The Kumulipo: A Creation Chant Translated in Prison

In eighteen ninety-five, Queen Liliuokalani was under house arrest in Iolani Palace, the palace she had governed until two years before, now occupied by the provisional government that had taken it from her. She had been convicted of misprision of treason for her alleged knowledge of a royalist counterrevolution. She spent her days in a second-floor room and was permitted limited visitors. She spent the time translating.

The text she was translating was the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant, a composition of more than two thousand lines that traced the genealogy of the Hawaiian people from the primordial void through the birth of every form of life, coral polyp before fish, fish before bird, bird before human, each form generated from the darkness in succession. The chant had been composed in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century in honor of the high chief Ka-I-I-mamao and was chanted at the birth of Kamehameha the First. No English translation existed.

Liliuokalani worked through the chant line by line, producing an English version that was eventually published in Boston in eighteen ninety-seven and remains the standard English rendering. The act of translation was also an act of preservation: by producing an English text from a Hawaiian-language original, the deposed queen was ensuring that the foundational literary and spiritual document of her people could not be dismissed as inaccessible or irrelevant by the culture that had replaced her.

She finished the translation under house arrest. She was released in eighteen ninety-six. The Kumulipo she completed in that room is one of the most precise acts of cultural defiance in American history, and it was performed in a building the United States government had just helped take from her.