Hawaii books examine ravages of Western disease, Kalapana village

“KAHUNA: TRADITIONS OF HAWAIIAN MEDICINAL PRIESTS AND HEALING PRACTITIONERS”

By Malcolm Naea Chun (First People’s Productions; $39.95)

A captivating storyteller and inquiring researcher, Malcolm Naea Chun, author of more than 10 books on Hawaiian history, culture and medicine, opens another panoramic window onto Hawaii’s traditional society and how it changed with the arrival of westerners in “Kahuna: Traditions of Hawaiian Medicinal Priests and Healing Practitioners.”

In addition to the traditional medicine of kahuna lapaau and the training of Native Hawaiian doctors in Western medicine, Chun details the Hawaiians’ desperate need for healing. William Ellis, a surgeon’s mate and artist on Captain Cook’s third voyage, observed that the Hawaiians “seem to be very healthy … both men and women are very cleanly in their persons.”

By 1800, their population had declined by 48 percent due to venereal disease introduced in 1778 by Cook’s crewmen.

This was followed by a plague of mai okuu, or “squatting disease,” in 1804.

Kekuni Blaisdell, a medical doctor who was a driving force behind the Native Hawaiian Health Care Improvement Act of 1988, wrote that this was probably typhoid or dysentery caused by fecal pathogens brought by westerners.

“These virulent microorganisms, spread among residents who were customarily careful about disposing of their excrement, long remained hidden,” Blaisdell wrote, until the disease broke out in 1804 among 7,000 warriors camped in close quarters before a planned invasion of Kauai by Kamehameha I.

By the mid-1800s, stricken by mumps, smallpox, whooping cough, tuberculosis, measles, influenza and more, the pre-contact population had diminished by about 80 percent.

Chun also discusses the literature of healing, including genealogical pule (chants) and moolelo (stories) of kahuna lapaau, and how these came to be written down.

“Kahuna” is a critical reminder of how different points of view shape how the past is presented to us, and why we need to review it.

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“UNDER THE VOLCANO: THE PEOPLE OF KALAPANA, 1823 TO 2010”

By Charles Langlas and Kupuna (Pili Productions; $15)

Oral histories of Native Hawaiians who grew up in the rural seaside village of Kalapana, Hawaii island, in the 20th century are the arresting heart of “Under the Volcano: The People of Kalapana, 1823 to 2010” by Charles Langlas, a former associate professor at the College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and 18 kupuna, listed as coauthors. The kupuna told their life stories to him and his students from 1987 to 1990, when the village was destroyed by lava flowing from Kilauea.

Looking back to the Great Mahele of 1848 to 1855, when “the most valuable land soon passed into the hands of white sugar planters,” Langlas writes, “Kalapana remained Hawaiian because it was lava land, too poor for plantations.”

The book’s focus is how people lived in this predominantly Hawaiian community in the 1920s to 1930s, when the kupuna in the interviews were young. Theirs was a close-knit community that subsisted on fishing, cultivating taro and sweet potato, tending livestock and weaving lauhala mats and hats.

“The kupuna described their childhood as a time of hard work, but not of hardship,” Langlas writes, noting the unfairness and cultural bias of the “lazy Hawaiian” stereotype promulgated by white society beginning in the 1930s.

When they weren’t in school, the children learned life skills in the traditional Hawaiian way by watching their elders work. Six complete interviews, filled with lively, detailed reminiscences in the kupuna’s own words, are wonderful to read. Picking opihi, “you only taking the big ones, leaving the small ones” so when you went back “you still have,” says James Kaleikaapuni Ahia Sr. When the four to five canoes came in, “they share the opelu (with) anybody that’s on the sand.”

His grandparents taught him that if a shark appeared when you were fishing, it was a warning to stop, “maybe just saying that, ‘Oh, you have enough already.’”

This engrossing portrait of an isolated village and its warm, self-reliant people is abundantly illustrated with maps and 37 photographs, some going back to 1926 with such starkly beautiful sights as Waiakolea pond, in whose clear waters children swam, canoe landings improvised on lava-rock sea cliffs, and the since-collapsed Kaimu (black sand) beach was fenced by towering coconut trees.