Hawaii

Heʻe nalu — the Hawaiian art of wave-sliding — is often reduced to a single word in English: surfing. But the sport that now draws millions to coastlines worldwide began as a deeply spiritual, class-bound practice reserved for Hawaiian aliʻi (chiefs), governed by kapu (sacred laws), and accompanied by chants, rituals, and offerings. This article traces heʻe nalu from its origins in pre-contact Hawaiʻi through its near-erasure after Western contact, its 20th-century revival, and the ongoing efforts to reclaim its cultural roots in a globalized sport. In the early 1900s in San Mateo, California, three young aliʻi — princes

On a Tuesday morning at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, a group of schoolchildren sat in a circle repeating phrases in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. The sound of the language, banned from schools for decades after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, filled a room lined with feather cloaks and carved wooden gods. That scene — children learning words their grandparents were punished for speaking — captures the slow, deliberate work of bringing a language back from the edge of silence. Numbering about 300,000 at the time of Captain James Cook’s arrival in 1778, full-blooded Hawaiians numbered fewer than

In Hawaiian, the word moʻolelo does something Western categories struggle with: it holds story and history together in a single term, refusing to separate myth from record, parable from genealogy. For generations, Hawaiians have transmitted knowledge through oral traditions rooted in this concept — a practice that master storyteller Kumu Micah Kamohoalii, speaking in a 2022 Fodor’s feature, described as carrying not just origin stories but “the sacred genealogical lineages that connect the Hawaiian people to the land, plants and elements.” For anyone curious about Hawaiian culture — whether you plan to visit the islands or simply want to