The Hawaiians

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A feathered head the size of a man’s torso, its mouth a snarl of dog teeth, its eyes of pearl shell, its crest a comb of red and yellow feathers lashed to a basket of woven vine — this is how the war-god Ku came to those who served him. Few of these images survive; the one that Kalaniopuu, the ruling chief of Hawaii Island, gave to Captain James Cook in 1779 now sits in a museum in London. It was never a portrait. It was a body the god could occupy, dense with the potency the Hawaiians called mana, and to stand before it without the right was to risk one’s life. The people who made it were the Kanaka Maoli, the real people, the human ali’i and maka’ainana of the islands at the northern point of the Polynesian triangle — and the order their gods enforced reached from that feathered head down into what a person might eat, and when, and beside whom.

The voyage to the northern point

The Hawaiians are the northernmost of the Polynesians, and they reached their islands last and farthest. The ancestral Polynesian society crystallized in the Tonga–Samoa region out of the seafaring Austronesian world whose archaeological marker is the Lapita cultural complex, roughly 1500 to 500 BCE; from that hearth, voyagers in double-hulled canoes pushed east across the central and marginal Pacific, and at some point in the first millennium CE — the dating remains under revision in the archaeology — they raised the Hawaiian chain over the horizon, the most isolated archipelago on earth, more than two thousand miles from any other inhabited land.

Hawaiian tradition does not measure this in centuries. It remembers a homeland, Kahiki — the same word that names Tahiti and that answers to the wider Polynesian Hawaiki, the ancestral place and the road the dead travel back along — and the genealogical chants register voyaging waves, named canoes, named navigators. The demigod Maui, the most widely told figure in all of Polynesia, fished the islands up from the sea-floor with his hook; he snared the sun at the summit of Haleakala on Maui island to slow its passage so his mother could dry her bark-cloth. These are not the same kind of statement as a Lapita date, and a Hawaiian narrator would not confuse them, but they sit in the same world: the islands are at once a landfall reached by instruments of star and swell and bird, and the catch of a god’s line.

In their long isolation the Hawaiians built one of the most steeply ranked of all Polynesian societies. At its head stood the ali’i, the chiefs, graded by the purity of their descent; below them the maka’ainana, the people who worked the land and the sea; and apart from both, the kahuna, the trained experts — prayer-priests, healers, canoe-makers, the architect-diviners who sited a temple or a fishpond. Rank was not a courtesy. It was a measure of how much divine potency a person carried, and the highest chiefs carried so much that their bodies, their possessions, even their shadows falling across a commoner could be lethal.

The chant of the source

What bound this order together was genealogy, and the supreme statement of Hawaiian genealogy is the Kumulipo — “the source in deepest darkness.” It is a ko’ihonua, a genealogical prayer-chant of 2,102 lines, composed in honor of a high chief and carried by chanters for generations before King Kalakaua had it printed in 1889; Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last sovereign of the kingdom, made the standard English translation while under house arrest after her throne was taken from her.

The chant is built in sixteen wa, eras. The earliest belong to the po, the primordial darkness, the age before the present world’s light, and they unfold not a single act of making but a long birthing-out: the coral polyp comes first, and from it, paired male and female, upland and seaward, the sea-creatures and their land-counterparts, the fishes and the plants and the insects and the animals, each generation slipping out of the dark after the one before. Only in the later wa, in the ao, the daylight, do the gods and the first humans appear, and from them the long line of chiefs descends, unbroken, down to the historical ali’i of the eighteenth century in whose honor the chant was made.

The effect is total. The chief at the end of the Kumulipo is not merely well-born; he is the living terminus of a line that runs back through every animal and plant to the first stirring in the dark. His genealogy is the natural history of the world. This is why the chant was a sovereign instrument as much as a sacred one: to recite it was to locate the ruler at the piko, the umbilical center, of the whole created order. The chant is not a relic. In September 2025, performers chanted all 2,102 lines at ʻIolani Palace in Honolulu.

The four gods, the guardians, and the law

Above the chiefs stood the akua, the great gods, conventionally a quartet. Kane was the god of life — of fresh water, sunlight, procreation, the living force in things. Ku was the upright one, the god of war and of the forest and of deep-sea fishing, invoked under a swarm of named forms, of which the war-form Kukailimoku, “Ku the snatcher of land,” was the special god of the ruling chief. Lono was rain and cultivation and healing and peace, whose season, the Makahiki, suspended war for the harvest. And Kanaloa was the deep ocean, paired again and again with Kane in invocation. Whether Kanaloa was originally a darker, underworld-tending figure is debated among scholars; the chants as they survive give him the sea.

The gods were not distant. Each was met through kinolau, the many bodily forms — a particular plant, a stone, a fish, a cloud-shape — in which the god was sensibly, physically present. And below the great akua ranged the ‘aumakua: the deified ancestors, the guardians of a particular family, who came to their living descendants in animal form. For one lineage the ‘aumakua appeared as a shark, who would turn a capsized fisherman toward shore; for another as the owl, the pueo, or the lizard, the mo’o. To meet one’s family’s shark in open water was to meet one’s own grandfather.

A feathered image (akua hulu manu) of the war-god Kū, eighteenth century. Photograph by Wikimedia user Lebrac, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Two paired ideas made this world operate. The first was mana — the realized potency, the efficacy, that flowed from a divine source down through genealogy, through ritual correctness, through mastery of a craft. Mana pooled most densely in the highest ali’i; it was why their persons were dangerous. (Whether mana in everyday Hawaiian speech was a thing that could be possessed, or rather a quality of acts that worked — a verb more than a noun — is one of the longest-running arguments in Pacific anthropology, and it is not settled here.)

The second was kapu — the sacred prohibition, the law of the set-apart. Where mana was potency, kapu was the fence that channeled and protected it. Kapu marked the highest chiefs, the temple, the refuge, certain seasons, certain foods, certain acts, as forbidden to the wrong person at the wrong time; its opposite was noa, the free, the common, the safe-to-touch. Kapu ordered the entire texture of life. It set which fish might be eaten and by whom, and in which months; it set the rank-distance a commoner kept from a chief. Its most pervasive expression was the ‘aikapu, the eating-kapu, under which men and women could not eat together and certain foods — pork, bananas, coconut, some fish — were closed to women altogether. To break a serious kapu was, in principle, to die for it.

The architecture of this religion was stone. The heiau were temple-platforms, walled and terraced, ranging from the small agricultural shrines where Lono was asked for crops to the great luakini, the war-temples that admitted human offerings and were the prerogative of the ruling chief alone. The luakini was the gravest institution of the tradition, dedicated to Ku, and the tradition named it plainly as such: the highest sacrifice was made there, a man’s life laid before the war-god. It is recorded soberly here as the tradition’s own — never as spectacle. When Kamehameha built the great heiau of Puʻukoholā to Kukailimoku in 1790–91, its dedication was such a rite.

Puʻukoholā Heiau, the luakini war-temple built by Kamehameha I to Kūkāʻilimoku, 1790–91, Kawaihae, Hawaiʻi Island. Photograph by Agau007, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The land itself was alive with gods, and none more present than the volcano. On Hawaii Island the fire-goddess Pele dwells in the crater of Halemaʻumaʻu at the summit of Kilauea; her sister Poliʻahu holds the snows of the high peak. The mountains were not scenery but ancestors and elder kin — a relation that, on Mauna Kea, the firstborn mountain, remains the heart of a living contest today.

Lava fountaining from the Fissure 8 cone during the 2018 eruption of Kīlauea, the volcano in which the goddess Pele dwells. Photograph by the U.S. Geological Survey, public domain.

The free eating, and the year before the mission

By the start of the nineteenth century the islands, long divided among rival chiefdoms, were drawn into a single kingdom. Kamehameha I conquered Hawaii, Maui, and Oahu by war — the decisive battle at Nuʻuanu on Oahu was fought in 1795 — and in April 1810 completed the unification when the chief of Kauaʻi, Kaumualiʻi, ceded the last island peacefully and held it as a tributary king. For the first time the whole chain answered to one ruler, and that ruler governed within the old order, building temples and keeping the kapu.

Then, within months of Kamehameha’s death, the order ended from within. He died in May 1819; his son Liholiho acceded as Kamehameha II into a kingdom where the kapu had been quietly fraying. Foreign captains had for years sat to table with Hawaiian women aboard their ships, eating the forbidden foods together, and no divine punishment had visibly followed. In November 1819, at Kailua-Kona, pressed by the two most powerful women of the realm — Kaʻahumanu, the formidable favorite widow of Kamehameha I and now regent, and Keōpūolani, the young king’s mother and the highest-ranked chiefess alive — Liholiho sat down to a public feast and deliberately ate with the women. The deepest kapu of the eating-law was broken in the open, by the king himself. The guests cried out ʻai noa — the free eating, the eating made common. The high priest Hewahewa ordered the temple images thrown down and the heiau burned across the kingdom.

Not everyone consented. Liholiho’s cousin Kekuaokalani, who kept the war-god Kukailimoku, rose in arms to defend the old religion and was defeated and killed at the battle of Kuamoʻo in December 1819. The system did not erode; it was abolished, by its own rulers, in a single season.

Into precisely this opening the first American Calvinist missionaries sailed. The brig Thaddeus, sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, made the Hawaiian coast in the spring of 1820, about a year after the ʻai noa — arriving to find the temples already cast down and the old law already gone. The historical irony is hard to overstate, and Hawaiian and academic historians alike have stressed it: the indigenous decision had dismantled the institution of the older religion before Christian instruction began, which is much of why the conversion that followed, taken up by Kaʻahumanu and the chiefly class, moved so fast. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins read the ʻai noa as the structural transformation of a system whose powerful women had developed interests the inherited eating-law could no longer hold; Hawaiian scholars such as Lilikalā Kameʻeleihiwa read it as a sovereignly Hawaiian act, not a missionary effect. The reading is contested. The fact and the date are not.

There is a related caution that belongs here. A body of twentieth-century New Age writing, launched by an American named Max Freedom Long in the 1930s and marketed ever since as “Huna,” the “ancient secret” of the Hawaiian kahuna, dresses New Thought and popular occultism in borrowed Hawaiian words. Native Hawaiian scholars and the archival record are united and blunt about it: it is a Western fabrication, repudiated by the community whose vocabulary it took. It is not part of this tradition, and it is named here only to set it outside.

The taking of a nation, and its return

The Hawaiian kingdom that the missionaries entered was a recognized sovereign state, with treaties, a constitution, and a flag. It did not survive the century. As American sugar planters and businessmen grew dominant in the islands’ economy, they grew impatient with Hawaiian rule. On January 17, 1893, a self-styled Committee of Safety led by the planter-descended Lorrin Thurston deposed Queen Liliʻuokalani — the same queen who would translate the Kumulipo — and proclaimed a provisional government. They did not act alone: the United States minister, John L. Stevens, had ordered 162 sailors and Marines from the USS Boston ashore the day before, and their presence was decisive. The Republic of Hawaii was declared on July 4, 1894, with the planter Sanford Dole as president.

Queen Liliʻuokalani, photographed in 1891 by James J. Williams. The last reigning monarch of Hawaiʻi, deposed in 1893; she later translated the Kumulipo. Public domain.

Annexation followed five years later. By the Newlands Resolution of July 1898, the United States took the islands; the formal transfer was made at ʻIolani Palace on August 12, 1898. A people who had held one of the largest sovereign reaches in the Pacific, who had received a queen’s translation of the chant of the source as an act of memory under house arrest, had their nation taken by the descendants of the merchants who came in the wake of the mission. (A century later, in 1993, the United States Congress passed and President Clinton signed a formal apology to Native Hawaiians for the American role in the overthrow.)

The people did not vanish, and the tradition did not end. The later twentieth century brought what is called the Hawaiian Renaissance — a deliberate, generational reclaiming. The hula, suppressed and trivialized for a century, returned as the serious art and the embodied memory it had always been. The Hawaiian language, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, banned from the schools after annexation and pushed to the edge of extinction, was carried back through immersion schools, the pūnana leo, where children once again learned it as a first tongue. And in 1976 the double-hulled voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa, built by the Polynesian Voyaging Society, sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti without instruments — guided by Mau Piailug, a master navigator from Satawal in Micronesia who agreed to teach the star-knowledge outside his own lineage so that it would not die — and proved on the open ocean that the wayfinding science that first found these islands was recoverable. Out of that voyage came a revived navigation of stars and swells and birds — the navigators’ reading of the sky belonging to the same order of trained divination as the priest’s reading of omens — and a new generation of Hawaiian navigators.

Alongside the language and the chant and the canoe runs a movement for sovereignty — the claim that the nation taken in 1893 was never lawfully surrendered, and that something of it is owed back. That claim is unfinished, and it is not for an outside reckoning to close. What can be said is plainer: the Kanaka Maoli are a living people, and the Kumulipo, sung again to its last of 2,102 lines in the palace where their queen was deposed, still names them the descendants of the first light out of the dark.

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