E. S. Craighill Handy
2000
The island of hawaii dominated the culture of the northernmost of the polynesian groups, even before the high chief kamehameha conquered the other islands and formed a united kingdom in the first decade of the nineteenth century. This truly great warrior, diplomat and ruler was born in kohala, but was reared, trained and toughened for his mission in ka-u, the southern and most rugged district of hawaii, where his mother, the high chieftainess kekui-a-poiwa, isolated herself to protect her child against the enmity of rival claimants to highest rank and power. The cultural dominance of hawaii was doubtless a consequence of size, richness of forests and soils, diversity of environmental conditions and hence variety and quantity of population. The dynamic temperament of the old polynesian stock of the “big island,” as it is affectionately called today, was probably partly a consequence of the grandeur of the scene, where the great ocean and the pacifics greatest volcanoes respectively formed the outlook and the background of every locality in which hawaiians of hawaii were born and reared, lived and loved and hated, laboured, planted, hunted, fished, played, fought and worshipped. Its active vulcanism certainly had a dynamic effect on the culture of this island, and may be presumed to have affected directly the organisms that were the folk who lived intimately with and within and upon the stupendous earth-drama of lava eruptions accompanied by seismic and meteorological disturbance, and the explosive seething of forest and ocean when the molten rivers of pahoehoe (flowing lava) and steaming smoking aa (crumbling cooling rubble) poured or crept seaward from pits and vast fissures on the slopes of mauna loa. Within the life spans of my colleague, mrs. Pukui, and of her mother and grandmother, dwelling in ka-u, that land has been the scene of eight great flows that have crept from mauna loas barren uplands, through forests and over the inhabited plains, four of them plungi
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