L earning Objective 28

I. The purpose of viewing this film is two-fold. First is to understand something of the Hawaiian's sense of creation of life, how it developed, and their understanding of their place in the natural order. Secondly, it introduces many terms and concepts of the Hawaiian culture, especially as it relates to their use of plants.

II. At the beinning, we hear the great KUMULIPO chant. It is one of several creation chants and has its particular point of view. It speaks of the time of Po, the time of darkness. The foundation of the earth was coral and a "life-giving" slime was the source of plant and animal forms. The time of Au followed, the time of light and humans.

A. The first interviewee, Johnson, says that this time of creation is like the Old Testament in that is comes from sources at least 3,000 years old.

B. The Kumulipo shows that the Hawaiians understood the basic manifestation of biological evolution, and they classified living organisms from simple to complex, one and a half centuries before Darwin proposed the same ideas to the Western world. One difference is that Darwin also proposed a mechanism for the process.

Scientists recognize the Hawaiian Islands to be the site of one of the most unique and dramatic occurrences of evolution found any where on earth. Not surprisingly, the Hawaiians, whose existence depended on observation and understanding of plants and animals, also saw this pattern.

C. The other Hawaiian creation chants and myths have gods creating humans and living things, or giving birth to them. This is not unlike Roman/Greek or other eastern religions. Overall, whichever myths the Hawaiians accepted, the universe was orderly: everything from humans to rocks descended from the gods or a force.

A. One way the migration can be traced is through place names: the name Hawai'i is also found on the islands of Tahiti and the Marquesas (two areas identified as places Hawaiians came from initially) and even has its root in the word JAVA, or Hava, the possible start of all migrations.

B. The stars were critical in navigating to Hawai'i and made them easier to find again. The Happy Star, or ARCTURUS, played an important role because it marked the east-west line where the islands could be found.

C. The first Polynesian peoples were believed to have come from the Marquesas Islands about 3,000 miles away, one of the closest island chains to Hawai'i. The chant from Moloka'i describes one such journey, and the two male dancers are wearing Ti-leaf "raincoats."

A. The most important is KALO (Taro), which, according to myth, was the first offspring of the Sky father whose rain fertilizes mother earth, Papa. A deformed offspring is buried and sprouts into kalo. The second offspring of this union is the human. Thus, humans are brother/sister to kalo.

B. Early populations were believed to be small. They lived mostly on the windward side of the islands where rainfall was abundant, growing kalo and other crops. Fish were plentiful, also.

C. A great horticultural feat was bringing ULU, or breadfruit, to the islands, which is difficult to transplant from one yard to another! The engineering skills required to build the terraces for growing kalo, and maintaining a precise water flow, is another amazing Hawaiian feat we still do not fully understand.

A. Part of this culture was the "historian" who kept all the history and knowledge in his memory, often chanting without mistake all day, "word perfect." There is every reason to believe that the ancient chants are a reliable source of information about the Hawaiian culture.

B. It is believed that the Hawaiians, with their tremendous oral tradition, could have easily developed the written form. One likely reason for not doing so was to keep the power of the word to a select few.

C. Part of the new social order had KAPU (taboo) as an important feature. It means that which is sacred, is set aside or protected. As applied to harvesting plants, or fishing, it reflected knowledge of the times critical to reproduction and protection for those times, so the sources were not depleted. Today, with use of drift nets, limus yanked from their holdfasts, or over-harvesting of native plants, this perspective is lost.

D. Pele, the powerful goddess of the volcano is seen as destroyer/creator of the islands - much like the scientific explanation of the "hot-spot" creating the lava islands up through the ocean.