Kanaka Mano

Kii: Ku'ialuaopuna

 In our Lua traditions of Hawaii, a group of warriors arrived in Hawaii from a faraway island. These warriors came on waa or canoes with their faces painted, and bodies adorned with their traditional tattoo. They were called the kanaka mano or the warrior sharks by the people who were present there at that time in history. This story comes down from Kawena Puku’i to Olohe Lua Likeke Paglinawan of Waiahole, Oʻahu. These kanaka mano settled in and around the coastal villages on the south end of Hawaii Island in the aina called Ka'u today. These warriors settled into the population where they eventually intermingled and married into the families. There seems to not have been any confrontation between these warriors who came on their waa seeking a new place to call home or seeking to make war and the Hawaiian people living there at that time.  There may not have been any old government structure in place at the time of their landing, or those kanaka mano really had no competition for lands or any opposition to them being there. This must have been in a time of Hawaii's very earliest migration settlements, perhaps over a thousand years ago.  The new land that they settled in was re-named Ta’u, after their own homeland in Samoa. There are many place names in Hawaii that have similar names to the lands in Samoa, such as Upolu, and Manu’a. This time of the migration from Samoa must have been so far ago that there is no memory of what the land of Ka'u was called in the ancient past. This was a time before certain Hawaiian tribes left Ka Lae in Ka'u to settle in the Land called Aotearoa. In Samoa there is a land named Savai'i, as there is also a land in Tahiti called Hawaiki, which is the island of Raiatea, Tahiti. Our Hawaii people are a mixture of many people and tribes across the Pacific. This is also to say that our fighting arts are rooted in other Pacific fighting arts as well. There are other migrations that came from Marquesas, Rapa and many other distant islands over a thousand years. We have a direct lineage to all Pacific Islanders.