Menehune

The wall was not there at sunset. By the time the valley woke, a curve of fitted lava rock nearly nine hundred feet long stood across the mouth of the Huleʻia, holding back a flat sheet of brackish water where the stream had run loose the evening before. No one had heard hammering. No one had seen a single worker cross the mud flats, felt the ground shake under carried stone, or caught so much as a torch moving along the bank. On Kauaʻi this was simply how certain things came to stand, and the people knew better than to ask too loudly who had done it.

They lived back in the folded green of the interior, in the deep forest and the high hidden valleys, and they came down only at night. A person walking a ridge after dark might hear them before anything else: a low murmur of many small voices, the knock of stone on stone, sometimes singing, sometimes the flat crack of tiny bowstrings, because they loved archery and dancing and the plunge off a sea cliff as much as they loved work. They were small, most of them about knee-high to a grown man, a few no taller than a hand span. What they lacked in height they carried in the shoulders. Squat, thick-limbed, hairy, with brows that hung low over the eyes and a flush to the skin, they were built like nothing so much as the stones they moved.

Where they came from is a question the stories will not settle. One line of telling makes them among the first people to reach the islands, an older stock pushed up into the mountains when later voyagers came. When canoes from Tahiti landed, the newcomers are said to have called the earlier settlers manahune, a word for the low-born and the common, and these driven people withdrew into the uplands and passed out of daylight into legend. The folklorist Katharine Luomala, who spent a career on them, read the little-people stories as largely a thing of the years after European ships arrived, the old word manahune bent toward the shape of the brownies and helpful goblins the sailors talked about. In her reading the Menehune are the makaʻāinana themselves, the commoners who actually cut the ditches and stacked the ponds and were then written out of the chiefs’ own histories, remembered only as a swarm of nameless little builders. The stories disagree on this, and they always have. An 1820 census of Kauaʻi still counted sixty-five living people as Menehune.

Whatever they were, the work was the heart of it, and the work followed rules. They built in a single night or not at all. If dawn found a thing unfinished, it stayed unfinished forever, and they left it and did not come back to it. To raise the Alekoko fishpond they are said to have formed a line running some twenty-five miles from the quarry at Makaweli, each one carrying a single stone, passing it hand to hand down the whole length of the island until it reached the water. Their palms wore through and bled, and the pond took its name from it, Alekoko, the rippling of blood. Two gaps were left in the finished wall, the story says, because the sun came up before the last stones could be set, and no Menehune would touch them after.

The other great monument is a watercourse. At Waimea the chief Ola wanted taro water carried along the valley wall, and through his kahuna Pi he set the Menehune to the task. They quarried and squared their blocks, each brought one, and by morning a lined ditch ran where there had been bare rock. The stonework of Kīkīaola is real and still stands, and it is genuinely strange: something like a hundred and twenty basalt blocks, cut and dressed and closely fitted, along a face where Hawaiians almost never bothered to dress stone at all. Captain Vancouver saw it in 1792 and had no better account of who made it than the valley did. The pay, in the old telling, was a feast, and the workers were counted the only way such a crowd could be counted, by handing each one a single shrimp.

Their gifts were the gifts of a whole people compressed into one restless night. They were strong far past their size, quick past belief, and there were a great many of them, so that a labour of years became a labour of hours. They knew stone. They asked no wages a chief could not meet, only food and the courtesy of not being stared at, and where they had worked the ponds filled and the taro drank. A chief who knew how to approach them could raise a temple by asking.

Their limits were folded into the same nature. The dark held them; the sunrise dismissed them; and above all they could not bear to be watched. A curious eye at the treeline was enough to end a project and send the whole host back into the hills, the half-built thing left to stand as a monument to their shyness. They would not be looked at. In the end they went, and the tellings differ on how: driven off by later people, or thinned by marriage into ordinary families until the blood ran out, or simply retreating further as the islands filled and the quiet places closed. The sixty-five names in the old census are the last ledger anyone kept of them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Menehune in Hawaiian mythology?

The Menehune are a race of small, strong forest-dwelling people in Hawaiian mythology, best known as master builders who worked only at night. They are usually described as about two feet tall, stocky, and hairy, living hidden in the mountains and deep forests of the islands, especially Kauaʻi. They avoided human contact and were credited with raising fishponds, temples, roads, and irrigation ditches in a single night.

What did the Menehune build?

The Menehune are credited with several real stone structures on Kauaʻi, most famously the Alekoko (Menehune) Fishpond near Līhuʻe and the Kīkīaola watercourse, called the Menehune Ditch, at Waimea. According to legend they built each in a single night, passing cut stones hand to hand along a human chain. The Kīkīaola ditch is notable for its roughly 120 finely cut and fitted basalt blocks, a kind of dressed stonework Hawaiians rarely used.

Why do the Menehune only work at night?

The Menehune worked only at night because they were extremely shy of being seen and would abandon any project witnessed by humans before it was finished. Their labour also had to be completed between dusk and dawn: if the sun rose on unfinished work, they left it incomplete permanently and did not return. This is used to explain gaps left in structures like the Alekoko Fishpond wall.

Are the Menehune real?

The Menehune are legendary, but the debate over a real origin is long-running. Some early theories held that they were an earlier people, called manahune or “commoners,” who were pushed into the mountains by later Tahitian settlers, while the folklorist Katharine Luomala argued the little-people stories mostly formed after European contact and stand in for the ordinary commoners who actually built Hawaiʻi’s ponds and ditches. An 1820 census of Kauaʻi still listed sixty-five people as Menehune.

How tall were the Menehune?

The Menehune were usually said to be about two feet (60 cm) tall, with some accounts describing individuals as small as six inches, tiny enough to fit in a palm. Despite their size they were described as muscular and thickset, with hairy bodies and heavy brows, and strong enough to move and stack large stones. Their build was suited to the heavy construction work they were famous for.

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