Land and culture

In Hawaiʻi, land and culture go hand-in-hand. The idea of cultural attachment – how people identify with and personify the environment around them – was central to early Hawaiians, including those who lived and visited the areas around Kīlauea Volcano. It’s no less true today for most of the people who choose to make Volcano their home. Then, as well as now, the landscape of Kīlauea shaped the myths, stories, songs, art and cultural milieu of the area. There’s an intimate relationship between the sites, features and phenomena of the Volcano landscape and the way people go about their daily lives.

The most important of those relations is the one that has existed for centuries between ka lua Pele (Kilauea crater) and the goddess Pelehonuamea, her family and protectors. The first foreigners to visit the area took note of the relationship that Hawaiians had with the landscape. There are dozens of wahi pana (sacred places) that reference Pele and her family, which Hawaiians both feared and protected them. Early accounts from Hawaiians and foreign visitors show that chants and offerings were always given by people who passed through the area.

In a review of the cultural literature of the area, historian Kepā Maly has documented just how thoroughly the cultural beliefs and practices were tied to places on the slopes of Kīlauea, from the ocean at Keauhou through the summit area. “The early accounts from the 1820s to the 1850s, regularly describe the beliefs, manners, customs, and practices of native Hawaiians that were observed when approaching, and traveling through Kilauea,” Maly writes. “It was noted by all that there was great awe and fear of Pele and the associated volcanic phenomena. While the foreigners made light of the native beliefs and traditions associated with Kīlauea, they also described them in words of respect, grandeur, and even fear.”

Maly also notes that Hawaiian historian, cultural practitioner, and kumu hula Pualani Kanaka‘ole-Kanahele considered the entire mountain, not just specific sites, to be sacred. “The whole area is very sacred, and we don’t really use just one site, we use many sites. It depends on how we feel,” she said. “The land is very much alive and growing and that growth has to be allowed. so, any time you steam coming out of the land, that’s an indication that the land is alive and is growing and it has breath....Kīlauea is really the house of Pele, she resides in Kīlauea. But then Pele is also the lava that comes out of Kilauea as well as the diety. She is also the lava

While the area was kapu to most Hawaiians before the middle of the 19th Century, a special class of people was permitted to visit the upper Puna forests for activities like feather gathering, adze making and harvesting of logs for canoe making. Offerings were always made to the gods, setting one free to enter and guaranteeing protection. Visitors could also gather the plentiful ōhelo berries for food and ōhiʻa lehua and paʻinui, a native lily, but never before giving a share of what they took to Pele. Maly retells the 1881 Hawaiian-language account of one visitor who offered a prayer before gathering the lei flowers near the summit of Kilauea and then heard a voice tell her: “If you gather the paʻiniu, take 10 leaves, six for you and one for me. Your lei shall be for me and for you and you shall be my companion in the place of verdure.”

The tradition of hoʻokupu, or paying tribute, has continued through historic and modern times. In a series of oral interviews conducted and compiled by Charles Langlas in the 1970s and1980s, Hawaiians who grew up in the Kaʻu and Puna districts spoke of bringing offerings to Pele when they visited the volcano.

Pele Hanoa, who was born in Punaluʻu in 1932, remembered that her mother took her many times to Kīlauea and they always brought offerings of flowers and lei, but never food, to “Tutu Pele” when they needed her help, tossing their gifts into the pit at Halemaʻumʻau. Hanoa also returned often to the national park area to pick palapalai, a`ali`i, and paʻiniu for a lei, which she sometimes offered to Pele after wearing it.

Another Kaʻu resident, Api Kanakaole Oliveira, said her father took her to Kīlauea for the first time when she was 12, and brought a whole pig as an offering, along with a bottle of liquor and a maile lei. “My father would go get it, put it all in a big package and he took me down and he introduced me to Pele. He said, ʻThis is my daughter.’ And he chanted and danced and he threw.”

Visitors today sometimes make offerings that are inappropriate and out of context, even to the point of being offensive. Money. alcohol, rocks, hair, etc. have no place in the practice of hoʻokupu. In a 2015 essay, Leilehua Yuen suggested that the best option for those not trained in traditional native practices was to avoid physical offerings of any kind. “The most perfect offering is one’s aloha, ha, and ʻōlelo,” she wrote. “To love a place, and breathe out that love in the form of a spoken promise to cherish and protect it, that is the most perfect offering.”