Abolition, Suppression and Revival

In 1819, shortly after Kamehameha I died, his successor Liholiho and the chiefess Kaahumanu publicly broke the eating kapu, and the kapu system was abolished from the top. The temples were abandoned within months, and the kahuna classes attached to them lost the structure they had worked in. Christian missionaries arrived the following year into that vacuum. Over the nineteenth century surviving practice was pressed further: healing by kahuna lapaau was brought under licensing law, and the word itself acquired a disreputable sense in English-language usage. Much of what continued did so privately. From the 1970s the position changed.

The revival associated with the voyage of Hokulea in 1976 and the recovery of non-instrument navigation put one body of specialist Hawaiian knowledge back into public standing, and language, chant and healing followed; practitioners of kahuna lapaau work openly today. One development should not be confused with any of this.

A twentieth-century system marketed under the name Huna borrowed Hawaiian vocabulary for a set of ideas of its own, and it has no standing in Hawaiian practice; Hawaiian practitioners have said so repeatedly. The atlas now records the office under Native Hawaiian Religion itself rather than at the Polynesian family level, and treats Huna as a separate modern invention with no standing in Hawaiian practice.