Pele

The chant traditions describe Pele arriving from a homeland called Kahiki and travelling down the Hawaiian chain looking for a home. She digs a pit at Niihau, then Kauai, then Oahu, then Molokai, then Maui, and each time she strikes water and the fire is quenched, until she reaches Hawaii island in the southeast and digs Halemaumau at the summit of Kilauea, which is deep enough and dry enough, and there she stays.

The Hawaiian islands were formed by a stationary hotspot in the mantle over which the Pacific plate moves northwest. Kauai is roughly five million years old, Oahu about three, Maui somewhat over one, and Hawaii island is still being built, with Kilauea erupting for much of the past forty years. The islands are progressively older to the northwest, which is why the older ones are eroded, deeply weathered and full of groundwater, and the youngest is bare lava. Pele's route follows that sequence exactly, from oldest to youngest, and her failures follow it too, since the wet pits she abandons are precisely the islands whose volcanism has ended and whose rock has had time to hold water.

This is not geological knowledge in the modern sense and should not be presented as prophecy. It is a record of close and accumulated observation of a landscape by people who lived on it for centuries and could see that the northwestern islands were worn down and quiet while the southeastern one was raw and burning. The chant encodes an accurate relative chronology.

The tradition is current. Offerings are left at the crater rim; families trace descent from Pele and from her sister Hiiaka; hula halau maintain her chants; and during eruptions, including the Leilani Estates flows of 2018, Hawaiian residents and officials alike spoke of the lava as her action. Geothermal drilling on Kilauea has been opposed on the grounds that it violates her, and that objection has been argued in court.

Pele's sister Hi'iaka has her own extended narrative cycle, the Hi'iakaikapoliopele saga, which stands as one of the major works of Hawaiian literature and a crucial source for understanding the fuller Pele tradition beyond the volcano goddess's own core chants. The story follows Hi'iaka's long and perilous journey across the Hawaiian islands, undertaken at Pele's command, to fetch Pele's mortal lover Lohiau from Kauai and bring him back to Kilauea, an errand complicated by numerous supernatural encounters, romantic tension, and eventually a serious rupture between the sisters when Pele, believing Hi'iaka has betrayed her, destroys Hi'iaka's beloved groves of trees in her absence. This saga survives today chiefly because it was recorded and published serially, chapter by chapter, in Hawaiian-language newspapers in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when a literate Hawaiian public sustained a vigorous indigenous-language press even as the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893 and the language itself came under increasing external pressure, and the newspaper serialization of moolelo, traditional narratives, like the Hi'iaka cycle was a major way that older oral literature was deliberately preserved in written form by Hawaiian writers and editors during exactly this period of political upheaval.

Modern scholars and Hawaiian-language revitalization efforts have returned to these serializations as primary sources, since they represent versions recorded by Native Hawaiian writers for a Native Hawaiian readership rather than accounts filtered through outside colonial recorders, giving the Hi'iaka cycle particular value as a comparatively unmediated window into how Pele's story was understood within the community itself.