The carved type of Lāhainā’s goddess Kihawahine has been in a museum in Germany for greater than 130 years. Efforts to return her to Mokuhinia, the as soon as ample wetland pond in Lāhainā, might have important cultural and non secular impacts on the Native Hawaiian group.
For greater than 400 years, the folks of Lāhainā have been protected by the highly effective moʻo goddess or lizard deity Kihawahinemokuhiniakalamaʻulakalāʻaiheana, a.ok.a. Kihawahine.
She resided in a 17-acre pond often known as Mokuhinia in Lāhainā. She guarded Mokuʻula Island, which served as home to Maui chiefs and Hawaiian royalty courting again to the sixteenth century.
Her mana, or non secular energy, was famend. She was the one moʻo who might transfer freely from pond to pond, island to island, traversing the paeʻāina of Hawaiʻi.
This mana was coveted by many, together with Kamehameha Nui, who was recognized to journey together with her in carved type.
It was Kihawahine who legitimized the authority of Kamehameha Nui and enabled him to carry onto the land he conquered. He carried this picket picture of Kihawahine with lime-bleached hair wherever he traveled.
But Kihawahine was not born a moʻo. She was born a high-ranking chiefess. Her father, Chief Piʻilani, dominated the island of Maui within the late 1500s.
Native Hawaiian educational Noelle Kahanu says that upon Kihawahine’s dying, the chiefess was remodeled right into a mo’o or lizard deity.
“She turned Kihawahine, who actually takes her place among the many legendary moʻo, who defend waterways, ponds and passages,” Kahanu stated.
“But she’s actually most well-known for and most related to Mokuʻula, which is the island, the seat of political energy, non secular energy that was current inside Lāhainā.”
Accounts of moʻo akua, or Hawaiian reptilian water deities
Accounts of Kihawahine handed down by the generations describe a 6–8 foot black lizard or a dragon with crimson or auburn hair.
She would seem in Mokuhinia periodically with the cycles of the moon. She turned manifest by rituals and was final seen within the late 1800s.
Research by Hawaiian scholar Marie Alohalani Brown on Hawaiian reptilian water deities, or moʻo akua, particulars practically 300 recognized moʻo.
Brown says moʻo dwell primarily in or close to our bodies of contemporary water. They range in measurement, showing as tall as a mountain or as tiny as a home gecko. Moʻo are predominantly feminine, and the feminine moʻo that masquerade as people are sometimes described as stunningly stunning.
The carved picket statue of Kihawahine
The picket type of Kihawahine stands at about two toes excessive and is carved from kou wooden with pearl shells for eyes and human tooth. It was thought that the mana or spirit of a god would occupy the carved statue, and Kihawahine had been worshiped for generations at this level.
What occurred to Kihawahine after Kamehameha died in 1810 stays unclear. But she ended up within the arms of German microbiologist Eduard Arning.
“[Arning] was a microbiologist introduced over by King Kalākaua to try to resolve Hansen’s illness,” Kahanu stated.
“While he is doing his analysis, his aspect gig is amassing this ethnographic assortment, which ultimately includes some 500 objects, and amongst these is Kihawahine.”
Research into how Arning got here into possession of Kihawahine discovered that he and doctor Herbert Purvis enlisted assistance from two Hawaiians from Waimanu Valley on Hawaiʻi Island in 1885 to secretly empty a stone-lined pit on a small outcropping beneath 800-foot sea cliffs.
Within the pit have been two carved figures, together with Kihawahine and an iwi poʻo (cranium).
“So Kalākaua is aware of it is in Arning’s possession, however he in the end permits her to be faraway from Hawaiʻi,” Kahanu stated. “So Eduard Arning, when he leaves Hawaiʻi in 1887, finally ends up donating his assortment to the [Ethnological] Museum in Berlin.”
What occurred as soon as Kihawahine leaves Hawaiʻi could also be coincidental. But the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown six years later.
And by the 1900s, Mokuhinia Pond was all however dried up by sugar plantation skimming wells and stream diversions. By 1914, the sacred Mokuʻula Island was coated by a baseball subject.
Efforts to convey Kihawahine home to Lāhainā
Descendants of the Piʻilani line nonetheless make the pilgrimage to Berlin to honor Kihawahine. But within the museum Kihawahine sits on a shelf, amputated, unadorned and out of her watery aspect.
The ongoing effort to find and return necessary cultural objects like Kihawahine is getting a lift from recent federal laws often known as the STOP Act, or the Safeguard Tribal Objects of Patrimony Act.
“The STOP Act is an act that was handed to cease the export of cultural objects from being trafficked outdoors the nation,” defined Colin Kippen, interim CEO of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.
The Act will increase the penalty for violators and creates an export certification system. But maybe crucial function of the Act, Kippen stated, is that it requires these in possession of such objects to record them and establish how these things received there within the first place.
“If you’ve got acquired one thing since you robbed a grave or as a result of they’re stolen, these objects should be returned,” Kippen stated.
“But sadly, the place that many native claimants are in is, earlier than you possibly can declare one thing, you could know that it is there.”
Over the previous 30 years, Hawaiʻi repatriation advocates have helped to convey home feather cloaks, picket statues, and greater than 6,000 ancestral bones.
Each merchandise returned to the islands brings with it a return of its mana or energy, which can be precisely what Lāhainā wants, Kahanu stated.
“I feel that even simply invoking her identify, Kihawahine, is the kāhea that helps to convey her home. This is what occurred with Kalaniʻōpuʻu’s ʻahuʻula (feather cape). It is what occurred with the Kū,” Kahanu stated.
“In different phrases, it is like this mana needs to be activated, and we activate it by talking her identify and remembering her because the daughter of Piʻilani, as she who resided in and guarded Lāhainā. … And if that kāhea is robust sufficient, then so too is her response, and her return.”
