HAWAII HISTORY AND FOLKLORE It is thought that the first people to come to Hawaii arrived from Hiva in the southern Marquesas Islands around 400 A.D., though you will hear arguments from some experts that the Hawaiian Islands have been occupied since around 100 B.C. Later migrations probably came from Tahiti, as the Tahitians had the navigational skills to make the long journey in both directions. The existence of the Hawaiian Islands wasn't known to Europeans until the late eighteenth century. Captain James Cook had made a name for himself in exploring and mapping the South Pacific. At the time, the immensity of the Pacific Ocean still boggled European explorers and many thought that there might be a great passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It was on a quest to find this passage that Cook "discovered" the Sandwich Isles, which Cook named after John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich, who was the financial underwriter of Cook's voyage. In the early dawn of January 18, 1778, a deep blue island appeared to Cook's two ships, the Resolution and the Discovery. Lack of wind kept the ships from approaching shore and during the night, and the ships drifted from the island they'd spotted. They steered toward a second island, and in so doing, saw a third on the horizon. When the ships got closer to shore, a group of sturdy brown-skinned men, physically similar to the people Cook had encountered in his South Pacific explorations, launched canoes and approached Cook's ships, hailing them in a language that sounded to Cook and his men like that of the Society Islands. Cook landed on the island of Kauai. It was obvious to Cook that the Sandwich Isle natives, like the islands Cook had visited in the South Pacific, had made his voyages hundreds, if not thousands, of years in advance of his trip, and he was intrigued by the islanders' ocean skills. He never settled the issue of how the Polynesian settlers had traversed thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean without big ships or navigating instruments, and people are still exploring this question. The Polynesian Voyaging Society built the Hokule'a, which is Hawaiian for the bright star Arcturus, to prove that it was possible for the ancient Polynesians to migrate the huge distances between their isolated islands using a double-hulled canoe without the use of western navigational instruments. In 1976, the Hokule'a set out on a 5,000 mile roundtrip between Hawai'i and Kahiki (Tahiti), where chants and legend say the Hawaiians originated. The voyage proved that the traditional double-hulled vessel design and the ancient navigational techniques were capable of making the regular trips that the Polynesian claimed to have traveled. Along with the stories of Polynesian travels, the various island natives shared other similar beliefs, which they passed from generation to generation by way of chants and dances. It is interesting to note that the Hawaiians, Maoris, Tahitians, and Cook Islanders, for example, all tell stories about Mäui. And they all have little differences. Even within Hawai'i, there are different accounts of Mäui's exploits that depend on where you are in the state. West Mäui, East Mäui, Läna'i, Hawai'i, and O'ahu, tell slightly differing versions of the same tales. These stories in dance are still told today, to the delight of people all over the world. Hawaiian language is closely related to other Polynesian languages. 'Olelo Hawai'i belongs to a family of languages from central and eastern Polynesia, which includes Hawaiian, Tahitian, Tumotuan, Rarotongan and Maori. The arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778 marked not only the beginning of major changes for the people of Hawaii, but also changes in their language. Around 1820, missionaries from New England began to arrive in the islands. These people were determined to educate the Hawaiians, including teaching them to read and write. In order to do this, they needed to give the Hawaiian language a written form. The main goal of the missionaries was to teach Christianity to the "heathens," and nearly all of these people were untrained in linguistics, let alone life outside their own small New England towns. This affected the Hawaiians in a myriad of ways, and it changed the Hawaiian language forever. The newcomers were unable to distinguish between many of the sounds in the Hawaiian language, for example, they could not distinguish between t and k, l and r, or b and p. By the time the oral tradition was translated to paper, the alphabet for the Hawaiian language consisted of just 12 letters, all found in the English alphabet. To show the glottal break in the language, transcribers added the 'okina, which looks like a backwards apostrophe. Today, the Hawaiian alphabet consists of the vowels a, e, i, o and u, the consonants h, k, l, m, n, p and w, and the 'okina. HAWAIIAN MYTHOLOGY The ancients believed that the world was given birth by the night, whom they called Po. Po had a son named Kumulipo, who was the source of darkness, and he mated with his sister Po'ele, who was the deep, dark night. From these two sprang all the creatures of the world: the coral polyps on the ocean floor, the fish of the sea, the creatures on the land, and the birds in the sky. The Hawaiians had as many as 40,000 akua, or gods, and from these akua were born the Hawaiian people. The Hawaiian culture believed that everything in the world is related by birth, and as such, all parts of the Hawaiian world are of one indivisible lineage. The first child of Kumulipo and Po'ele was the coral polyp, an akua named Hina. Hina, which is a shortened version of wahine or the word for woman, gave birth to sea urchins, seaweeds, reef creatures, and their cousins of the land, fresh water shrimp, mosses, and small ferns. In ancient Hawaiian mythology, women were the source of new life and of mana, which is spiritual power. The Polynesians maintained that mana wahine, or the power of woman, was a force that could never be ignored. In the ancient Hawaiian scheme of genealogical ranking, the first ancestor was the most powerful. Consequently, it was wahine, or woman, who gave birth to new life, and it was woman who controlled the moon, the tides, the reefs, and the secret of fire. Hina was also the mother of the pig-god Kamapua'a, who taught the people how to plant kalo, or taro. To her other son, Mäui, she gave the power to slow the sun in its race through the heavens so that she could bring land from the bottom of the ocean for new generations to cultivate and live on. Mäui pushed up the sky so that people might walk upright, and he obtained the secret of fire from Hina's sisters, the Alae birds. The ancient Hawaiian women prayed to Hina for permission to pick medicinal herbs in the forest, and for skill in the delicate art of tapping out the kapa bark cloth that clothed the people. Women also prayed to Hina as the akua of reef fishing, for that was women's work. It was Hawaiian tradition that women were powerful because they gave birth, but men needed something to do as well, so they were allowed to govern the land. The Hawaiians divided their culture into female and male domains of work, and it was considered pono, or correct and righteous, to have a balance between the two. When there was balance in the world, the ancestral akua were pleased, and when there was perfect harmony in the universe, people were protected from harm. There were four major male akua: Ku, god of war; Lono, god of fertility and agriculture; Kane, god of sunlight and male essence (the word kane means man), and Kanaloa, god of the ocean. Each of these gods had a female counter part: Kuho'one'enu'u, the war goddess of O'ahu island, Lonowahine, the goddess of the Makahiki festivals, Kaneikawaiola, the goddess of fresh running water, and Namakaokaha'i, the goddess of the ocean. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thanks to... Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa, Ph.D., Director, Center for Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa John Fischer, on the Hawaii Visitors Bureau website Gavin Daws, Shoal of Time, A History of the Hawaiian Islands, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1968