The old stories of the Big Island are attached to real places. The volcano is a woman with a family and a temper. A boy from Kohala gets even with a shark by letting it eat him. A chief settles a war by winning an argument about a road.
These are our own retellings, kept short, for anyone who wants the story without the lecture. Most of them end somewhere you can drive to.
Table of contents
- How Pele came to Kīlauea
- Pele’s love story, and the forest she burned
- Kaʻehuiki, the child born a shark
- Punia, the boy who let a shark swallow him
- Why one side of the island is wet and the other dry
- ʻŌhiʻa and Lehua: why picking the flower brings rain
- Lonoikamakahiki, the chief who fought with words
- The places these stories attach to
The seven stories, in short
A paragraph each, with a link to the full retelling underneath it. Four of them involve Pele, and two are about sharks.
How Pele came to Kīlauea
Pele’s house, mid-eruption. The Hawaiian texts call Halemaʻumaʻu her kapu chiefly house, and the crater has kept erupting into our own time. Image credit: USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
Pele was born in Kahiki and left after falling out with her older sister. She came down the island chain looking for a home and found one at Halemaʻumaʻu, the crater at the summit of Kīlauea, where the accounts say she lives now. She is not a closed subject either: for some families in Puna and Kaʻū she is still a family deity.
Read it: Pele, goddess of the volcano.
Pele’s love story, and the forest she burned
Lava tree molds at Lava Tree State Monument in Puna: what is left standing when a flow runs through a forest and burns the trunks out of its own casts. Image by Sean A. Clevenger [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons.
Pele sent her youngest sister Hiʻiaka to Kauaʻi to fetch a man she wanted. Hiʻiaka agreed on two conditions: that Pele look after her ʻōhiʻa groves, and after her friend Hōpoe. The journey took too long for Pele’s liking, so she burned the groves and buried Hōpoe in lava, and it ends badly for everyone at the crater.
Read it: Pele, Hiʻiaka and Lohiʻau.
Kaʻehuiki, the child born a shark
The boardwalk at Puʻu Loa runs a loop around the carvings, on the same stretch of Puna coast as Pānau. Staying on it is what keeps the petroglyphs intact.
A couple on the Puna coast have a child who is born a shark. He grows up wanting a place among the great sharks of the islands, travels the coast paying his respects to the shark chief of every district, and gets past a dangerous one on Maui by swimming into its mouth.
Read it: Kaʻehuiki, the shark child of Pānau.
Punia, the boy who let a shark swallow him
Punia’s father dived for lobster at a hole in a shore like this one, and the shark pack killed him there.
A shark kills a fisherman at his lobster hole in Kohala. Years later the fisherman’s son goes back to the same hole with a rolled mat and two carved sticks, and lets the shark swallow him whole. The best scene is on the beach afterwards.
Read it: Punia and the shark Kaiʻaleʻale.
Why one side of the island is wet and the other dry
One of the forms Kamapuaʻa takes in the 1861 text is the humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa, the fish whose name ends in “pig”. Humuhumunukunukuapuaa (reef trigger fish), the state fish of the Big Island of Hawaii. Image credit: Wikipedia.
Why the east side of the island is wet and the west side is dry. Pele and the demigod Kamapuaʻa were lovers, it went badly, and they split the island between them: he took the rainy windward side, she kept the dry leeward one.
Read it: Pele and Kamapuaʻa.
ʻŌhiʻa and Lehua: why picking the flower brings rain
The lehua blossom. Pick one and it rains that day. Red Ohia Lehua flower.
Pele wanted a warrior named Ohia, who was already promised to Lehua. When he turned her down she turned him into a twisted tree, and the gods made Lehua its flower so the two would stay together. Pick one and it rains that day.
Read it: Ohia Lehua, and the jealousy of Pele.
Lonoikamakahiki, the chief who fought with words
Puʻukoholā Heiau stands above Pelekane Bay, on the Kohala coast Lonoikamakahiki’s army crossed generations earlier. Image credit: NPS Photo, Puʻukoholā Heiau National Historic Site.
A chief of Hawaiʻi Island who spent his youth learning a formal contest of riddling and wit, beat the chief of Oʻahu at it round after round, and later settled where to fight a war with Maui by taking his priest’s advice about which road to march out of Kawaihae.
Read it: Lonoikamakahiki, the chief who fought with words.
The places these stories attach to
Most of these attach to somewhere you can go. The Puʻu Loa petroglyph field is on the same Puna coast as Pānau, reached by a boardwalk off Chain of Craters Road. Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau was a place of refuge, where someone who had broken a law could be absolved. The petroglyph fields at Puakō and Waikoloa sit on the Kona and Kohala side.
Pele’s hair, the strands of volcanic glass that drift downwind of a vent, is named for her: Pele’s hair. Haumea, her mother, also names a dwarf planet: Haumea. For heiau and historic sites, start with our history and culture guide, and for hula and chant performed rather than read, the luʻau and hula page.
We work from Hawaiian-language sources where we can reach them, mostly the Hawaiian newspapers of the 1800s and early 1900s and the modern editions of them published by Hale Kuamoʻo at UH Hilo, which are free to read online at Ulukau. Each page says at the bottom whose telling it follows. Caren Loebel-Fried is the local storyteller and author we point people to for these in print.