Hawaiian Book Resources Returning To Print

The Bishop Museum Press plans to issue a new edition of Kepelino's Traditions of Hawaii this spring on the 75 th anniversary of its original publication as a Bishop Museum Bulletin #95 in 1932. The new edition will feature a facsimile of the original Hawaiian and English text edited by Martha Warren Beckwith, as well as notes written by Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukui who worked on the original translation. It will also include a new introductory essay by contemporary Hawaiian scholar Noelani Arista.

Born around 1830, Kepelino was the son of Kanekapolei-a daughter of Kaemhameha, and Namiki-a descendent of the priestly lineage of Pa'ao. In his youth and early adulthood, Kepelino received a Western education in subjects such as reading, writing, geography, and arithmetic through the Catholic Church. Like Native Hawaiian Historians Malo, Kamakau, and Papa Ii, he worked in the mid-nineteenth century, bridging both his lineage and academic training, by recording Hawaiian historical, cultural, and religious knowledge for future generations.

Between 1858 and 1830, Kepelino was actively engaged in writing for the Catholic press, producing a four-part serial publication entitled, Hooiliili Havaii, or Hawaiian Collections, on a variety of traditional cultural practices and Hawai'i's natural history. In 1868, he produced the text, Mooolelo Hawaii, his most comprehensive collection, which provides a wealth of cultural and historical information on a variety of topics, from the origins of the Hawaiian people and Polynesian navigation, fishing, farming, and the Hawaiian moon calendar, to the structure and political protocols involved in ancient Hawaiian society. Mooolelo Hawaii would become the basis for Beckwith's Kepelino's Traditions of Hawai'i.

In her introduction to the new edition, Noelani Arista suggests that "far from being simply an artifact reflecting an older, quickly vanishing or forgotten past, Kepelino's Mooolelo Hawaii is a particular blend of ideas and historical tradition that only Hawaiians of Kepelino's training and experience could produce. He was a man enmeshed in complicated and sometimes confrontational social, political, and religious issues of the 19 th century. If we read Mooolelo Hawaii as a product of a particular actor's engagement with his own society, we then have the opportunity to understand a little more about an incredibly important and transformative period of time in the national history of Hawai'i and its people."

The new reprint edition of Kepelino's Traditions of Hawai'i will be available in both a hardcover ($24.95) and softcover ($16.95) in March. The editions are 216 pages. -- www.bishopmuseum.org