All right aloha everyone and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Cindy Among-Serrao one of
your hosts for today so now I'm gonna pass it on to Allen Tom our superintendent who's gonna do
our intro slides and then we have our awesome presenter Jane Au here today, take it away Allen. Hey
my apologies I totally misunderstood what my role is today good morning everybody I see we have 133
attendees and the number is still growing I know we have 300 registrants today so I am thrilled
that you can join us today today's talk is about seeking the depths of Kanaloa, Hawaiian
religious understandings of the ocean and I know that this webinar series that's created
by the National Sanctuary Program was really meant originally to talk about Western science
sort of some of the science that's happening in the Sanctuaries but I am glad that we can talk
about other things that are going on including cultural science and we had a talk last year
from Sol Kaho'ohalahala about the importance of humpback whales in Hawai'i and that is now
available on our webinar library if people want to check it out. So next slide please Cindy.
Okay i'm sorry my screen is acting funny okay so our webinar host is me, I am the Superintendent
and Cindy Among-Serrao who really is the person running the show here and she's going to be
helping facilitate the questions. Everybody is in listen only mode if you do have any
questions please put them in the chat box. Some people are saying they do not have audio
so I think Cindy can respond to that I will say that this is being recorded so that it will
go on our webinar series hopefully in the next month after I get around to closed captioning it
and it will be available to for people to view. Next slide please.
Okay so the National Sanctuary System is a system of federally marine protected areas of
National Marine Sanctuaries and two National Marine Monuments, if you'd like to learn more about them
please do google us and each site has just as many wonderful things going on at their sites
as we're do as we're doing here today. Next slide please and I believe we're going to talk
about sort of the National Marine Sanctuaries Act real quickly you know we cover a lot of
different focus focuses such as recreation, ecological and archaeological importance places.
Next slide I will say that as as we're going through these slides the National Sanctuaries
Act is a very powerful federal act that does allow us to protect our ocean resources and we
use these ocean resources as living classrooms. Next I believe it's research areas that we do
have next please, okay so okay so the Humpback Whale Sanctuary real quick was created by
Congress in 1992 and approved by the State of Hawai'i in 1997, real quickly next slide
I'm trying to go fast because we have a great speaker and I don't want to take up all her time
but I do want to show the boundary of the sanctuaries and you can see the Sanctuary here
the red line is the boundary of the Humpback Whale Sanctuary this is the northern portion of it
and the area where you saw the cursor there on the North Shore of Oahu that is actually where Jane
our speaker is from even though she does a lot of her work on the island of Molokai which
is on the right hand of the screen, there's a little cursor for those of you who do not know
the geography of Hawai'i that is where Molokai is located and that is where her program is located.
Next slide and I'm calling you from the beautiful island of Maui where our office is located in
Kihei and in normal times I would invite you all to come visit us but of course right now we are
closed and so this is the best way that we can get to everybody which is through these virtual talks.
Next slide please and so real quickly I just want to mention to folks again the Sanctuary is here
for the protection of humpback whales but we also facilitate user groups and want to make sure that
the public is aware that if they do see people out on the beach harassing animals like the monk seals,
the sea turtles, the dolphins, of course humpback whales, please call the NOAA hotline 1-800 wait
1-888-256-9840 where you can report these incidences. These are federally protected
animals by both the federal government and the State of Hawai'i and we want to make sure that they
remain protected and allowed to do what they need to do. Next slide please. Okay now we get to it
so I am so pleased to introduce our speaker Jane Au, she has a beautiful Native Hawaiian name which
I am not going to try to mispronounce and be disrespectful of, so she can explain her full name
when I turn it over to her but she was raised on the North Shore of Oahu, she is a daughter,
a sister, mo'opuna, an artist, an enthusiast of nature. She obtained her B.A and M.A in Religion at the
University of Hawai'i at Manoa where she focused on Hawaiian religious beliefs and practices.
She has spent several years studying religious theory focusing in particular on indigenous
belief systems and their inherent messages of sustainability. She strives to incorporate
traditional Hawaiian aesthetics, genres in her work. In 2018 she successfully defended her master's
thesis on Kanaloa using rarely accessed Hawaiian language resources and materials.
She currently works as a Program Director for 'Aina Momona and I would like to welcome Jane
Au to our presentation and again thank her for doing this talk today, Jane. Thank you so much Allen
and mahalo nui everybody who's joining us today from near and far. My name is Jane Lokomaika'ikakua Au
as Allen said born on the I raised on the North Shore of Oahu in a community calledMaeaea
more commonly known as Haleiwa today an ocean-dependent ocean centric community.
I currently work as a Program Director for 'Aina Momona, we're a native Hawaiian nonprofit
organization dedicated to achieving environmental health and sustainability through restoring social
justice and the occupying Hawaiian lands. Prior to my time with 'Aina Momona I was a
religion student at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa as a Bachelor's and Master's student.
I studied religion focusing in particular on the traditional Hawaiian belief system. I studied under
Dr. Maria Lohalani Brown who is notably the world's only professor on Hawaiian Religion and
particularly as a Bachelor student I found that in reading authoritative texts on Hawaiian religion
there are a lot of misconceptions being made about our Pre-christian beliefs and practices. Too often
scholars who aren't familiar with na mae'a Hawai'i and scholars who cannot access Hawaiian language will
conflate important distinctions about our deities and about our
beliefs and practices and as an M.A student in particular I really wanted to readdress
some of these misconceptions that are being purported in Western academic texts. Too often
especially historically but this is unfortunately something that continues modern modernly
indigenous knowledge is left out of consideration in Western academic work
even when that work discusses indigenous life and indigenous people and I think Kanaloa is is a
good example of this and in surveying information about Kanaloa in English language texts that are
considered authoritative on the Hawaiian belief system compared to other deities very little is
said of Kanaloa in these secondary resources and the bulk of existing scholarship doesn't consider
the diverse portrayals he has in primary Hawaiian language resources. Instead there's a focus on the
later demonization that Kanaloa faces with the advent of Christianity and there's a strange
idea within these texts that not a lot is known about Kanaloa which within the Hawaiian community
we know is not true. Lots of information on him has been lost because these English texts failed to
consider Hawaiian language olelo Hawai'i resources. And so my goal was to kind of recenter the ancestral ways
that our kupuna understood Kanaloa and understood the ocean environment, that he
was in control of. I myself grew up in a very ocean-centric community growing up in Haleiwa
from fishponds to surfing to navigating both historically and in modern day we're
very dependent on the ocean and we spend so much time in the water the idea that not a lot is known
about Kanaloa or that Kanaloa is sinister in any way was very shocking to me to see
in any kind of text and so it was very important to me personally to try and do a work that would
re-center our indigenous ways of understanding him. My thesis tries to offer a more holistic
understanding of Kanaloa by examining o'iwi artistic intellectual genres such as
genealogy which is mo'okuapao, our mo'olelo, our stories and histories as well as our mele, our oli and
our chants which have been preserved primarily in 18th and 19th century Hawaiian language newspapers.
I try to offer evidence that will engender new ways of interpreting Kanaloa
and expand on his functions beyond the ocean realm which is where we tend to get
stuck on thinking of him but in reality he actually has a very diverse
set of forms and functions. Within this work and within this lecture, it's never my goal to provide
a clear-cut definition of what Kanaloa's functions, domains or forms are but rather to readdress
more narrow interpretations that have flourished within academic work. I use the word huliko'a
in the title of this because I think it best describes my research process. Huliko'a means
to seek into the depths of a matter or to describe fully rather than to define which is to confine or
to put limits on something and so my process here is not to say anything definitively but rather
to kind of push us to all look beyond the the norms that we were given and understanding Kanaloa
when it comes to these academic texts. Within my talk I'm going to be going over a selection
of my chapters from my thesis I'll spend some time talking about Kanaloa's wider Polynesian lineages
because I think that's an important thing to consider when we're talking about any Hawaiian
deity is the manifestations they have beyond Hawai'i recognizing the close kinship between all
Pacific communities. I'm also going to spend some time going over why Kanaloa was demonized with the
advent of Christianity because I think that's a very interesting phenomenon and also an important
point where we start to lose valuable information about Kanaloa's wider forms and functions and
then I'll go into some of the findings that I collected within Hawaiian language newspapers
that reveal more broad ways we can understand Kanaloa. But before I do that I did want to
open up to the audience we have a couple of like poll-type questions that we wanted to ask you all
to answer just as a way to find out how familiar everybody is with Kanaloa and get a sense of what
you all think of in terms of function when Kanaloa comes to mind. So I believe Cindy is going to
share some information on how we can answer and get these questions pulled from all of you.
All right aloha everyone so I am going to launch the first poll question
and right now it should probably pop up right on your guys screen.
So what is your familiar familiarity with Kanaloa and please select one so
whatever is your guy's comfort level with Kanaloa
and then I'm going to wait to around 70 to 80 percent
of attendees have voted and then we'll show the results live so just a few more seconds.
All right so it seems like we have 85 percent voted 86 which is great so give five seconds
get your guys votes in
all right and we're going to close this poll
and then I will share it.
Alright so here are the results from the first poll hopefully everyone is seeing it right now
we have around 58 percent unfamiliar, 35percent somewhat familiar and 7 percent very familiar
and then Jane did you have any words before I go to the next poll.
Yeah it's just it's interesting to see how many are unfamiliar with Kanaloa and I
hope for all of these categories you will get to learn something new today so it's exciting to
know where we're all at. All right and now we're gonna do our second poll question.
When you think of Kanaloa, what domains and functions first come to mind.
So once again we'll give you guys some time to submit your poll
and we'll wait so around 80 percent of attendees have voted.
There are currently 202 attendees on this webinar.
All right a few more seconds for people to submit their votes.
All right so we are going to close this poll now.
All right and here are the results for the poll. 86 percent ocean and marine life, 1 percent death and dying and 12percent
healing. Very interesting so this was the reason I included this poll is I expected most of us to
think first of ocean and marine life in connection to Kanaloa but he does have other connections so
it's good to see that some folks are familiar with those and then hopefully today we will all
walk away with a little bit of a broader understanding of Kanaloa.
Okay thank you so much Cindy for that. So I'm going to start off today but just
especially since we're not super familiar with Kanaloa talking a
little bit about some of his wider Polynesian manifestations. So trying to change my screen
there's a bit of a lag okay during the research phase of my project I investigated
Ta'aroa of Tahiti, Tagaloa of Samoa, Tangaloa of Tonga, Tanaoa and Takaoa of the Marquesas ,Tangaroa
Aotearoa and Tangaroa of Manihiki, trying to collect data on their unique roles and functions
to broaden our knowledge about Kanaloa's wider lineages. For the purpose of being concise, I
focused primarily on Tahiti and Tataoa within my thesis because I didn't want to
misappropriate another's culture in my pursuit to very broadly look at all these different
distinct cultural manifestations and so part of the reason why I picked Tahiti specifically
is Tahiti and Hawai'i bear many connections particularly in terms of our navigating practices
which Kanaloa and Ta'aro both oversee. An example of the relationship between Ta'aro, Kanaloa and
Tahiti and Hawai'i can be seen specifically in looking at Kaho'olawe which is notably one of
Kanaloa's kinola'u, one of his bodies. Kinola'u can be defined as many bodies or many forms.
My mentor Maria Alohalani Brown offers the most holistic definition of this term and it's the
physical manifestations and symbolic associations of a deity and so Kaho'olawe is actually the only
major Hawaiian island that is a kinola'u for a deity and the body belongs to Kanaloa. According
to several histories and chants from Kaho'olawe Tahitians belonging to a specific class of kahuna
came to Hawai'i and brought their god to Ta'aroa with them and named the island after this deity which
is supposed to be a a reason for why Kanaloa is connected to Kaho'olawe. Now as is the case with all
of our stories and all of our traditions there's much variety in that so other stories of Kanaloa's
arrival to Hawai'i differ and don't mention Tahiti at all don't mention Kaho'olawe at all
but there is a consciousness that links these two deities and in our quest to learn about Kanaloa
his counterparts including Ta'aroa are relevant and revealing it's not enough to just look at his
Hawaiian manifestation in isolation because doing so causes really valuable information to be lost.
so looking at some a variety of Tahitian texts Ta'aroa occupies the position of the creator
god in the Tahitian pantheon he has a variety of forms and functions and roles but his primary
position is that of creator. Ta'aroa is responsible for creating the entire Tahitian universe, he's
responsible for creating the rest of the pantheon of Tahitian deities and so he occupies a very
supreme and important position in the pantheon however when we look at English again
authoritative texts on Tahitian religion his role as creator isn't as well developed as his position
as a fishing god which is what gets focused on the most. Craig Hill Handy in particular focuses
heavily on Ta'aroa having the primary role of a fishing deity in Tahitian society almost ignoring
altogether that he occupies the role of creator this is significant because if the the deity that
creates your entire universe is also connected to the ocean, is also connected to fishing
that says something about what the ocean means and what ocean practices mean to your community.
Gods reveal what is most important to a culture and to a people and to conflate Ta'aroa as just
a fishing god ignores a lot of the importance that the oceanic realm had to this community
and to these people and since many of the western scholars that studied Ta'aroa and wrote about him
also studied Kanaloa and wrote about Kanaloa and Hawai'i. Ta'aro's conflation as just a fishing
deity further isolates Kanaloa and studies of him in Hawai'i erasing their shared importance
and responsibilities that they have outside of the oceanic realm. For example both Ta'aroa and
Kanaloa their very deep connections to healing particularly but also death and the afterlife
and by only focusing on Ta'aroa as a fishing deity which Kanaloa is notably not connected to fishing
practices and Hawai'i just navigation there seems to be more disconnect than commonality between the
two when reading western scholarship and so it's very important as we try to re-investigate these
deities that we try and look at their broader lineages, their broader genealogies because they
have in some extent moved through very distinct cultures, languages, landscapes and all of that
adds to how we understand them as they land in a new island community. Now in my
third chapter I discuss how Kanaloa within Hawaiian texts, Hawaiian academic texts
was transformed into a Hawaiian concept of evil or a Hawaiian concept of the devil even with the
advent of Christianity within academic circles and this is something I didn't realize until
studying religion academically studying Hawaiian religion academically there are numerous texts
still considered authoritative that purport the misconception Kanaloa represented something
sinister to Hawaiians and this entire viewpoint comes from a very specific set of stories
written by two Hawaiian scholars Samuel Kamakau and Kapelino Kealokalani, both scholars were
native Hawaiians who grew up were born in a world pre-Christianity a Hawaiian world pre-Christianity
but were more or less raised to be Christian and both of them set out to write a Hawaiian account
of creation that connected Hawaiian traditions to the Bible and what they end up writing is what
they call the Kumu Honua legends. Now I'm looking at the original transcripts of these legends you can
tell that Kamakau and Kapilino are are authoring them themselves not as old traditional accounts
but as their attempt to connect Hawaiian stories and Hawaiian deities to creation accounts within
genesis. Within these stories you see Kane, Ku and Lono depicted as a sort of Hawaiian trinity. Kane
being the leader of this this trinity ,the father so to speak and Kanaloa is kind of an outsider
to them an outcast to them. The three within the trinity set out to create a person of the
earth and they mold the being and they breathe life into him and the first human being is born.
Kanaloa is extremely envious of this and he tries to create his own being but the being cannot
doesn't come to life, he doesn't have the power to give it life and so Kanaloa sets out to grow
thorny plants and bitter plants and tempt this human and all of its offspring to stray from the
light of Kane. When you read this story if you're familiar with genesis or with the Bible at all you
see immediately that this is a Hawaiian spin-off, a Hawaiian interpretation of the genesis account.
However Abraham Fornander a sort of armchair anthropologist who studied and wrote
extensively on Hawaiian religion and Hawaiian culture publishes this account as an authentic
Hawaiian account of creation which goes on to allow several generations of scholars after him
to treat this story as though it was a Hawaiian religious belief when in reality it is a Christian
account and a Christian story that simply makes use of Hawaiian deities, Hawaiian
names and certain aspects of Hawaiian culture and I do my best to to kind of break down why
of all deities in the Hawaiian pantheon and specifically of the four major gods Kane
Ku, Lono and Kanaloa. Kamakau and Kepelino would have selected Kanaloa to fill this role as
a Hawaiian devil and this is largely because Kanaloa is connected to death he's connected to
the afterlife and he's connected to the depth of the realm which has a Christian connotation
to like the underworld or the death so he was the most fitting candidate to be a devil but it's
important to note that when we look at these same authors accounts outside of the Kumu Honua legends
they do not speak of Kanaloa as a sinister being this was something that they did in a specific
story with a specific aim but unfortunately this account did lead to several scholars making the
misconception and purporting the misunderstanding that Kanaloa was somehow sinister to us but as
a ocean dependent and ocean-faring people we of course would not have seen the primary ocean god
as sinister or negative in that way and so it's important to readdress these misconceptions
especially since they've allowed for so much scholarship to kind of advance this incorrect idea.
So in my second and and longest chapter I go over Kanaloa's functions as derived from Hawaiian
language archives. Sorry I'm trying to change my screen but it doesn't seem to be working
oh
okay here we go. So in in researching Kanaloa within Hawaiian language archives
I primarily turn to 19th and 20th century Hawaiian language newspapers
and for those who aren't familiar with any of the with these archives from the 19th and
20th century there were thousands of newspapers published by the by Hawaiian language speakers
and they were a huge success I guess you could say Hawaiians who gained literacy really really
loved contributing to these and within these resources we have so much valuable information
about Hawaiian culture, Hawaiian religion, Hawaiian life and beliefs and so I turned to this archive
to look at what the ancestral Hawaiian community had to say about Kanaloa and what their
what information I could pull from these resources since so much of the western
scholarship was sort of piecemeal-ed and largely drawn from secondary resources rather than primary
and in research in Kanaloa in the nu'pepa, newspapers in the newspapers his name was most frequently mentioned
in Kanikao which are funeral dirges Kanikao are really intimate kind of intense even chants of
mourning, chants of lament they are deeply personal and it was very common within the nu'pepa, newspapers for
Hawaiians to share these sort of in replace of an obituary which you would share today when a loved
one died you would compose usually a very long mourning chant, a Kanikao and you would publish
this in the newspaper to let those know about the loss and I found several thousand examples
of Kanikao that specifically named Kanaloa as the deity that will greet their loved one in the
afterlife and more specifically they talk about Kanalo's ala, his path and in looking at these
Kanikao I pulled out several hundred examples of Kanaloa's path in connection to to death and
the loss of a loved one on the screen here we have some of just a few of the examples sometimes the
it's the na ala is ma'awe which is like narrow and rough sometimes it's muku which is silent
huna is hidden, all of these laula is wide all of them depict very different imageries of what the
path is but it's very clear that the path is one that leads from this material plane to the next, to
the afterlife. This is really significant because outside of the sort of negative depictions Kanaloa
gets within the Kumu Honua legends he's not widely connected to death or dying within scholarship
and so this reveals that while he does have this connection to death and dying it's certainly not
negative it's very positive nobody who was experiencing the loss of a loved one would
have written about a sinister deity meeting them on this path and so it goes to show that Kanaloa
was not only connected to the ocean but had a very meaningful connection a very deep connection to
the afterlife and to death and dying. Outside of these Kanikao we can also see different ways
that Kanaloa has been connected to death and dying particularly in looking at his dyadic relationship
with Kane who is his natural counterpart. Kane is connected to the eastern hemisphere
which is where the sun rises and there's a place connected to life and to birth. Conversely Kanaloa
is connected to the western hemisphere where the sun sets which is a phenomenon and a place
connected to death and to dying. Again this isn't supposed to be negative it's meant to show the
complementary aspects between Kane and Kanaloa between living and between dying
and it's not to make one negative and one positive and just show the way they they complement each
other as deities representing these phenomena. Martha Beckwith a scholar who has produced
some problematic scholarship, some good scholarship has made a very what I think is an astute point in
commenting on Kane and Kanaloa's relationships and she remarks that we might understand Kanaloa as
being connected to the embryonic stages of life so when we are in our mother's womb surrounded
by water deep inside of her body we we are in the domain of Kanaloa but upon birth and entering this
world of light we join into Kane's realm and it's not until our death that we rejoin Kanaloa so
thinking of it as Kane being the principal deity connected to our time on the land and Kanaloa
being the principal deity during our time after life and before we are born in our mother's womb
and and looking at Kane and Kanaloa's relationship we can find a lot of other examples
of this sort of them being paired together and representing different lines of an extreme.
One can be in looking at stories of Kane and Kanaloa as water finders so when we look at mo'olelo
about Kane and Kanaloa many of them depict them as arriving to Hawai'i before there's any
humans, before there's any other gods and before there's any water above ground all the streams
all the rivers are still in underground aquifers and the two are traveling the islands together and
they get thirsty for some awa and they need fresh water to mix their awa with. Kane has a digging
stick, a big o'o and he's the one to break the earth open so that the underground water will shoot
up from the surface this is part of the reason why Kane is it got associated with fresh water
above ground, with our rivers, with our streams but notably in these stories Kanaloa is the
one to tell Kane where to break the ground open which is revealing that he has knowledge about
where submarine submarine groundwater exists he's connected to the underground aquifers and the
premier scholar of Hawaiian religion Pua Kanahele has noted that Kanaloa is not just associated
with the ocean with kai, which is salt water but is also associated with wai, fresh water that is still
underground. So Kane is connected to fresh water above ground that we can see that we can access
Kanaloa is connected to submarine groundwater that we cannot see and we cannot easily access.
In looking at the Hawaiian language newspapers
I found a variety of articles written by native Hawaiians on the island Kauai describing Kawaiakanaloa, a body of fresh water, a specific body of fresh water that was named for Kanaloa.
This body is supposed to somewhat secret but it is supposedly near the Haena region
on the North shore of Kauai and the articles talked about how people would come near and far
to to go to this spring, this body of water which was fed from a puna, a spring deep deep underground
and because the water was pumping up from deep in the earth it was extremely mineral rich and it
had healing powers people would come far and wide to have mental, physical, emotional, even spiritual
ailments healed by being in this pond and sitting in this water and so this this not only furthers
evidence of Kanaloa's connection to groundwater but also extends the ways we can conceive of him
as a healing deity he does have other connections to healing particularly in connection to his
kinolau, the he'e, the octopus. He'e means to slip and to slide and it is used in a lot of healing chants
and healing practices to encourage illness to slip and slide away from us but outside of these
practices we can also see that he's connected to certain healing waters which is very significant
in expanding his roles and functions beyond just the ocean. Now Pua Kanehele has also noted that
a deities kinolao, their bodies, their manifest manifestations reveal aspects of the gods
character and of the the domains and functions that they have. In reading about Kanaloa's kinolao
he notably only has one plant body or form. Mary Kawena Pukui lists out these forms and she notes
that Kanaloa's plant kinolao is the banana but she also notes that it's the banana and plants of
a similar type but she doesn't explain or expand on what this type of plant is. So I spent some
time thinking and researching banana plants and I found that while they are colloquially considered
trees, banana trees they're botanically classed as a berry which I found very fascinating but as
not true trees they don't have the vascular tissues on their trunk that trees use to store
water for long periods of time. Instead a banana trunk works similar to the way an underground
aquifer works holding water in large tubes that move through the plant almost continuously and so
if you actually cut a banana tree in half and wait the stump will fill with potable drinking water
and in this way we can see how the banana plant has a similar function to underground
aquifers and that that is the phenomenon that Kanaloa is representing in the space
the phenomenon of unseen water unseen drinkable potable water that is moving through the earth
through the subterranean realms. This expands on his connections and realms beyond just the ocean
and into deep water and into depth in general which is very significant and looking at some
of Kanaloa's other kinolao we can also see more things that are revealing of his character
revealing of his true self. Notably the bulk of Kanaloa's kinolao are animals that stay
in in deep water they are not animals that were widely eaten by Hawaiians a
lot of these animals have connotations of of mistrust such as the the stingray, the hihimanu
animals that were hard for us to perceive and interact with were considered elusive
and like the he'e, Kanaloa is slippery and elusive in looking at his bodies and forms he is not a
deity that is easy to see easy to interact with as opposed to other major forms of divine like Kane
and Ku and Lono whose manifestations are plants and animals that we regularly engage with and
interact with on a regular basis for our survival. Kanaloa has none of these forms or manifestations
and which is revealed and his character being sort of elusive to us as humans who live on the land
In looking at aumakua manifestations of deities all gods typically have aumakua forms.
An aumakua is an ancestral guardian a family guardian and it's most typically an animal.
Kanaloa and even in looking in primary Hawaiian language resources it's very clear
that Kanaloa has no aumakua manifestations he as a deity doesn't have a variety of
forms manifestations that are connected to people specifically but in looking at his kinolao
and his his elusive character we can understand why as the the principal deity connected to
the embryonic stages of life and to death he doesn't serve a prevalent function in the everyday
lives of humans and as such he doesn't take on the role of being a guardian, being an aumakua for us
in this way. Again this is not to say that he's negative or that people looked upon him with any
kind of disdain but in being able and seeking out an aumakua you want something that you can readily
access readily see and that is not something that Kanaloa represents he's harder to perceive.
I also think it's revealing of the way Kanaloa exists beyond human concepts and human
constructs so an example of this can be seen again and looking at his connection to Kaho'olawe.
I've mentioned previously that the only major island that is a kinolao of a god is Kaho'olawe
and it is belongs to Kanaloa. One of the poetic names for Kaho'olawe is kohe a malamalama a kanaloa
which translates to the shining vagina of Kanaloa which is a very puzzling statement since
most people consider Kanaloa to be male and most typically he is described as a major male form
of the divine but in in thinking about Hawaiian religious philosophy it's important to note that
Kanaloa doesn't get his characteristics from the ocean. The ocean gets its characteristics from
Kanaloa that's the way the Hawaiian religious philosophy works now on the land there are no
animals that can change gender but in the ocean there are a variety of fish species that are
able to switch their gender. According to Hawaiian religious philosophy these sea animals get that
quality from Kanaloa who is not a gendered being he doesn't belong to any kind of gender binary
and this point shows that as an ocean deity who represents an elusive other realm Kanaloa was
unique and beyond human constructs like gender as one example and so in the conclusion of my
thesis and of my work I argue that there's a variety of different ways we can understand
Kanaloa and that most of them point to the ways that he's not a readily accessible deity
but more centered on our pre-birth and after life stages and because of that I argue that
he's representative more of the subconscious aspects of our life that go beyond our very
obvious cognitive needs again in looking at his relationship to Kane we can see that Kane is the
god of the sky, of the sunrise, of fresh water above ground and of our staple foods like Kalo
and because of this he can be conceived of as the principal deity connected to humanity's vital
needs connected to our survival. As his natural counterpart we can understand why Kanaloa takes
on a less obvious and less prominent role in human lives it's not that he's less important but his
roles are connected to the sea, where humans cannot survive indefinitely. He's connected to death which
is a realm that we cannot easily perceive and a realm that we tend to associate with death
and that we can't just readily understand it's not something we can readily study and
access like these other domains that other deities deal with. I believe Beckwith is really correct in
stating that we understand Kane as the general high god for humans during their life on earth
while Kanaloa is the main deity for us in the womb and for life after death. Therefore the phases
where Kanaloa is most dominant are not visible to living humans they're the stages that bookend
our conscious life and our existence and then this way we might understand Kanaloa as the
subconscious to Kane's conscious. Kanaloa was additionally connected to fresh water, deep deep
underground and he has an intimate connection to the earth's subterranean realms via his connection
to underground aquifers as well as to the ocean which is the deepest portions of our earth in
this way his association with death in general becomes evident and in looking at his connections
to healing specifically to to mourning and then kanikao the the loss and death I think it's
interesting to look at Kanaloa's function as a god of psychology and looking at his therapeutic
functions in terms of healing as well. The scholar Taupouri Tongaro has noted that Kanaloa
doesn't just represent depth of the earth but depth of self and deep thinking and then this
way we can start to understand how both Kanaloa and the ocean realm he represented were connected
to our psychological well-being and served a sort of therapeutic function which i think we can all
relate to in some small way if we live near the ocean and you're experiencing turmoil I
think we all feel that need to get into the water, to get into the ocean it is still
very much a healing place for us but in looking at Kanaloa's wider connections
and the functions that he serves we can really understand how and why both Kanaloa and the
ocean take on this really deep meaningful healing psychological aspect and role.
Now all Hawaiian deities have an underlying philosophy that they embody
their roles function and importance can change considerably over time as the people who keep them
change and but nevertheless they encapsulate and symbolize a set phenomenon and express a set idea
and as the principal ocean deity Kanaloa represents how Hawaiians in part understood the ocean realm
and is revealed very much as a place of healing as a place connected to to death
and dying as a place connected to our beginnings the embryonic stage of life
compared to Kane, Kanaloa appears chaotic even intimidating but that's not to diminish the
importance of his roles in our life it's very easy to miss this and just engaging with english
scholarship but when we dive into the wealth and depth of knowledge and Hawaiian language resources
we see all of these bits of information that help us better understand these deities and the natural
phenomenon that they represent. There's something very subconscious about Kanaloa, he's of the psyche,
the the human mind and the spirit and so it makes sense that he was difficult to understand
but I think we need to recognize that in engaging with primary resources and engaging with Hawaiian
language resources we are able to pull out a lot of very important very detailed information
about our cultural practices and about our beliefs so that's just
something that I always like to advocate for and all the work I do is whether we're trying to
write religious theses or create scientific documents and produce data on the ocean it's
always important to consider primary resources it's always important to consider cultural
resources and cultural expertise to give context to the domain and the space that we're
working in and I think Kanaloa is a case in point and and judging by the polls that we had earlier
a lot of this information is new to us and I do hope whether you are scientists or just ocean
lovers that this information will help change your relationship with Kanaloa moving forward
and I just want to recognizing how many of us are on this call I just want to take a moment to thank
you all so much for coming here today and spending time I know we all spend too much time on zoom as
of late or on webinars as of late and so I really appreciate the attention and I tried to keep this
short enough so we can answer some questions if we have any, we have a little bit of time
but that's my presentation for today and I just want to yeah mahalo everybody for listening.
Okay mahalo Jane that was awesome we have a lot of positive comments on your presentation so thank
you for that. We do have a lot of questions that we'll try to get through. So I think
first question oh let me so feel free to keep submitting questions via the
chat box if we don't get to your question we will save them
and share them with Jane and we will send them out via the email that you registered with
at a later date hopefully within a week or so. All right let's start off with the first question.
When you say Kanaloa is connected to death can we think of that as being connected to Po.
Yes I didn't use the word Po in this presentation specifically because I wasn't sure
how familiar the audience would be with it but in reading primary Hawaiian language resources there
is a lot of language about Kanaloa's connection specifically to the Po and for those who don't
know Po is our term for night, for darkness and it's sort of the word we have for not just
the afterlife but sort of the the realm where our beginnings began where our entire universe
was born from there is a lot of evidence that Kanaloa is connected to that realm specifically.
Excellent thank you
Okay next question.
Do you find any connection between Kanaloa and Uhi like we find in other parts of the Pacific ?
I do yes so in in certain parts of the specif Pacific
Kanaloa's manifestations seem to take on a very prominent role in connection
to Uhi but they also do in Hawai'i as well particularly because Uhi which is the practice of
of tattooing, traditional tattooing falls under the work of Kane and as Kane's natural
counterpart it makes sense that Kanaloa would also have a connection to this work
particularly in the way that the tattoo's function as a connection to your ancestors, a connection
to those who came before you and looking at how Kanaloa is connected to your time in the
in embryonic stage before your birth and to your time after death we can see how he takes on this
ancestral aspect of connecting you before you're born to the time after you've lived your life and
there's a similar function with with tattooing and connecting you to those who came before you as
one who's come after them and so in that way there is a connection to Kanaloa and that work.
Awesome okay and then the next question. Can you briefly speak
to any other connection between Kanaloa and other Hawaiian deities?
Sure it's really interesting because Kanaloa doesn't seem to have too many broad connections
to the deities outside of Kane, at least on what I've seen I will preface this by saying
that I have not exhausted Hawaiian language resources on Kanaloa so there might be a mo'olelo
or something out there that would discount this belief but at least in what I've
seen typically when Kanaloa is mentioned in a mo'olelo in a story that's discussing a
lot of deities he's sort of the silent partner of Kane he's always named with Kane not alone
and he rarely has a speaking role but he's always there, he's always present
and so I guess this isn't so much an example of his connection to other deities but it's
interesting to see that when he is depicted in some kind of you know bodily form as a god
he's almost always just the sort of silent counterpart to Kane he doesn't really take
on a lot of speaking roles he might do things in the story but he doesn't speak much and I think
that's kind of revealing of the way that he's not taking the the most active role on the things that
are happening on the land to these living already born beings it kind of further shows where his
function lies as juxtaposed to the other deities who are centered on specific natural phenomenon
specific work specific functions connected to human functioning lives if that makes sense.
Thank you Jane. We probably have time for one more question you guys have a lot of questions
so i'm filtering through them. So would the nai'a or dolphins be considered a kinolao of
Kanaloa or another deity. So nai'a is a kinolao of Kanaloa and Pua Kanahele actually notes that the
nai'a is one of the few kinolao Kanaloa has that reveal his playful side and so I didn't discuss this in my
in this lecture. I did think about it though in talking about Kanaloa's kinolao and
his functions there's a focus and emphasis on how they are slippery and elusive and kind of stick to
the depths but the nai'a, the dolphin is one of the few kinolao he has that show his playful side
because the ocean isn't just an unknown place it's really deep and scary we have a lot of fun in the
ocean it's a really happy and meaningful place to us and the nai'a is revealing of his more playful
qualities and characteristics and if anybody's ever swam with with nai'a or or gone out and seen
them in the water you know that that's they always look like they're having so much fun and that's
the a part of Kanaloa's quality and character as well and this isn't a question that was asked but
it's something that just making me think of it really briefly before we end I think it's really
interesting that while Kanaloa is connected to navigating and connected to the ocean he's not
connected to fishing practices in Hawai'i like Ta'aroa is in Tahiti which I think makes sense
because why would Kanaloa be connected to the practice of killing his bodies and his forms most
fish and marine life are his kinolao and so that domain belongs to Ku who is our deity of of war
but also of tools and making use of tools and so that's an interesting distinction to keep in mind
that Hawaiians didn't conceive of Kanaloa as a fishing deity in any way he wasn't associated with
the killing of marine life just with the ocean and with navigating it it's an interesting point.
Thank you Jane and thank you everyone you guys have a lot of great questions so
as I previously mentioned we will share all the unanswered questions with Jane and we'll send
it out to everyone that has attended this webinar and now we're gonna go ahead and do a few closing
slides and let me which will be done by Allen. So while we're waiting for the slides I want to again
thank Jane. I think you have a whole new fan club now of people who know about you and your
work and for those of you on the phone who didn't get your online, who didn't get
your questions answered what's nice about this program that we have is that we can we know
who you are and we know your emails and so we have recorded all the questions you have typed
in, we will send them to Jane and she will get back to you at some point. I probably forgot to mention
because I was in such a hurry to introduce Jane is that she's the Program Director for 'Aina Momona
and you can go to their homepage and learn more about her program and what they're doing and I am
proud to say that the Humpback Whale Sanctuary just signed an MOA, memorandum of agreement with Jane's
group and so I expect because I think one of the questions was we need to have Jane back on again
so Jane certainly I think you and I will be working more about how we can get your information
out to the public so thank you. Absolutely. Cool and several have asked it has this
been recorded yes it is recorded and will be closed captioned and we'll go on to the webinar
archive so people can watch Jane as many times as they want to once it gets posted. So next slide.
We have several webinars coming up that I want people to know about but before I talk about that
each of you will get one hour of professional development
and we will send this certificate out hopefully within the next 48 hours to all of
you who are who did attend and stayed with us on this lecture and like I said coming up next slide
coming up we do have more talks in the works and we do want your comments so please let us
know, go online let us know what you thought about this talk what you would like to hear
in the future and what other things that the sanctuary can do for you. Next slide.
Okay so our next slide February 9th is Makaala Kaaumoana from the island of Kauai she'll be talking about
an area that she lives in, Hanalei and that whole north shore area of Kauai so you can already go
online and register for that talk and following Maka'ala will be in March I believe the next talk
will be on oh sorry I'm wrong we actually have two a a two day teacher workshop two
two hours each we're each education coordinator from the three sanctuaries here in the Pacific
Papahanamokuakea, The National Marine Sanctuary of American Samoa, of course the Humpback Whale
Sanctuary in association with the Waikiki aquarium we'll be holding a teacher workshop for two hours
where they basically basically will be having virtual lessons that you can learn
and this really is open to anybody so please feel free to go online and register for that
and then in March I believe our next talk will be from Dr. Ward on Cephalopods, he'e
of Hawai'i and she is on the island of Kauai so she will be doing a presentation
on octopi and we just added another talk next slide in April on Whale sharks so different
kind of whale animal it's a Whale shark and we'll be talking the talk would be given by Travis from
the island the Big island in Kona so please join us for those and I believe that is the last slide.
So again i want to thank Jane for taking time to put this presentation together, I
want to thank all of you who attended us or attended the talk today
and please give us your comments and i just want to say thank you for joining us
Aloha