Prologue In the Land of La''amaikahiki I have a great fondness for ''Ulupalakua, that sleepy settlement of darkgreen paniolo houses nestled among eucalyptus groves astride the southeastern rift of Haleakala. I celebrated my sixteenth birthday there in the summer of 1966, in Captain Makee''s old ranch house, while helping a Bishop Museum team map ancient house sites on the windy slopes of Kahikinui. Makee was a nineteenth-century Scots captain who found refuge from the sea on ''Ulupalakua''s fertile slopes, overlooking Kaho''olawe and her tiny sister island, Molokini. ''Ulupalakua has always been a place of rest. In ancient times weary travelers coming from Hana on the far side of East Maui stopped here for the night, as did those arriving from the sheltered landing down at Makena Bay. ''Ulupalakua translates "breadfruit ripened on the back." The story is told of the traveler from Hana who had walked for days on foot, following ancient stone-lined trails through Kipahulu, Kaupo, and Kahikinui, to finally arrive at this place and discover that his load of breadfruit picked in Hana had ripened literally on his back. ''Ulupalakua is the gateway to a kua''aina that hugs the vast southern flank of Haleakala, whose majestic summit looms 3,055 meters above the ocean.

Kua''aina, "back of the land," is what Hawaiians call the backcountry. Even in ancient times, kua''aina were underdeveloped relative to the more populated areas. These were the marginal, less fertile lands, lacking in lush taro patches and productive fishponds. However, the word kua''aina refers not just to these backcountry lands, but equally to the people who lived on them. Na kua''aina were the inhabitants of the backcountry, the backwoods folks. These people were largely maka''ainana, commoners, although certainly some chiefs (ali''i) and priests (kahuna) lived among them, to govern the people and attend to their religious needs. Na kua''aina were at times looked down upon by the chiefs and people who lived in the royal centers and favored lands, who saw the former as "rustic" or unschooled in social etiquette. Yet na kua''aina possessed remarkable knowledge and skills, for they and their ancestors had learned how to make a living in the leeward drylands.

Na kua''aina made a living by dryland farming of sweet potato and taro. In the twentieth century, the kua''aina regions became refuges for those clinging to the old traditions, to a simpler way of life. Native Hawaiian scholar Davianna Pomaika''i McGregor, who has worked with the people who still inhabit these regions, calls them "cultural kipuka." A kipuka is a patch of older terrain surrounded by more recent lava flows; her metaphor is very apt. Even today, oldtimers on Maui refer to this part of the island as "Backside." The kua''aina of southeastern Maui, of Kahikinui and Kaupo, is among the last great spaces of Hawai''i to have resisted the onslaught of "development" that overtook the islands over the past century. The last survivors of the original Native Hawaiian population of Kahikinui abandoned their lands at the end of the nineteenth century, no longer able to fend off the encroaching herds of cattle that trampled their sweet potato fields. The stone walls of their house sites, the platforms of their ancient temples, are long overgrown with exotic lantana and panini cactus.

In Kaupo district, to the east of Kahikinui, a few families remained, mostly earning a living as paniolo, cowboys. But even cattle ranching was marginal in this ''aina malo''o, this arid land. The late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century economic booms of sugarcane and pineapple plantations bypassed Kahikinui and Kaupo entirely. When the tourism industry began to sweep through Hawai''i after statehood in 1959, resort developers shunned this backcountry. There are no white sand beaches, like those at Ka''anapali or Kihei, to draw the throngs of tourists from Los Angeles and Tokyo. While those areas of Maui sprouted high-rise hotels, golf courses, and time-share condominiums, Kahikinui and Kaupo remained unchanged, a true kua''aina land. The kua''aina, or backside, of southeastern Maui begins as one leaves ''Ulupalakua. Beyond this little community the highway narrows to a two-lane track, winding around the cinder cone of Pu''u Mahoe.

As you turn eastward and leave behind the verdant pastures of ''Ulupalakua, the wind hits you squarely in the face. Reddish-brown and black ''a''a lava flows are offset by the dark green of tough native ''a''ali''i and ''akia shrubs. Jagged lava extends to the horizon. You pass through Kanaio, the most easterly ahupua''a of Honua''ula district. Ahead lies the land of Kahikinui, "Great Tahiti," named in the distant past by Polynesian voyagers from the ancestral homeland of Tahiti. Maui--the greatest of all Polynesian demigods--gave his name to the second largest of the Hawaiian Islands. Maui is renowned across much of the Polynesian world for his supernatural feats. He raised the islands from the bottomless deep with his magic fishhook.

But his heroic deeds did not end there. Maui stole the secret of making fire from the ''alae mud hens, so that humans could cook their food. On the island that was named for him, Maui climbed to the In the Land of La''amaikahiki 3 summit of the looming mountain, Haleakala (House of the Sun), to snare the solar disc with his net, slowing its passage through the sky. Maui''s grandmother Hina now had enough time in the day to dry her strips of bark cloth. We will never know what particular view of the Hawaiian Islands greeted the intrepid crew of Polynesian seafaring explorers who, in their weatherbeaten double-hulled canoe, first arrived from one of the archipelagoes of southern Polynesia. It could have been the towering peaks of snowcapped Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa on Hawai''i that first caught the navigator''s sharp eye, bringing great relief after a month or more at sea. Or it may have been the crest of Haleakala, rising above the clouds that so often shroud the rain forests clinging to her mid-elevations. Certainly, one of those early voyaging expeditions spied the slopes of Maui from the spray-splashed deck, noting the unmistakable resemblance between this island with its twin volcanic mountains (Haleakala and the West Maui peak of Pu''u Kukui) and the great island of Tahiti.

Indeed, it is probable that these voyagers either came from, or had visited, Tahiti, the largest island in central-eastern Polynesia. Like Maui, Tahiti is comprised of twin volcanoes. The much larger Tahiti Nui ("Great Tahiti") rises to 2,241 meters in Mount Orohena, while the smaller Tahiti Iti ("Little Tahiti") tops off at 1,306 meters above the ocean. Comparing maps of Tahiti and Maui side by side, one is struck by the overall resemblance in shape between these two islands, although the relative positions of the larger and smaller volcanoes are reversed from west to east (see map 1). Kahikinui--perhaps we should spell it Kahiki Nui to make the point more clearly--is a direct transferral of the Polynesian place name Tahiti Nui, the ancient Polynesian t sound having been replaced by k in the written language set down by the Protestant missionaries in the 1820s. When they first glimpsed the profile of Maui after many long days at sea, approaching from the south, the Polynesian crew must have proclaimed the higher and more massive volcano to be "Tahiti Nui," Great Tahiti. Polynesians often bestowed the names of islands already famed in ancestral traditions upon newly discovered islands. It was thus that the big island of Hawai''i took the name of the ancient homeland, Hawaiki, and that the southeastern flank of Haleakala became Kahikinui.

Despite this evocative link between Tahiti and Maui, there is surprisingly little in the Hawaiian traditions, the mo''olelo, about the ancient land of Kahikinui. Kahikinui was always a kua''aina, of little interest to the chiefs or their genealogists and bards who passed on the mo''olelo from generation to generation. Nonetheless, a few references to Kahikinui can be gleaned from the traditions. One comes from the writings of Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau, the nineteenth-century scholar whose corpus is among the most important of the Hawaiian sages''. In "The Coming of the Gods," Kamakau relates the following: According to the mo''olelo of Kane and Kanaloa [two of the great gods of ancient Hawai''i], they were perhaps the first who kept gods (''o laua paha na kahu akua mua) to come to Hawai''i nei, and because of their mana they were called gods. Kaho''olawe was first named Kanaloa for his having first come there by way of Ke-ala-i-kahiki [the road to Tahiti]. From Kaho''olawe the two went to Kahikinui, Maui, where they opened up the fishpond of Kanaloa at Lua-la''i-lua, and from there the water of Kou at Kaupo. This fragment of traditional lore suggests that at least one of the first voyages from Kahiki arrived off Maui from the south, by way of Kaho''olawe.

Perhaps that landfall took place on the coast at Luala''ilua, where there stands a remarkable monument from the period of long-distance voyaging, the panana at Hanamauloa (which I describe in chapter 7). Kahikinui also figures in the saga of La''amaikahiki, son of the famous voyaging chief Mo''ikeha, who sailed to Tahiti and back around the fourteenth century A.D. When he was an old man, Mo''ikeha sent another son, Kila, to Tahiti to fetch La''amaikahiki, whom he had left there as an infant. After spending some time with his father on Kaua''i Island, La''amaikahiki sailed to O''ahu and then to Maui. In the pages of Fornander''s Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities, published in 1916 by the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, we find the mo''olelo of Mo''ikeha, and the following passage: Laamaikahiki lived in Kauai for a time, when he moved over to Kahikinui in Maui. This place was named in honor of Laamaikahiki.