Kamapuaʻa

The chiefs of Koʻolau woke to churned mud where their taro had stood. Corms flung about, leaves trodden into the wet, the wall of the fishpond opened and the fish long gone with the tide. Something enormously heavy had come through in the dark and gone again before light. The tracks were a pig’s, and far too large, and they led up toward the cliffs where nobody sensible went.

Kamapuaʻa was born at Kaluanui on the windward coast of Oʻahu, or in Kahiki, depending on who is telling it, and the disagreement is old enough that both versions are told with equal confidence. His mother was Hina. His father was either Olopana, the ruling chief of that district, or Olopana’s younger brother Kahikiula, and the tellings are not shy about why the question comes up. He arrived early and wrong. His elder brother threw the thing away as unfit to live, and when Hina came up from her purification bath she found a small pig lying on her pāʻū where the tapa had been spread to dry. It was the grandmother who settled the matter. Kamaunuaniho was a sorceress and knew a kupua when one was handed to her, and since the gods had given the child a hog’s body he would carry the name of one: kama, child, puaʻa, hog.

He grew up in her cave on layered tapa, six sheets under him and six over, eating taro and breadfruit his brother prepared, and he grew up rough. The raids began small. He would go out at night and root up a neighbour’s taro, carry it home in his mouth, tear open a patch of fern and grass with his snout until he had good ground, and plant the stolen crop there so that his grandmother’s household woke to food nobody could account for. He was a thief. When his brother beat him for it, the advice that came with the beating was to steal further from home, and Olopana’s fields were the furthest thing he could reach.

So he took Olopana’s chickens, and then Olopana’s sacred rooster, and then whatever else came to hand, and the district armed itself. Four hundred warriors went up the valley after him. They caught him more than once, and each time the thing they had caught turned out to be more than the ropes could hold: he broke the litter under himself, killed the men carrying it, and went back to the hills. Once he sat out a whole search in plain sight on a boulder in the high grass, watching the men run past below him and calling to one another, and the boulder is still called the hiding stone of Kamapuaʻa. The man who spotted him from the opposite ridge and shouted is the upright slab standing above it.

The escape everyone remembers happened at the head of Kaliuwaʻa, the leaky canoe, where the valley narrows to seventy feet of shadow between walls no one can climb. He lifted his grandmother onto his neck, set his back against the black rock, and stretched. His followers went up the length of him hand over hand by the bristles and stepped off onto the uplands. The hollow he wore into the cliff face is there, smooth and canoe-shaped, and the valley is approached with care to this day, with leaf offerings left at the entrance.

He also has an appetite for other people’s fields and other people’s wives, and neither ends well for anybody. On Kauaʻi he courted two sisters at a spring so still they used it as a mirror, took them both, fought their brother’s wars with a club that onlookers could see swinging with no arm attached to it, and hoarded the feather cloaks stripped from the chiefs he killed under his own sleeping mats. The sisters found the cloaks. They also hid every spring on that coast from him, and when he came home raging with thirst they stood where he could see them and laughed. He threw them off a cliff and spoke them into two stones, then put his snout down and rooted until water came, and the water he found was bitter and has stayed bitter.

His powers are all of a piece with his shape. He is a kupua, protected by ancestral gods and godlike himself, and his transformations run in several directions at once: hog, man, fish, and a whole roster of plants named in his chants. The plants are how he wins fights. Lonokaeho of the eight stone foreheads brought them down on him and Kamapuaʻa tangled every forehead in growing weed until the stone could not fall. Kūʻīlioloa the dog-man opened his jaws for him and Kamapuaʻa stuffed himself down the throat in his weed bodies and cut his way back out. And when he changes into a hog he does not simply become one hog. The place fills with them.

Then he came to Halemaʻumaʻu and heard a hula drum, and stood in the morning light where Pele’s sisters could not help noticing him. Pele looked once and called him a pig and the son of a pig. The courtship that followed was mostly insults, and when it turned to violence it turned fast. She stamped and the ground opened and lava came up the hill at him; he raised his hands and brought the rain down until it cooled. Her brothers closed over him and would have smothered him if his love-making god had not lured them off with the sight of a woman. He threatened to drown the pit and very nearly did, calling in fog and rain and the sea until the fires went out and only the fire sticks were left glowing, and his sister came down from Makahanaloa with more rain, and hogs ran everywhere across the crater floor.

He lost the last exchange, in the version Westervelt collected. His bristles burned, and burning bristles is the one thing that costs him, and he went down the slope with the lava spreading along the beach on both sides to cut him off and threw himself into water already boiling. What came out was a small tough-skinned fish. He gave it the pigskin, which is why the humuhumunukunukuapuaʻa grunts.

The older tellings end differently and more usefully. The fire sticks were saved, Pele yielded, and the two of them split the island: she took Puna, Kaʻū and Kona, which the lava crosses, and he took Kohala, Hāmākua and Hilo, which the rain never leaves. Their son Ōpelunuikauhaʻalilo became an ancestor of chiefs and commoners on Hawaiʻi. The line of the argument is still legible on the map, and the offering that pleases Pele most is still a pig, or, failing that, one of the other things he can turn into.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kamapuaʻa in Hawaiian mythology?

Kamapuaʻa is a Hawaiian kupua, a being of supernatural power, whose name means “hog-child” and who moves between the forms of a hog, a man, a fish and several plants. He was born to Hina on the windward coast of Oʻahu, raised by his sorceress grandmother Kamaunuaniho, and is associated with rain, fresh water and the fertility of cultivated land. He is best known for raiding the fields of Oʻahu and for his violent affair with the volcano goddess Pele.

What happened between Kamapuaʻa and Pele?

Kamapuaʻa came to the crater of Halemaʻumaʻu to court Pele, who insulted him by calling him a pig and the son of a pig, and the two fought with fire against water until neither could finish the other. In the most widely told version Pele yielded and they divided the island of Hawaiʻi between them, Pele keeping Puna, Kaʻū and Kona where the lava flows and Kamapuaʻa taking the rainy windward districts of Kohala, Hāmākua and Hilo. A rival version has him defeated and driven into the sea. Their child, Ōpelunuikauhaʻalilo, is named as an ancestor of Hawaiian chiefs and commoners.

What forms can Kamapuaʻa take?

Kamapuaʻa can take the form of a large black hog, a handsome man, several plants including the coarse grass called kūkaepuaʻa, and the small tough-skinned fish humuhumunukunukuapuaʻa. His plant forms are weapons rather than disguises, and he uses them to entangle the eight stone foreheads of Lonokaeho and to kill the dog-man Kūʻīlioloa from the inside. When he takes hog shape he can also multiply, filling a place with hogs at his prayer.

Why did Kamapuaʻa kill Olopana?

Olopana, the ruling chief of Koʻolau and possibly Kamapuaʻa’s own father, had him captured and laid on the altar as a sacrifice after years of raids on his fields, fishponds and sacred rooster. The priest Lonoaohi smeared Kamapuaʻa with the blood of a black hog and left him unbound so that he only appeared dead. When Olopana came to perform the sacrificial rites, Kamapuaʻa rose from the altar, seized the bone daggers used to dismember offerings, and killed him.

Is Kamapuaʻa a god or a demigod?

Kamapuaʻa is usually described as a kupua rather than a god, meaning a being of extraordinary power who is neither fully divine nor merely human. He was worshipped as a god in at least one place, a small paved heiau at Wainiha on Kauaʻi, and he is often linked to Lono, the god of agriculture and rain. His forms are still accepted as substitutes at the altar when a pig cannot be found.

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