Early Hawaiian literature now at libraries around the world

Thanks to an ambitious venture by the Awaiaulu Hawaiian Literature Project, visitors to libraries, universities and national collections in every state and on every continent now have access to one of the most significant works of Native Hawaiian literature and translation.

Spearheaded by Awaiaulu executive director and noted Hawaiian language revivalist Puakea Nogelmeier, the Landmark Initiative has distributed some 200 sets of the dual-language books “Ka Mo‘olelo O Hi‘iakaikapoliopele” and “The Epic Tale of Hi‘iakaikapoliopele” to collections as far away as France, Peru and Kenya in an effort to raise awareness of an indigenous literary tradition that grew out of the most literate nation of the mid-1800s and boasted more than 100 English and Hawaiian-language newspapers.

“The epic stories of Hawaii — Pele and Hi‘iaka, Kamapua‘a, Kane and Ku — were vignettes of Hawaiian culture and worldview,” Nogelmeier said . “These characters travel through Hawaii and interact with people at different levels. The stories themselves get twisted and reframed with each presentation. But while no story can tell all, each one is a window.”

The Awaiaulu publication is drawn from a yearlong, six-days-a-week serial that ran in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ka Na‘i Aupuni from 1905 to 1906.

Nogelmeier began working with interns Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and Sahoa Fukushima in 2004 to recast the collected 450 pages of text with modern Hawaiian spelling conventions and to translate it into English. The work was completed in 2006, at which point Hawaiian and English volumes were packaged with illustrations, annotations and appendices, and published.

The texts distributed via the Landmark Initiative were a special run of legacy editions hand-bound in goat leather over moire silk, and were placed in a matching clamshell box. One hundred of these editions were sold for $1,500 each, many purchased by Hawaiian community leaders for the purpose of donation. Nogelmeier, who was born in San Francisco and raised in Minnesota before settling in Hawaii more than 40 years ago, had grand designs for the rest.

“Twenty years ago, I was back in Minnesota and I went to the state library,” Nogelmeier recalled. “I loved reading when I was a child and I grew up going to that library. But when I asked about its Hawaii section, they only had five books — books like ‘Our Pineapple State’ from the territorial period and forward.

“That’s always rung in my head,” he said. “I wanted this book to be in Paris and in Iowa. My dream is that if someone walks into a library anywhere in the world and asks if they have a book on Hawaii, they’ll be able to pull out something that is dense in content and beautiful in form. I’d like this to be something that forms a ripple that changes the world’s vision of Hawaii.”

To realize his far-flung ambitions, Nogelmeier spent the last three years dealing with the microbureaucracies of scores of foreign and domestic libraries, universities and national collections, often wriggling past reflexive midlevel naysayers and appealing to the highest authorities he could reach. Some thought the offer of a free deluxe edition of such a work was too good to be true, others weren’t quite sure what to do with such a luxe piece at a time when digitalization is transforming the modern library.

Nevertheless, the editions are now present on library shelves as near as Hamilton Library on the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus and as distant as the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. (The state library in Minnesota turned down a copy, but one can be found at the University of Minnesota.)