Theme Music Narrator: In the time of darkness, the deep blue black, the time of pō from the life-giving slime, the stock began, began in the spirit world, a world of gods, a world peopled by gods alone.

The night became thirsty.

Born in this night was Kumulipo, source darkness.

Male.

Born was pōʻele, night blackness.

Female.

Born to them, was pōʻili darkness.

Night followed night, and born to the darkness were the eternal spirits.

This was the beginning of the earth, born to the darkness was the coral, foundation of the earth.

Born was the burrowing worm hilling the soil.

Born were invertebrates peʻa and ʻina, the barnacles, mollusks, ʻopihi, the creatures that live in the sea and on land, born with the plants ʻēkaha and taro, born with the fishes of the sea and the animals that swam through the air, born with the creeping things, the birds and the crawlers born was puaʻa, the night digger.

Born were the nibblers and the dogs.

Still, it was night for such was the time of pō when it was still dark.

Tranquil was the time as night pressed on into day.

It was called calmness then.

Laʻi, when the wombs gave birth, so was born the ancestor of the race and well-formed was the child, the first chief of the dim past, who dwelt in the cold uplands.

This was the time when men multiplied, when men came from afar, born of woman, of man and of gods.

They were born in the hundreds and in ever increasing numbers, in canoes hewn from upland trees, man was here now.

It was the time of Ao.

It was day.

Nearly all that is known of the origins of Hawaiʻi's indigenous people is contained in clues gleaned from lyrical lines of epic chants that have passed essentially intact through millennia.

Contained within this chanted poetry are genealogies of Hawaiʻi's chiefly families traceable in direct line, generation by generation, through their Polynesian ancestry back to the creation of life itself.

Kawena Johnson: It, of course, did not have its genesis in Hawaiʻi, because too much of the history of the Polynesians as a people other than the Hawaiians, there's, you know, their cousins, the Tahitians, Marquesans are in there.

This is not a creation, or this is not a genealogy strictly for the Hawaiians, but goes back maybe 3,000 years.

Wayne Chang: You know, if we're drawing parallels or looking at other things very much like the Bible and the Old Testament.

The Old Testament, the main purpose was to establish one person's coming, and so you went through who begat who and who begat what have you.

Narrator: It is the very age of the various creation chants that makes the scientific principles within them so remarkable.

In their intimacy with nature, the Polynesians observed and classified animals and plants, along with numerous subspecies.

From this they concluded that all life forms ascended from the simplest to the most complex and it is known that among Hawaiians, a concept of biological evolution was understood, accepted and firmly established in their oral tradition at least a century and a half before the appearance of Charles Darwin's “The Origin of Species.” But evolution, as contained in the kumulipo, was not their only view of life and universe.

Kawena Johnson: All right, it's only one, really, of a number of creation myths or ideas and the Hawaiians had all three of these: one that the gods created him and created the universe, several of them, not just one, or gods and goddesses who gave birth to them.

That's the second idea, that everything had to be born.

And the third is, of course, the kumulipo idea, which is that everything came of itself and if there is deity, deity is a process of that too.

The gods evolved also.

Herb Kawainui Kāne: The entire universe was an orderly, fixed whole in which all the parts were integral to the whole, including man himself.

Man was descended from the gods, but so were the rocks, so were the animals, so were the fish.

Thus, man had to regard the rocks and the fish and the birds as his relatives.

It's an ecological point of view, which Western man is only beginning to discover now, I think.

Narrator: Also contained within the ancient chants are great legends, which trace Hawaiian ancestry to the earliest Polynesian seafarers, 2,000 years before the birth of Christ, and 35 centuries before Columbus.

Mapless navigators set out from the oceans of the Asias and Indonesia on a voyage of exploration and settlement of tiny dots of land that lay sprinkled throughout 45 million square miles of Pacific Ocean.

First, they traveled eastward and south before turning their canoes east again, where they may have rested 1,000 years in the islands of Samoa and Tonga.

It is thought that by the time of Christ, Polynesian canoes had reached New Zealand, Tahiti, the Marquesas and by 200 AD set out again, turning their canoes north and to windward to Hawaiʻi.

To ascertain the details of this first great Polynesian migration, contemporary historians and anthropologists turn to the genealogies and storylines found within ancient oli, the chants that speak often of great heroes and deeds.

Kawena Johnson: So the history of the Polynesians, as such, is not seen as, well, this section belongs to the Tahitians, this one is for the Samoans, but rather it's the history of the migrations of a people from the Pacific across and the thread of connection is seen through the list of names which are held in common.

We can take these genealogies apart, compare them to Samoan, compare them to Tahitian, and we can see where we have a common lineal ancestor at one point in the genealogy.

Then we say, oh yes, we share that person.

Wayne Chang: Many things were events, particular events, and in the Hawaiian mind's eye, or the, or anyone living in Polynesia, events were noted because they were above the ordinary.

Um, okay, it would be the same in history anywhere else in the world, the events that come through historically will be like superhuman type of feats.

Narrator: On their journeys across the Pacific and to Hawaiʻi, the Polynesians revealed a very human trait found in all great migrations.

That of naming a new home for an old one.

Abraham Piʻianaiʻa: Because when you look at some of the older place names in Hawaiʻi, you have a reflection of colonization.

Tahiti Nui is on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, and that's one of the major, major districts in the, in the Society Islands.

ʻUpolu is an ancient name for some of the islands down there, and it's there's ʻUpolu up in Hawaiʻi.

Punaluʻu is a famous district in the Society Islands in Tahiti, and we have a Punaluʻu here.

Narrator: The eventual name of the island group Hawaiʻi is traceable to Hawaiʻi, an ancient name for the island of Raiatea in Tahiti.

There is also Hawaiiki in the Marquesan group, and further back we find the name Hawa for what we now know as the Indonesian island of Java, believed the launching point of the great voyages.

Most evidence credits Marquesan islanders with the discovery of the Hawaiian chain somewhere between 300 and 500 AD.

How they found it remains shrouded in mystery.

Abraham Piʻianaiʻa: First of all, I think that they discovered these Hawaiian Islands were purely accidental.

A group of perhaps a group of fishermen, or a group of persons, basically men looking for something or going someplace, and they could have been disabled or got caught in a storm and was a little bit off of their regular beaten path, and they found themselves eventually north of the equator, and one of the first things that they recognized almost immediately was there, there was a star there that never moved, and that happens to be the North Star, Polaris.

I suppose, uh, several things could happen out of curiosity.

They could have headed straight for the star and kept on going, and eventually arrived here.

Herb Kawainui Kāne: Well, I think every discovery of new land is a fortuitous accident.

But once here, being able to stand on these islands and watch the movement of stars overhead, they could then fix the star paths in their mind and find their way back here again.

Narrator: So keen was their knowledge of the night sky that ancient Hawaiians and presumably their Polynesian cousins had identified the five earliest known planets named collectively Nā Hōkū ʻAeʻa, the wandering stars and more important for navigation, Nā Hōkū Paʻa, the fixed stars.

But it was the intimate knowledge of one fixed star that made possible the so-called second migration of Polynesians to Hawaiʻi, called Hōkūleʻa, Star of Gladness, or Happy Star.

Western man knows it as Arcturus.

Herb Kawainui Kāne: It's the zenith star.

It appears to pass directly overhead of this island in the night sky, and it will also appear to pass directly overhead at any point east or west, directly east or west of this island.

Now, in sailing from Tahiti, if you want to hit this island, first of all, you must stay to windward of it, so you sail north, keeping to windward as much as possible until Hōkūleʻa appears directly overhead in the night sky, appears to pass over directly, then you turn downwind and sail directly west, and you'll pick up this island.

Narrator: Very little is known about the first Hawaiian settlers, the Marquesans.

How they lived or the state of their culture.

Marion Kelly: So, we tend to, and it's very understanding, tend to say, well, this is Hawaiian society, and that's the way it always was, even from the time that they arrived here, and you often see depicted the first arrivals of the Hawaiians and the Hawaiian Islands on these large double canoes with the chief standing there with this big kahili and flowing feather cape.

Well, probably nothing could be farther from the truth, because I'm pretty sure that when they first came up here, there were not very many of them, and maybe not very many of them, for an awfully long period of time, in which everybody was pretty much equal.

Herb Kawainui Kāne: We can assume it was a Polynesian society led by chiefs with commoners along with them.

There's probably no more than, uh three or four canoes in that first fleet, so it would be a small group, but it would have been a fully organized Polynesian society.

Drums and chanting Narrator: This chant offers one description of the first migration.

It tells of voyagers who made landfall and settled in a remote valley, Hālawa, on the island of Molokaʻi, the words speak of hardships endured, of ships lost at sea.

It says only five canoes survived.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: The earliest Marquesan settlers found very little of the lushness we know in Hawaiʻi today, very little to support life.

What did exist was carried by wind, birds, and the sea.

Dr.

Donald Kilolani Mitchell: The first settlers who came found very little that was really nutritious and very delicious, although they found other plants and the like that were very important in their environment.

So, in the canoes, the colonists brought first of all taro, because taro was the number one starch food.

It was the number one food.

Narrator: Taro is of both practical and spiritual importance to Hawaiians, believed by many to be the origin of man himself, child of an early mating of the gods of creation.

When Wākea, Sky Father, caused his sacred rain to fall upon Papa, Earth Mother, and fertilized her.

Kekuni Blaisdell, MD: The taro plant is not only the source of food to the Hawaiians, but it's also a medicinal plant, and the taro plant is our hiapo, that is taro plant is the eldest sibling of all of us Hawaiians, because in one of the matings of Wākea with Papa, there was a deformed product of that conception, and what was placed in the ground up sprouted the taro plan.

Narrator: A later mating of Wākea and Papa created Hāloa, the first man, younger brother of the taro.

From Hāloa are descended the Hawaiian people.

Larry Lindsey Kimura: This just represents the kind of connections we have to our own traditions, the kind of affinity we have for our, for our surroundings, and that we are all related to that first brother, Hāloa, who came sprouting as a taro plant, so we relate it to the plant, to the soil, to the sky, to the water, to our whole world.

Narrator: As the taro grew and flourished in this new land, so did the people.

The population seems to have doubled every 100 years or so.

The people settled in the windward areas of the island chain, where there was a steady supply of fresh water to grow food easily and simply.

The fish in this pristine environment were plentiful.

Relative peace reigned for several 100 years.

Abraham Piʻianaiʻa: For some reason, the population, which grew up here, became probably one that there was a little bit unruly after, after, a great expansion in population, and as a result, those persons who were of the of the priestly class found it necessary to go back to bring back some powerful, chiefly people to these islands and to bring back some segment of, or some semblance of order again.

Narrator: To many authorities, formalization of the ancient Hawaiian society began with the arrival of the great priest Paʻao.

Believed to have come from Tahiti, some say the Samoas, Paʻao made landfall at Puna on the Big Island, about 1100 AD.

There he erected a great temple called a heiau, which he named Wahaʻula, before proceeding up the coastline to Kohala, where he made his home.

Not far from Kohala, at the northwest point of the island, Paʻao built the great heiau of Moʻokini, among the largest and oldest ever found in Hawaiʻi.

Legends say Moʻokini was built of stones passed by hand, man to man, from Niuliʻi, a feat requiring at least 15,000 men standing three feet apart over a distance of nine miles.

At Moʻokini heiau, Paʻao officiated, and according to legends contained in the ancient chants, introduced walled heiau, red feathers worn as a sign of rank, prostrating before high-ranking chiefs and other extreme practices and rituals that serve to institutionalize the power and status of chiefs and priests.

Herb Kawainui Kāne: It is said that he brought the, the, great temple drum, he brought the possibly the institution of human sacrifice.

Um, what this shows is that he brought the classical Polynesian culture that had developed in the Tahiti area during the between the time that Hawaiʻi was first discovered and, and, the time that adventurers started sailing out from Raiatea and Bora Bora and the Leeward Society Islands.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: The arrival of Paʻao marked the beginning of comprehensive change and contributed in large part to shaping what we think of today as ancient Hawaiian society.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: It was then, a second wave of migrations began, this time from Tahiti, the epic chants, the oli, chronicle journeys of many groups, which came up from the south.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: A calculated transplanting of an entire culture took place during this series of voyages.

The migrants brought their chanted memories, the accumulated knowledge of their history, personalities, laws, customs, and instructions in the design and use of tools for fishing and agriculture.

All of this knowledge was transmitted in the spoken word of the poe moʻolelo, the history person or historian who'd been trained to store the entirety of his culture and the genealogies of his chiefs in his memory.

For centuries, the canoes traversed the 3,000 miles to and from Tahiti, relying on virtually all natural phenomena for navigation.

They used prevailing ground swells to keep their bearings during the day until Nā Hōkū Paʻa, the fixed stars could confirm their location at night.

The flight of the migratory birds, the patterns of the winds, and the currents all served to guide these ancient mariners.

Long journeys by sea were so extensive that even today the channel off the tip of the Hawaiian island of Kahoʻolawe is called Keala i Kahiki, the path to Tahiti.

The seafarers brought their families, their wives and children and domestic animals, dogs, pigs and chickens.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: They built homes that were simple, but adequate structures for the climate made of bark and wood with coconut fronds and pili grass used for thatching.

Eating houses were separate, one for men and one for women.

They also brought wauke the paper mulberry plant, from which the women pounded out the kapa or tapa cloth for fiber, cordage, and clothing.

To the rhythm of the tapa chant, they made the material for pāʻū, short skirts for themselves, and malo, loin cloths for their men, or the kīhei, the cloak worn by all.

They brought many plants, which became staples of the Hawaiian diet: yams, sweet potatoes, coconut, mountain apples, bananas, sugarcane and one of the most remarkable transplants of this or any time.

Herb Kawainui Kāne: We have the legend of Kahaʻi, who brought breadfruit here, and because that's, he landed at Kualoa in at Kāneʻohe Bay, Oʻahu, where Hōkūleʻa came back, and, and, we have that legend, so it must have been an important event.

Breadfruit is a very difficult plant to transplant even from one yard to the next, it has to be transplanted as a living tree to carry it over 3,000 miles of seawater, which is deadly to plant tissues and keep it alive, is an agricultural feat of no small order.

Yet they were able to do it and they chronicled it in their legends.

Narrator: Everything in nature was revered, and much of the respect they showed appeared in their fine arts and adornments.

Necklaces of shell, bone, teeth, of shark or dogs were worn about their necks or as anklets in celebration of their dances.

Intricately woven feather capes and helmets for the great chiefs or aliʻi were painstakingly acquired without harm to the birds who provided them and flowers in abundance were woven as crowns for their heads, about their necks as bracelets or anklets.

They saw beauty in all that surrounded them, and they embraced it.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: This dance tells of the beauty of Mauna Loa on Molokaʻi, of the sacred lehua blossom, famous for the lei, of the great forests of ʻōhia from which canoe makers got their logs and of rushing springs and streams that fed the glistening seas of Hale o Lono.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: As the population flourished, its survival could be assured only if there were enough to eat.

This required social order and an agreed upon method of protective control of the food supply.

To this end, Hawaiians turned to an ancient Polynesian system of social control known as taboo, kapu in Hawaiian, which translates as forbidden, sacred, or separate.

The Polynesian custom was adapted in Hawaiʻi and became a sort of common law.

It set apart as kapu, fixed rules of religious and civil behavior towards gods, chiefs and priests, one another and to nature.

And the force which held it together was mana, the life force, the spiritual essence of all creation.

Kawena Johnson: If you were to say there's an equivalent to the concept of God being omni, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, this would be it, more so than the four Polynesian or the four Hawaiian major gods equal Jehovah, uh ah, the Christian God equals mana.

I mean, if we were really to analyze it, and mana is strictly this: whatever made the universe be, whatever made it alive and whatever made it take the form in which we see it today, it may take other forms, whatever.

It has always to be there.

Kekuni Blaisdell, MD: And the central belief was that every person was in lōkahi, or harmony with himself and with others, and with everything in nature and everything in nature was not only alive but also conscious and communicating, which means they did not distinguish between what we now distinguish between animate and inanimate.

To Hawaiians, everything in the cosmos was alive and not only alive but conscious, that is able to perceive and therefore able to communicate.

So, Hawaiians of old, just as many of us Hawaiians today, still talk to the wind and the ocean and the mountains and the trees and the water in the streams as well as to the birds and animals.

Herb Kawainui Kāne: They had no word for religion and what does that tell us?

It tells us that it pervaded so much of their everyday life.

Religious thought pervaded every waking moment of their life, that there was no thinking of it as a separate thing, as something you only do on Sunday.

Again, that springs from their worldview, from their idea of the creation.

Wayne Chang: I suppose, when you live on an island, and your entire existence, whether you're going to survive, whether you're going to live, whether you're going to die, is dependent on the natural forces around you, whether you have enough rain to supply the fields of taro growing or the ʻulu or whatever.

Whether the oceans are calm enough and that the fish are plentiful, then obviously your respect for these forces are going to grow, which was the case of the Hawaiians.

They knew that they would not eat if things turned against them.

So, what happened and as it developed, were the gods and goddesses that controlled these forces.

They became paramount in their existence.

So, the connections were there.

Narrator: The Hawaiian knew that the natural forces which affected all that surrounded him were the very forces that created him.

He was inseparable from his universe, inseparable from all that was sacred.

The life forces could take many forms, the wind, ka makani, the sun, ka lā, and life forces could only be influenced by the gods, the only absolute possessors and dispensers of mana, who, like the life forces could take many forms.

Of the four major Hawaiian gods, the numerous secondary gods, and perhaps 400,000 lesser gods, among the most visible and understandable today is Pele, tempermental and jealous, from her present home at Kīlauea Caldera on the island of Hawaiʻi, Pele will take whatever she chooses, should she choose, and destroy everything in a fiery swath to venge her wrath.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: But, like all life forces, like gods and nature, Pele is dualistic.

She is the very creator of these islands.

As she destroys, she creates vistas of extraordinary blackened beauty, in which at times, a single flower will burst forth, her flower, the lehua blossom, the first life that sprouts from her cooled lava.

Pualani Kanakaʻole Kanahele: Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: Hawaiians honored their deities at heiau, stone temples, where priests, kahuna, conducted sacred rites, recited the genealogies of their chiefs and chanted praises to whichever god the heiau sanctified.

As temples of gods, heiau were places of great mana, mana, which was protected by ritualistic kapu.

As there were places of mana, there were times of mana.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: The chant speaks of the setting sun of dusk, a time of quiet, most favored by the gods.

As the aliʻi received their mana directly from the gods, the exquisite peace found at evening was reserved for them.

Chanting in Hawaiian: Although mana existed in all life, the highest born, the chiefs or aliʻi, as direct descendants of the gods, could by implication claim the greatest amount of mana, and enormous deference was accorded them.

It was kapu forbidden to step within the shadow of an aliʻi, or to allow one's own shadow to fall upon an aliʻi.

To do so might steal his mana, and violation of this kapu meant almost certain death.

To protect their people from accidentally breaking this kapu, a conch was blown to announce the imminent arrival of an aliʻi.

Thus alerted, a commoner had time enough to move out of the way or prostrate himself, so no shadow could fall.

The rules of kapu both separated the classes and bound them together.

Ritualized laws of behavior and obligation assigned a place for each person and protected that place.

As keepers of knowledge, chanters of the sacred genealogies and protectors of the rites at heiau, the priestly class claimed the second greatest amount of mana.

Charles Kenn: The kahuna was, you might say, the man who taught the people.

They were four.

There were several, many different kinds of kahuna, who you might say specialized in different arts, different occupations, who taught, you might say the people in their various occupations and various ways of life.

For example, what we call the kahuna lapaʻau lāʻau was a man who was medicine, in medicine.

We have the kahuna lawaiʻa, was a man who taught fishing.

We have the kahuna mahiʻai, which was a man who taught farming, and so forth.

Narrator: The kahuna and the aliʻi directed the work of the class beneath them, the commoners, the makaʻāinana.

The makaʻ āinana were the doers, the fishermen, and the farmers.

They had many kapu to observe.

Rocky Kaiouliokahihikoloʻehu Jensen: They were strict in terms of what fish to catch.

For example, during the makahiki, you did not catch the aku and the āhi, but you ate the ʻōpelu and the akule in terms of.

Kapus like that no longer exist.

In, in terms of eating various bananas or various agricultural products, because of the season in which they were dormant, or the because of the season in which they were, were, ready for the harvest.

This is another way of maintaining a certain, a certain degree of excellence in their, in their foodstuffs, and what I, what I feel about this is that they developed it to a such a high degree that they didn't forage for their food, they, they developed a plantation effect.

Dr.

Donald Kilolani Mitchell: Two of the very popular food fish were the aku and the ʻōpelu, and we have a feeling that the old folks studied the breeding habits of the fish, and they decided that the ʻōpelu laid their eggs, and so forth, during the first half of the year, according to our calendar, January to June or July.

So, during that time, they, fisherfolk, caught aku, but didn't touch the ʻōpelu.

Then came July and they let the aku go about their matrimonial affairs, and they caught the ʻōpelu.

Narrator: Kapu prevented ancient Hawaiians from depleting their food sources.

There were also kapu that required prayers and offerings to appropriate God forces to ensure a favorable outcome in their endeavors.

Dr.

Donald Kilolani Mitchell: You usually didn't say to kāula, give me a good catch today.

He would say, I would like to appeal to you to have the fish multiply and be abundant.

I would like to appeal to you to have fish come into our area.

It was, there's a difference in a seemingly greedy attempt to have lots of fish.

No, he wanted nature to work sort of in his direction, you see, and that was kind of a nice one.

And then when he came back in, he either brought the first fish of his catch and put it at kāula, or he might bring the first one of each kind that he caught.

Chant offering The whole thing was with its religious overtones, and I believe in that, because if you are saying your little prayers to the gods, that causes you to be sincere, and you look over your bait, and your lines, and your hooks, and you go out with the right attitude, and you, by the way, tell your wife, while you're out fishing, don't gossip at home, aha.

Narrator: Ecological awareness among Hawaiians is seen not only in conservation kapu, but within a sophisticated system of land division and agricultural technology.

Land was distributed in ahupuaʻa, often pie-shaped sections incorporating a complete valley from the mountain to the sea, assuring its occupant access to fishing, agricultural plots of taro and other lowland crops and products from higher forest elevations.

The ahupuaʻa were virtually self-sufficient.

Controlled by aliʻi, lesser chiefs, or land managers, the ahupuaʻa were worked by makaʻāinana, who supported their chiefs with its produce but who also held ready access to its bounty.

Rocky Kaiouliokahihikoloʻehu Jensen: They were sophisticated in their planting.

They were sophisticated in their aquaculture.

Um, in the sophistication of their planting, you had many varieties of bananas, maiʻa, you had many varieties of sweet potatoes, you had many varieties, you have over 300 varieties of taro or kalo.

Narrator: Masterfully terraced taro gardens were fed by elaborate irrigation systems, which maximized the conservation of fresh water an achievement found nowhere else in Polynesia.

Marion Kelly: The water goes down through the terraces very gradually, so that the water doesn't heat up from the sun and rot the taro, and but not so fast that the water would erode the terraces, you wouldn't want that to happen, so the irrigation system, the ditches that they built, the ʻauwai that they built, would control the speed of the water, and the amount of the water would be controlled by the type of dam that you put up and so you can control it's a method of controlling water and getting what you need where you need it when you need it, so this is a big engineering project, and I'm, and they did it, they were very good at it.

Narrator: The skill and engineering demonstrated in the terraces and irrigation systems were also present in the design, development, and success of an early and unparalleled form of aquaculture.

Dr.

Donald Kilolani Mitchell: The Hawaiians were the only Pacific Islanders that made shoreline fish ponds, so those are really artifacts and they were really the iceboxes for the people, for when the weather was inclement and they couldn't go fishing, they could go to the fish ponds and dip up the fish that they needed.

We do think that the chiefs did a little more dipping into the fish ponds than the makaʻāinana, but at least if the chiefs got their fish out of their ponds, that let the makaʻāinana go out and have greater use of the fish in the open bay or open sea.

Marion Kelly: What you really have is it's like a, like a pasture, you have a pasture in which you create.

The environment, the best environment you can for growing algae, and the more algae you have, the more food you have for the fish, and that's very attractive to the fish to come in and have all this food growing there, and, and, then they get fat, and then they can't go out the same way they came in, because they're too fat now, and so it's really very ingenious of the Hawaiians to have selected the herbivore link to raise in their fish ponds.

Abraham Piʻianaiʻa: You look at some of the monumental things that were structured, like some of the heiaus and some of the fish ponds, when you look at that kind of work, you wonder, at least I wonder, and say, boy, to do that backbreaking work to haul the rocks all the distances, they had to really require some kind of discipline.

If you didn't have discipline, you would have had revolution, and revolution was almost non-existent, so far as I know, in the Hawaiian society.

Narrator: Artists, scientists, poets, craftsmen, fishermen, farmers, hula dancers, each had his place and his duties in Hawaiian society and generation upon generation, those skills were passed on through an oral transmission from the kahuna and the poet trained in the skills of memory.

In truth, the very survival of the Hawaiians depended on the accurate storage and retrieval of their accumulated knowledge kept within the lines of precisely memorized oli, or chants.

Chanting in Hawaiian Elizabeth Tatar: Chant was life.

Because the language was life the way you communicated was through the language.

We had a lot of body language too, but still there was so much in the word, the famous proverb, in the word is life, in the word is death, that carries the whole concept of mana power, certain words, certain chants had so much power, they were used for such a long time, they became so sacred, so kapu, that they could, to the Hawaiian, in their belief, change a life or start a life or end a life.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: The chanted poetry of the oli was delivered in long sustained phrases, sometimes using only two pitches, sometimes more.

There are six major styles of chanting, all of which required certain pitches, voice qualities, and methods of delivery.

Elizabeth Tatar: There were some very particular things that Hawaiian chanters did.

One was to hold the voice entirely up in the throat.

They didn't sing from down here as an opera singer would, or the way one is taught to sing in the Western way is use your chest, use your diaphragm.

Chanting in Hawaiian Elizabeth Tatar: The Hawaiian chanters placed their voice in the throat.

They had a lot of tension created.

Very small area was used to project one's voice.

They chanted it at a relatively high level.

It's chanted in what's called a kind of a mid-register.

It's not a chest, and it's not a head.

A head register would be something that's called falsetto, but this is right in between.

There's a lot of tension created in the sound that way.

Narrator: There were over 100 terms describing types of chants, according to their purposes.

The voice quality was determined by the function of the chant.

Oli could free someone from kapu, express sorrow, declare love, praise a hero, or a great feat, in addition to maintaining the history of an individual or family and each function required a certain unique way of chanting.

Elizabeth Tatar: And all of these are related to the general styles, and they're related to the functions, so you will not do a hoʻouwēuwē, which is a style of wailing using various particular voice qualities in that for a love chant, or for a praise chant, or a name chant, because functionally a praise chant does not require wailing.

You have to go to a lamentation, a kanikau.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: How reliable are the chants as sources of history?

Herb Kawainui Kāne: In order to answer that, one has to answer the question of why they did not have writing, and they did not have writing, I believe, because the word was so important, the words itself had power, and one, if one put words into writing and distributed it, then anyone could have that power, including those who were not worthy of it.

So, knowledge was kept to those who were deemed worthy, worthy of it.

Kawena Johnson: The Hawaiians had would penalize their orators with death in some instances if they did not, if they missed line in public oratory.

So, I would say that you could more or less trust that what they, what we have is a lot of attention has been given to try to keep, keep these traditions intact.

Herb Kawainui Kāne: There was a reverence for the word.

We know that some of their chants would last an entire day and had to be word perfect in order for the chant to work to invoke the help of a particular spirit.

So, there was a reverence for the word, which suggests to me that that the words did not change very much over, over, the centuries, that that they were kept carefully.

Narrator: The feudal society built by ancient Hawaiians appears on the surface strict, inhibiting, brutal at times, yet the precision of its oral tradition, even its kapu, found the Hawaiians at the zenith of their culture virtually disease-free and prosperous.

Abraham Piʻianaiʻa: It's very easy for us, who grew up in a different kind of society, to make a comparison of that society to us, and end up seeing, boy, that was an unjust society.

If you had to live at that time, you would probably have found it a very just society, and that's the way I'd like to look at it.

Narrator: At once just and harsh, sophisticated, complex, self-sufficient, and self-contained.

The society created by ancient Hawaiians by the middle of the 18th century achieved a cultural, economic, and technological peak unrivaled in Polynesia.

It worked.

Yet at its very height a new voice was heard that rose above the chanted memories of the people.

Drums and chanting Narrator: In the words of the prophet Keaulumoku came a new chant, clouded at first in its imagery, but as time passed, its message grew painfully clear.

Chanting in Hawaiian Narrator: This chant foresaw the coming of the white man, the death of the royal line, suppression of the ancient religion, gods and goddesses, the disappearance of most things Hawaiian.

A challenge, too, was left to the Hawaiian people.

ʻAuʻa ʻia e tama e tonamoku o tonamoku e tama e ʻauʻa iʻa.

Hold fast, child, to your land, to your land, child.

Hold fast.

Theme music Announcer: Major funding for Hawaiians was provided by Hawaiʻi Public Television, with additional funding made possible by Bank of Hawai’i.

Transportation for the production of HAWAIIANS was provided by Aloha Airlines.