Episode #206- Were Magical Dwarves the First Hawaiians?

You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family.

And now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

Learn more about APU's 40-plus career-relevant master's degrees and certificates at apu.apus.edu.

APU built for the hustle.

There's a story that a long time ago, there was a Hawaiian leader named Wahe Iloa, highest chief from the island of Maui.

On one auspicious day, the chief's wife, Hina Hawea, gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

that the couple named Laka.

Both parents were completely smitten with their their new son.

The chief was so overcome with paternal love that he swore that he would get for his son the most incredible gift for the child to use as a toy.

This gift would be no less than a treasure prized by the gods.

It was described by some as a sacred rainbow kept on the big island of Hawaii.

So, not long after the birth of his first son, the chief set off in his canoe to to find this wonderful gift.

Many days and nights passed, and the chief did not return.

Soon word was sent that Chief Waheiloa was dead.

He had been killed by an unknown attacker while exploring a cave on the big island.

When young Laka came of age, he started asking about his long-lost father.

His wise grandmother told him the whole story.

His father had been gone many years, and the last anyone had heard, he had been murdered.

But the truth of this had never been confirmed.

If the chief was dead, then his remains needed to be returned to Maui, where they could be properly honored.

So Laka swore a solemn oath that he would travel to the big island of Hawaii and either bring his kidnapped father home or find his sacred remains.

His grandmother approved of this, but she told her impetuous grandson that if he was serious about this quest, he was going to need to build a canoe that was seaworthy enough to endure the journey from Maui to the Big Island.

To do this, Laka's grandmother told him that he needed to travel to the mountains and there search for a tree that had leaves shaped like a crescent moon.

He should then cut down this tree and carve it into a boat.

This, his grandmother assured him, would be the only way that Laka would ever reach the big island.

So Laka headed to the mountains, and before long he found a tall tree with leaves the shape of the crescent moon.

He set to work felling this enormous tree, and before long it came crashing down.

But by that time it was getting late and the effort of bringing down this tree had exhausted Laka.

So he found a comfortable place to sleep and closed his eyes.

The next day, he woke up eager to start work on his new canoe.

But when he returned to the place where he had felled the tree, he discovered that the tree was once again standing tall.

Even the branches that had broken off during the felling were reattached.

The tree looked as though Laka had never touched it.

Thinking this was strange, but not wanting to waste any time, Laka once again got to work cutting down the tree.

After a day's work, the mighty trunk was once again on the ground, and so Laka retired for the night.

But sure enough, the next morning the tree was once again standing upright, growing as if it had never been touched.

This process repeated for many days until Laka devised a plan.

Clearly someone, or something,

was playing a magical prank on him.

So, the next day, Laka started by digging a hole.

Then, once again, he set about cutting down the tree, but this time he made sure that tree landed in just such a way that it obscured his hole.

This gave Laka a perfect hiding place.

He climbed into his hole, and there he waited.

Sure enough, not long after sundown, Laka started hearing voices.

First, he heard a song praising the gods of the forest.

Then, as the voices got closer, he heard a conversation.

These voices were discussing exactly how they were going to raise the tree back up again.

Seeing that his moment had arrived, Laka sprang from his hiding place.

What he saw were a dozen or more short little fellows, the tallest among them being no higher than three feet tall.

Immediately he knew that these stout little workers must be the Menahune.

These were a magical people who had lived on the islands longer than anyone else.

Acting fast, Laka quickly grabbed two of these Menohune and locked them under his arms.

Angrily, Laka demanded to know why he shouldn't kill them, considering that they had undone all of his hard work for days on end.

The The two Menohune responded that if Laka was to kill them, then he would not have anyone to build him a canoe.

Intrigued, Laka slackened his grip.

The Menohune then cut him a deal.

If Laka went to the seashore and built a simple shed that could hold a canoe, and there prepared a feast for the Menohune, they would build him the most perfect canoe ever carved on Maui.

Further, they would personally deliver the canoe to the shore.

Even better, the Menahune would accomplish all of this in one night.

Thinking this was more than fair, Laka released his Menahune captives and headed to the shore to make the appropriate preparations.

There he built the requested canoe shed and prepared a feast of fish and tarot for the Menahune workers.

Then he waited.

Sure enough, the Menahune kept their word.

Before the night was out, a band of tiny but strong Menahune workers emerged from the forest with the most perfect canoe Laka had ever seen.

They placed this canoe in Laka's newly built shed.

Then the workers sat down and had a rowdy feast, singing and cavorting the way only the Menahune knew how.

As the night wore on, the Menahune bid their farewell, and by the time the sun had risen there was no sign of the wild party that had unfolded just hours before.

The next morning Laka took his perfectly crafted canoe and set out for the big island.

After many travals, he found his father's bones in a cave and reverentially brought them home to Maui.

The quest was complete thanks to the help of the Menahune.

What you just heard was one of many stories from Hawaii that feature the island's most beloved magical residents.

Stories tell us that the Menahune are a small, elf-like people who live in the mountains and the forests of the Hawaiian islands.

They are elusive by nature.

Some say the Menahune can can transform themselves into rocks to hide from the gaze of unfriendly passers-by.

Others say that only those Hawaiians descended from the Menahune can see the Menahune.

The folklore is clear that in ancient times the Menahune interacted far more openly with the other residents of the islands.

There were even Hawaiian leaders who had a strong enough connection to the Menahune that they could call on huge Menahune workforces to complete impressive building projects.

While the story of Laka tells of the Menahune building a canoe, it's widely understood that their true talent was working with stone.

Around the Hawaiian islands, there are a number of structures that are credited to the Menahune.

Many of these are the remains of temples and sacred sites of worship known in Hawaiian as heau.

Some of the most elaborate structures can be found on the island of Kauai, which tradition holds had the largest population of Menahune during their heyday.

On Kauai, there are man-made fish ponds, dams, and watercourses that can still be visited that some believe were created by a workforce of magical dwarves.

The Menahune were said to work only at night and were bound by a code where every project they started needed to be finished in just one night.

If the sun rose and the Menahune had not completed their task, the project would be abandoned.

If the stories are to be trusted, then the early Hawaiians knew that if these magical builders were approached carefully and were properly compensated with a feast, then they could be relied on to create some truly impressive feats of engineering.

Some stories say that this tribe of dwarven engineers eventually left the islands in a mass exodus some centuries before the arrival of Europeans.

However, other tales insist that the Menahune still live in more isolated parts of the archipelago.

In fact, every year there are Hawaiians who report strange encounters with creatures that they swear are Menahune.

In recent years, Menohune encounters have taken on the character of Bigfoot sightings or ghost experiences, that is, strange occurrences that seem to resist scientific evaluation.

However, there are some who have proposed that the Menohune should not be understood as supernatural creatures.

In fact, some believe that the stories of the Menohune actually preserve the memory of a real group of early Hawaii.

These were not magical elves, but but industrious human beings who arrived in Hawaii long before the Polynesians from whom contemporary Hawaiians are descended.

Were the Menahune actually Hawaii's first people transformed through centuries of storytelling into a powerful but elusive tribe of builders?

Or is there something else going on here?

Let's find out today on our fake history.

One, two, three, five

Episode number 206.

Were magical dwarves the first Hawaiians?

Hello and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story.

It simply must be told.

Before we get going this week, I just want to remind everyone listening that an ad-free version of this podcast is is available through Patreon.

Head to patreon.com slash our fake history and start supporting at $5 or more every month to get access to an ad-free feed and a ton of extra episodes.

You also get to be part of the community over there at Patreon.

You get to pick future extra episodes and you generally feel good knowing that you're supporting this show.

If you like this podcast and you want more, then head to patreon.com slash our fake history and find a level of support that works for you.

This week we are heading to the beautiful Hawaiian Islands to explore the tales of the Menahune.

Do the Hawaiian Islands need an introduction?

This archipelago of volcanic islands are smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and represent one of the farthest flung outposts of Polynesian civilization.

As America's 50th state, Hawaii is an outlier in literally every way.

It's been described as an earthly paradise, but as history buffs know, Hawaii has had a tumultuous and sometimes tragic history, especially after first contact with Europeans in 1778.

But today, we're going to be focused on one of the more enchanting elements of Hawaiian storytelling tradition.

Now, it's always a tightrope walk when I start exploring traditions that some folks consider to be sacred.

Longtime listeners have probably noticed that I tend to be a bit more delicate when it comes to matters of religion.

The ultimate goal of this podcast has always been to encourage critical thinking and hopefully to spark a love for history.

And while I've certainly taken on religious topics, I try to do so with a certain amount of respect and care for people with with sincerely held religious beliefs.

I try to approach the spiritual beliefs of indigenous people with the same level of care that I do any other religion.

Back when I did my series on Rapanui or Easter Island, I discussed the Rapanui oral traditions about the discovery and colonization of that island.

In that episode, I pointed out that that particular oral tradition likely contains lots of truth and is largely aligned with archaeological and genealogical research into the origins of Rapanui's first people.

Not long after I released those episodes, I received a very sweet and thoughtful email from a Polynesian listener who said that she had enjoyed the series.

but she had bristled a little when I referred to what she considered to be sacred stories as mythology.

I heard what she was saying, because as we've explored at length on this podcast, the term myth or mythology can sometimes have negative connotations.

We can use it casually to mean the opposite of verifiable fact.

However, mythology can also be understood using the ancient Greek concept of mythos.

Mythos doesn't refer to lies, but rather a type of truth that's understood figuratively through storytelling.

So, when I refer to sacred stories from any tradition as mythology, I don't mean it in a negative or demeaning sense.

Mythology can be mythos, it can hold truth.

Now, what's interesting about the stories of Hawaii's Menahune is that there seems to be some debate among Hawaiians concerning just how sacred and ancient those tales actually are.

The Menahune stories exist in a slightly different category than many other tales that are more closely associated with traditional Hawaiian religion.

While oral tradition is always going to have a degree of variation and change depending on the storyteller, Many have remarked on the impressive consistency of oral traditions that are considered sacred.

The Menahune stories, on the other hand, are wildly diverse, to the point where there's little agreement on exactly who or what the Menahune are.

So while I have no doubt that there may be some listening who take the Menahune stories seriously, the writing of experts like pioneering anthropologist Catherine Lumala and Hawaiian journalist Jan Tenbruggenkate have convinced me that this particular Hawaiian tradition is a bit more appropriate for the Our Fake History treatment.

My reading has suggested that the Menahune stand on a blurry boundary between traditional storytelling and modern folklore.

Now, when I say that there's little agreement about who or what the Menahune are, there are some generally accepted characteristics of this group.

W.H.

Rice, an early collector of Menahune lore, described them as, quote, a race of mythical dwarves from two to three feet in height, pygmies who were squat, tremendously strong, powerfully built, and very ugly in face.

They were credited with building many temples, roads, and other structures.

It was believed that they would work only one night on a construction.

and if they were unable to complete the work, it was left undone.

End quote.

That description is helpful, if only to give a basic outline of how most people conceive of the Menahune.

They are helpful, short-statured, lightly magical, but mostly human residents of Hawaii.

However, other descriptions make them sound more like supernatural apes.

One 19th century Hawaiian storyteller, J.H.

Kaiwee, was used as a source by many early compilers of Menahune lore, and he claimed that his grandparents had met a group of Menahune sometime in the early 1800s.

Kaiwi claimed that the Menahune were covered all over in hair and had a dark, almost reddish skin tone.

His Menahune had low, protruding foreheads, large eyes, and fearsome expressions.

They almost sound like miniature Neanderthals.

However, another Hawaiian source contemporary to Kaiwi, cited by the author Thomas Throom, claimed that the Menahune were not furry at all and were instead mostly hairless.

The size of the Menahune can also change drastically depending on who is telling the story.

There's one popular tradition that the Menahune are no larger than a foot tall.

Others who claim that they have seen the Menahune report that the creatures are more like gnomes or pixies, measuring no more than five or six inches in height.

Every year, there are Hawaiians who report strange encounters with these miniature Menahune.

They're glimpsed darting under houses or behind bushes.

Sometimes abandoned homes are said to be occupied and maintained by tiny, magical Menahune.

However, there's also a whole branch of Menahune mythology where these builders are described as neither tiny nor magical.

In these stories, the Menahune are simply a group of very human Hawaiians who were either the first or some of the first Polynesians to make their way to the archipelago.

Now, Whether the Menahune were early Polynesian voyagers or supernatural creatures who sprang up independently on the Hawaiian islands, most folks who believe in the Menahune agree that they were the first Hawaiians.

The Menahune are the most indigenous of the island's indigenous people.

Now, I've learned that in Hawaii there's a concept known as kama aina, which translates directly as the children of the land, but can also mean trusted friend.

Now, this is where my Hawaiian listeners could add some deeper context, but I've learned that this term is used by indigenous Hawaiians whose ancestry goes back to the first Polynesian voyagers, but also by other Hawaiians who may not be ethnically Polynesian, but have deep roots on the islands.

According to some, all of these Hawaiians can claim to be kama'aina.

The opposite of kama aina is malahini, which means stranger, foreigner, or newcomer.

Now, over the tumultuous course of Hawaiian history, these terms have been used by various political causes.

Malahini could sometimes be thrown around as a slur.

Any group of outsiders perceived as a threat to Hawaii could be branded Malihini.

Catherine Lumala has pointed out that in 1946, during the first island-wide strike against Hawaii's increasingly exploitative sugar companies, union busters trying to undermine the workers' movement started claiming that the union leaders associated with the International Longshoremen's Union were Malihini.

This slur was used in hopes of breeding distrust between native Polynesian Hawaiians and workers of other ethnic backgrounds.

But in 1946, in an act of defiant solidarity, the retort from Polynesian Hawaiian workers to anyone calling a union brother or sister Malihini was that only the Menahune can claim to be kamaaina, children of the land.

So.

What I want to do on today's episode is explore whether or not that idea has a historical basis.

Are the Menahune creatures of pure legend, or were they in fact the very first Hawaiians?

So let's start by looking at some of the best known Menahune stories and see what we can figure out.

You want your master's degree.

You know you can earn it, but life gets busy.

The packed schedule, the late nights, and then there's the unexpected.

American Public University was built for all of it.

With monthly starts and no set login times, APU's 40-plus flexible online master's programs are designed to move at the speed of life.

You bring the fire, we'll fuel the journey.

Get started today at apu.apus.edu.

The best known and most repeated Menahune stories have to do with their impressive building projects.

Throughout the Hawaiian Islands, there are dozens of structures or structural remains that are popularly credited to the Menahune.

Some are even adorned with historical plaques proudly explaining the site's connection to Menahune mythology.

These sites can be found throughout the archipelago, but the highest concentration seems to be on the island of Kauai.

According to one well-known tradition, Kauai was the island with the highest population of Menahune at their peak.

One of the best-known Menahune building projects is the island's Alacoko Fish Pond, sometimes popularly called the Menahune Fish Pond.

The pond, which was used for catching fish and cultivating mullet, was created by diverting a bend in Kauai's Hulahia River, using an impressively engineered stone wall stretching under just one kilometer.

Archaeological investigations have determined that the wall was likely first built around 600 years ago.

Now, the tale is that a Kauai chief, sometimes called Alacoko, commanded his people to undertake this massive construction project.

But work on the fish pond soon proved to be difficult and slow.

Among the workers was a man named P,

who after laboring for weeks had grown sick of the monotonous work.

So P started playing hookie.

This was good for P, but bad for his family, as he was no longer collecting the rations that he was being paid for his labor.

So his wife angrily demanded that he step up and do the right thing for his family.

P knew she was right, but also didn't want to keep hauling rocks.

Luckily, P was descended from the Menahune and knew that they could be relied on to help one of their descendants.

So P headed to the forest and found the Menahune.

He asked what he could do to get them to complete the fish pond.

The leader of the Menahune told P that they would help and they would finish the construction in just one night.

But they had two conditions.

First, the Menahune needed to be fed.

Every Menahune worker would expect a serving of tarot and a fish.

Secondly, the Menahune insisted that they not be watched by anyone who was not a Menahune.

So P took the offer to the chief and his sister, who were co-rulers.

P presented the Menahune proposal, and the chief and chief S accepted, so long as P would do the work of getting the food prepared for the Menahune workforce.

P agreed, and he got down to it.

He harvested and cooked the tarot.

Then he went fishing.

But it was taking forever to catch enough fish.

So P, always eager to cut a corner, started trapping shrimp instead, which he knew he could collect much more quickly.

The Menahune were small, so a single shrimp would surely count as a fish for them, or so he hoped.

P then wrapped each worker's meal in a neat little leaf package and hung them from a tree to be collected by the hungry Menahune.

Luckily for P, the Menahune were satisfied with their shrimp and tarot.

And that night, as the sun set, they got to work.

An army of Menahune passed rocks from hand to hand over many kilometers and with incredible speed erected a perfectly engineered wall for the fish pond.

But the chief and his sister were far too curious.

After hearing that Pea was going to recruit the Menahune, they found a hiding place where they could covertly spy on the tiny workers.

At one point in the night, night, the pair peeked their heads over a ridge that they were hiding behind to catch a glimpse of the Menahune.

But they were immediately spotted, and without a moment's hesitation, the brother and sister were turned to stone.

As promised, the pond was finished in a night, but Alacoko and his sister would never see the fruits of the Menahune labor.

Now, by all accounts, this story has changed and evolved over the decades.

According to expert Jan Tenbruggenkate, the detail about the Menahune turning the spying siblings into stone is a fairly new addition.

Still, I told you that tale because it's emblematic of many Menahune stories from around Hawaii.

The Alicoco fish pond is not the only impressive feat of early Hawaiian engineering that's been credited to the Menahune.

Also on Kauai, you can find the remains of a stone-cut aqueduct or watercourse.

This is sometimes called Ola's watercourse or kiki-aola in reference to the Kauai chief who tradition holds ordered its construction to help with irrigation.

But it's perhaps best known these days as the Menahune Ditch.

The myth associated with the Menahune Ditch is much like that of the Alacoco fish pond.

It's said that the chief Ola recruited a band of Menahune who built the entire structure in one night in exchange for a healthy feed.

In some versions of the story, the Menahune help because Ola himself is part Menahune.

In other versions of the story, Ola seeks out our old buddy P,

who he's heard can act as a liaison with the Menahune.

Now, one common element in these stories is the idea that the Menahune are especially helpful to their descendants.

Does this mean that early Hawaiians believed that the Menahune were part of the Hawaiian gene pool?

After all, the Menahune help Ola and Pea because they're part of the family.

This is one of the reasons that some embrace the idea that the Menahune were a real group.

If not magical, perhaps the Menahune were simply a human tribe of skilled stoneworkers, so good at what they did that their feats became magical in the retelling.

If that was the case, then were they then the first Hawaiians?

Well, let's start with what the stories say.

Now, this is tricky because the myths about the origins of the Menahune are diverse.

One set of traditions claim that the Menahune were among the first beings to set foot on Hawaii.

One story tells of a great flood where a group of people were saved by a man named Nu.

Among those saved were the Menahune, who after the flood populated Hawaii and traveled all over the Pacific as far as Aotearoa or New Zealand.

Now, this story is very suggestive, as it hints that the Menahune were Polynesian voyagers.

However, this particular tradition, sometimes known as the Kumu Honua myth, has been shown to be a type of mythical mashup that bears the influence of the Christian missionaries that arrived in Hawaii in the 1820s.

The Great Flood seems to be a Hawaiian reimagining of the biblical flood, and New is an obvious analog for Noah.

There are also parts of that tradition that clearly retell the story of the Garden of Eden and Jacob and his 12 sons, but with Hawaiian names.

There's also a very strong consensus among experts that this tradition only emerged in the 19th century after a few decades of Christian missionary work on the Hawaiian islands.

So that story may not be the best one to use when trying to understand the origins of the Menahune.

Other origin stories for the Menahune suggest that they were early immigrants, but not necessarily the first Hawaiians.

One story tells of a triple-tiered floating island on which exiled gods were forced to live.

On the lowest tier of that floating island were the Menahune and a handful of other spirit creatures.

The story goes that when this floating island floated over Kauai, the Menahune jumped off and made it their new home.

One of my favorite traditions comes from the island of Oahu.

That story tells us that in ancient times, an early group of Hawaiians found themselves unable to undertake any building projects because they simply did not have enough people to work.

So they called on the talents of a powerful sorcerer named Kahano Anua.

A late 19th century compiler of Menahune stories, Judge Abraham Fornander, summarized the story like this:

Kahano Anua, quote, stretched out his hands to the furthest bounds of Kahiki, and on them as a bridge came the Menahune to Oahu.

⁇

There on the island of Oahu, they were put to work by a powerful Hawaiian queen.

Now, that author, Judge Abraham Fornander, was a respected Hawaiian official in the days of the independent Hawaiian monarchy.

He also published a series of pioneering works on Polynesian language, culture, and history.

In his work on the Menahune, he included all of these origin stories, but he took particular interest in the story of the Hawaiian sorcerer magically stretching out his hands to bring the Menahune to Hawaii.

In that tale, he thought he perceived some kernels of truth.

According to Fornander, the Menahune were likely not the first Hawaiians, but were rather a group of laborers brought to Hawaii to support an earlier wave of Polynesian settlers.

He believed that the reference in the story to Kahiki was actually meant to describe the island of Tahiti.

This is significant because there's lots of evidence that one of the first groups of Polynesians to arrive in Hawaii were originally from the Society Islands, the largest of which is Tahiti.

Perhaps the real Menahune had actually been Tahitian laborers brought to the Hawaiian Islands to help with building projects.

This would have happened sometime in the 11th or 12th centuries.

Now, this hypothesis gets even more compelling when you factor in the fact that in Tahiti, there's a group of people that are traditionally known as the Manahune.

Not Menahune, Manahune.

in tahiti this term was applied to a lower class of laboring people

those familiar with polynesian language and culture might recognize the root mana in that word to grossly oversimplify mana refers to one's spiritual power and energy chiefs and spiritual leaders were thought to have powerful mana the mana hune were a low mana people.

These were commoners who did lots of the heavy lifting in Polynesian society.

So, Fornander guessed that the Hawaiian Menahune were actually a real people, the Manahune, that is, Tahitian commoners who were brought to Hawaii to supplement the labor force.

He sums it up like this, quote, this name, Manahune, as a national appellation, was apparently dropped at a very early period.

In Hawaii, it disappeared as a national name so long ago that subsequent legends have converted it into a term of reproach, representing the Menahune people sometimes as a separate race, sometimes as a race of dwarves, skillful laborers, but artful and cunning.

End quote.

It was his belief that the lower-class laborers were transformed through generations of storytelling into literal little people.

This idea was then picked up and elaborated on by another influential anthropologist.

This was the one-time member of parliament from New Zealand, Te Rangi Hiroa, or Sir Peter Buck.

Tairangi Hiroa was Maori on his mother's side and Anglo-Irish on his father's.

Now, this guy lived a truly remarkable life.

And in many ways, his journey as both a proud Maori and a British colonial knighted by the King of England seems to tell the history of New Zealand in miniature.

But significantly for our story, Te Rangi Hiroa was one of the first well-published anthropologists and ethnologists to write about the Polynesian islands who was himself Polynesian.

In the course of his research, Terangihiroa also grappled with Hawaii's Menahune tradition.

Like Fernander, he also believed that the similarity between the words Manahune and Menahune could not be a simple coincidence.

The fact that both of these groups were builders and workmen also seemed to suggest a close connection.

However, where Ta Rangi Hiroa differed from Fornander is that he was convinced that the Menahune were the first Polynesians to make the trip to Hawaii.

He was less influenced by the sorcerer of Oahu story and gave more credence to the widespread Hawaiian folk belief that the Menahune were the original children of the land.

The folklorist Catherine Lumala also argued that Te Rangi Hiroa's ideas were clearly influenced by developments in Hawaiian archaeology in the early part of the 20th century.

The discovery of remains of man-made structures on a rocky island called Necker in the so-called Windward Islands, northwest of the main Hawaiian island group, suggested that there had likely been more than one wave of Polynesian migration to Hawaii.

The ritual structures or heiau on Necker seem to have a slightly different style and earlier construction dates than most of the heiau on the main island group.

This was interpreted as evidence that an earlier group of Polynesian migrants may have been displaced by a group of later arrivals with a slightly different twist on traditional Polynesian religion.

The The stonework of this displaced group may have only survived on the far-flung windward islands.

Terangi Hiroa believed that this first displaced group of Hawaiians were the real Menahune.

This is why in the stories there were Hawaiians who could claim to be descended from the Menahune.

It was his belief that they were the first Hawaiians, but they were denigrated in storytelling traditions because their culture was deemed inferior by later arrivals.

Tehrangi Hiroa was actually quite dismayed by the fact that the achievements of real Polynesians were being credited to magical imps.

He would write, quote, the Menahune pioneers have come to be regarded as gnomes and fairies.

It's even said that they are a race of dwarves, an erroneous description similar to that given by later storytellers to their Manahune kinsmen in Tahiti.

It seems to be a Polynesian characteristic to laud one's own family ancestors and belittle those who preceded them in exploration and settlement.

The Menahune were real live people of Polynesian stock and they are entitled to the honor and glory of being the first to cross the ocean wastes to Hawaii.

⁇ End quote.

Now, in the the years since Terangi Hiroa was writing, further research has demonstrated that there's quite a bit of evidence that there was more than one wave of migration to Hawaii.

The first was likely from Tahiti and the Society Islands, and a second migration a few hundred years later likely came from the Marquesas Islands.

Based on my reading for this show, the idea that these two groups had an acrimonious relationship or that one earlier group was pushed out or in some way oppressed has not been demonstrated in a conclusive way.

Unless I'm missing something and I could always be missing something

in 1951, when the anthropologist Catherine Lumala published her analysis of the Menahune stories, she pointed out that sometime in the late 18th or early 19th century, the last independent king of Kauai was said to have conducted a census of that island's Wanahina Valley.

In that census, it was apparently reported that 65 people living in that part of the island identified themselves as ethnically Menahune.

If that's true, then that means that a Menahune ethnicity may have persisted into the early 1800s.

Now, all of this provides a very satisfying explanation for the Menahune tradition, now, doesn't it?

Stories of magical little people distantly related to other Polynesian Hawaiians achieving great feats of engineering are actually the mythical renderings of distant historical truths.

Perhaps there was an early group of Hawaiians who had lower class laborers who did the building.

Perhaps that group were known as the Manahune, like the laboring class in Tahiti.

When that group was displaced by newer arrivals, potentially from the Marquesas Islands, their achievements were eventually credited to an exceedingly supernatural group of people.

Now,

wouldn't that be a nice place to conclude?

That would be a real clean episode of Our Fake History right there.

Here's a charming and slightly mysterious tradition from Hawaii.

Here are some tales of magic and whimsy.

And now, here comes the most interesting New Zealander you've ever heard of to help us make sense of it all.

The Menahuna mystery is put to rest by one of the first Maori-descended anthropologists.

You gotta love it.

But

I have some news.

The story does not end there.

While all of these pieces fit quite nicely, they're complicated by an inconvenient fact.

That is, that the Menahune seemed to be a shockingly recent invention.

As far as we can tell, the word Menahune does not appear anywhere in writing until 1861.

In the world of mythology, that's practically yesterday.

So,

what's going on here?

Are the stories of the Menahune actually a distant mythological memory of a real group of people?

Or are these tales a strange modern development?

Well, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll pick it apart.

By 1951, belief in the Hawaiian Menahune had gone mainstream, so to speak.

In the years after World War II, as the tourism business on the islands started to take off, many Hawaiian businesses started using the Menahune as a marketing gimmick.

Hawaiians with dwarfism were recruited to dress up in costumes and act as Menahune mascots, meant to entice tourists into various restaurants and souvenir shops.

It was in this environment that the folklorist Catherine Lumala, who was working in conjunction with Hawaii's Bishop Museum, wrote the most thorough academic analysis of the Menahune up to that point in history.

Her goal was to throw the question of the origin of the Menahune wide open.

Fernander and Hiroa had guessed that the Menahune had at one time been a real people.

But how much evidence was there of that, really?

She went into this analysis knowing that some people might resent a scientific approach to a beloved bit of island folklore.

In her introduction, she acknowledged that, quote, those who regard the Menahune as their favorite characters in mythology may say that anyone who would dissect a hapless Menahune caught in the scientific net would pick the wings off a butterfly, end quote.

I read that and I felt very seen.

You You don't want to be the person who carelessly ruins someone else's favorite story.

But, you know, we're also trying to get to the bottom of stuff out here.

In her scholarly monograph, The Menahune of Polynesia and Other Mythical People of Oceania, Lumala made a deep survey of all known Menahune stories and the existing hypotheses concerning the historical origins of those stories.

After carefully considering all of the ideas put forward by her predecessors, she pointed out that the hypotheses that the Menahune were once a real group of people were based on a vanishingly small amount of evidence.

The one bit of evidence that she believed was worth considering was the fact that the word Menahune was so close to the Tahitian word manahune.

But she rightly pointed out that it was deeply unclear exactly when the word manahune made its way to Hawaii.

It may have come with a migration in the 12th century, but it was just as possible that it had come to Hawaii after contact with Europeans, as Tahitians and other Polynesians working on merchant ships and whalers made their way to the island group.

Her point was that in 1951, neither scenario could be properly demonstrated.

She also made a very good case that the Menahune stories shared quite a lot in common with stories about other mythical forest spirits from throughout Polynesia.

Menahuna stories could often be very similar or identical to stories associated with spirit creatures known as the Mu, the Wa, and the Iipa, just to name a few.

The story of Laka and his canoe that I told in the introduction is a particularly clear example of this.

In that story, you may have noticed that the Menahune don't do any stonework, but instead magically restore a tree that had been felled, and then craft an excellent canoe.

The magical ability to replant a tree that had been cut down was considered one of the signature abilities of the Iepa and other Polynesian forest spirits.

The story of Laka and his canoe was likely a reimagining of a much older story about the Iipa.

It seems like at some point in history, one group of Polynesian sprites was subbed out for the Menahune.

This was just one of many Menahune stories that she analyzed that shared similarities with other Polynesian myths.

Lumala also pointed out that some of the Menahune stories recorded by Europeans seemed influenced by stories about leprechauns, elves, and brownies from European folklore.

As such, it was entirely possible that the Menahune tradition had been affected by contact with Europeans.

She summed up her conclusions like this: quote, comparisons of the Hawaiian Menahune tradition with beliefs and myths about other strange mythical bands of wonder-working little people elsewhere in Polynesia, Micronesia, and Melanesia reveals that the native narrators in these three culture areas follow the same general pattern in the attributes assigned to these bands.

There's nothing to prove that they were ever real people.

They They are the products of human imagination, and considering the lack of any good evidence to the contrary, the only conclusion possible is that they are a mythical people invented by storytellers.

End quote.

Lumala demonstrated that the Menahune stories fit comfortably within the larger world of Polynesian lore.

As such, she was unconvinced that they had once been real.

But her research didn't entirely close the door on that possibility.

After all, both things could be true.

The Menahune may have been a real group of people who, over the centuries, collected a body of legends that had once been attributed to a wide variety of forest spirits and magical dwarves.

Also, let's not forget that suggestive Kauai census that that apparently recorded 65 Menahune individuals.

If the Menahune were entirely fictional, how do we explain them?

Lumala acknowledged that while she found it unlikely that the Menahune were real, real Menahune may still be confirmed by future research.

This was where the conversation on the Menahune stalled for decades.

Most average Hawaiians were unaware of Lumala's scholarly work, so it didn't really move the needle when it came to what local people actually believed.

Academics generally let Lumala have the last word on the matter.

Even recently published popular articles looking to add an air of scholarly sophistication to their look at the Menahune almost always cite Catherine Lumala.

That was until 2018 when the journalist, popular historian, and longtime Kauai resident Jan Tenbrugenkate published his book, Menahune Mystery, The Original Tales and the Origins of the Myth.

As far as I can tell, this was the first proper examination of the Menahune tradition since 1951.

Jan Tenbrugenkate was aided by the fact that he can read and speak Hawaiian and had access to archives that were not available to Catherine Lumala.

As a result, he was able to construct the most complete record of written references to the Menohune to date.

He was curious just how far back references to the Menohune go in the historical record.

Were people always talking about the Menohune in Hawaii?

What he found was frankly surprising.

After scouring the archives, Tenbruggenkate could not find any written references to the Menahune that predated 1861.

Then, after 1861, mentions of the Menahune explode in Hawaiian newspapers, books, and collections of mythology.

Now, it's worth noting that since Polynesian Hawaiians did not have a writing system of their own, the written historical record in Hawaii only begins with the arrival of Captain Cook in 1778.

So it's worth asking whether or not these colorful Menahune stories were simply ignored by Western writers for the first 80 years or so of Hawaii's history.

That is entirely possible, after all.

Well, Jan Tenbruggenkate points out that there were many books published in that period that that took an interest in the tales of spirits, magical creatures, and other minor divinities from Hawaii.

And none of them mention the Menahune.

For instance, in 1821, the author Gilbert Matheson wrote extensively about South America and Hawaii.

He went out of his way to speak about supernatural beings said to inhabit the Hawaiian islands.

He wrote about shape-shifting forest spirits and the Hawaiian taboo against walking at night lest one encounter a malicious supernatural creature.

But he says nothing about the Menahune.

Similarly, the Reverend Hiram Bingham, a Christian missionary writing in the 1840s, described Hawaiian beliefs about gods who could take the form of sharks and reptile deities said to live under waterfalls.

But in his work, no Menahune.

One of the first indigenous Polynesian Hawaiians to write the island's history was David Malo, who published his Hawaiian Antiquities in 1838.

In that book, Malo wrote extensively about traditional Hawaiian beliefs and included sections about supernatural creatures said to inhabit the archipelago.

He says nothing about the Menahune,

but he does write about a, quote, mischievous set of sprites known as the Mu.

In his estimation, the Mu, who were not really known for building projects, were the only Menahune adjacent creatures worth mentioning.

In Menahune Mystery, Tenbruggenkate points to a number of other examples of books produced between 1778 and 1861 in which the Menahune are conspicuous by their absence.

The first mention of the Menahune that he found anywhere was in a Hawaiian language newspaper from 1861.

That story does not describe the Menahune as tiny or magical.

Instead, it tells of a man named Ku Leonui, or Ku with the big voice, who, in an earlier time, could summon a huge Menahune workforce and put them to work on ambitious building projects, so long as each worker was paid with one shellfish.

In Hawaiian language newspapers published later that year, Tenbrugenkate found the first known versions of the Alacoco fish pond story and the tale of Menahune building the water course on Kauai.

But in those stories, the Menahune are referred to using a similar, though slightly different name.

They're called the Melahuna or the Melahune with an L.

Now, this is notable because it suggests that the etymology of the word Menahune may not be as closely connected to the Tahitian word manahune as originally suspected.

Are you keeping track of this?

I know all these words sound incredibly similar, but stay with me.

The melahuna, melahune terms are still favored in parts of Kauai and do not necessarily translate as low mana or underclass people.

In scouring those early newspaper reports, Tenbruggenkate discovered that the earliest references to the building of the Kauai waterway, now commonly known as the Menahune Ditch, did not mention the Menahune at all.

The building was credited to an ancient Hawaiian chief with no supernatural assistance.

It was not until 1861 that the first stories appeared about this structure being built by Menahune.

In fact, Tembruggenkate was able to find a number of examples of structures that clearly did not have Menahune associations, but then gained them in the late 19th century.

For instance, the author Abraham Fornander, whose work we were quoting from earlier, was told by Hawaiian informants in the late 1800s that an important ritual site on Maui had originally been built by the Maui chief Kekolike in 1730.

But by the time the site was being excavated by archaeologists in the early 1900s, local people were telling the archaeological team that the structure had been built by Menahune.

In just around 30 years, a Menahune tradition had arisen where there was not one before.

We also know that in 1871, the people of Kauai built a corduroy road through a swampy region on the island.

This was done specifically for the Hawaiian queen, commonly known as Queen Emma, the widow of Kamehameha IV, who was traveling through the region.

But by 1929, the author John Ferris was being told by locals that the Menahune had built the Corduroy Road.

This is a well-documented modern building project associated with a beloved member of the Hawaiian royal family.

And still, within 50 years, that history had been popularly supplanted by a Menahune story.

So, if the Tenbrugginkate research is correct, then the Menahune are a very recent folkloric invention.

Their first appearance in Hawaiian language newspapers attests to the fact that the Menahune stories come from indigenous Polynesian storytellers.

However, the evidence seems to suggest that Hawaiians started telling these stories no earlier than the mid-1800s.

Once the Menahune were released into the world of Hawaiian storytelling, they quickly started getting credit for all sorts of structures that had pre-existing oral histories about their construction.

The Menahune lore also absorbed stories told about other forest creatures.

Hawaiian tales about the tricky moo, the forest-protecting iipa, and the diminutive wa were by the early 1900s mostly about the Menahune.

At the risk of being too cavalier about stories many Hawaiians hold dear, the rapid rise and domination of Menahune stories makes them seem like a mythical invasive species.

As Jan Tenbruggenkate explains, quote, the entire Hawaiian panoply of mythical figures was largely supplanted eventually by the Menahune.

robbing Hawaiian culture of an enormous depth and breadth, end quote.

He also notes just how quickly the Menahune stories evolved.

In the earliest references in Hawaiian newspapers, they are described as a mostly human, regular-sized workforce.

But by the time Abraham Fornander was writing his collection of Menahune tales, they had become dwarves and were thought to have the types of supernatural abilities traditionally associated with the Hawaiian creatures, the Mu and the Iipa.

Tembruggenkate writes, quote, they have taken over stories originally featuring others, like the Mu.

They started as hard-working, apparently normal-looking, skilled masons.

But from the middle 1860s to the 1890s, they got oddly shorter, magical, tricky, and gained the ability to disappear.

End quote.

This transformation was supercharged once westerners got hold of the Menahune tales.

Soon stories were appearing where the Menahune were basically leprechauns in all but name, wearing crowns and headbands decorated with green emeralds.

So what about the Menahune-Manahune connection?

Well, that is still suggestive, but Tenbrugginkate guesses that the manahune term came to Hawaii in the mid-1800s with Tahitian sailors on Western-owned merchant ships.

It's notable that Hawaiians had their own word for lower-class workers.

They did not call them manahune.

They used the term maka-ainana.

The Tahitian word manahune doesn't seem to be part of the Hawaiian vocabulary until the late late 19th century.

Jan Tenbruggenkate has guessed that when that Tahitian word finally made its way to Hawaii, it was blended with the traditional Kauai word melahune for a mythical little people.

Manahune and melahune came together and the menahune were born.

Following this

now, to be clear, this is just a guess.

But the fact that there are no Hawaiian sources that use the word Menahune from before 1861 suggests that this was not a centuries-old Hawaiian name for a group of workers, magical or otherwise.

But what about that census done by the king of Kauai that found 65 Menahune?

How do we explain that?

Well, here's the thing.

That census may not have happened.

As far as we know, there is no surviving documentation of that census.

Also, the story of the census has changed greatly in the retelling.

The first known reference to this alleged Kauai census comes from an 1893 Hawaiian language newspaper called the the Aloha Aina.

That story reports that at an unknown date, decades in the past, the last independent king of Kauai conducted a census.

And in that census, he did find an unusual group of people.

But in that story, the people he found were not identified as Manahune.

Instead, the author of that Hawaiian language story writes that the people he found were forest creatures known as the Moo.

The next time this alleged census was referenced was by Reverend John Lydgate in an article from 1913.

In that article, Lydgate changes the name of the village where these people were allegedly found, and he claims that the Moo were in fact Menahune.

Lydgate is also the first writer to claim that there were exactly 65 of these individuals.

It's deeply unclear where he got that number from.

Now, Lydgate's report would go on to be cited by anyone interested in the topic for the next 100 years, including serious statisticians writing in academic journals.

But Jan Tenbruggenkate points out that in that article, Lydgate goes out of his way to say that he does not trust the report he received about this census, and that he found the detail about the Menahune completely unbelievable.

So, the guy that everyone cites as their source for this alleged census was pretty sure that this census was bogus.

So much for the 65 Menahune on Kauai.

Were there actually a group of Mu on Kauai?

Well, that remains to be confirmed.

So, what's going on with the Menahune?

Well, after reading the work of Jan Tenbruggenkate, I've been convinced that the Menahune represent a fairly recent invention of Hawaiian storytelling.

The Menahune stories likely do not represent a distant memory of a real people,

Which is too bad, because that would be a more satisfying conclusion.

The best evidence seems to suggest that Hawaiian people started telling stories about the Menahune or Melahune on Kauai around the mid-1800s.

Sometime in the early 1860s, the ancient water course on Kauai went from being popularly attributed to an ambitious builder chief to being understood as the work of Menahune.

Over the course of the next few decades, more stories about the Menahune started appearing in Hawaiian newspapers, and soon they became an unmissable part of Hawaiian storytelling.

Oral traditions about the building of other structures on Hawaii were forgotten in favor of Menahune stories.

The tradition was given an added boost in the late 19th century when Westerners started publishing collections of Menahune lore.

In those collections, the stories were presented as ancient tales, even though they probably weren't so ancient.

In the process, some legitimately old stories about supernatural beings like the Iipa and the Mu were folded in to the Menahune tradition.

The old spirits were being swapped out for diminutive Menahune.

Before long, it was popularly understood that the Menahune had been the first Hawaiians, the original children of the land.

If anything, the Menahune stories demonstrate just how quickly something can become a beloved tradition and can take on the air of ancientness.

Like the work of the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the Menahune stories feel like they could be timeless myths, but in fact, they are 19th century fairy tales.

But I feel confident that nothing I say on this podcast will change how Hawaiians feel about the Menahune.

I predict more Menahune sightings will keep rolling in every year.

I'm not sure you can pluck the wings off of this butterfly.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will explore an all-new historical myth.

As always, before we go this week, I need to give a shout out to some very special people.

Big ups to Ted B,

to Christopher Crusan,

to William Perubski, to Christopher Hammond, to Reuben R,

to Adam Clutier,

to Rondon's Pool Service, Palm Harbor, Florida.

Sneaky, get your little business plug in there.

Nice work, Rondons.

Big ups to Louis Negrete or Louis Negrete,

David Webb, to Pat,

to TE,

to Benjamin Hurler, to Miriam K.

To Sin R.

Johnson,

to

Alex Witch, to Andrew Liu, to Dave Baxter,

to

Connor Mangan,

to DF Drake

to NJ Baker, to Andy B,

to Mark Christie, and to Peter Nikolai Roberts.

All of these people have decided to pledge at $5

or more every month on Patreon.

So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support.

Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast at all levels.

It means absolutely everything.

If you want to support us in a free way, give us a nice review.

Go to Apple Podcasts or whatever other app allows you to review podcasts and give us five stars and write something nice.

You can also go to our YouTube channel, like and subscribe, watch all the videos we got there.

If you ever want to get in touch with me, you can always send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

You can hit me up on Facebook, facebook.com slash ourfakehistory.

You can find me on Twitter.

Should I start calling it X?

I've really been holding off on that.

Let's call it X at Our Fake History.

I'm on Instagram at OurFake History.

I'm on TikTok at OurFake History.

As always, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

You can find out more about Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, five.

You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family.

And now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

Learn more about APU's 40-plus career-relevant master's degrees and certificates at apu.apus.edu.

APU Built for the Hustle.