Nawao

High on the wet shoulders of the Hawaiian mountains, above the last taro terraces and below the bare rock of the summits, lay a belt of forest the old people called the wao. It was not a place anyone lived. It belonged to spirits and to the deep trees, and a person climbed into it only with a task in hand and a prayer already spoken. Somewhere in that dripping green, the genealogies say, ranged the Nawao: a wild people, big of body, who ran down game along the ridges, ate the wild bananas, and wanted nothing at all to do with the villages below.

They were old. Older than the ordinary run of Hawaiians, older than the chiefs who kept the chants. The record that survives of them is thin and strange, a few lines set down in the nineteenth century from the memory of genealogists, and it describes them almost entirely by what they were not. They were not tame. They did not mix with the kanaka, the common people of the settled land. Abraham Fornander, gathering the old traditions, wrote them down as a people of large size, wild, hunters who chased animals across the uplands, once numerous and by his day long gone. That is nearly all anyone can say for certain about their bodies: large, and wild, and vanished.

Even their name points away from the human world. Wao is the Hawaiian word for that high, spirit-haunted band of the mountainside where people did not settle, and na makes it plural. The Nawao were, in the plainest sense, the ones who belonged to the wild forest. They shared it with two shadowy kindred, the Mu and the Wa, whose names carry the sounds of the deep woods, the Mu silent, the Wa a shout among the trees. Together they made a single old family of the uplands, remembered less as neighbors than as presences.

Their beginning is fixed to one figure. On the Kumuhonua genealogy, the twelfth name down from Nuʻu is Lua-nuʻu, called also Pua-Nawao, the stock or blossom of the Nawao. The chant gives him two wives and two very different sets of children. By a slave wife he fathered the Nawao, the wild banana-eaters of the forest. By a chiefess wife he fathered the Menehune, the small, clever, orderly people from whom living Hawaiians trace their own descent. So the two races were half-brothers, sprung from one father and two mothers, and the difference in their mothers’ rank ran all the way down into the world. One line became the ancestors of kings. The other took to the trees.

Picture them at their work. A file of big shapes moving without much noise through a grove of wild maiʻa, the broad banana leaves closing behind them, the ground soft and rotten underfoot and smelling of it. Game breaks cover ahead, a pig or a bird, and they are after it at a dead run, spears held low, gaining. They lived by that. No planted fields, no ovens laid in rows, only the forest and whatever could be caught or picked in it.

It did not last. The Menehune are the ones called human in the old stories, set deliberately against the wild Nawao, and the stories are blunt about what passed between them. The neat, industrious little people who built the fishponds and the night-raised heiau walls inherited the islands, and the big wild hunters of the wao dwindled to a name and a rumor of something that used to be up there. The Menehune wiped out most of them.

What was left of the Nawao slipped out of history and into worship. They and their kindred the Mu and Wa were folded among the aumakua, the ancestral spirits, under the joined names Ku-a-mu, Ku-a-wa, and Ku-a-wao. When people climbed into the upland forest to fell a great tree, above all the ohia log dragged down to consecrate a newly built heiau, they called on these spirits of the wao. The procession that brought such a tree down was a dangerous thing to cross. Any man who happened to stand in its path could be seized on the spot and killed as an offering, his bad luck read as the will of the wood. A sorcerer who wanted a man dead could send one of these same spirits against him, chanting for Ku-a-mu to enter his victim head and tail, to make of him bread and meat, and not to return until the body was devoured by worms.

Whether the Nawao were ever people at all is a question the sources cannot settle. Martha Beckwith, who gathered the Hawaiian material into a single book, turned it over both ways. The wao was spirit country, and the Mu and Wa might be nothing more than the hush and the clatter of the living forest given names, kin to the rat and the gecko who crowd the old spirit tales. And yet these same spirits were said to have left human descendants, and it may be that some short, wild, older population, real people of a very plain way of living, lies buried somewhere under the legend. The folklorist Katharine Luomala went further and suspected that the whole cycle of Menehune and their like took its familiar shape only after Europeans arrived. The honest answer is that no one can now cleanly separate the fact from the telling.

Their strength was the strength of the wild itself. As aumakua of the wao they held the high forest, and a person entered their country on their terms, with offerings and set words, or risked being taken by it. They could be called down onto an enemy like a sickness. But their weakness was written into the same story that made them. They belonged to an older age and a losing side. They were large and they were strong and it was not enough, because the small people were cleverer and better organized, and cleverness took the islands. The chants remember that a rite of incision, brought in under Lua-nuʻu, marked the tame Kane people off from the wild, a line drawn through the family that the Nawao stood on the wrong side of. In the end they are less a race than a boundary, the name the settled Hawaiians gave to everything older, bigger, and wilder than themselves, still up there in the cold mist above the fields, still owed a prayer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Nawao in Hawaiian mythology?

The Nawao are a legendary race of large, wild hunting people in Hawaiian tradition who lived in the upland forests and ate wild bananas. They are remembered as an ancient stock that kept apart from ordinary humans and vanished long ago, surviving mainly in old genealogical chants and among the ancestral spirits of the deep woods.

Where did the Nawao come from?

The Nawao descend from Lua-nuʻu, the twelfth name on the Kumuhonua genealogical line, who is also called Pua-Nawao, meaning the source of the Nawao. According to the chant he fathered the wild Nawao by a slave wife and the small, orderly Menehune by a chiefess wife, making the two races half-brothers from a single father.

What happened to the Nawao?

The Nawao were displaced and largely exterminated by the Menehune, the people described as “human” in contrast to the “wild” Nawao. The Menehune took over the islands, and the Nawao dwindled until they survived only as a name in the genealogies and as forest spirits invoked in the uplands.

Are the Nawao the same as the Menehune?

No. Although both are ancient Hawaiian forest peoples descended from Lua-nuʻu, the Nawao are described as large, wild hunters, while the Menehune are small, industrious builders. The two are treated as rival half-brother races, and it was the Menehune, ancestors of living Hawaiians, who destroyed most of the Nawao.

Are the Nawao a real historical people?

The sources cannot say for certain. The scholar Martha Beckwith noted that the Nawao and their kindred, the Mu and Wa, may have been nature spirits of the wild forest, yet were also said to have human descendants, hinting at some older population behind the legend. The folklorist Katharine Luomala argued that such Menehune-type traditions may have taken shape only after European contact.

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