Kumulipo

Impact

Genealogical chants are common throughout Polynesia, especially the eastern section of Polynesian islands, which includes Hawaii. Since precontact Hawaii was a nonliterate society, we do not have any records of Hawaiians’ reactions to the Kumulipo when it was composed or when it was chanted for Captain Cook. We do know, however, that the Kumulipo is vitally important to the history and the study of Hawaiian religion today. Ten other Hawaiian genealogical creation chants have survived in written form, but after an extended analysis of the Kumulipo and the other chants, the scholar Dorothy B. Barrère came to the conclusion that the manuscript version of the Kumulipo is the only one that seems to be nearly unaltered by the influence of Christianity and of the various cultures that were introduced to Hawaii in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Queen Lili‘uokalani, in the introduction to her translation, states that one of her reasons for undertaking the project was so that Hawaiian terms and allusions to natural history would be preserved for posterity.