User:KAVEBEAR/Kepelino

Kepelino Kahoali‘i Keauokalani (ca. 1830–1878) was born into a priestly family, and his father was known and recorded as a cultural expert (Kepelino 1932: 3 ff. [Beckwith]). He and his family were converted to Roman Catholicism in 1840, and Kepelino was educated by Catholic priests to be a teacher, learning English, French, Latin, and Greek. He worked briefly in his youth as an assistant missionary in Tahiti and wrote for the Catholic side in religious controversies. His writings on Hawaiian culture seem independent of those of Malo and his followers, and he is considered one of the greatest stylists of Hawaiian prose.

KEPELINO (ZEPHYRIN) (18307-1876) Kepelino came from a family descended from the legendary priest PAAO, but he was brought up as a Catholic and trained to become a lay teacher. When he received his diploma in 1845, however, no position was open to him. He accompanied Father Ernest Meurtel in 1 847 to work at a mission in Tahiti but grew bored and was sent home. In time he became private secretary to the dowager Queen EMMA, and campaigned so vigorously for her election in 1 874 that he was brought to trial by the victor, KALAKAUA, on a charge of high treason, and on October 17 of that year was sentenced to be hanged. His death sentence was commuted but he served in prison until 1 876. He left half a dozen works in the Hawaiian language, the most important of which is Kepelino's Traditions of Hawaii (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1932), translated by Martha W. BECKWITH.

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FOREWORD by Noelani Arista With this republication of Kepelino's Traditions of Hawaii comes an important opportunity for readers to reconsider some of the most pressing historical and methodological issues in the current state of Hawaiian history. We have the opportunity to re-read Kepelino with a vision that looks beyond ethnographic questions of the "authenticity" of the text and its author.1 An historical approach to Kepelino's work emphasizes both the author's genealogy, training, and activity as well as the context in which his text was produced. Far from viewing the text as innately revelatory and self-referential, a newer historical approach to Mooolelo Hawaii seeks to locate its production within the broad cultural, political, educational, and religious currents of socially cosmopolitan, nineteenth-century Hawai'i. By approaching Kepelino's text in this manner, we have an opportunity to examine his writing and other writing by mid-nineteenth century Hawaiian intellectuals as part of a vital and culturally complex intellectual movement in Hawai'i. awaiian intellectuals like Kepelino were wide-ranging in their apprehension of knowledge, and they brought together their education in various schools and branches of Hawaiian knowledge with the training offered through religious. The writings they left were shaped by plural intellectual traditions of Hawai'i, Europe, and America.2 And because their writings emerge out of their negotiation of multiple intellectual traditions, their texts will continue to be compelling sources not only to enrich our knowledge of the Hawaiian past, but also as a window unto the multi-layered present in which each author lived.

.......

A cultural historical approach to reading the work of these Hawaiian intellectuals requires one to seek literacy in multiple intellectual traditions, as well as to understand the manner in which multiple epistemolo- gies and pedagogies shaped their intellects and the work these scholars produced.

1 For the purpose of this essay I have chosen to refer to the author as Kepelino in accordance with the English title reference. The name Kepelino is a Hawaiian adaptation of "Zepherin ." His name appears in print in a number of ways depending on his choice, the context, and the way in which different people related to him. His name appears variously as Z. Teauokalani, Z. Zeperino, and Z. Kahoalii. The most complete rendering of his name appears in the manuscript Mooolelo Hawaii as "Zepherin Kuhopu Kahoalii Kameeiamoku Kuikauwai, known as Z. Keauokalani." 2 I hope to suggest here that Hawaiian intellectuals received pedagogical training from a multitude of sources. Hawaiian intellectuals often received family-specific training that complicates the impulse to categorize all individuals as simply "Hawaiian," since the training they received was not only family specific but also specific to a particular place or locale. Additionally many of the writers who emerged during this period were trained in American Protestant or French Catholic schools. Fluency in Hawaiian language, literature, culture,

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Fluency in Hawaiian language, literature, culture, and historical traditions is fundamental to a process of deep textual engagement. In order to fully engage Kepelino's text, one should also be able to apprehend both the traditional disciplinary oral training of Hawaiian scholars like Kepelino as well as their training and proficiency in Western intellectual traditions and modes of knowledge dissemination such as letters, journals, manuscripts, and newspapers

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Kepelino was born around 1830, the year before the Protestant seminary Lahainaluna was established by New England missionaries and Hawaiian ali'i in order to furnish Hawaiian advisors (like Davida Malo) to the ali'i and to provide chiefly offspring and intellectuals already serving ali'i with a Western Christian education. Kepelino was born to Kanekapolei, a daughter of Kamehameha, and Namiki, a descendant of the priestly lineage of Paao. Why his parents chose to be baptized and converted to the Catholic faith is a question that has yet to be investigated. The answer, however, may be found in the early history of Protestant and Catholic missions competing for souls in Kailua, Kona around 1840, when the Catholic mission was first established in that place. Kepelino's family were residents of Kailua at the time.4 As a boy, Kepelino received a Catholic education that included basic knowledge of reading, writing, geography, and arithmetic. It is well known that as a youth Kepelino was sent to Tahiti in 1847 to assist in establishing a Catholic mission there. Father Ernest Heurtel, who accompanied him, hoped that the young Hawaiian would attract the company of young Tahitians, eventually interesting them and their families in the Catholic faith and education. But Protestant missionaries also stationed in Tahiti proved to be formidable adversaries in this competition for conversion, forbidding their Tahitian converts to allow their children to socialize with Kepelino. He was sent back to Hawai'i by the Catholic mission, for Father Heurtel feared that in Kepelino's idleness, the youth would become "lost in this Babylon of ours."S Not much is known about Kepelino's life after his return from Tahiti in 1848 or 1849. He attended the Catholic high school at 'Ahuimanu that was established after Kamehameha III granted the church land for the seminary in 1845. Obtaining the lands for a school was a hard-won battle fought between Protestants and Catholics for governmental largesse and control over the Hawaiian education system.6 At the school in 'Ahuimanu, which he attended sometime between the years 1861 and 1869, Kepelino studied with Bishop Maigret and became proficient in English, French, Latin, and Greek.7 Just prior to and during his school years, Kepelino was actively engaged in writing for the Catholic press. Between the years 1858 and i860, Kepelino produced a four-part serial publication entitled Hooiliili Havaii,6 or "Hawaiian Collections." The first, "He Mau Hana, Olelo, Manao e Pili ana i to Havaii Nei" [Activities, Sayings and Thoughts concerning Hawai'i] provided a description of different Hawaiian 4

Father Reginald Yzendoorn. History of the Catholic Mission in the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu: Honolulu Star Bulletin, 1927, 16C-174. 7 Dorothy B. Barrere. The Kumuhonua Legends: A Study of Late 10th Century Hawaiian Stories of Creation and Origins. Pacific Anthropological Records, Number 3. Honolulu: Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 1971. 8 Kepelino's writings in the newspaper, as well as the typed copy of the manuscript reflect the orthography adopted by the Catholic press, which used "v" in place of "w." The majority of writings and publications of the time however were influenced by the standardized Protestant orthography which privileged the "w" in place of the "v." For publication, Martha Warren Beckwith chose to replace all of the "v's" that appear in the original manuscript with "w.".

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gods, the work of religious experts, and Hawaiian ritual practice prior to the overturning of the kapu in 1819. In the next three installments of Hooiliili Havaii, "He Vahi Huli-Toa Manu Havaii" [A Short Study of Hawaiian Birds], Kepelino provided a descriptive list of the different birds found in Hawai'i. In 1867 he published an extensive descriptive list of Fish found in the seas of the islands entitled "Ka Mooolelo o na la Havaii" [The History of Hawaiian Fish]. 9 In 1861, Kepelino launched frequent incendiary missives against Protestant missionaries and their Hawaiian converts in the Catholic newspaper, Ka Hae Karitiano [The Christian Standard]. Articles appearing in the rival Protestant newspaper, Ka Hoku Loa [The Morning Star], often provoked Kepelino and other Catholic writers to express their vehement opposition to the policies and practices of the Protestant churches which still maintained close ties to the New England-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.10 Although more volatile in his opinions on Hawaiian issues than most, the historian and writer Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau, who was schooled at Protestant Lahainaluna and then chose to convert to Catholicism, also contributed articles to Ka Hae Karitiano during this same period." In 1868, Kepelino produced the text "Mooolelo Hawai'i." After the death of King Lunalilo in February 1874, a struggle for the throne ensued between dowager Queen Emma and David Kalakaua. Kepelino was secretary to Emma at the time. And as the power struggle continued, Kepelino found himself charged with and tried for treason— the first such legal proceeding in the Kingdom's history— allegedly for writing letters after the riot of February 1874 to the Queen of England and the King of Italy, requesting the assistance of warships to support Emma's claim to the throne.12 The letters were intercepted, and, after Kalakaua's election, Kepelino's trial for high treason took place. A translated letter to the Consul General of France at the Court of the Hawaiian Islands, published in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser's coverage of the trial, 9 One other publication, "Ka Moo Atua" [The Many Gods] is thought to have been written by Kepelino in 18J8 and discusses some of the gods, the creation of the islands, and kahuna.10 Hawaiian Catholics were persecuted, and met with phyical punishment, imprisonment, and fines during the period from 1829 through the early 1840s; see Father Reginald Yzendoorn, History of the Catholic Mission in the Hawaiian Islands. Honolulu: Honolulu Star Bulletin, 1927 for a more detailed account. A comprehensive history of Catholic-Protestant strife and the tensions that developed between the American-based board of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the French sponsored Catholics in the islands has yet to be written. 11 It was also during the latter half of this decade, and into the next that Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau's serialized works on Hawaiian history and traditions were published extensively in the newspapers Kuokoa and Ke Au Okoa. 12 Most biographies of Kepelino describe the documents as letters, but the article referenced here refers to the document Kepelino penned as a petition. Several statements in the article "Sentence of Kahoabi forTreason" published in the Pacific Commercial Advertiser on October 17, 1874 raise questions about whether or not Kepelino was Emma's secretary. A message to the court read in Hawaiian from Albert Kunuiakea stated that because he could not be "personally present to guard my cousin the Queen," he had appointed John P. Z. Kahoalii as "my deputy. The verbal directions or rules that he may make, shall be binding." A statement by Kepelino asking for mercy also claims that writing the petition, "...was urged upon him by the friends of Queen Emma." Much of the secondary literature notes that Kepelino was Emma's secretary, and it will be interesting to uncover more about the particulars of his relationship to the dowager Queen and Albert Kunuiakea. Of course the fact remains that he was on trial for treason for the act of writing out a petition. "Sentence of Kahoabi for Treason," PaciEc Commercial Advertiser, October 17, 1874, 2. See also "O ka mea nui ho'okahi...," Ka Nupepa Kuokoa, October 17, 1874, 2.

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helped the jury decide to convict Emma's former secretary.1* The letter, which is signed by a "John P. Zephyrina Kahoalii," laid out in explicit detail why Emma was indeed the true sovereign of the Hawaiian nation and argued that the people of Honolulu overwhelmingly supported her bid for the throne. The letter fired off sharp accusations against Kalakaua and his supporters in government, accusing the king of "rebelling against the Queen" and attempting to "destroy our independence. ...For this false King D. Kalakaua is very desirous of mortgaging the government to some foreign government for a million dollars."1* Kepelino was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. But his sentence was eventually commuted, and he served almost two years in O'ahu prison until he received a full pardon on September 23, 1876. Kepelino died soon after in 1878.

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The Kepelino manuscript containing what purports to be the Hawaiian Kepelino's own account of old native tradition was for some years the property of the Roman Catholic Mission in Honolulu for which it was composed. Recently it has been given to Bernice P. Bishop Museum with full rights of publication, and it may be consulted in the original copy in the library of that institution. It is written into an old ledger in the fine hand of Bishop Maigret, founder of the Catholic mission in Hawaii, who seems either to have copied it from an original by the accredited composer or to have taken it down from dictation. The Hawaiian text here published is from a typed copy of this manuscript made by Father Reginald Yzendoorn, the present Chancellor-Secretary of the mission. To the courtesy of the mission and especially to the intelligent cooperation of Father Reginald we are hence principally indebted for the preservation of this record of native Hawaiian thought about the old days of the early monarchy. In the translation, Mrs. Mary Wiggin Pukui of Honolulu has been a most efficient co-worker. For doubtful passages in the text Mrs. Lahilahi Webb and Mr. John Wise, both able authorities upon old Hawaiian usage, have kindly given advice. The chants have been referred to Mrs. Wiggin, the mother of Mrs. Pukui and an old time hula expert, well versed in Hawaiian poetical composition. To all these my warm thanks are due for their good offices. If anyone familiar with the Hawaiian language can propose a better reading for any passage, the text is here to test his judgment. Most must be content with the present rendering, which gives as close an approximation as possible to the meaning of the text without consciously altering the original. In order to conform with modern usage, the v of the original copy is replaced by a w and the name of the composer is rendered in the form which he bore among the English and Hawaiian speaking community about town. Supplementary material is added to illustrate traditions which reappear in unpublished accounts left by other historians and genealogists, and in conversations with Hawaiians who are familiar with old ways of thinking. For the facts about the life of Kepelino Keauokalani, or Zepherino, as the name is rendered in the French, I am indebted to Father Reginald Yzendoom, who derives them from Father Maigret's diary, from letters of...

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doom, who derives them from Father Maigret's diary, from letters of Father Ernest on file at the Catholic mission, and from the Reverend and Mrs. Andrew Bright, of Honolulu. Kepelino was born in Kailua, on the island of Hawaii, about 1830. His father, Namiki, was "a descendant of the priestly race of Paao, a man well acquainted with priestly lore," who was in fact the "vieux sauvage" of Remy's narrative (58)*. His mother was Kaneikopulei, "a daughter of Kamehameha by Kahulilanimaka." There were two children, a girl named Puahau, who married Piimauna, and this boy, whose name from his parents, as indicative of chiefly rank, was Kahoali'ikumaieiwakamoku, "To-be-the- chief-of-the-nine-districts," that is, of Hilo, Puna, Kau, South Kona, North Kona, South Kohala, North Kohala, Hamakua, and Mokuola. When on June 26, 1840, Fathers Walsh and Ernest Heurtel came to Kailua to establish the Catholic mission in that part of the islands, Kepelino's parents were among their earliest converts. The boy was put to school and was later sent to Honolulu to qualify for a teacher's certificate, which "in those days supposed a sufficient knowledge of Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and Geography." Writes Father Ernest, July 7, 1845: "I recommend to you once more my little Zepherin whom I [should] like to see return with his teacher's certificate." And on September i : "I am delighted by what you and Father Desvault tell me about my little Zepherin. . . ." Again, October 18, he writes:

Father Martial writes me about our little Zepherin, telling me that he has been received as teacher but that because they have no school to give him as yet, he has not received his diploma. Father Desire wants to keep him to send to the High School; but when will you have a High School? Perhaps not so soon. I think therefore that Zepherin would be more useful here as we lack teachers.

In 1846 "little Zepherin" was still in Honolulu and very ill. Father Ernest's letters express anxiety for the boy's condition and desire for his future usefulness. In 1847 it was determined to send Zepherin as assistant to Father Ernest, who was setting out to establish a mission in Tahiti. Father Maigret's day book notes, June 5, 1847, "Father Ernest leaves. I paid for his passage and that of Zepherin $89.00." Arrived in Tahiti on July 6 after a voyage of thirty-one days, Father Ernest addresses to the Bishop of Arathie, August 25, the following communication : Something else. I had taken along with me Zepherin in order to try to attract the kanaka children to the school, and he would have succeeded perfectly if it had been possible. There are children who liked him very much, but the Protestant ministers are as bad at Tahiti as those of [the] Sandwich [Islands] and they caused to be demolished what he wanted to build. They told the parents that if they allowed the...

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children to go to the Pope they would cease to belong to the church. The intimidated parents have forbidden their children to come to see us, and they all have left. Since then Zepherin, having nothing more to occupy him, has got bored ; he has begun to play some little pranks and as I am afraid that idleness may become a cause of [his] getting lost in this Babylon of ours, I have resolved to send him back to his parents. I ask you, Bishop, to send him to Hawaii by the first occasion. This is the last record of Kepelino's school life. It was in 1853 that Jules Remy met him and received from him the "genealogy of his ancestors back to Paao." At some time after the founding of the Catholic High School at Ahuimanu he is said to have studied there with Bishop Maigret and to have acquired English, French, Latin, and Greek. Between i860 to '61 the Hae Kiritiano, at that time the organ of the Catholic church in Honolulu, printed controversial letters under the signature of Z. Kahoali'i dated from Honouliuli, Oahu. Letters printed in 1869 in the Hae Katolika are dated from the same place. Three dirges for Father Walsh date from this year. He is said to have been living at this time with a student of Hawaiian lore named Koha with whom and others of similar tastes he discussed questions of ancient times. February, 1874, when King Lunalilo died without naming an heir, he was acting as secretary for Queen Emma, who, with the prince, David Kalakaua, was competing heir to the Hawaiian throne. Letters written by Kepelino to the king of Italy and to the queen of England asking for warships to support Emma's claim were intercepted by Kalakaua, who was acting postmaster and recognized the handwriting, and after the election of Kalakaua he was arrested, but at the intercession of Bishop Maigret was released. Kepelino seems never to have married. He died about 1878 at an age between forty-five and fifty. Two questions present themselves in regard to the validity of the Kepelino manuscript as a genuine contribution from original native sources. Has the account been tampered with by the inscriber? How far is the account influenced by foreign contacts? As regards the first question, Father Yzendoorn assures me that Bishop Maigret, an essentially honest and practical man, could have had nothing to gain by exerting any conscious influence upon such an informant. The orderly divisions of the subject, which certainly suggest direction so far as organization is concerned, have nothing to do with the content. It is to be observed that other native writers on antiquities, like Malo and Kamakau, also follow an imposed pattern. As to the political bias and the Christian standards of morality here reflected, there is every reason to suppose that these present Kepelino's own sympathies as a devout Catholic and an adherent of the European party as opposed to that of the American. More serious indeed is the charge that the facts themselves represent not original Hawaiian ideas but such as have been superimposed or at the best

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distorted by foreign teaching. It must at once be granted that Kepelino is telling of Hawaiian tradition as it was preserved in the monarchy. The country life he pictures is that of Kona after the introduction of the coffee and other foreign plants. The official life at the court is that of the monarchy established by the Kamehamehas. So with the stories of the creation, of the origin of death, of the rewards and punishments in the life after death, of the eartly paradise and the story of the flood. All these are certainly interpreted after the pattern of Christian teaching. Nevertheless, unless the substance of the stories had existed in native form, it is not possible to suppose that all this material could so swiftly have taken form in the minds of a people who for the first time came in contact with the ideas. Many of the chants must be genuine, as also the allusions to the "A'ai'a bird," the "Waa-halau," the "tree of life," and the "Hidden land of Kane." How far they are taken from their original meaning and reinterpreted in the light of Biblical dogma is a problem difficult today of solution. Several arguments, however, support their sincerity. The first is the fact of the manuscript's being preserved at all. Kepelino must have been well informed by his father even if, as some think, the record does not actually represent his father's own composition. He knew the object of his friends in the mission for seeking information and would have no reason to give them a consciously falsified account. The fact that he appeals to no fixed dogma, the frankness of his own expressions of opinion, which are exactly in accord with what we should expect of a man of his training, are an indication of sincerity. But oral transmission and the encouragement of the art of esoteric composition must have left to the preservers of tradition considerable latitude in the rendering of ancient tradition. To this Kepelino's own account testifies when he speaks of those whose office it is to relate the old stories before the chiefs as "rearranging them from time to time and casting out all that was unsuitable in the tales." It is therefore by no means unlikely that something belongs to his own age rather than to that of an ancient past. A second argument for their genuineness is to be found in the fact of the preservation of similar traditions in other Polynesian groups. This I have tried to indicate in the notes attached to the translation. Unless this similarity is due to old contacts, there is no reason why exactly those groups show most closely related traditions which we know on other grounds to have been historically most closely connected with Hawaii in the past. In the third place, if we are dealing with stories invented since the introduction of Christianity, why should the interest be limited to purely Old Testament concepts ? It is difficult to see why the doctrine of the atonement and the stories of the birth and teachings of Christ should have made no impression if we are dealing with ideas entirely foreign to native thought.

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And finally it is evident that the description here given of old Hawaiian worship and of Hawaiian religious conceptions is certainly uninfluenced by Christian thought. It is altogether opposed to the Christian doctrine and can but be regarded as a sincere attempt to organize and classify the inherited religious concepts which existed still in a state of flux in Kepelino's own day. Modern Hawaiians, for example, would differ from Kepelino in their definition of the aumakua, whose protecting care is still a living belief among the Hawaiians today, even of those of the highly cultivated classes. The explanation here given of the niaupio chief differs from that preserved by the late court genealogist. For all these reasons I think we must accept this record for what it is worth, an attempt by a Hawaiian of exceptional inheritance and training to explain the beliefs and traditions of the past as they had been handed down to those Hawaiians of of his own time who interested themselves in these matters. The close correspondence to Old Testament story is due in part at least to actual correspondence in data, in part to the emotional coloring read into the story by an early convert to Christianity. Nor can the charm of the composer's personality escape the reader in those artless allusions to the everyday life of his people in which he also played a sympathetic part. Even those who demand more rigorous proof of the historical accuracy of the Kepelino manuscript as an exact replica of antiquity, may grant its value as the genuine thought about his own ancient heritage of a native Hawaiian who grew up during the stirring days of the missions and the monarchy in Hawaii. The Folklore Foundation, Vassar College March 16, 1931 TRADITIONS OF HAWAII FOREWORD

Zepherin/Zephyrin Kepelino Kahoalii Keauokalani (c. 1830-1878) was a Hawaiian historian who was involved in an attempt overthrow of King Kalākaua in favor of Queen Emma of Hawaii by the French. His full name was Zepherin Kuhopu Kahoalii Kameeiamoku Kuikauwai. Kepelino is the Hawaiianized pronounciation of his Christian name Zepherin and he is often called Z. Keauokalani.


 * 

Born in 1830, Kepelino's mother was Kahiwa Kānekapōlei, a daughter of King Kamehameha I by Kauhilanimaka/Kahulilanimaka.

Despite his counsel's argument that the petition was not a secret and that it had never reached the French official to whom it was addressed, Kepelino was sentenced to death on October 12, 1874 by Supreme Court Justice Charles Coffin Harris. Kalakaua eventually pardoned Kepelino.