September is Hawaiian History Month

The University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge in collaboration with the Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī Coalition has launched the first Hawaiian History Month  to increase awareness around the Native Hawaiian community. Throughout the month of September, there will be virtual events where you can engage with Hawaiian history through storytelling, art, and action. The first event kicked off on September 2nd with a celebration of the 182nd birthday of Queen Liliʻuokalani’s 182nd birthday—the last reigning monarch of Hawai’i.

To support and celebrate the inaugural Hawaiian History Month, take a deep dive into our books by Native Hawaiian scholars and about Native Hawaiian culture. 

Kaiāulu: Gathering Tides
Mehana Blaich Vaughan
An important contribution to scholarship in the fields of natural resource management, geography, Indigenous Studies, and Hawaiian Studies, Kaiāulu is a skillfully written and deeply personal tribute to a community based not on ownership, but reciprocity, responsibility, and caring for the places that shape and sustain us all.
 
Ancestral Places
Katrina-Ann R. Kapāʻanaokalāokeola Nākoa Oliveira
Ancestral Places explores the deep connections that ancestral Kānaka (Native Hawaiians) enjoyed with their environment. It honors the moʻolelo (historical accounts) of the ancestral places of their kūpuna (ancestors), and reveals how these moʻolelo and their relationships with the ʻāina (land) inform a Kanaka sense of place.
 
Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography
Renee Pualani Louis
Kanaka Hawai‘i cartographic practices are a compilation of intimate, interactive, and integrative processes that present place as “experienced space,” situate mapping in the environment, and encode spatial knowledge into bodily memory via repetitive recitations and other habitual practices, such as hula.