Native Hawaiians

Hawaiian religion is set out at greatest length in the Kumulipo, a chant of two thousand lines tracing the world from darkness through the emergence of coral, of sea and land creatures in paired sequence, and finally of people and of the chiefly line that commissioned it. Martha Beckwith's translation and commentary is the standard scholarly edition. As a genealogical chant it is at once a cosmology and a claim to rank, because in Hawaiian terms those are the same thing.

Four great gods stand at the centre: Ku, associated with war, forest and the deep sea; Kane, with fresh water and with life; Lono, with agriculture, rain and the Makahiki season; and Kanaloa, with the ocean. Beside them stand the family gods, the aumakua, who take the form of a shark, an owl or another creature and belong to particular lineages, and Pele, whose presence in the volcano is not a matter of the past tense.

The kapu system regulated all of it. Restrictions governed what could be eaten and by whom, who could enter which ground, and how a person of rank was to be approached, and the penalty for breach could be death. Beckwith's collection of the wider mythology sets the deities and the heroes within that framework rather than extracting them from it.

The kapu system was ended by Hawaiians. In 1819, after Kamehameha I died, the regent Kaahumanu and the young king Liholiho broke the eating restriction in public, the temples were ordered destroyed, and the state religion was abolished. American Congregational missionaries arrived the following year into a religious vacuum that Hawaiians had made, which is a large part of why conversion proceeded as rapidly as it did.

What followed was demographic collapse from introduced disease, the transfer of land into private and foreign hands, and, in 1893, the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani by a group of American and European businessmen with support from United States forces, followed by annexation in 1898. The Hawaiian language was excluded from schools for most of the twentieth century.

The Hawaiian renaissance from the 1970s reversed a good deal of that. Hula was restored as a religious and historical practice rather than an entertainment, the language was brought back through immersion schooling, and the voyaging canoe Hokulea sailed to Tahiti in 1976. Religious claims followed: the protection of burials, the return of ancestral remains and of objects, and the dispute over the summit of Mauna Kea, where the state established a new stewardship authority in 2022 after protests over telescope construction. Sam Low's account of the voyaging revival records how closely all of it is connected.