The Ahupuaʻa — Land from the Mountain to the Sea

The ahupuaʻa is the Native Hawaiian land division that ran in a single territory from the mountain to the sea, and it stands behind the whole of Hawaiian cooking. Alana Kysar, in Aloha Kitchen, credits the fifteenth-century chief Māʻilikūkahi with creating the system of parcels reaching from sky to sea, and the same land-to-sea order of resources is the frame in which the Provenance research on the Pacific migration trail places the loko iʻa, the fishponds of the coast.

Polynesian settlers reached Hawaiʻi in waves, which current radiocarbon work dates to about 1000–1200 CE, coming first from the Marquesas and later from Tahiti. The islands offered fresh water, fish, shellfish, limu and birds, but few edible plants beyond some ferns and fruits, and the settlers therefore carried with them more than twenty plant species, the canoe plants, together with chickens, dogs and pigs. Among them were kalo (Colocasia esculenta), ʻulu (Artocarpus altilis), niu (Cocos nucifera), kō (Saccharum officinarum), ʻuala (Ipomoea batatas), kukui (Aleurites moluccanus), maiʻa (Musa), ʻōhiʻa ʻai (Syzygium malaccense), pia, ʻōlena and ʻawapuhi. Kalo stood at the centre of the diet, and in the Kumulipo tradition it is the elder brother of the first Hawaiian: Hāloanakalaukapalili, the stillborn first son of Wākea and Hoʻohōkūkalani, became the first kalo, and his younger brother Hāloa the first man. The ahupuaʻa gave that table its order. Each division was a slice of the land that ran from the upland forest, through the cultivated valley and the loʻi kalo, down to the coast and out over the reef, so that its people held timber, fibre, water, starch and fish within one boundary. Kysar records that the boundaries were sometimes marked by ahu, heaps of altar stones, or by a puaʻa, a wooden pig head, though many followed natural markers such as a stream or a row of trees, and that the plots ranged from about a hundred acres to about a hundred thousand. The sectioning let a community reach enough food and materials to live well without holding more than it could manage, and what a division lacked it obtained by trade with its neighbours. The fishpond shows the system at its most exact. The research describes freshwater runoff from the mountain enriching the brackish water of the loko iʻa, which raised ʻamaʻama (Mugil cephalus) and awa (Chanos chanos) to feed the coastal community, which in turn maintained the ponds. The kuapā, the stone walls, need constant repair against the waves, and the makahā, the sluice gates, must be set to admit young fish while keeping the grown fish inside; neglect of either brings the whole to failure. The pre-contact population is contested, with estimates running from about 250,000 to a million, but every estimate rests on a land managed in this fashion. Restoration of ponds such as Heʻeia on Oʻahu now returns a limited quantity of pond-raised ʻamaʻama to the table. The later history of the islands is written across this order. The eating rules of the kapu system, the ʻaikapu, ended with the ʻai noa of 1819 under Liholiho, with Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, and the American Board missionaries arrived the next year. The plantations that followed drew on the Chinese from 1852, the Japanese from 1885 after the Gannenmono of 1868, the Portuguese from 1878, the Puerto Ricans in 1900–1901, the Koreans from 1903 and the Filipino sakada from 1906, and from their kitchens came the local table and the plate lunch. Each of these arrivals took its place on a land that the ahupuaʻa had first divided and understood.

The table of the ahupuaʻa was built on kalo, taken as the cooked corm and pounded into paʻi ʻai, with ʻuala, ʻulu and maiʻa beside it, and the fish of the pond, reef and open sea, with limu and salt. Pork and dog were kept for feasts and were cooked in the imu, the earth oven, wrapped in kī leaves. The flavours were clean and mild, of starch, salt and the sea, and the ʻaikapu later kept some of these foods from women until 1819.