Run For Your Life

Imagine you have a death sentence on your head for a minor crime, something as innocuous as oh...having a another person's shadow touch you. Imagine you believe very strongly that powerful gods exist in this world and that if their agents catch you, they will strangle you until you no longer breathe. Imagine it's dark and you have no form of light, not because you can't make fire or electricity doesn't exist yet, but because carrying any sort of light would make you easier to spot. You are scared, exhausted and anxious because your life is literally in the balance and there is nobody to help you.

Imagine in this situation that you have one hope to stay alive. If you can just make it through the jungle, traverse dangerous black-as-night volcanic rocks, avoid drowning in the ocean and somehow manage to scale a ten foot high by 17 foot wide stone wall, you might just make it to a priest who can commute your sentence and save you, allowing you to return to your family and friends. Now, if you don't like this option, you really have no other choice. You can't survive on your own, won't be able to hide and you live on an island in the middle of the largest ocean on Earth so fleeing somewhere far away is not an option. So you run. To find a priest.

After miles of pushing through completely wild terrain and with the noise of the surf masking any sound of the pursuers you fear are hot on your heels, you finally spot your destination and see the wall you need to climb over to survive. There are torches with open flames to allow some sort of visibility and give you a point to head towards but the flames also cast deep shadows that make it difficult to see clearly and exaggerate the features of the rocky shore around you. Just as you are about to reach salvation, out of the shadows lurches a terrifying monster with a wide maw and huge teeth that in your deepest nightmares you imagine is just what the gods would send to capture and kill you. And it's not alone, there are others just as grotesque and hungry for human flesh all around. You fear all is lost and you're done for. It's all over.

Now if all that sounds like something out of a science fiction or horror movie, you might be correct. But it also might quite well have happened in Hawaii about 250 years ago. And that's not really that long ago if you think about it.

When English Royal Navy Captain James Cook unexpectedly stumbled upon the Hawaiian islands in 1778, he discovered a society with death sentences for stepping on someone's shadow, or looking at someone the wrong way or touching someone's fingernail clippings. I'm not kidding here. All these were actual crimes with severe punishments in ancient Hawaiian society. Of course, these crimes couldn't really be committed by the islands' nobility, or ali'i. Nor could they be committed by the priests, or kahunas, who made up these silly rules with very serious consequences. But for the majority of the people in the island chain, the common people or maka'ainana, the possibility of sacrificing anything from their crops to their lives based on the whim of someone powerful was a daily risk.

Although some sentences could be handed down based on proclamation from an ali'i for whatever reason he or she made up on any given day, most rules in the society were issued as kapus, or forbidden acts, that required punishment. There were various types of kapus, from prohibitions on women eating various types of food (and in the presence of men entirely) to specific requirements for interacting with ranking ali'i to rules about how fishing could take place. Breaking a kapu brought a sentence without trial, discussion or mercy.

But for some kapu breakers, there was a way out. If you could make to a pu'uhonua, or place of refuge, before being caught, it was possible to have your sin purged by a kahuna and you would be allowed to return to society unharmed. Seems like a fairly straightforward concept until you think about the obstacles and dangers in place: long distances; treacherous ground to cover; high walls to climb; and people on the lookout for you. And then there are the ki'i (sometimes called tikis), carved wooden representations of men with grotesque and ferocious features that must have scared the daylights out of many a man or woman trying to reach the pu'uhonua. Or so I have already imagined.

Looks gorgeous today, but climbing that wall with people after you was no joke.

In Hawaii today, you can find tikis pretty much wherever you go. They are placed outside stores or hotels or luaus with funny expressions designed to amuse tourists who likely have no idea that their original purpose was to scare people away. Admittedly, these cartoon versions of the old Hawaiian ki'i aren't very scary at all. But there is one place in the islands where you can see tikis like they had back when kapus were unbreakable laws to be feared and respected: Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park on The Big Island. If you want to see the real thing (or more accurately reproductions of the real thing), then you have to put this place on your itinerary.

Established as a National Historical Park in 1962, the Pu'uhonua O Honaunau is the best preserved former pu'uhonua in the islands. The park features walking trails which take you through the site of a former royal village and then through and around the thick wall that kapu breakers had to get through to be freed of their crimes. Today it's just a gorgeous setting like most other spots in Hawaii but you can get a sense of how dangerous and forbidding it once was. The wall is thick, massive and seems impenetrable and the rocks on the shoreline would seem to prohibit any sort of access by water if the sea was in any way rough.

The attraction for me here, though, was the ki'i. There are a dozen or so in the Park and while they look tame today in the broad daylight of the 21st century, it's fun to imagine the impression that these would have had on people 250 years or more ago. Or maybe fun isn't the right word. Horrifying? Remember, people believed that there were supernatural beings all around them. Like the comical tikis that stand in front of tourist spots today, some of these figures seem funny but others are believably frightening to a 18th century innocent man or woman on the run. For me, it's the open mouths with their teeth showing and the strange eyes that seem to be covered over with some sort of protective shield.

The ki'i didn't survive long after the arrival of Captain Cook, whose first (and last as it turned out; he was killed less than a month after he hit town) landing in Hawaii ended up opening the door for more and more Europeans and Americans each subsequent year. By the year 1819, just 41 years after Cook sailed into Waimea Bay on the island of Kauai, the kapu system was abolished, punted forever into history by Queen Ka'ahumanu who became disillusioned with the entire system once she saw the white men repeatedly violating the laws of the gods with no divine retribution whatsoever.

So it may not have just been the lack of justice for the white man that made up the Queen's mind. She was also apparently sick of having to eat separately from the men as well as being forbidden to eat bananas and certain types of fish. None of that made any sense to her and I think she was right. Whatever the ultimate motivation, the kapu system, the pu'uhonua and the ki'i that tried their darnedest to keep people away from those sanctuaries were gone just about one generation after Cook's arrival. Christianity moved in to fill the void and Hawaii would never be the same again.

For me, visiting the Pu'uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park was a touchstone moment of my Hawaiian trip. There's some genuine history that's chilling here but I can also appreciate the ki'i, these agents of the kahunas, both as historical artifacts and a sort of folk art at the same time. I love these things so much that I have one on my desk at home staring at me as I finish this post. I opted for the "winner" tiki from one of the ABC Stores we passed while on vacation. I don't expect to ever lose at anything from now on, although I don't have my hopes up too high. At least it's not out to kill me!