The formal end of the old order came from inside it rather than from the missionaries who are often credited with ending it. In 1819, months after the death of Kamehameha I, his son and successor Liholiho, pressed by the chiefess Kaahumanu, sat down to eat publicly with women, breaking the kapu that had kept the sexes ritually separate at meals for as long as anyone could remember. The act was deliberate and public, and it broke the whole kapu system rather than one rule within it: temples were abandoned within months, the priesthood that had served them lost the structure it depended on, and the first Christian missionaries arrived the following year to a religious landscape the Hawaiian chiefs themselves had already dismantled.
What followed was not a clean replacement. Christianity became the religion nearly every Hawaiian professed, and much of the older practice went private or was actively suppressed, a suppression sharpened after the 1893 overthrow of the kingdom, when the Hawaiian language was pushed out of schools and hula and chant lost public standing along with it. Heiau, the stone temple platforms, mostly stood abandoned. The turn came from the 1970s, in what is usually called the Hawaiian Renaissance: the 1976 voyage of the canoe Hokulea, navigated without instruments using knowledge recovered from Pacific tradition, put specifically Hawaiian knowledge back into public pride at the same moment that language immersion, hula in its older forms and the restoration of some heiau for ceremonial use were all gaining ground. Practice today is living rather than reenacted, conducted by Hawaiians rather than performed for visitors, and the atlas records it on those terms.