An aumakua is a family god, a Hawaiian ancestor who, after death, is believed to have entered into a natural form and to remain able to warn, protect and occasionally punish the descendants who honor the relationship. The forms vary by lineage: a shark patrolling a family's home waters, an owl that appears at moments of danger, an eel, a lizard, a particular species of plant or even a stone associated with a specific place. Martha Beckwith's collection of Hawaiian mythology records the diversity of these forms directly from families who named their own aumakua and the circumstances under which it had appeared to them.
The relationship runs in both directions. A family is expected to recognize its aumakua, to avoid harming the species or individual creature associated with it, and to make offerings, while the aumakua is understood to warn of danger, to guide a lost traveler home or a fisherman to a good catch, and to receive the dead back into itself when a descendant dies. Because the specific identity of a family's aumakua, and the protocols for approaching it, belong to that family's own inherited knowledge rather than to a single codified public teaching, this entry describes the general pattern that published ethnography and Hawaiian oral tradition record, not any one family's particular practice.