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"The oral traditions collected herein are a tribute to the 'living spirit and divine courage' of [Pacific island] voyagers." -from the Introduction by Dennis Kawaharada
A novel about a great Polynesian voyaging canoe; "Takitumu"; and the people who sailed across Te Moana Nui a Kiva (the Pacific Ocean).
"Hawaiian Fishing Legends" an excellent catch for reader (Book Review). Tino Ramirez. Sunday Honolulu Advertiser and Star Bulletin. March 1992. Hawaii was never a paradise, where fruit fell from the trees and fish leapt from the ocean for the sake of man. Before Western contact, between 300,000 to 1 million Hawaiians lived in the islands, gathering food from the mountains; farming the valleys and uplands and harvesting fish and water-life from streams, fishponds, and the ocean. To ensure abundance and the fair distribution of food, these resource areas had to be carefully managed, as editor Dennis Kawaharada points out in the introduction to "Hawaiian Fishing Legends." One prevalent management method was the kapu, or banning of an activity. In Ka'u on the Big Island, for example, a kapu was placed on inshore fishing and gathering during the winter. allowing the marine life to regenerate. To end the kapu, a kahuna, or priest, went to the coast and examined the seaweed, shellfish and fish. Breakers of fishing kapu could be sentenced to death, or killed by a shark, as was a woman who caught too many squid on Oahu's North Shore. When fishing commenced, the social classes went out in turn. according to protocol. Distribution of the catch was also ordered by customary practice, depending on who caught the fish and how many were involved in the effort. Perhaps those required to be most generous were the alii, the ruling class. Kawaharada refers to the greedy chief Ha-la-ela, who drowned when his canoe sank under the weight of all the fish he had demanded from his subjects. Culled from various sources such as Thomas Thrum's "Hawaiian Folk Tales," Abraham Fornander's "Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities," and the Hawaiian language newspaper "Ka Hoku o Hawaii," the legends in this collection celebrate the accomplishments of the ancient fishers, giving us insight into their values. Ku'ula-kai of Maui, for example, devotes himself to fishing, working diligently and taking care of all his relationships, religious and secular. The fishpond he builds feeds the area's alii: when his neighbors have no fish, he freely gives his own. His story demonstrates what happens when the proper order of things is ignored, when the alii and people listen to a troublemaker, forget Ku'ula-kai's righteousness, and kill the great fisherman who fed them. The fish disappear and everyone starves. Only after Ku'ula-kai's surviving son restores his parents' spirits to the coast do the fish return, and the alii is killed by his own appetite. Eventually, Ku'ula-kai is deified as a fishing god. These legends, some translated from the Hawaiian language by Esther Mookini especially for the collection, stand well on their own as stories. The glossary, maps of the legendary sites, and Kawaharada's extensive introduction and notes enrich them. Providing references to other legends and stories associated with the places named, the notes also describe Polynesian fishing practices, from the use of stone images to lure turtles, to the building of log platforms for catching freshwater 'o'opu. The second book of works translated from the Hawaiian and published by Kalamaku Press in two years, "Hawaiian Fishing Legends" is another welcome volume to the body of Hawaiian literature. Besides being a good read, this one makes a lot of material available to scholars, teachers and writers. The proper practice of many of the fishing techniques described here may be forgotten, but the legends' values, characters and metaphors are not.
Tracing the origins of the Hawaiians and other Polynesians back to the shores of the South China Sea, archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch follows their voyages of discovery across the Pacific in this fascinating history of Hawaiian culture from about one thousand years ago. Combining more than four decades of his own research with Native Hawaiian oral traditions and the evidence of archaeology, Kirch puts a human face on the gradual rise to power of the Hawaiian god-kings, who by the late eighteenth century were locked in a series of wars for ultimate control of the entire archipelago. This lively, accessible chronicle works back from Captain James Cook’s encounter with the pristine kingdom in 1778, when the British explorers encountered an island civilization governed by rulers who could not be gazed upon by common people. Interweaving anecdotes from his own widespread travel and extensive archaeological investigations into the broader historical narrative, Kirch shows how the early Polynesian settlers of Hawai'i adapted to this new island landscape and created highly productive agricultural systems.
The stories of Kauai's ruling chiefs were passed from generation to generation in songs and narratives recited by trained storytellers either formally at the high chief's court or informally at family gatherings. Their chronology was ordered by a ruler's genealogy, which, in the case of the pua alii (flower of royalty), was illustrious and far reaching and could be traced to one of the four great gods of Polynesia--Käne, Kü, Lono, and Kanaloa. In these legends, Hawaiians of old sought answers to the questions "Who are we?" "Who are our ancestors and where do they come from?" "What lessons can be learned from their conduct?" Nä Pua Alii o Kauai presents the stories of the men and women who ruled the island of Kauai from its first settlement to the final rebellion against Kamehameha I's forces in 1824. Only fragments remain of the nearly two-thousand-year history of the people who inhabited Kauai before the coming of James Cook in 1778. Now scattered in public and private archives and libraries, these pieces of Hawaii's precontact past were recorded in the nineteenth century by such determined individuals as David Malo, Samuel Kamakau, and Abraham Fornander. All known genealogical references to the Kauai alii nui (paramount chiefs) have been gathered here and placed in chronological order and are interspersed with legends of great voyages, bitter wars, courageous heroes, and passionate romances that together form a rich and invaluable resource.
This narrative recounts the 18th and 19th century shipping out of Pacific islanders aboard European and American vessels, a kind of counter-exploring, that echoed the ancient voyages of settlement of their island ancestors.
Written by a senior scholar and master mariner, Sailors and Traders is the first comprehensive account of the maritime peoples of the Pacific. It focuses on the sailors who led the exploration and settlement of the islands and New Zealand and their seagoing descendants, providing along the way new material and unique observations on traditional and commercial seagoing against the background of major periods in Pacific history. The book begins by detailing the traditions of sailors, a group whose way of life sets them apart. Like all others who live and work at sea, Pacific mariners face the challenges of an often harsh environment, endure separation from their families for months at a time, revere their vessels, and share a singular attitude to risk and death. The period of prehistoric seafaring is discussed using archaeological data, interpretations from interisland exchanges, experimental voyaging, and recent DNA analysis. Sections on the arrival of foreign exploring ships centuries later concentrate on relations between visiting sailors and maritime communities. The more intrusive influx of commercial trading and whaling ships brought new technology, weapons, and differences in the ethics of trade. The successes and failures of Polynesian chiefs who entered trading with European-type ships are recounted as neglected aspects of Pacific history. As foreign-owned commercial ships expanded in the region so did colonialism, which was accompanied by an increase in the number of sailors from metropolitan countries and a decrease in the employment of Pacific islanders on foreign ships. Eventually small-scale island entrepreneurs expanded interisland shipping, and in 1978 the regional Pacific Forum Line was created by newly independent states. This was welcomed as a symbolic return to indigenous Pacific ocean linkages. The book’s final sections detail the life of the modern Pacific seafarer. Most Pacific sailors in the global maritime labor market return home after many months at sea, bringing money, goods, a wider perspective of the world, and sometimes new diseases. Each of these impacts is analyzed, particularly in the case of Kiribati, a major supplier of labor to foreign ships.
Relative to the other habited places on our planet, Hawai‘i has a very short history. The Hawaiian archipelago was the last major land area on the planet to be settled, with Polynesians making the long voyage just under a millennium ago. Our understanding of the social, political, and economic changes that have unfolded since has been limited until recently by how little we knew about the first five centuries of settlement. Building on new archaeological and historical research, Sumner La Croix assembles here the economic history of Hawai‘i from the first Polynesian settlements in 1200 through US colonization, the formation of statehood, and to the present day. He shows how the political and economic institutions that emerged and evolved in Hawai‘i during its three centuries of global isolation allowed an economically and culturally rich society to emerge, flourish, and ultimately survive annexation and colonization by the United States. The story of a small, open economy struggling to adapt its institutions to changes in the global economy, Hawai‘i offers broadly instructive conclusions about economic evolution and development, political institutions, and native Hawaiian rights.
A first study from an archaeological perspective of the elaborate systems of Polynesian chiefdoms presents an original account of the processes of cultural change and evolution over three millennia.
