The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant

The Kumulipo is the Native Hawaiian creation chant, and this University of Chicago Press book is Martha Warren Beckwith's scholarly translation and study of it, drawing on multiple textual sources including Queen Liliuokalani's own earlier translation of the chant among the materials she consulted. Its strength is combining serious academic method with access to Hawaiian language sources and to a translation produced by a Native Hawaiian monarch herself, giving the work a grounding beyond an outside scholar working alone. Its limit is its age, an early twentieth century scholarly edition, and the source record itself notes that later Hawaiian language scholarship has refined some of its specific readings, so a claim resting on a fine point of translation is safer checked against more recent scholarship on the Kumulipo alongside this foundational edition.