the thing the whole site is built around, and the honest course is to keep the three registers side by side rather than collapse them: what the people who keep the ground say it is, what the excavators date it to, and what the documented history records happening to it.

The wall, and the mana it guards

The offense that sent a man running could be small in the outsider’s eye and total in its consequence. To let one’s shadow fall across a high chief, to take the fish or the food reserved for another rank or another sex to the wrong eating place, to set foot on consecrated ground — any of these threw the order dangerously out of balance, and the balance had to be restored. In the frame of the tradition the debt was real and the akua would exact it; the transgressor’s life was forfeit. There was, however, an escape written into the system itself. If the offender could outrun the pursuit and reach a puʻuhonua, the claim could no longer follow him across the threshold. The way in was not always the land trail; those cut off from the coast could take to the water and swim across Honaunau Bay to the refuge from the sea, and the accounts hold that reaching the ground by any route was enough. Inside, the kahuna pule performed the ceremony of absolution, and the kapu-breaker was made noa and could go home, in a day or two, as though the offense had never happened. The balance was restored — but by ritual rather than by blood. The refuge did the same work in war: the vanquished, and the non-combatants — the old, the women, the children — could shelter here while the fighting passed the district, and leave unharmed when it was over. It was, in the plainest description, an institution for turning death back into life without unbalancing the sacred order that demanded the death.

The mortarless lava walls of Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau — uhau humu pohaku, “stone laid on stone” — where each rough block is set so as to lock against its neighbors. Haleykierstenbork, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Great Wall is the physical form of that threshold. It is uhau humu pohaku — dry-set lava masonry, stone laid on stone without mortar, the rough blocks fitted so that they lock against one another like interlocking teeth and hold by their own weight and bite. It stands about twelve feet high and some seventeen feet thick, and it runs close to a thousand feet along an L that encloses roughly five acres, dividing the aliʻi’s royal grounds from the consecrated refuge on its seaward side. Built with no mortar and no metal, it was laid so well that, by the account the Park keeps of it, over eighty percent of the original wall was still standing intact when the site was restored in the late 1960s. The masons worked in more than one technique — the wall preserves evidence of paʻo, a caverned method in which lava slabs are bridged across upright columns, alongside the straightforward stacking of the courses — and the whole was raised without the aid of any tool of iron. It is easy to read the wall as a fortification and wrong to leave the reading there. It is a boundary of sanctity made visible — the drawn line between the world where the kapu kills and the ground where the kapu is lifted.

The source of the refuge’s protective force stood a short way within the wall, on a platform at the water’s edge: the Hale o Keawe, a mausoleum that was also a heiau, a temple. It is named for Keaweʻīkekahialiʻiokamoku, a ruling aliʻi nui of Hawaiʻi Island of about the turn of the eighteenth century, either built by him or for him and his line. Into it the bones of high chiefs were gathered — the Park and the tradition record the remains of some twenty-three chiefly persons brought there, a last interment made about 1818, on the very eve of the old order’s end. The mana of those deified aliʻi, living on with their iwi, was the reservoir that sanctified the whole puʻuhonua; the house that held them was, in effect, the engine of the refuge. And it did not stand unguarded. Around it stood the kiʻi — the great carved wooden images of the akua, tall figures of ʻōhiʻa and other native hardwoods, set to keep the temple and the power within it. The divine force of the ancestors, made a shield for the living: that is the claim the ground turns on, and it is a coherent one on its own terms.

Kiʻi — carved wooden images of the akua — standing at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau. Such figures surrounded the Hale o Keawe, guarding the temple and the mana of the chiefs’ bones within it. Thomas Tunsch, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Set against the other great works of the same sacred order, the refuge shows its distinctive character. The luakini temples of the war god Kū — chief among them the war-heiau Puʻukoholā that Kamehameha raised to gather the mana he needed to conquer the archipelago — concentrated a divine power that took life in order to win and to rule. The puʻuhonua concentrated a divine power aimed the other way: it gave life back. Both drew on the same currency of mana and the same architecture of set-apart ground and consecrated image; the difference was in the direction of the work. One temple was built so that a king might unite an island group by conquest; the refuge existed so that the smallest transgressor, or the defeated of that very conquest, might be handed his life again. In a religious world often described from outside only through its severities, the puʻuhonua is the institution of mercy built into the system’s own logic.

The undoing, and the ground that endured

The refuge’s office was ended not by any assault on the place but by the revolution that ended the sacred law across the whole archipelago. In 1819, months after the death of Kamehameha I, his heir Liholiho — Kamehameha II — sat down to eat with the women of the court and with the powerful kuhina nui Kaʻahumanu in the act called the ʻai noa, the free eating, and with that deliberate breach of the eating kapu the system of sacred prohibition was formally thrown down. The kapu that the puʻuhonua existed to relieve was, from that year, no longer in force; and a refuge whose whole function was to absolve the breaking of a law now had, in the new order, no law to absolve. Its absolving power was left without an office. (This is the same overturning that reordered every sacred institution on the islands, from the war temples to the seasonal peace of the Makahiki; its fuller telling belongs to the living people who carried the change and its aftermath, the Kanaka Maoli.)

A decade later the house itself was taken down. In 1829 Kaʻahumanu, by then a Christian convert and the effective regent of the kingdom, ordered the Hale o Keawe dismantled. The record kept of the temple is precise about its fate: the chiefly bones were removed to Kaʻawaloa, up the coast at Kealakekua Bay; the great timbers of the frame were carried off to build a school and a government house; and smaller pieces of its kauila-wood framework were given as keepsakes to the missionaries. The kiʻi and the temple were scattered. What had been the engine of the refuge was disassembled and its charge dispersed — an act, in the new dispensation, of clearing away what the mission called idolatry, though that word belongs to the outside record and not to the thing it was aimed at.

The ground, though, endured. Through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth the walled shelf on Honaunau Bay remained, its wall largely standing, and in the middle of the twentieth century it passed into a new frame of keeping. On July 26, 1955 it was established as a federal park under the name City of Refuge National Historical Park — the English gloss that missionary translators had long reached for, borrowing the cities of refuge of the Hebrew scripture to render a thing that was not quite the same. In 1978 the park was given its own name back: Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park, some 420 acres on the bay. In 1966–67 the archaeologist Edmund Ladd directed the excavation and stabilization of the Hale o Keawe platform, and the thatched house, the wooden palisade, and newly carved kiʻi were raised again on it; a further restoration was carried through in the years around 2004. The reconstructed temple that stands at the water today is not the mausoleum of the chiefs — their bones are gone — but it marks the place the mana was held, and it stands ringed again by the carved images that guarded it.

The park preserves more than the wall and the temple. On the royal grounds within the enclosure lie the platforms of older heiau, the stone-walled royal fishponds, the remains of a coastal village, and the hōlua — the tracks of the chiefly sledding runs, down which the aliʻi raced narrow sleds on beds of grass. Together they make the ground legible as what it was: a working royal seat with its refuge attached, not a single monument but a landscape of the old order.

What that ground is now is not a museum of a defeated faith, and the outside language that would make it one is to be set aside. The mission-era vocabulary of “idols” and “superstition,” and the later tourist trade that reduces the kiʻi to postcard “tiki” kitsch, are both distortions worked upon the place from outside it; neither describes what the images are or were. For the Kanaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people, the ground is still sacred, kept in a living practice and not a remembered one — and the park is one of only four places in all Hawaiʻi, with ʻIolani Palace, Mauna ʻAla, and Thomas Square, where the flag of the Hawaiian Kingdom may officially fly alone, without the flag of the United States above it. The bones that made the refuge were carried off long ago, and the law they relieved was thrown down two centuries back. But the wall still turns toward the sea where a fugitive once crossed it out of death, and the ground it encloses is tended still by the people whose chiefs once lay there — held not as a ruin but as a puʻuhonua, ground set apart.

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