Mary Abigail Kawena `ula o kalani a hi`iaka i ka poli o pele ka wahine `ai honua Wiggin Puku`i (1895-1986), known as Kawena, was a Hawaiian scholar, dancer, composer, and educator. She was born in Ka

Her grandmother, a traditional dancer in the court of Queen Emma, taught her chants and stories, while grandfather was a healer and kahuna pale keiki (obstetrician) who used lomilomi (massage), la`au lapa`au (herbal medicine), ho`oponopono (forgiveness), and pule (prayer). Her great-great-grandmother was a priestess kahuna pule in the Pele line.

Mary Kawena Puku`i was recognized in her lifetime as the greatest living authority on Hawaiian culture. Recipient of many honors for her immense contributions to the fields of language, music, chanting and hula in her more than 80 year career, Kawena is perhaps most widely known for her authorship, with Samuel H. Elbert, of the Hawaiian Dictionary.

As a kumu hula, she sought to preserve the Hawaiian chant; Ka'upena Wong, Kaha`i Topolinski, and daughters Pele Pukui Suganuma and Pat Namaka Bacon were among her most notable students.

In 1971, at the zenith of her long career, Kawena Pukui received Hawaiian music's most significant prize, the Hawai`i Aloha Award. Her legacy to Hawaiian music was the legitimizing of the endeavor to perpetuate our Hawaiian culture, for it is through chant and song lyrics that much of the drama and color of Hawaiian life was first preserved.

♫ Kawena performs a seated hula at her home in Honolulu, ca. 1935. Originally filmed by Vivienne Mader; this sequence from the 1984 film, "Ka Po`e Hula Hawai`i Kahiko (The Hula People of Old Hawai`i)" by Dr. Elizabeth Tatar, who provides voiceover narration.  (Quicktime Movie)    (wmv Movie)

♫ Kawena demonstrates the use of Bishop Museum's new audiotape recorder (with Eleanor Williamson) in Hawaiian Hall, Nov. 1954. Originally filmed for KBMB-TV's 1997 "Life of the Land."  (Quicktime Movie)    (wmv Movie)

He'e Nalu (Surfing)

In old Hawaii, life revolved around the extended family and the clan; it was an `ohana (family) society, a group of both closely and distantly related people who share nearly everything: land, food, children, status, and the spirit of aloha.  Source: Coffee Times

`Ohana is a basic organizing principle of Hawaiian life. This concept resonates with the word `oha, a synonym for kalo (taro) which refers as well to the plant's origins in the original stalk. To be a member of an `ohana is then to be a node on the open-ended rhizomatic growth that both gives birth to and feeds each person. (This) rhizomatic network includes connections to spirits, akua, ancestors and future generations, as well as to those people that Euro-Americans might recognize as living family members. Source: Mary Abigail Puku`i    

`Ohana means family in an extended sense of the term including blood-related, adoptive or intentional. It emphasizes that family and friends are bound together and members must cooperate and remember one another.  Source: Wikipedia
 
To be Hawaiian is to be a person configured within a particular `ohana in an ever-evolving, living web. Today the concept of `ohana is often extended to include unrelated persons, community groups, or church membership. This is a corruption of the concept as the real `ohana is a natural phenomenon. It refers not to wishing for a relationship but to a unity of people due to their common ancestors living both in them and in the spirits who remain in palpable daily contact with the `ohana."   Source: Mary Abigail Puku`i 
   

     Ho`ao a`a and the `Ohana
     The Women of Hawai`i

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