Ancient Hawaii - Introduction

Ancient Hawaii, by Herb Kawainui Kane:
INTRODUCTION

The Council of Chiefs
Collection of
The Four Seasons Resort, Hualalai

Dependent as we are upon modern technology, what may interest us most about ancient Pacific Islanders is how they accomplished so much with so little. We may call them "stone age," For they had no metals. We may call them "pre-literate," for they had no alphabet. The Arabic system of numbers and the invention of the wheel did not reach them. On islands without clays, the pottery skill of their Proto-Polynesian ancestors was forgotten. Yet without much of what we regard as essential to modern life, with only the meager material resources of their environment, they explored Earth's largest ocean and progressed beyond mere survival to build a culture of surprising affluence and complexity.

Much that we would like to know about them has been lost by the impact of Western ways as well as their own customs of secrecy. Much of what remains is tantalizingly indistinct, blurred through the lens of our modern vision, distorted by the fantasies and embellishments all peoples invent about their pasts.

Enough is known, however, as hard evidence or as conjecture carefully grounded on widely accepted cultural facts, to provide us with a view of a civilization that now seems alien and remote. Yet in their stories we hear themes that are hauntingly familiar, universal to other indigenous cultures throughout the world and archetypal to our own.

This little book is an introduction to a people who, aware of no others, knew themselves not as Hawaiians bur simply as The People (Kanaka Maoli). Their 19th century descendants, buffeted by the impacts of Western culture, looked back to them wistfully as The People of Old (Ka Po'e Kahiko). With the passage of another century they have become ever more distant From us, our view of their world increasingly obscured.

It was a world forever lost when waves of change began to crash against these shores.

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