Pele sent her younger sister to Kauaʻi to fetch the man she wanted. While Hiʻiaka was away, Pele burned the forest her sister had asked her to look after and killed her sister’s closest friend. That is the Pele love story, and nobody in it comes out well.
The legend of Pele, Hiʻiaka and Lohiʻau
The groves Pele burned were ʻōhiʻa, and the lehua is their blossom. Red Ohia Lehua flower.
From her home at the summit of Kīlauea, Pele wanted Lohiʻau, a man on Kauaʻi. She asked her sisters to go and bring him to her. They all refused except the youngest, Hiʻiaka, who agreed on two conditions: while she was gone, Pele would look after her ʻōhiʻa groves, and look after her friend Hōpoe.
Hiʻiaka reached Kauaʻi and found Lohiʻau dead. She brought him back to life and started for home with him, and the journey took longer than Pele had meant it to.
Waiting at the crater, Pele decided she had been betrayed. She burned the ʻōhiʻa groves, and she buried Hōpoe in lava. The two things her sister had asked her to protect.
Hiʻiaka could see it happen from far off. She brought Lohiʻau the rest of the way to Kīlauea and embraced him there, in front of her sister. Pele killed him.
Hiʻiaka started digging down through the floor of the crater to let the sea in and put the fire out. At the last moment she stopped, and the two sisters made it up.
The ʻōhiʻa forest Pele burned
The ʻōhiʻa around Kīlauea is the tree Pele burned, and it has a second story of its own about her jealousy: Ohia Lehua, and the jealousy of Pele. You drive through that forest on the way up to the crater.
Pele has her own page, and the rest of the stories we have written up sit on the mythology hub.
The full telling ran as a serial by Hoʻoulumāhiehie in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Naʻi Aupuni in 1906, which survives only as newspaper scans. We worked from a Hale Kuamoʻo book that draws on it, free online at Ulukau, and from the National Park Service’s summary for the order of events.