Before the development of a written Hawaiian language in the early 19th century, oral histories were the Hawaiians’ links to the past. When the population of native Hawaiians began collapsing at about the same time, a number of authors took on the task of setting down the stories about Hawaii’s past in written form. Because of the nature of oral histories, variations in the written versions of the stories reflected the mindsets and biases of the story tellers, translators, and authors. As Winston Church noted “History is written by the victors.”
This website relies in particular on the writings of David Malo, the Reverend Sheldon Dibble, Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau, Abraham Fornander, King Kalakaua (with Rollin Daggett), Martha Beckwith, Mark Twain, and Mary Kawena Pukui. These authors set down stories that can be used to characterize the history of the island of Hawaii.
Completed in 1839, by David Malo, Hawaiian Antiquities (Mo‘olelo Hawaii) is an account of Hawaiian culture and society in pre-contact times. Born in North Kona on the island of Hawaii in about 1793, Malo was raised under the kapu tradition among the chiefs, priests, artisans and scholars of the court of Kamehameha I. He attended Lahainaluna Seminary where he became a student of the Reverend William Richards. Malo was ordained in the Christian ministry but married a woman whose “dissolute ways” drove him to distraction and eventually caused him to choose to die.
The newlyweds Reverend and Mrs. Sheldon Dibble arrived in Honolulu after a voyage of 161 days, on June 7, 1831. The Reverend Sheldon Dibble had an interest in early Hawaiian history and traditions. While teaching at Lahainaluna, he encouraged his pupils to collect and write down folklore and used their material in his History of the Hawaiian People, which was published in 1843.
The Dibbles had been summoned to Hawaii by the Reverend Hirum Bingham whose writings reflected the Calvinistic moral rigor the early missionaries brought with them from New England, as reflected by Bingham’s description of Hawaiian surfers:
“The appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism, among the chattering and almost naked savages, whose heads and feet, and much of their sunburnt skins were bare, was appalling. Some of our number, with gushing tears, turned away from the spectacle. Others, with firmer nerve, continued their gaze, but were ready to exclaim, ‘Can these be human beings?!… Can such things be civilized?’”
Sharing a similar sentiment, Dibble later wrote: “The evils resulting from all these sports and amusements have in part been named… But the greatest evil of all resulted from the constant intermingling, without any restraint, of persons of both sexes and of all ages, at all times of the day and at all hours of the night.”
In 1873, Mark Twain summed the situation up accurately in his Letter from the Sandwich Islands: “The traders brought labor and fancy diseases – in other words, long, deliberate, infallible destruction: and the missionaries brought the means of grace and got them ready. So the two forces are working together harmoniously, and anybody that knows anything about figures can tell you exactly when the last Kanaka will be in Abraham’s bosom and his islands in the hands of the whites.”
Born on O‘ahu in 1815, Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau collected and published on the history and traditions of his people. In 1833, he entered Lahainaluna Seminary where he remained as a pupil and teacher’s assistant for seven years under the influence of Reverend Sheldon Dibble. His series on Hawaiian history and culture originally appeared in the weekly Hawaiian language newspapers Ke Au ‘Oko‘a and Ka Nupepa Ku’oko’a from 1866-1871. He also served as a district judge and in the State legislature.
In 1880, when the second volume of his Ancient History of the Hawaiian People was published, Abraham Fornander, a Swede by birth, had lived in Hawaii for most of 36 years. From the time he deserted a whaling ship in 1844, Fornander was an active participant in the life of the Hawaiian kingdom. As a newspaper and magazine editor and as inspector general of schools, he aroused the ire of many Protestant missionaries, but earned the respect of others. Married to an ali‘i, he helped rescue the stories of Hawaiian history and mythology from being lost.
In his Ancient History, Fornander was trying to write history and obviously tried to discriminate between the factual and fictitious, but he did have a theory to prove. Fornander believed that Polynesians had an Aryan ancestry. In his book An Account of the Polynesian Race, he argued (and provided evidence from linguistics and mythology, that one group of Aryans migrated to Europe and another swept over Persia and India, into the Southeast Asian archipelago and out to the Pacific islands. While some lauded his extensive research, others saw such efforts as unconscious acts of “intellectually colonizing new lands and their Native peoples.”
Recently, the Genographic Project (sponsored by National Geographic Society) has used DNA evidence to show that the ancestors of Polynesians did indeed come “out of Africa” (like all of humankind) and migrated along the route proposed by Fornander (and are related to Micronesians, Taiwan Aborigines, and East Asians, and some say Melanesians). Some female ancestors of present-day Polynesians share the mitochondrial haplotype B with some native north and south Americans. One study of 1,000 modern Polynesian men in Rarotonga (in the Cooks Islands) found that all of them had inherited their mitochondria DNA from native Polynesian maternal ancestors and at least a third had inherited their Y chromosomes from western European paternal ancestors (e.g., “sailors, traders, whalers and missionaries”). Other researchers using similar techniques have shown that the mitochondrial DNA of Hawaiian feral pigs (who are good swimmers but not that good) can be traced back to Vietnam.
Kalākaua I, born David Laʻamea Kamanakapuʻu Mahinulani Nalaiaehuokalani Lumialani Kalākaua and sometimes called The Merrie Monarch (November 16, 1836 – January 20, 1891), was the last reigning king of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. He was the first Hawaiian king to travel around the world and is said to have wanted to build a Polynesian Empire. He tried to restore the old monarchy by giving more power to the Hawaiian Nobles. The Missionary party grew very frustrated with Kalākaua. They blamed him for the Kingdom’s growing debt and accused him of being a spendthrift. An armed group called the Hawaiian League forced him to sign a new constitution in 1887. King Kalākaua earned the nickname “the Merrie Monarch,” because of his love of joyful elements of life. He is known to have revived the hula, lua (the Hawaiian martial art), music, and surfing.
Rollin Daggett arrived in Hawaii in 1882 as the new United States minister to the kingdom. Appointed by President Chester Arthur, Daggett had become wealthy through mining investments and had been a successful politician in Virginia City, Nevada, of Comstock Lode fame. He was also a professional journalist, having served as a reporter with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), and was a versatile prose writer. He soon became a poker-playing, whiskey-drinking crony of King Kalākaua. According to Clemens, Daggett wrote the stories told to him by King Kalākaua. The book The Legends and Myths of Hawai‘i was published in 1888.
Daggett reportedly considered the book a romance and did not hesitate to add his own ideas of “what might have been.” Others consider the book to have “mangled Fornander’s An Account of the Polynesian Race” commenting that “it amounts to tidying up the history of a people whose voices ‘finally will be heard no more forever’ and to preparing the islands for their destiny: ‘The Hawai’ian Islands with the echoes of their songs and the sweets of their green fields will pass into the political, as they are now firmly with the commercial system of the great American Republic.”
Originally published in 1940, Martha Beckwith’s Hawaiian Mythology charted a course through hundreds of books, articles and little-known manuscripts that recorded the oral narratives of the Hawaiian people. Born in 1871, Beckwith first visited Hawaii with her parents to visit relatives who had been pioneer missionaries. Her father developed a plantation at Haiku, Maui, where Beckwith became a friend of the Alexander family who sponsored (anonymously) her work at Vassar College. Her headquarters while on Hawaii was at Bishop Museum where she was an honorary research associate in Hawaiian folklore during the years when she translated the Hawaiian manuscripts stored there. She did not seek “to test a particular hypothesis but to make clearer an overall map of the field.” One reviewer noted that in her work, Hawaiian Mythology, “the writer has not intentionally or unconsciously, interfered with the ideas which are presented….”
Born in the rural district of Ka’u on the island of Hawai‘i in 1895, Mary Kawena Pukui grew up with her Hawaiian grandmother, who instilled in her a lifelong passion for her Hawaiian heritage. Pukui was taught the Hawaiian language and countless chants, hula, sayings, and stories. She began to collect the stories and traditions of her Hawaiian culture, fearful that they might be lost in the sea of change swirling through Hawai‘i. Her notes became the foundation for her books, as well as for files of chants, texts and ethnographic data now preserved by the Bishop Museum. Pukui took scrupulous care to record mo’olelo (stories) just as she had heard them. This fidelity makes her stories especially valuable. Among her works are five articles which appeared between 1950-1955 under the title “The Hawaiian Family” in the Journal of the Polynesian Society which were published as The Polynesian Family System in Ka‘u Hawai‘i in 1958.
Our screenplays are a reimagining of the stories about events that occurred in the Kohala district of the island of Hawaii in the 17th and 19th centuries. It is an attempt to understand the events that shape the landscape and people of Kohala today.
By their nature, oral histories that recount events that happened centuries before focus on important people and events. Details about other aspects of history and culture are often lost. In Hawaii, the important people were the chiefs and chiefesses and the important events were the relationships among that nobility. Moreover, in ancient Hawaii, it was in the king’s court that the bards and poets were gathered, those whose job it was to safeguard Hawaii’s oral histories.