Braided Waters. Wade Graham

the invading, conquering chief whose war rituals are descended from ancient fishing rituals. The last is Lono, associated with sweet potatoes, gourds, and hogs, the primary foods of dry areas. The authors note that, in the makahiki festival of the new year celebrated on Hawai’i Island, the ruling chief who tours the island accepting his tribute of food and goods, the ali’i ai moku (chief who eats the land), takes the role of Lono, not Kāne, though Lono is the only god who takes human form and has no role in Hawaiian creation myths.

      That new influences continued to arrive in Hawai‘i in the centuries after the first colonization is attested to by considerable evidence of a renewed “voyaging era” in the thirteenth century that saw frequent interisland travel in South Pacific Polynesia and interchange between Hawai‘i and a place called Hawaiki in the Hawaiian mo‘olelo oral histories, a generic name for ancestral lands to the south of Hawai‘i—most probably Tahiti and other islands in the Society group. The voyages brought new material techniques and new crops, especially ‘uala, which was not part of the original Polynesian crop suite but a later addition imported from South America. They also brought new social and religious ideas. A key figure was the Tahitian priest Pā‘ao, who is credited with major changes to the religious and ritual practices of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. He installed there a Tahitian chief he had brought with him, Pilika‘aiea, built major luakini heiau temples at Waha‘ula in Puna and Mo‘okini in Kohala, and introduced human sacrifice and the Kū war cult. Both of these would come to dominate ali‘i practices on Hawai‘i, as intensive dryland culture of ‘uala would radically expand their economic and territorial bases there.¹⁰⁵

      The voyaging era was over by about 1400, and thereafter “the further evolution of Hawaiian society, economy, politics, and religion was a strictly endogenous affair,” yet the innovations the outsiders brought must have contributed to “a fundamental transformation in Hawaiian economic, social, and political structures” between the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century.¹⁰⁶ First, the expansion of dryland agriculture into previously marginal leeward landscapes and the new, more aggressive ali‘i culture that oversaw and parasitized it began to shift the balance of population and power from the older western islands to the younger eastern ones. This may also, in Hommon’s words, “explain the decoupling of the Hawaiian commoner and chiefly classes” that occurred during the period.¹⁰⁷ Unique in Polynesia, land tenure in Hawai‘i became completely alienated from the majority cultivators to a small class of ruling chiefs. Victorious war chiefs could displace the entire hierarchical structure of land tenure in areas they controlled at will; indeed this displacement was almost automatic in late prehistory. Also probably unique in Polynesia, commoners in Hawai‘i by the time of contact were not allowed to recite their ancestry beyond parents and grandparents—a radical impoverishment of identity in a society in which all claims to rank and power rested on recited genealogies.¹⁰⁸ This differentiation was reflected in new concepts: nā kanaka for the common people and nā li‘i for the chiefs—a shift of categories “from clan to class” that was highly unusual in what had hitherto been a kinship-based society and known elsewhere in Polynesia only from Tonga and Tahiti.¹⁰⁹ There was even a class of slaves or very low-class people (kauwa), described by Handy, Handy, and Pukui as “probably the descendants of aborigines found already settled in the Hawaiian Islands when the migrants from the south came and their chiefs established themselves as overlords.” These untouchables lived apart in reservations strictly kapu—taboo, in the anglicized Tahitian—to others and were “killed at will” for human sacrifice purposes, according to the Hawaiian chronicler Kepelino, born in 1830 and himself a descendent of the voyaging priest Pā‘ao.¹¹⁰

      While today few scholars credit the idea that the Tahitians invaded the Hawaiian Islands in the thirteenth century, Hawaiian folk memory contains references, perhaps embroidered, to such a cataclysmic change. A particularly vivid version of these events comes to us in the oral history of the venerated Molokai kumu hula (hula and chant expert) Kaili‘ohe Kame‘ekua, recorded before her death in 1931:

      To us, they were invaders. Pa‘ao had gone back to Tahiti and gathered thousands of people to come to Hawai‘i . . . The people on Lanai’i saw them approaching. Their red malo [loincloths] could be seen stretching from horizon to horizon. Soon the sea itself turned red with the blood of our people as thousands were slaughtered and enslaved. Those who could make their way to Kaua‘i were safe. Others hid in mountain caves. Those who were caught were used as fish bait and human sacrifices, and our people’s bones were used to decorate the tiki statues of their gods.

      The ali‘i people ruled through a system of chiefs. Where we had lived in unity, they made separations and distinctions everywhere among people and things. War was accepted as a way of life. They thought everything could be taken by force.¹¹¹

      Dryland religion, especially on Hawai‘i, was dominated by Lono and the war cult of Kū over Kāne, the god of kalo, streams, and irrigation.¹¹² The social structure was more aggressive, with more turmoil from young chiefs rebelling against old and more frequent cycles of warfare and territorial conquest. Kurashima and Kirch describe the dryland ali‘i as “hostile and expansionistic” because of the conjuncture between their own ambition and the instability and therefore vulnerability of their economic system.¹¹³ Consequently, more pressure was put on the productive base while at the same time it was being undermined by the same environmental dynamic already seen. In a short period of time, from their expansion around 1650 to a peak sometime in the early eighteenth century, the great dryland field systems of Hawai‘i and Maui reached limits and began to see declining yields relative to input, even as the population continued to increase, and field units were divided into smaller and smaller pieces.¹¹⁴

      This is the pattern of competitive socioenvironental involution. Indeed, on Hawai‘i, for several hundred years before contact, warfare between the few long-established, windward kalo areas such as Waipi‘o Valley and the large, rapidly growing but unstable leeward areas increased. At the end of the period, there is evidence of caves adapted as places of refuge in the Kona district. Dry West Hawai‘i appears to have been primed to head down the Mangaian road, and had it been an isolated world, it might have found an end there. But it was part of a much larger system and could turn its stress-derived energies, what Sahlins calls its “historical dynamism,” to advantage by turning to conquer wetter, windward areas that had not reached the same limits.¹¹⁵

      The wet/dry dichotomy correlates with duration of settlement and so with deeper, and thus better, genealogies in the western islands versus the eastern. In consequence, leeward chiefs coveted windward kalo lands for ritual legitimacy as well as for the productivity of their landscapes.¹¹⁶ The archetypal story comes from the sixteenth century, when the Hawai‘i chief Umi-a-Liloa, son of the chief Liloa by a low-ranked chieftess, is driven out by his half brother from his inheritance of Waipi‘o Valley, the only large kalo valley on the entire island. Exiled to the arid plateaus in the interior, Umi becomes a master farmer and pig herder, feeding the oppressed people there, who then help him to reconquer Waipi‘o, where he builds his war temple. Subsequent Hawaiian history is largely that of Maui and Hawai‘i chiefs who, when not attacking one another, were campaigning to seize the windward and western lands. Robert Hommon, noting the prevalence of marriages between Hawai‘i and Maui chiefs sealed with gifts of food and other forms of wealth and predicated on genealogical exchanges and the prevalence of wars between such clans, called them “cousin’s wars.”¹¹⁷ With his unification of Hawai‘i in the wake of Cook, Kamehameha the Great, Umi’s descendent, repeated the myth and fulfilled it; then, in unifying the archipelago under his rule, he replayed it on a grand scale: upstart dry West Hawai‘i finally subjugated the ancient salubrious cores.¹¹⁸ Kirch sums up the full, complex dynamic as a “set of linked feedback loops” between economic change, population pressure, and environmental limits and variability, causing food and “staple finance” insecurity, as well as drivers in the specific cultural context, including intensified status rivalry and competition and conquest warfare. On the eve of contact, he explains: “The aggressive, expansionist, Ku-cult centered polities of Maui and Hawai‘i were precisely those most dependent on intensified dryland field cultivation. In Hawai‘i and Maui, and especially in their leeward regions