HAWAI`IʻS NINTH ISLAND - ITʻS NOT LAS VEGAS
SFGate.com - July 9, 2023
Hawaii may be known for its eight main islands, but the Hawaiian archipelago is a string of 137 islands, most of which exist beyond the shores of Kauai. These islands, including reefs, islets and atolls, make up the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, established in 2006.
Of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, there are two that contain archaeological evidence of human life: Mokumanamana and Nihoa. They were labeled the “mystery islands” by early archaeologists. Though the islands held clues that people once lived there, archaeologists had no idea who they were or where they went.
Of these two, Nihoa holds the most archaeological sites of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Nihoa is not to be confused with Niihau, also known as the “forbidden island,” which is the westernmost inhabited Hawaiian island, seen off the coast of Kauai. Nihoa cannot be seen from Kauai as it is 138 miles farther west.
The island of Nihoa is small, about 170 acres, but its appearance is striking. Out of the ocean, its sheer cliffs soar to nearly 1,000 feet. The most biologically diverse of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Nihoa hosts an innumerable number of seabirds that fly around its steep and rocky landscape. The island’s one and only beach is covered with monk seals in the summertime and its valleys are filled with loulu palm trees.
“When you go to Nihoa, it’s steep and dramatic and foreboding, and you can see it miles and miles before you get there. It has a powerful presence,” Sheldon Plentovich, Pacific islands coastal program coordinator for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, tells SFGATE. “Nihoa is the most untouched of the Islands that I’ve experienced.” She takes a 30-hour boat ride once a year to steward the island and its many creatures, from insects to birds. It requires a lot of rock climbing, she says.
Among its pristine ecological landscape, the island’s cultural and historical significance is apparent. Evidence suggests that Hawaiians began occupying the island as far back as A.D. 1000 on a semi-permanent or permanent basis. Kekuewa Kikiloi, director of the Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii, believes they lived there continually from 1400 to 1815. Afterward, Hawaiians traveled there intermittently. Their history is told in the 88 archaeological sites that remain, including traditional Hawaiian shelters, agricultural terraces, fishhooks, burials and heiau (traditional temples).
“If you just stand and look around, you’ll see numerous sites just all around you,” Plentovich says. The island is dry and there isn’t a lot of shade, but the Hawaiians who stayed there were resourceful. Plentovich describes a beautiful basin carved into rock on the side of a cliff that was used presumably to collect water. “They must have really wanted to be there, because it’s not easy,” she says of the environment.
Like the basin, the archaeological features depict a life that was full of cultural activities, but early archaeologists questioned whether the people who lived there were Hawaiian at all and why they had left.
“Well, nothing happened to the people,” Kikiloi tells SFGATE. He says the people that lived on Nihoa were Hawaiian and Hawaiians were still visiting Nihoa into the 1800s. It’s just that when people began to document the islands in the 1900s, Hawaiians’ visit to the island had gradually come to a stop.
Kikiloi used geochemical sourcing to determine that artifacts found on these islands were, in fact, Hawaiian. Tools and plants originated from Oahu, Kauai and Hawaii Island. Similar to the vast archaeological records, there are also historical records and oral traditions that tell the island’s story.
“There’s so much information that is coming to light now because of Hawaiian language and the Hawaiian language resources being scanned and available. We have some of the largest sort of Indigenous archival records in the world in Hawaii,” he says. “Our ancestors in the 1800s were writing about these things and documenting everything.”
Prior to the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, Hawaii boasted one of the highest literacy rates in the world. There were almost 100 different newspapers published during the time of the Hawaiian Kingdom. After it was overthrown, the Hawaiian language went nearly extinct. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a movement to revitalize the language emerged. In 1997, the University of Hawaii started digitizing Hawaiian language newspapers, then others followed. Later, initiatives were created to transcribe Hawaiian language publications. These actions have made it easier to find and research older records.
“We were able to find a lot of things that talked about mythological stories [in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands] of gods coming from that region and then epic heroes going through rites of passage in their stories,” Kikiloi says. “That part of the archipelago was seen as sort of like the source where things migrate out of and are born and return to after death kind of like in a cycle.”
He describes Mokumanamana, which has the highest concentration of temples in the archipelago, as a “ritual center of power” in his 2012 dissertation. Nihoa served as “a remote elite outpost for recurrent staging and use of the ritual center.”
Alii, or chiefs, were most likely to make this journey, he says, because it required a lot of resources and planning to take the lengthy trip. But oral traditions tell of other visitors, too. Fishers from Oahu and Hawaii Island were documented to have gone there into the late 1800s. Traditional stories from the people of Niihau tell how they would travel to Nihoa annually to collect loulu palm tree wood for spears and makiukiu grass for cordage. Other visitors include Queen Kaahumanu in 1822 and Liliuokalani in 1885, when she was a princess.
Hawaiians may have stopped going to Nihoa once Western influence grew and political power changed at the turn of the century, but the island’s cultural significance never changed. As part of the national monument, visitors are not allowed, but some Hawaiians have been able to return as cultural practitioners. They journeyed to Nihoa and other Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to honor it and its cultural history.
“There’s places in the world that are wild, you know, and that are linked to these ancestral sort of places that are important to us. These islands are sort of a pathway for us to reconnect,” Kikiloi says.
