Photo: Courtesy of Bishop Museum


‘O ka lale au o Kaiona
I nonoho i ka malu ‘ohai
I am the sweet voiced bird of Kaiona
Who dwells in the ‘ohai shade

The mythical lale, a bird for which we have no other name or referent, is remembered in chant and story for the beauty of its song. Lale also means “to encourage, urge, stir to action.” Kaiona, the benevolent goddess of the Wai‘anae Mountains, served as inspiration for the best known of Bernice Pauahi’s chant names – Ka Wahine Hele Lā o Kaiona, The Woman Who Walks in the Sunlight of Kaiona.

Ka Lale o Kaiona is dedicated to intelligent discussion of Hawaiian poetry and to a renewed understanding of the words to which the lale of our kūpuna gave sweet voice. We feature four mele in each four-month volume of our forum: their texts, translations, backgrounds, and interpretations. We encourage you, in turn, to contribute to this discussion with thoughts, connections, critiques, and memories of your own.

We hope that our dialog will help to correct an egregious flaw in the conventional, classroom wisdom of our day: that mele Hawaiʻi belongs to a second-class literature unworthy of serious study and appreciation. It is, in fact, helu ‘ekahi: rich, deep, and wonderfully nourishing. It is the beloved poi ‘uoʻuo that feeds our na‘au and sustains the nexus of our Hawaiian intellect and emotion.