The Game That Was Playing When Everything Changed
Before 1822, there was no written Hawaiian language. Everything that mattered, the history, the legends, the genealogies, was held in memory and taught orally, generation to generation. The aliʻi, or noble class, high priests and the kahunas kept this tradition with particular care. That is how the story of the Makahiki games survived at all.
And one of those stories begins at a kōnane board.
Lonokaiwai and Lonoikamakahiki
To understand where the Makahiki games came from, you have to understand who Lono was.
Lono was the fourth of the four great gods that were worshipped throughout Polynesia. He had a separate order of priests and temples of a lower grade. Traditions connected with the ancient kings Lonokawai and Lonoikamakahiki, seem to have been mixed with those belonging to the primeval god Lono. Lonoikamakahiki is reputed to have instituted the games which were celebrated during the Makahiki festival. He is said on some account to have become offended with his wife and murdered her; but afterward lamented the act so much as to induce a state of mental derangement. In this state he travelled through all the islands, boxing and wrestling with everyone he met. He subsequently set sail, in a singularly canoe, for Tahiti, or a foreign country. After his departure he was deified by his countrymen, and an annual contest of boxing and wrestling were instituted in his honor.
The Legends of Lono and Kaikilani
Lonoikamakahiki was a chief of Ka'u and Puna on the island of Hawai'i. He was married to the beautiful Kaikilani hohe panio. Lono was a chief who did not follow the advice of his priests and counselors, so they left him. Throughout their marriage, Lono proved to be a bad-tempered husband to his wife mainly because he was jealous of her beauty. He frequently punished her physically.
One day they decided to leave Ka'u and move to Kea-lakekua, Kona. On a sunny day Lono was playing kōnane on a large flat stone in a huge coconut-leaf shed with the other chiefs and their mates, including Kaikilani.
Because of the beauty of Kaikilani, there were people who were jealous of her. These people sought to find a cause for her to be killed. So they climbed on the cliff of Manuahe, some distance from the coconut shed and called out:
O Kaikilani, beautiful chiefess of Puna, your lowly lover Heaakekoa sends his regards.
Frightened and worried, Kaikilani heard them and tried to distract the kōnane players, especially Lono by shouting, "That goes forward, this flees, The white is removed, the black wins." (66: 48)
But the mischief makers persisted and called out louder again, "O Kaikilani, beautiful chiefess of Puna, your lowly lover Heaakekoa sends his regards."
Lono and all the people in and around the shed heard the call clearly. In a fit of rage, Lono grabbed a block of wood and unmercifully beat Kaikilani to death.
Two difference
Samuel Kamakau documents that Lono was overtaken by grief. He became, in Kamakau's account, "crazy with the grief for his wife," wandering from Hawaiʻi to Maui to Oʻahu to Kauaʻi. Kamakau does not connect this story directly to the origin of the Makahiki festival.
Martha Beckwith and E.S. Craighill Handy carry the story further.
Lono sends out two of his brothers as messengers to find him a wife on earth. They travel from island to island and finally in the Waipio valley on Hawaii beside the falls of Hiilawe they find the beautiful Kaiki-lani dwelling in a breadfruit grove companioned by birds. Lono descends on a rainbow and makes her his wife and she becomes a goddess under the name of Kaikilani ali'i o Puna. They live at Kealakekua and delight in the sport of surfing. A chief of earth makes love to her and Lono hears him singing a wooing song. He is angry and beats her to death, but not before she has assured him of her innocence and her love for him.
Image intended for illustration purposes only
Lono then institutes the Makahiki games in her honor and travels about the island like a madman challenging every man he meets in a wrestling match. He builds a canoe such as mortal eyes have never seen since, with a mast of ohia wood and sails woven of Niihau matting and cardage twisted from the coconuts of Keahou. The people bring heaps of provisions and pile them up before him. Forty men bear the canoe to the launching place, but Lono sails forth alone. His words of promise to the people are that he will return to them, not by canoe but on an island shaded by trees, covered over by coconuts, swarming with fowl and swine.
Stewart Culin and Handy offer the most widely held interpretation: after Lono departed, the people deified him. The annual contests of boxing and wrestling were then instituted by the people, in Lono's honor, not Kaikilani's.
That question sits at the center of all these accounts. Who started the games? Lono, grieving his wife? Or the people, honoring the god Lono had become? Most historians conclude the latter. The sports and games of the Makahiki were the people's act of devotion, directed at a deified Lono.
What we learn from this story
The kōnane board was there at the beginning. Not as a detail in the background. As the setting where everything shifted.
The exact origin of the first Makahiki festival is undocumented. The Hawaiian language was not written until 1822, and no record names the year the celebration began. What the oral tradition preserved, and what scholars later recorded, is a story about grief, deification, and a people who turned their loss into something annual and ceremonial.
It is interesting to realize that the kōnane board was already in play before the story became a legend.
Makahiki Games
Sources
Kamakau, Samuel M. Ka Poʻe Kahiko (The People of Old)
Beckwith, Martha. Hawaiian Mythology
Handy, E.S. Craighill. Native Planters in Old Hawaii
Culin, Stewart. Games of the North American Indians
Malo, David. Hawaiian Antiquities