Ancient Hawaii - The Power of Words

Ancient Hawaii, by Herb Kawainui Kane:
THE POWER OF WORDS

KA'AHUMANU IN 1794
Artist's Collection

Modern culture, economics, representative government—the world as we know it—could not exist without broad dissemination of information. The written word is the vehicle of power. But writing was not invented in Polynesia because the very idea of its result, the uncontrolled dissemination of knowledge, was incompatible with the belief that knowledge was sacred power, a manifestation of mana that must be guarded as sacrosanct to those worthy of it.

In old Hawai'i, words were believed to have mana of their own. It was said, "A word thrown as a spear may fly back and slay the speaker." An invocation delivered by a kahuna pule would invoke spiritual help, it was believed, only if the delivery was word perfect, for the power was in the words. Words transmit mana as knowledge. The spoken word can be confined to a select audience, but the mana of written words made widely available could be dissipated or misused.

This view changed when Hawaiian chiefs discovered literacy as the key to understanding and using the power of Western culture. Soon after missionaries arrived in 1820, they published a reader in Hawaiian. This caught the interest of the Queen Regent Ka'ahumanu, and though she resisted conversion to Christianity for several years, she learned to read in five days. Schools were set up throughout the kingdom, and the people ordered to attend. By 1824 some 2,000 students were learning to read. By 1828, 37,000 were literate, and by 1831, 52,000-two-fifths of the entire population had graduated. Reading and writing had become an exciting new adventure.

Examinations in reading and writing were given four times a year, and graduations became occasions of great festivity. By 1834, a majority of the population had become literate. With the continuous passage of students through the schools, the Kingdom of Hawaii soon achieved what may have been the highest literacy rate of any nation in the world at that time, one which supported numerous Hawaiian language newspapers and other periodicals.

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