Hawaiki Rising: Hokule'a, Nainoa Thompson, and the Hawaiian Renaissance

Sam Low is a writer and photographer who was himself involved with the Hokule'a voyaging canoe project, and this Island Heritage Publishing book is his narrative account of the canoe, navigator Nainoa Thompson, the master navigator Mau Piailug who trained him, and the broader modern revival of traditional Polynesian wayfinding within the Hawaiian cultural renaissance. Its strength is Low's own direct participation and access to the people involved, giving firsthand texture to this modern movement's history that an outside historian would need to reconstruct secondhand. Its limit is exactly that closeness, it is a sympathetic participant's narrative rather than a detached academic history, and it addresses the modern revival specifically, not precontact Native Hawaiian religious practice itself, so a claim about the older tradition needs a different source.