ali‘i people ruled through a system of chiefs. Where we had lived in unity, they made separations and distinctions everywhere among people and things. War was accepted as a way of life. They thought everything could be taken by force.111
Dryland religion, especially on Hawai‘i, was dominated by Lono and the war cult of Kū over Kāne, the god of kalo, streams, and irrigation.112 The social structure was more aggressive, with more turmoil from young chiefs rebelling against old and more frequent cycles of warfare and territorial conquest. Kurashima and Kirch describe the dryland ali‘i as “hostile and expansionistic” because of the conjuncture between their own ambition and the instability and therefore vulnerability of their economic system.113 Consequently, more pressure was put on the productive base while at the same time it was being undermined by the same environmental dynamic already seen. In a short period of time, from their expansion around 1650 to a peak sometime in the early eighteenth century, the great dryland field systems of Hawai‘i and Maui reached limits and began to see declining yields relative to input, even as the population continued to increase, and field units were divided into smaller and smaller pieces.114
This is the pattern of competitive socioenvironental involution. Indeed, on Hawai‘i, for several hundred years before contact, warfare between the few long-established, windward kalo areas such as Waipi‘o Valley and the large, rapidly growing but unstable leeward areas increased. At the end of the period, there is evidence of caves adapted as places of refuge in the Kona district. Dry West Hawai‘i appears to have been primed to head down the Mangaian road, and had it been an isolated world, it might have found an end there. But it was part of a much larger system and could turn its stress-derived energies, what Sahlins calls its “historical dynamism,” to advantage by turning to conquer wetter, windward areas that had not reached the same limits.115
The wet/dry dichotomy correlates with duration of settlement and so with deeper, and thus better, genealogies in the western islands versus the eastern. In consequence, leeward chiefs coveted windward kalo lands for ritual legitimacy as well as for the productivity of their landscapes.116 The archetypal story comes from the sixteenth century, when the Hawai‘i chief Umi-a-Liloa, son of the chief Liloa by a low-ranked chieftess, is driven out by his half brother from his inheritance of Waipi‘o Valley, the only large kalo valley on the entire island. Exiled to the arid plateaus in the interior, Umi becomes a master farmer and pig herder, feeding the oppressed people there, who then help him to reconquer Waipi‘o, where he builds his war temple. Subsequent Hawaiian history is largely that of Maui and Hawai‘i chiefs who, when not attacking one another, were campaigning to seize the windward and western lands. Robert Hommon, noting the prevalence of marriages between Hawai‘i and Maui chiefs sealed with gifts of food and other forms of wealth and predicated on genealogical exchanges and the prevalence of wars between such clans, called them “cousin’s wars.”117 With his unification of Hawai‘i in the wake of Cook, Kamehameha the Great, Umi’s descendent, repeated the myth and fulfilled it; then, in unifying the archipelago under his rule, he replayed it on a grand scale: upstart dry West Hawai‘i finally subjugated the ancient salubrious cores.118 Kirch sums up the full, complex dynamic as a “set of linked feedback loops” between economic change, population pressure, and environmental limits and variability, causing food and “staple finance” insecurity, as well as drivers in the specific cultural context, including intensified status rivalry and competition and conquest warfare. On the eve of contact, he explains: “The aggressive, expansionist, Ku-cult centered polities of Maui and Hawai‘i were precisely those most dependent on intensified dryland field cultivation. In Hawai‘i and Maui, and especially in their leeward regions that constituted the ancestral seat of the most powerful and aggressive kings, the limits of increased productivity even with significant labor inputs (including the addition of female labor in field cultivation) had probably been reached by the end of the seventeenth century. And the increasingly frequent objects of their aggression became the western islands of Moloka‘i, O‘ahu, and Kaua‘i, rich in irrigated pondfields and fishponds.”119
EXCEPTIONAL MOLOKAI
Molokai, in certain locales, was a rich food producer and an irreplaceable stopover for moving armies, but these spots were too few and far between for the island as a whole to sustain population centers comparable to the larger islands. The Hālawa, Wailau, Pelekunu, and Waikolu Valleys thrived, as did the larger southern valleys, especially those joined with major fishpond complexes. These places, big enough to produce a surplus that could be siphoned off but too small to defend themselves, were vulnerable to invasion and control from outside and to the intensification imposed by conquering, parasitic chiefs. But other places were either too small or too inaccessible to be powerfully attractive to outside forces. Western and upland areas were too poor, too sparsely populated, and too far from canoe landings where armies could disembark to be effectively subdued or occupied, as the people simply melted into the woods and shadows. The Kala‘e area is celebrated in Hawaiian tradition for its stubborn independence. Its ali‘i were said to be so proud that they kept only their own kapus, even in the presence of higher-ranked chiefs.120 Kala‘e was also known as a place of kauwa (slaves or low-status individuals), who frequently lived on the margins of the cultivated areas of settlement, such as in the kula uplands and forests: “Kala’e pe’e kakonakona” (Kala‘e hides and avoids contact.121 Another word for kauwa, reported by Malo, was nahelehele, people of the wild woods.)122
Molokai acquired a mythology of resistance and its people a reputation for sorcery. Many legends in the ethnographic corpus describe powerful invaders repelled by the spiritual force of the weaker, less numerous Molokai people: O Molokai i ka Pule o’o (Molokai of the Powerful Prayer). The island was known for its traditional prophets (kaula), typically common men and women “of spontaneous inspiration,” in Sahlins’s words, who constituted “an alternative to the ‘organized religion’” that buttressed ali‘i rule. In a later context, Sahlins considered that the association of kaula with a popular religious revival “reinforces the sense of an anti-chief movement.”123 The greatest school of kaula kahuna in Hawai‘i was that of Lanikaula, on the East End, and its mythology centers around the hostile visits of outside chiefs and rival priests.
The history of Molokai is notably replete with incidences of poisoning—typically by kama‘āina (children of the land) using poison against stronger malihini (outsiders). A legendary grove of trees on Mauna Loa, the kalaipahoa, was said to have intensely poisonous wood that could be made into weapons or powder. Kamehameha’s invaders were said to have been killed en masse by pule o‘o—though at least one local informant insisted that the Hawai‘i people were not prayed to death but were fed sweet potatoes mixed with ‘auhuhu, a common fish poison.124
LESSONS: A SOCIOENVIRONMENTAL CALCULUS
Because of the central role of irrigation in Hawaiian history, Hawai‘i enters into the long-running historical debate over the supposed correlation between large-scale irrigation worldwide and Marx’s “oriental despotism,” as advanced by Karl Wittfogel (who singled out late prehistoric Hawai‘i as “a crude, agro-bureaucratic hydraulic despotism”) and elaborated and extended to the American West by Donald Worster.125 This “hydraulic hypothesis” holds that the requirements of labor control and the management of large irrigation works assure the development of a bureaucratic elite that dominates the mass of producers. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, while agreeing with Wittfogel’s emphasis on irrigation in Hawai‘i, argued that the ali‘i overlay and dominance of the windward valleys was not inherently despotic.126 Kirch went further, arguing that it is intensification itself, not irrigation per se, that attends social complexity: “The neglect of intensive dryland cultivation by anthropologists and archaeologists . . . has masked the fact that it was not irrigation but short-fallow dryland systems that were the most demanding of labor inputs . . . the most hierarchically structured and hegemonic Polynesian polities are usually associated, not with the irrigation-dominated production zones as the hydraulic theorists would
