Ka'ahumanu

The kapu system regulated Hawaiian life as law and as religion at once. Among its central provisions was the separation of men and women at meals, together with prohibitions on women eating pork, bananas, coconut and certain fish. These were not customs but sacred restrictions, enforced by penalties up to death, and they were the visible foundation of a structure that included the temples, the priesthood and the ranked authority of chiefs.

By 1819 that structure had been under pressure for four decades. Foreign ships had come and gone since 1778 without their crews suffering for breaking kapu; sandalwood and provisioning had reshaped the economy; Kamehameha had unified the islands with foreign weapons; and the population had fallen sharply through introduced disease. Chiefly women in particular had been eating with foreigners aboard ship for years.

Kamehameha died in May 1819. Ka'ahumanu announced at the succession that he had willed her the office of kuhina nui, sharing rule with his son Liholiho, and she and Keopuolani pressed the young king to end the eating kapu. In November he sat down and ate with the women in public. The kapu system was declared at an end, and the temple images were burned. The kahuna nui Hewahewa is recorded as supporting the abolition. The first company of American missionaries arrived in March of the following year, to find the old order already gone.

The abolition did not go unopposed. Kekuaokalani, a nephew of Kamehameha who had been given charge of the war god Kukailimoku, refused it and gathered support; the two sides met at Kuamo'o on Hawaii island in December 1819 and he was killed. The new order was settled by force as well as by decree.

As kuhina nui, Ka'ahumanu governed alongside two kings, and after Liholiho died in England in 1824 she held the practical authority in the kingdom. She was baptised in December 1825 and thereafter used that authority for the mission: promoting schools and literacy, which spread with remarkable speed, backing the printing of Hawaiian, and issuing laws against practices the missionaries condemned. Her later years brought her into conflict with Catholic missionaries and with foreign traders, and the coercive edge of that period is part of the record.

Reading her is not simple, and Hawaiian scholarship has read her in more than one way. She can be seen as the person who dismantled her own tradition and admitted a foreign church, and she can be seen as a ruler who recognised that the old order had already been fatally undermined and moved decisively to control what replaced it, keeping the kingdom's authority in chiefly hands for another seventy years. Both readings are argued from the same events.