open society is more like another pathway, “different, more fluid,” sometimes leading to a more dire, or dead, end. Large islands, with greater productive potential and therefore more capacity to absorb population shifts and environmental stress, could take the path of intensification and still successfully accommodate more layers of human structure.
WAI AND MALO‘O
In the dichotomy between the western and eastern Hawaiian islands can be seen the outline of one of the most fundamental oppositions not only in Hawai‘i but most everywhere in Polynesia; one that extends the full range from the environmental to the social and their conjuncture: the wet and the dry (wai and malo‘o)—at once the differing productive regimes and crops of well-watered, kalo-growing windward landscapes and dry, yam- and sweet potato–growing leeward ones and the correspondingly different social systems each produced.100 As each island encompassed a wet/dry distinction based on trade winds and topography, so too did the archipelago: the western islands of Kaua‘i and O‘ahu predominantly wet and kalo growing and boasting the largest irrigation complexes in the Pacific; the eastern islands of Maui and Hawai‘i predominantly dry and yam- and ‘uala growing. Molokai sits in the middle, half wet and half dry and too small and segmented to rival its larger neighbors in either character. The Hawaiians acknowledged this fundamental distinction, as their creation stories of Pele and Hi‘iaka at opposite ends of the archipelago attest.101 They also understood, as well as do Kirch and other modern scientists, how “this environmental gradient played an important role in the political dynamics of the late prehistoric Hawaiian chiefdoms.”102
The force of the dichotomy derives from the single fact that irrigated kalo is the most efficient form of Polynesian agriculture, yet land suitable for it is strictly limited and varies in direct relation to position within the archipelago. Wet kalo culture and dry ‘uala culture stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of efficiency. Pondfield kalo culture produces the highest yield from the smallest land area, with the lowest long-term labor input, requiring only a one-time investment in the capital improvements of pondfields and ditch systems, accomplished through a community labor pooling organized by konohiki appointed by the ruling chief.103 On drylands, on the contrary, the path to intensification came through quickening the cropping cycle, decreasing fallow, and squeezing more yield from fertilization and mulching. All of this was labor intensive, rather than capital intensive. Dry land then, equaled constant risk and periodic stress: first agricultural and in direct consequence, social and political, shaping a sociopolitical structure different from that of the more stable windward valleys. Sahlins writes that “the great challenge [of the dryland economy] . . . lies in the intensification of labor: getting people to work more, or more people to work.”104
The religious structure of the archipelago also attests to this geographic one. The authors of Native Planters in Old Hawaii assert evidence for different times of arrival of certain agricultural and cultural forms from elsewhere in Polynesia in Hawaiian tales of gods and their identification with different foods: “It seems likely that the four chief gods of Hawaii . . . represent distinct eras of colonization.” The first is Kāne, associated with kalo, sugarcane, bamboo, and windward valleys, who is central to the creation myths of Hawai‘i and therefore assumed to have arrived with the first settlers. The second is Kaneloa, associated with bananas, the ocean, and springs. The third is Kū, god of war, coconut, breadfruit, and fishing—and therefore assumed to be a latecomer because breadfruit orchards are poorly developed in Hawai‘i but fundamental to the Tahitian economy and because fishing is strictly regulated as an ali‘i prerogative, as opposed to farming, the occupation of peasants. Kū often appears in myth as Kū-the-land-snatcher, 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
