After tracing this long unfolding of nonhuman life through the era of night, Po, the chant arrives at the era of light, Ao, and with it the birth of the first human beings, before continuing directly into a genealogy naming the specific chiefly ancestors of the high chief for whom the Kumulipo was composed, binding that individual chief's own lineage seamlessly onto the same unbroken chain of descent that produced the natural world. In this way the chant does not merely explain where the world came from; it argues for the chief's own legitimacy and mana, spiritual power and authority, by presenting his ancestry as continuous with, rather than separate from, the deep structure of creation itself.
The chant survived into the nineteenth century in the keeping of the Hawaiian royal family and was published, with an English translation and extensive commentary, by Queen Liliuokalani during her imprisonment following the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, a context later scholars, including Martha Beckwith in her study of Hawaiian mythology, read as significant in its own right: preserving the Kumulipo in print became an assertion of the very legitimacy the chant itself describes, at the exact historical moment that legitimacy was under direct political attack from the government that had just deposed her.