Lahainaluna
The primary purpose of the Hawaiian Language Reprint Series, as noted in connection with the publication of the rst two buke in this series, is to make available signicant works originally printed in the Hawaiian language in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but now long out of print and difcult to access. Ka Mooolelo Hawaii, the third in the series, is especially signicant for the place it holds among the large body of works produced by Native Hawaiian writers. As M. Puakea Nogelmeier explains in the Introduction that follows, Ka Mooolelo Hawaii, printed in 1838, is the rst book credited to Native Hawaiian writers, the rst history of the islands published in the Hawaiian language, and the rst concentrated effort to commit Hawaiian oral traditions to paper. The student of Hawaiian history may wonder, what is the connection between the present Ka Mooolelo Hawaii and another well known volume of the same title authored by David Malo As explained in the Introduction, the former is an amalgam that grew out of an 1836 seminar organized by Reverend Sheldon Dibble at Lahainaluna and attended by ten advanced students, one of whom was David Malo. Later, evidently in the 1840s, Malo wrote a more comprehensive “Ka Moolelo Hawaii,” its contents being as much ethnography as history. Translated in 1898 by Nathaniel B. Emerson, it was published in 1903 as Hawaiian Antiquities (Moolelo Hawaii). The two works are clearly linked, however, through general similarities of style, manner of treatment of the historical sections, and absolute identity of language in many passages of the two books.
Read this work at the World Public Library (library card needed).