Kua'aina Kahiko

Abstract

In early Hawaiʻi, kuaʻāina were the hinterlands inhabited by nākuaʻāina, or country folk. Often these were dry, less desirable areas where much skill and hard work were required to wrest a living from the lava landscapes. The ancient district of Kahikinui in southeast Maui is such a kuaʻāina and remains one of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in the islands. Its thousands of pristine acres house a treasure trove of archaeological ruins—witnesses to the generations of Hawaiians who made this land their home before it was abandoned in the late nineteenth century. This book follows a kamaʻāina archaeologist on a seventeen-year-long research odyssey to rediscover the ancient patterns of life and land in Kahikinui. Through painstaking archaeological survey and detailed excavations, the author and his students uncovered thousands of previously undocumented ruins of houses, trails, agricultural fields, shrines, and temples. The book describes how, beginning in the early fifteenth century, Native Hawaiians began to permanently inhabit the rocky lands along the vast southern slope of Haleakalā. Eventually these planters transformed Kahikinui into what has been called the greatest continuous zone of dryland planting in the Hawaiian Islands. The book examines the sweeping changes that transformed Kahikinui after European contact, including how some makaʻāinana families fell victim to unscrupulous land agents. But also woven throughout the book is the saga of Ka ʻOhana o Kahikinui, a grass-roots group of Native Hawaiians who successfully struggled to regain access to these Hawaiian lands.

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