Hawaiian Book Resource Returning to Print: Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawaii Released by Bishop Museum Press
The Bishop Museum Press has issued a new edition of Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawaii available now at Shop Pacifica and bookstores throughout the Islands. The new edition features a facsimile of the original Hawaiian and English text edited by Martha Warren Beckwith, as well as notes written by Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui who worked on the original translation. It also includes a new introductory essay by contemporary Hawaiian scholar Noelani Arista.
Born around 1830, Kepelino was the son of Kanekapolei—a daughter of Kaemhameha, and Namiki—a descendent of the priestly lineage of Paao. In his youth and early adulthood, Kepelino received a Western education in subjects such as reading, writing, geography, and arithmetic through the Catholic Church. Like Native Hawaiian Historians Malo, Kamakau, and Papa Ii, he worked in the mid-nineteenth century, bridging both his lineage and academic training, by recording Hawaiian historical, cultural, and religious knowledge for future generations. Between 1860 and 1870, Kepelino was actively engaged in writing for the Catholic press, producing a four-part serial publication entitled, Hooiliili Havaii, or Hawaiian Collections, on a variety of traditional cultural practices and Hawaii’s natural history.
In 1868, he produced the text, Mooolelo Hawaii, his most comprehensive collection, which provides a wealth of cultural and historical information on a variety of topics, from the origins of the Hawaiian people and Polynesian navigation, fishing, farming, and the Hawaiian moon calendar, to the structure and political protocols involved in ancient Hawaiian society. Mooolelo Hawaii would become the basis for Beckwith’s Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawaii.
In her introduction to the new edition, Noelani Arista suggests that “far from being simply an artifact reflecting an older, quickly vanishing or forgotten past, Kepelino’s Mooolelo Hawaii is a particular blend of ideas and historical tradition that only Hawaiians of Kepelino’s training and experience could produce. He was a man enmeshed in complicated and sometimes confrontational social, political, and religious issues of the 19th century. If we read Mooolelo Hawaii as a product of a particular actor’s engagement with his own society, we then have the opportunity to understand a little more about an incredibly important and transformative period of time in the national history of Hawaii and its people.”
The new reprint edition of Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawai‘i will be available in both a hardcover ($24.95) and softcover ($16.95). The editions are 216 pages. To order online, contact Bishop Museum’s Shop Pacifica by email at shop@bishopmuseum.org or call (808) 848-4158. (Admission to Shop Pacifica is free of charge.)
For more information about Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawaii, call (808) 848-4135 or visit www.bishopmuseum.org/press.
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