Nāwao

Also Known As: also written Nawao; equated in the dictionaries with Mū ʻai maiʻa, “the banana-eating Mū,” and sometimes simply Mū. The same word, uncapitalised, means a cultivated taro that has gone wild in the forest, from wao, the upland belt of mountainside.
Region/Culture: Oceania
Mythos: Hawaiian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A large-bodied, wild hunting people of the upland forest who lived on wild bananas and would not mix with ordinary men.
Role in Mythos: They are the untamed half of Lua-nuʻu’s descendants, set against the Menehune who displaced and destroyed nearly all of them, and the ancestors of the Mu and Wa spirits called on in the mountain forest.
Relation to Humans: They did not associate with kanaka at all, and the tradition uses them as the category against which “human” gets defined. Their descendants stayed nearer: the Mu and the Wa entered family lists of aumakua and were invoked by anyone going up to fell a tree, and by sorcerers who wanted an enemy eaten from the inside.

There is a taro that runs away from the garden. Left alone it works its way uphill into the wet forest, and the corm coarsens and reddens until it is no longer worth the cooking. In Kaʻū they called that plant nāwao, tame food gone feral in the wao, the high belt of mountainside where spirits keep house and people mostly do not. Capitalise the word and it stops being a plant. It becomes a people.

The Nāwao were, by the only description anyone troubled to write down, a people of large size, wild, who did not associate with kanaka. Abraham Fornander’s Hawaiian sources called them a hunting people, lāhui alualu holoholona, and added that they had been numerous in former times and had since disappeared. That is the whole of it. Four facts and a past tense.

They enter the record through a genealogy rather than a story. On the Kumuhonua line, twelve names down from Nuʻu, sits Lua-nuʻu, a man carrying a drawerful of names, one of which is Pua-Nawao, father of the Nāwao. By a wife who was no chiefess he fathered them: a forest people living on bananas, ka lāhui mū ʻai maiʻa. By his chiefess wife Mee-hiwa he fathered the Menehune, the numerous and powerful race from whom Hawaiians count their own descent. Two wives, two peoples, one father, and the tradition never once pretends the two lines were equal.

Picture the upland at midday, cloud sitting low in the ʻōhiʻa canopy, the light gone flat and cold and the air heavy enough to taste. A big figure moves through a stand of wild banana, taking fruit nobody planted, and does not come down the mountain. That is the sum of their daily business as the sources give it. Living high, eating wild, staying away.

Then the Menehune. In the traditions the Menehune are the ones called human and the Nāwao are the ones called wild, and most of the Nāwao, it is said, the Menehune exterminated. Nobody wrote down how. There is no battle, no siege, no last stand, no named survivor and no grave. An entire people is disposed of in a subordinate clause, and what makes that unusual is not the violence but the total absence of appetite for the details, in a tradition that elsewhere remembers exactly which chief threw which spear at which pass.

What they looked like is a shorter question still. Large. Wild. Not tiny, as Pukui and Elbert take the trouble to specify, meaning that whoever supplied the dictionary entry expected readers to picture the Menehune and needed heading off. Beyond that there is nothing. No face, no hair, no stature in feet, no garment, no ornament, no weapon, no voice, no single individual with a name. Compare the Mū of the Kauaʻi stories, who arrive described down to their beards and their round stomachs, and the silence around the Nāwao starts to look less like a gap in the record and more like a property of the thing itself. They were the people you did not see.

Their descendants left more of a mark. From the Nāwao come the Mu, the silent, and the Wa, the shouting, and those two turn up in the aumakua lists as Namu and Nawa, ancestral spirits with living families attached. Anyone going up to fell a tree in the high forest called on them together with the mountain itself: Kū-a-mu, Kū-a-wa, Kū-a-wao. At the ʻōhiʻa-ku procession, when a trunk came down for the god of a newly dedicated heiau, the whole crowd shouted the same three names, and any man who blundered into the line of march could be seized on the spot and used for the sacrifice. A sorcerer with a grudge used the names for something quieter, sending Kū-a-mu into a chosen man to eat him from within and not return until the worms had finished.

Martha Beckwith, working the genealogy through in 1940, noticed that the wao is precisely the zone of the mountain inhabited by spirits and nobody else, and wondered whether the silent Mu and the noisy Wa began as the quiet and loud small creatures that live there, the rat and the gecko, both of which carry serious weight in aumakua stories. She set the whole Lua-nuʻu episode against the Kumulipo’s account of first settlement, when the ancestors lived along the damp forest edge and bananas were the staple food. On that reading the Nāwao are less a lost tribe than the uplands remembering themselves.

Their power, such as it was, was the country. They held ground nobody farmed, ate food nobody had to plant, hunted where hunting was possible, and needed no one. In a society organised entirely around chiefs, land divisions, dedicated temples and the obligations that ran between them, a people who could feed themselves off wild banana in the cloud forest were effectively outside the whole apparatus.

That was also the end of them. Being outside it meant no chiefs, no craft, no genealogy running forward, no rite. Fornander’s material puts the introduction of incision in Lua-nuʻu’s time, and Beckwith thought the rite may have been what separated the people of Kāne from the wild ones, and what a man had to undergo before he could marry into the ancestral stock at all. Whatever the truth of that, the effect on the page is plain enough. The Menehune line runs on into families still counting from it. The Nāwao line stops.

The word kept working after the people stopped. Andrews recorded nawao in 1865 as a large red kalo unfit for eating, and by extension as a term for what is bad, in the saying that the good has been joined to the evil. Pukui’s collection preserves the fuller version: hui aku, hui mai, hui kalo me ka nāwao. Mixed here, mixed there, tame taro mixed with wild. It means utter confusion.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who or what were the Nawao?

The Nawao were a legendary people of Hawaiian tradition, described as large in size, wild, and living by hunting in the upland forest. They ate wild bananas and did not associate with ordinary people. Abraham Fornander’s Hawaiian sources record that they were numerous in former times and had since disappeared.

What happened to the Nawao?

The Menehune are said to have exterminated most of them. In the traditions the Menehune are called human and the Nawao are called wild, and the two descend from the same father, Lua-nuʻu, by different wives. No source describes how the killing happened, and no individual Nawao is named.

What did the Nawao look like?

The sources say only that they were of large size and wild. Pukui and Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary adds that they were not tiny like the Menehune. Nothing survives about their faces, hair, dress, weapons or speech, which makes them one of the least visually described peoples in Hawaiian tradition.

How are the Nawao related to the Menehune?

They are half-siblings in the Kumuhonua genealogy. Lua-nuʻu fathered the Nawao by a wife who was not a chiefess, and fathered the Menehune by his chiefess wife Mee-hiwa. One of Lua-nuʻu’s own names, Pua-Nawao, marks him as ancestor of the Nawao, and another, Ku-ma-menehune, marks him as ancestor of the Menehune.

What does the word nawao mean in Hawaiian?

Uncapitalised, nawao is a cultivated taro that has gone wild in the forest, and also the name of a small freshwater fish. Andrews recorded it in 1865 as a large red taro unfit for eating and as a figure for what is bad. Capitalised, Nawao is the mythical people, which the dictionaries treat as the same as Mu ʻai maiʻa, the banana-eating Mu.