Voices of Fire : Reweaving the Literary Lei of Pele and Hi'iaka Hardback

by Ku'Ualoha Ho'Omanawanui

Part of the First Peoples: New Directions Indigenous series

Hardback

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Description

Stories of the volcano goddess Pele and her youngest sister Hiâ€˜iaka, patron of hula, are most familiar as a form of literary colonialismâ€”first translated by missionary descendants and others, then co-opted by Hollywood and the tourist industry.

But far from quaint tales for amusement, the Pele and Hiâ€˜iaka literature published between the 1860s and 1930 carried coded political meaning for the Hawaiian people at a time of great upheaval.

Voices of Fire recovers the lost and often-suppressed significance of this literature, restoring it to its primary place in Hawaiian culture.

Kuâ€˜ualoha hoâ€˜omanawanui takes up moâ€˜olelo (histories, stories, narratives), mele (poetry, songs), oli (chants), and hula (dances) as they were conveyed by dozens of authors over a tumultuous sixty-eight-year period characterized by population collapse, land alienation, economic exploitation, and military occupation.

Her examination shows how the Pele and Hiâ€˜iaka legends acted as a framework for a Native sense of community.

Freeing the moâ€˜olelo and mele from colonial stereotypes and misappropriations, Voices of Fire establishes a literary moâ€˜okÅ«â€˜auhau, or genealogy, that provides a view of the ancestral literature in its indigenous contexts.

The first book-length analysis of Pele and Hiâ€˜iaka literature written by a Native Hawaiian scholar, Voices of Fire compellingly lays the groundwork for a larger conversation of Native American literary nationalism.