Study on the Hawaiian musical system of chanting in the nineteenth century.

Haina ia mai ana ka puana. This familiar refrain, sometimes translated "Let the echo of our song be heard," appears among the closing lines in many nineteenth-century chants and poems. From earliest times, the chanting of poetry served the Hawaiians as a form of ritual celebration of the things they cherished--the beauty of their islands, the abundance of wild creatures that inhabited their sea and air, the majesty of their rulers, and the prowess of their gods. Commoners as well as highborn chiefs and poet-priests shared in the creation of the chants. These haku mele, or "composers," the commoners especially, wove living threads from their own histoic circumstances and everyday experiences into the ongoing oral tradition, as handed down from expert to pupil, or from elder to descendant, generation after generation. This anthology embraces a wide variety of compositions: it ranges from song-poems of the Pele and Hiiaka cycle and the pre-Christian Shark Hula for Ka-lani-opuu to postmissionary chants and gospel hymns. These later selections date from the reign of Ka-mehameha III (1825-1854) to that of Queen Liliu-o-ka-lani (1891-1893) and comprise the major portion of the book. They include, along with heroic chants celebrating nineteenth-century Hawaiian monarchs, a number of works composed by commoners for commoners, such as Bill the Ice Skater, Mr. Thurston's Water-Drinking Brigade, and The Song of the Chanter Kaehu. Kaehu was a distinguished leper-poet who ended his days at the settlement-hospital on Molokai.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and “one of the greatest poets of our age … the Thoreau of our era” (Edward Hirsch) comes a thrilling story, in verse, of nineteenth-century Hawaii. Here is the story of an attempt by the government to seize and constrain possible victims of leprosy and the determination of one small family not to be taken. A tale of the perils and glories of their flight into the wilds of the island of Kauai, pursued by a gunboat full of soldiers. A brilliant capturing—inspired by the poet's respect for the people of these islands—of their life, their history, the gods and goddesses of their mythic past. A somber revelation of the wrecking of their culture through the exploitative incursions of Europeans and Americans. An epic narrative that enthralls with the grandeur of its language and of its vision.

This is a book about the politics of competing cultures and myths in a colonized nation. Elizabeth Buck considers the transformation of Hawaiian culture focusing on the indigenous population rather than on the colonizers. She describes how Hawaii's established religious, social, political, and economic relationships have changed in the past 200 years as a result of Western imperialism. Her account is particularly timely in light of the current Hawaiian demands for sovereignty 100 years after the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893. Buck examines the social transformation Hawaii from a complex hierarchical, oral society to an American state dominated by corporate tourism and its myths of paradise. She pays particular attention to the ways contemporary Hawaiians are challenging the use of their traditions as the basis for exoticized entertainment. Buck demonstrates that sacred chants and hula were an integral part of Hawaiian social life; as the repository of the people's historical memory, chants and hula practices played a vital role in maintaining the links between religious, political, and economic relationships. Tracing the ways in which Hawaiian culture has been variously suppressed and constructed by Western explorers, New England missionaries, the tourist industry, ethnomusicologists, and contemporary Hawaiians, Buck offers a fascinating "rereading" of Hawaiian history.

Reclaiming Kalākaua: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on a Hawaiian Sovereign examines the American, international, and Hawaiian representations of David La‘amea Kamananakapu Mahinulani Nalaiaehuokalani Lumialani Kalākaua in English- and Hawaiian-language newspapers, books, travelogues, and other materials published during his reign as Hawai‘i’s mō‘ī (sovereign) from 1874 to 1891. Beginning with an overview of Kalākaua’s literary genealogy of misrepresentation, Tiffany Lani Ing surveys the negative, even slanderous, portraits of him that have been inherited from his enemies, who first sought to curtail his authority as mō‘ī through such acts as the 1887 Bayonet Constitution and who later tried to justify their parts in overthrowing the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 and annexing it to the United States in 1898. A close study of contemporary international and American newspaper accounts and other narratives about Kalākaua, many highly favorable, results in a more nuanced and wide-ranging characterization of the mō‘ī as a public figure. Most importantly, virtually none of the existing nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century texts about Kalākaua consults contemporary Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) sentiment for him. Offering examples drawn from hundreds of nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspaper articles, mele (songs), and mo‘olelo (histories, stories) about the mō‘ī, Reclaiming Kalākaua restores balance to our understanding of how he was viewed at the time—by his own people and the world. This important work shows that for those who did not have reasons for injuring or trivializing Kalākaua’s reputation as mō‘ī, he often appeared to be the antithesis of our inherited understanding. The mō‘ī struck many, and above all his own people, as an intelligent, eloquent, compassionate, and effective Hawaiian leader.

In 1897, as a white oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the U.S. Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture. A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism.

This book is an excellent study of the history and unique musical stylings of the Hawaiian guitar. Stacy Phillips successfully pinpoints the characteristics of Hawaiian guitar solos. A special feature is the inclusion of a superb historical survey of Hawaiian music. Written in tablature only, G tuning. DeWitt Scott comments: There are two types of Hawaiian music, the 'authentic' style and the 'tourist' style. Stacy is presenting the 'authentic' style and this is much needed to keep the Hawaiian music alive.

In the summer of 2019, a group of kia'i, or protectors, made up of kānaka 'ōiwi (Native Hawaiians) and their allies came together to prevent the construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) on the dormant volcano Maunakea. In Mele on the Mauna, Joseph Keola Donaghy explores how music, and especially haku mele, or Hawaiian language composers, played a crucial role in this defense. Musicians flocked to the mauna (mountain) to perform for the kia'i and a worldwide audience via social media. Haku mele created new songs at unprecedented levels, releasing many commercially with proceeds benefiting organizations providing support services and supplies to the kia'i. This book features over 30 of the author's interviews with individuals who participated in musical activities connected with this movement, including kia'i and their supporters, composers, musicians, and community leaders. Donaghy explores Indigenous Hawaiian concepts and theories like mana (power), mo'okū'auhau and pilina (genealogy and relationships), kapu aloha (philosophical code of conduct), and aloha 'āina (love of land, patriotism), and western academic concepts like connectedness and community building, poetics, sound(ing) and silenc(e/ing), conflict, and creativity. Mele on the Mauna illuminates how music played a powerful role in building solidarity, inspiration, and activism, reveling in the most contentious confrontations about protecting Maunakea and the outpouring of musical performances and creativity that occurred.

Musical sounds are some of the most mobile human elements, crossing national, cultural, and regional boundaries at an ever-increasing pace in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whole musical products travel easily, though not necessarily intact, via musicians, CDs (and earlier, cassettes), satellite broadcasting, digital downloads, and streaming. The introductory chapter by the volume editors develops two framing metaphors: “traveling musics” and “making waves.” The wave-making metaphor illuminates the ways that traveling musics traverse flows of globalization and migration, initiating change, and generating energy of their own. Each of the nine contributors further examines music—its songs, makers, instruments, aurality, aesthetics, and images—as it crosses oceans, continents, and islands. In the process of landing in new homes, music interacts with older established cultural environments, sometimes in unexpected ways and with surprising results. They see these traveling musics in Hawai‘i, Asia, and the Pacific as “making waves”—that is, not only riding flows of globalism, but instigating ripples of change. What is the nature of those ripples? What constitutes some of the infrastructure for the wave itself? What are some of the effects of music landing on, transported to, or appropriated from distant shores? How does the Hawai‘i-Asia-Pacific context itself shape and get shaped by these musical waves? The two poetic and evocative metaphors allow the individual contributors great leeway in charting their own course while simultaneously referring back to the influence of their mentor and colleague Ricardo D. Trimillos, whom they identify as “the wave maker.” The volume attempts to position music as at once ritual and entertainment, esoteric and exoteric, tradition and creativity, within the cultural geographies of Hawai‘i, Asia, and the Pacific. In doing so, they situate music at the very core of global human endeavors.