From the Mountains to the Sea: A Hawaiian Lifestyle

One of the horrible legacies of European contact with the Hawaiian people, contact which led to a devastation of both Hawaiian culture and the pre-contact population levels (from up to a million people to less than 100,000), is the loss of specialized kahuna, or experts, in all segments of Hawaiian society: medicine, navigation, religion, fishing, and more. Since there was no written language, knowledge and wisdom were handed down, generation to generation, via oral traditions. When 90% of the Hawaiians died, it's not too difficult to imagine that Hawaiian society also lost 90% of its traditional wisdom. For example, a Hawaiian man named Kepelino, educated by missionaries in the mid-1800s, wrote in another book (Kepelino's Traditions of Hawaii): "There were many kinds of dances in Hawaii: There was the chest-slapping dance, the dance in which time was beaten with sticks, the dance with marionettes, and so on. All these things were sinful. Eyes, hands, feet and body ensnared the onlooker. The dance taught the young people to sin. He who had known no wrong would quickly learn it in the dance. There was no dance, not a single chant of Hawaii, that was not filthy. Hawaiian chants were all bad, even the name chants. They were all filthy. But the calling chants and some of the genealogical chants of gods and chiefs contained no double meanings, and the ancestral chants were almost free of them. All the rest of the chants were made by Lucifer." I think it is easy here to see the contaminating influence of Western contact. From The Mountains To The Sea: Early Hawaiian Life, by Julie Williams (and beautifully illustrated by Robin Racoma), is an attempt by Kamehameha Schools to describe pre-contact Hawaiian life based on the ahupua'a, a section of land usually running from a volcanic ridge to the ocean, and ruled by an ali'i, or chief. An ahupua'a should contain everything a community needed to survive and prosper: land and sea-based foods, fresh water, medicinal plants, clothing, shelter, religious sites, and trees for canoes. If they didn't have it or couldn't produce it, then they would trade with another ahupua'a. In addition to describing society's organizational structure, Williams also described a number of other aspects of early Hawaiian life: "Men and women did not eat together because men, and not women, were considered sacred. Food was also thought to be sacred. Men would lose their sacredness if they ate with women" (p. 41). "The ali'i made sure that men of special ability memorized their genealogies, making sure their descent from the spirits would be remembered" (p. 47). The chapters focus on the arrival of the first colonists, social structure, religion, farming, fishing, the craftsmen, language and literature, music, and games. There are some hints that life was better than it probably was: "Wise ali'i treated their people with respect and provided them with a sense of security" (p. 50). Slaves, on the other hand, were not

***** Although this is a book for students (young adults), I bought it as a mature adult and found it at an appropriate level for me. There are many Hawaiian words used and explained in the text (and I do not speak or read Hawaiian), thus I found the easier reading level to be perfect for me! This book won an award from the Hawaii Book Publishers Association---the Ka Palapala Po`okela Award of Excellence. It is well-deserved. This is a fascinating book about early Hawaiian life--life on the ahupua`a. The black and white drawings are also excellent. I found this to be a wonderful early book for readers with some light familiarity with the Hawaiian language and with a strong interest in Hawaiian history. Highly recommended. *****