The idea that people are a part of nature is often raised thoughtlessly, as though the fact that we are carbon-based life forms means we have the same moral culpability as panda bears or redwood trees, and any harm we might do is simply “natural.” In the Native Hawaiian tradition, the concept is considerably more demanding. According to the Kumulipo creation story—the Hawaiian equivalent of the biblical book of Genesis—the first living thing is a coral polyp, a minuscule life form that is the basic building block of reefs;* from there, life gradually branches out to include human beings, a world view that accords neatly with the theory of evolution. Rather than proclaim humans the pinnacle of nature’s progress, however, Hawaiian cosmogony holds that we are new arrivals among respected elders. For example, the taro plant, known as kalo on the islands, is specifically identified as the Hawaiians’ immediate older brother; humans are called upon to care for the taro, which has its own obligation to keep its younger sibling alive. The starchy taro-root paste called poi remains the defining dish of Hawaiian cuisine.
Before Europeans reached the archipelago, Hawaii was home to four hundred types of taro plant. Today, about seventy historical varieties of taro are known to remain; almost all of them can be found in Limahuli’s terraced fields. Perhaps it was this wealth of variety, which allowed the Hawaiians to produce food in conditions ranging from floods to drought, that encouraged their remarkable appreciation for biodiversity. No one can say. What is clear is that Hawaiians valued an incredible assortment of wild plants and animals, some as embodiments of godly power, others for their role in ritual or crafts, some as food, still others simply for their beauty. The relationship was one of give and take—it was social. The various species gave of themselves, and in return had a constituency of human allies who advocated not only for their survival, but their abundance. The Hawaiian term kuleana, which has a meaning suspended somewhere between “responsibility” and “privilege,” captures this interconnection. Imagine that a friend calls on you at a time of need. You are obligated to respond, but the obligation is also a point of pride. Your friend asked you, placed trust in you. It is your kuleana to answer the call—your duty and your honour.
The aspect of traditional Hawaiian culture that most challenges modern sensibilities is the system of kapu, or taboos, that governed everyday life and could carry an immediate death penalty if broken. By the time Europeans were writing about Hawaii, it seems clear that kapu was experienced by ordinary Hawaiians in large part as tyranny, and many taboos were quickly abandoned when the system was abolished by the Hawaiian royal family in 1819—the first rule to be broken was the prohibition against men and women eating together. Yet kapu had also played a critical role in sustaining the island’s natural richness. It may sound shocking that a person could be killed for such crimes as fishing out of season or bathing in a pool of drinking water, but to ancient Hawaiians, such rules might have seemed like common sense. They would no more threaten the basic conditions that preserved their survival than people today would choose to drive against the flow of freeway traffic.
Consider the story of Hua, the long-ago king of eastern Mau’i. The seven-hundred-year-old legend is considered, as King David Kalakaua wrote in 1888, “one of the most terrible visitations of the wrath of the gods anywhere brought down by Hawaiian tradition.” The story has taken on various forms, but I will tell it as it was told to me by Sam ’Ohu Gon III, a Honolulu-based conservationist who has completed both a PhD in animal behaviour and a rite of passage in traditional Hawaiian cultural protocol. We spoke at an outdoor table in the parking lot of a shopping mall.
Hua is a decadent and wasteful king, and he despises the restraint and aloofness of his high priest. Knowing there is a kapu against hunting the gull-like birds called petrels at the shore, where they are easily found and killed, Hua orders his bird catchers to bring him petrels from the mountains. But his hunters are lazy, and they snare their petrels on the coast and rub cinder dust into the feathers to make it appear the birds have come from the slopes of volcanoes. The hunters bring their catch first to the high priest, who suspects the ruse; he cuts open a bird and, finding seaweed and fish in its belly, confiscates the forbidden wildfowl. Knowing they have broken kapu and will be put to death, the hunters go to Hua and accuse the priest of keeping for himself the birds they had killed for the king. Seeing a chance to bring down his adversary, Hua has the priest put to death for treason. Immediately, a long drought begins. The people begin to die, and Hua himself is finally forced to flee his kingdom. But the drought follows him wherever he goes, and at last he falls dead with no one left to bury him. He’s remembered in a Hawaiian proverb: The bones of Hua rattle in the sun.
“Everybody paid for it,” says Gon, leaning back in his plastic chair. “Not just the bird catchers who tried to get away with it—all the people die. The priest dies. The king dies. This idea of kapu being so serious that everybody dies for it really speaks to how fundamentally important it was to obey those kinds of rules.”
Native Hawaiian culture was disrupted and suppressed after the islands’ colonization by Europe and later the United States, and the ahupua’a network was shattered as properties were divided among private, mainly foreign, owners. Today, the traditional land ethic endures in only a handful of places, and the land itself—deeply transformed over the past two centuries—is often the only code to decipher ancient ways of thought. Kawika Winter admits that he sometimes struggles to see the Limahuli Valley through the eyes of his ancestors. It’s an old saying, for example, that the health of the sea depends on the health of the mountains. The reason is obvious: water runs downhill to the shore. But it’s also said that the health of the mountains depends on the health of the ocean. Winter could make no sense of this until 2006, when two endangered seabirds, the Hawaiian petrel and Newell’s shearwater, were found breeding high in the Limahuli Valley. Today, Hawaii’s most important nesting sites are on offshore islands or behind fences that protect the birds and their eggs against introduced rats, while overfishing has drastically reduced the seabirds’ food supply. The hidden nests in Limahuli were a reminder that in the past huge colonies of petrels, shearwaters, albatrosses, frigatebirds, tropicbirds and boobies filled the cliffs and dug burrows in the highlands, their feces painting the landscape white with nutrients from the ocean.
“That’s the way our ancestors viewed everything: How do we engage and interact with this system and make it pump?” says Winter. “It’s a different mindset. Every time we lose a tree, a vine, a bush, a little bird, that’s a word and a name that drops out of our lexicon. That’s a story that we can no longer tell.”
Hawaii’s seclusion ended on January 18, 1778, when Captain James Cook of the British navy, commanding the ships Resolution and Discovery, stumbled upon the islands while en route to search for the Northwest Passage. Cook encountered a Hawaiian culture in some ways remarkably like his own: deeply religious, ruled by kings and queens and fed by a working class of farmers and fishers. The Hawaiians certainly were not eking out a desperate existence. They showed no interest in trading for the Englishmen’s food, instead seeking practical items such as metal nails and high-status goods such as beads; King Kamehameha apparently exchanged a feather cloak for nine iron daggers. Many Hawaiians enjoyed enough leisure time to celebrate human beauty, study navigation, prepare for war against rival factions, practise arts such as dance and carving, or dedicate their time to arranging flowers into the ceremonial garlands known as lei. Others practised thrill-seeking sports such as surfing, cliff diving and holua, in which wooden sleds were ridden hurtling down mountainsides on beds of leaves. Even today, a visitor to Hawaii may notice Old World similarities—the nostalgic fondness for monarchy among some Native Hawaiians, for example, or the deep love for a landscape that has few traces of its original nature.
The changes wrought by the first Polynesian settlers pale alongside the upheaval that has taken place since Cook’s arrival. Drive Hawaii’s highways today and you will see hardly a pla
nt or tree, let alone a forest, that is a part of the archipelago’s historical flora. The most common birds—red-crested cardinals, common mynas, the sweetly singing white-rumped shamas—are overwhelmingly introduced species, and feral cats, pigs, rats, dogs, chickens and mongooses are common even in remote areas. Invasions have supplanted invasions: the Pacific rat that arrived with the first Polynesians is losing ground to the even more voracious European black rat and brown rat, while Polynesian chickens have retreated under the onslaught of an Asian variety. Hawaii once had an incredible diversity of land snails, some 1,500 species like jewels in the forest; there still are land snails on the islands, but they are mainly invasive species, including one, the rosy wolf-snail, that has been killing native land snails since 1955. Every snake, lizard, honey bee and ant you might encounter has been introduced. Hawaii is so different from what it once was that the red hibiscus, an introduced species from China, has become a kind of de facto state flower; the official state flower, the yellow hibiscus or ma’o hau hele, which once covered huge areas on every island, is now so highly endangered that it is largely forgotten.
It was amid this tidal wave of change that the Hawai’i mamo finally disappeared. Mamos were seen, and shot, by the Cook expedition’s naturalists, who wrote of Hawaii’s birds in tender tones—one noted that “the Woods are filled with birds of a most beautiful Plumage & some of a very sweet note,” while another declared them “as beautiful as any we have seen during the Voyage.” The birds had endured because the Hawaiians managed them with care. Hunters did kill birds for the stew pot—mamo is said to have been delicious—but also used catch-and-release techniques. They applied a smear of latex sap from a native tree that would cause a bird to stick to its perch until the hunters could pluck the colourful feathers, clean the bird’s feet and set it free.
Cook’s naturalists made note of most of Hawaii’s most colourful birds—they were apparently common enough to be readily seen, and the crew also bought many of them, alive, from Hawaiians. More than twenty of these bird species have since gone extinct. The most recent disappearance—a finch-like bird named the po’o-uli, or black-faced honeycreeper—took place as recently as 2004. The causes run the gamut of ecological shocks, among them the spread of avian malaria after mosquitoes were introduced to Hawaii, possibly hatching from drinking water aboard a tall ship in 1826. By the time the last po’o-uli had disappeared, the mamo had been gone for a century or more. The last reported sighting was a small flock spotted in 1899 by one H. W. Henshaw, who shot one of the birds. “It was desperately wounded, and clung for a time to the branch, head downwards,” Henshaw would later recall. “Finally, it fell six or eight feet, recovered itself, flew around the other side of the tree, where it was joined by a second bird, perhaps a parent or its mate, and in a moment was lost to view.” At the time, Henshaw was working as a specimen collector for the British baron Walter Rothschild; one Hawaiian bird guidebook would later note that the best illustrations of the mamo and several other extinct Hawaiian birds are Rothschild’s paintings of his slaughtered subjects.*
It’s tempting to picture the Limahuli Valley as a secret paradise, somehow free of the agonies of history. Not so. Kaua’i never had mamos, but the island had its own royal bird, the ’o’o, which had yellow feathers nearly as bright. The last ’o’o was seen in 1985. The woods that climb Limahuli’s slopes today are dominated by invasive species; one of the trees they have largely supplanted is the latex tree formerly used by bird catchers. Another plant that has disappeared from much of its former range is Psydrax odorata, a shrub with no common name in English. Its Hawaiian name, alahe’e, translates roughly as “octopus fragrance,” yet the plant’s clustered white flowers have a delicious, slice-of-orange scent. The name, it turns out, is an ecological anachronism, a reminder of a time when the flowers grew in such groves that their odour spilled out each morning and evening, slipping in and out of the valleys the way an octopus slips in and out of its hole in a reef. There’s no longer any place in Hawaii where the land exhales this particular sweetness. That experience is, for the moment, extinct. The mamo, the ’o’o, the twilight perfume of the alahe’e—double disappearance after double disappearance.
Each year, work crews clear another few acres of invasive forest in Limahuli and replant the ground with native species. What they create is not a replica of the original woodland. For one thing, that ancient forest was shaped over centuries by dozens of animals, from tiny snails to flightless geese, that cannot be brought back from extinction without entering the realm of science fiction. For another, there is no hope of rooting out every new plant—more than a thousand species introduced to Hawaii since humans arrived are now free-living in the wild. Still, the dividing line between the invasive and the restored landscapes is stark. The non-native forest looks skeletal, with pale tree trunks rising above a jumble of stones that have lost most of their groundcover plants, and with them, the soil. Where the native woodland begins, the outburst of life is startling, a bright, multi-layered canopy that is green from the treetops to the forest floor. It would be false to describe one as the new Hawaii and one as the old: both are new, though only the restored forest acknowledges the value of the old. The intention in Limahuli is not to live in the past, but to end the war of the present against the past.
Kahimoku Pu’ulei-Chandler, better known as “Mokuboy,” is among those who’ve worked on the restoration crews. He’s a young man with the air of a gentle giant, and wears his hair in a wild afro—a style that recalls the bird catchers who once carried out their work in Hawaii’s spiritually perilous uplands. Mokuboy, however, is not from the lineage of bird hunters. Instead, his family was entrusted with the sacred fireworks.
Kaua’i was once famous throughout the archipelago for its fire-throwing ceremonies, and the peak of Makana, where the Limahuli Valley meets the sea, is one of only two sites on the island where they were performed. Near the mountain’s base was a school dedicated to the perpetuation of the chants, dance and other rites that carried forward history, mythology and genealogy among people who didn’t use a written language. When a class of knowledge-keepers was ready to graduate or on other special occasions, fire throwers would climb Makana by night on a secret trail, carrying bundles of dry wood cut to the length of a spear. At the summit, they’d build a fire and chant a call to the wind. At last, the fire throwers would light their wooden spears and hurl them into the air that howled up the face of Makana, curling back on itself to carry the fireworks out over the ocean. The ancient rite, known as ’oahi, was abandoned in the 1920s; Mokuboy’s grandfather had been among the last to carry it out. It was a particularly poignant loss: the forgetting of a tradition dedicated to the celebration of memory.
Mokuboy was my guide into the upper gorge of Limahuli. The valley is his family’s traditional ahupua’a; today, both he and his father are employees of the botanical garden. Mokuboy is in many ways a typical young man, spending much of his free time surfing, listening to music and taking photos on his iPad. At the same time, he sees nothing discordant about pausing at the head of the rough trail into what is now a forest preserve to chant an acknowledgement of the simple fact that we, two human beings, are fragile and temporary visitors on a landscape that rose out of the sea five million years ago. “Feels like home, you know?” he said to me afterward. “I feel real comfortable here.”
Even before he learned that his ancestors had been fire throwers, Mokuboy had wanted to climb to the peak of Makana. At last he went up the mountain alone, but was forced to turn back after finding himself on too dangerous a slope. From his high point, though, he had seen a different route that could take him to the top. On New Year’s Eve, 2011, Mokuboy, his father and a cousin ascended to the summit, this time carrying bundles of sticks that they strapped to their backs with strips of bark. Then they waited for nightfall.
The wood they took up the mountain that night was hau, also known as sea hibiscus. It’s a magnificent plant—a shrub that can form tangles as
big as a house and produces dazzling flowers that are red when they open, yellow as they age and then red again as they fall by the thousands, face up, to decorate the surface of passing streams. Historically, hau was considered good tinder for fireworks, but not the best. The best was papala, another plant that has never been given a name in English. Papala wood is hollow and therefore lightweight, making it easy to carry and to catch in the wind, and when one end was lit the flame would pass through the shaft to emerge from the other end as a tail of fire. Today, papala is an endangered species.
Far up the Limahuli Valley, where the waterfall tumbles out of the realm of the gods, Mokuboy pauses beside an unremarkable bit of greenery. As he begins to speak, he holds one of its large, oval leaves; the two of them give the impression of a brother and sister holding hands. The plant is a papala, one of a number planted in Limahuli by the restoration teams. He hopes, he tells me, that papala will one day be abundant enough to be carried again up Makana, if not by him, then by his children or grandchildren.
The first fireworks ceremony on Kaua’i in a hundred years took place unannounced, he tells me. They lit their fire, spoke to the wind and then threw their burning spears into the night. “People were screaming down below, just screaming at the wildness of it,” Mokuboy says. Only a lucky few saw it, the flames and sparks riding out into the blackness of sea and sky. It was not a historical reenactment. This was memory come back to life.
* It’s conventional among many Hawaiians to use “Hawaii” to refer to the U.S. state as a whole, and the Polynesian “Hawai’i” to identify the largest island of the archipelago.
* Rogers published his “double disappearance” concept in 1994, a year ahead of Daniel Pauly’s “shifting baseline syndrome” or Peter Kahn and Batya Friedman’s “environmental amnesia.” In fact, the idea that we forget the natural world of the past appears to be regularly rediscovered; here is biologist Raymond Dasmann in 1989: “But one adjusts to slow, deleterious changes in the environment and begins to accept them as normal. Young people, growing up in smog, have no basis for believing that things were better in the past, and could be better in the future if certain actions were taken. The abnormal is accepted as normal and becomes the standard by which future change is measured.” An optimist would say this is an idea whose time has finally come; a pessimist might suggest that we are doomed to forget even what we remember we’ve forgotten.
The Once and Future World Page 17