Manono and the Battle of Kuamoʻo: “Keep Your Love”

"Mālama kō aloha" — "hold on to your love," or "keep your love" — are the words Chiefess Manono is said to have chanted as she died in the Battle of Kuamoʻo in 1819, on the island of Hawaiʻi.

A contemporary painting by Brook Kapukuniahi Parker puts her at the center of that moment, fighting beside her husband Kekuaokalani among his warriors on the lava field: steady on her feet, determined, yet calm — at peace, ready to die for her beliefs, her way of life and her homeland.

The scene is a tragic one. Kuamoʻo was a turning point in Hawaiian history: it ended the traditional kapu system, the code that governed nearly every part of daily life in the islands. Hawaiians fought Hawaiians, cousin against cousin, tradition against change. The traditionalists, Manono's side, lost not only family and loved ones but the ancient code that had ordered their world. Her dying words, though, offer a way to heal and go on — through love.

Moʻolelo

Moʻolelo are more than stories: they weave myth, history and tradition together to carry lessons. As anthropologist Ty Kawika P. Tengan describes it, moʻolelo string words and fragments together to link different times and places. Keeping moʻolelo alive — including the one Parker painted — is essential to the continuity of the Hawaiian people, land and culture.

Two visions for Hawaiʻi

• Manono came from a long line of aliʻi (the ruling class) and was born on Maui in the 1780s. She fell in love with and married Kekuaokalani, nephew of King Kamehameha I. For a time they lived quietly in Maui's mountains with their four children, until they were called back to the royal court on Hawaiʻi Island.
• When Kamehameha died in 1819, a power struggle broke out between opposing visions of Hawaiʻi's future.

Urged on by his mother and Kaʻahumanu, Liholiho chose not to reinstate the ʻai kapu — the sacred eating laws that kept men and women from eating together. In doing so he effectively overthrew the whole kapu system, which had governed relations between women and men, commoners and aliʻi, and people and their gods. Kekuaokalani and Manono resisted, and those who agreed rallied to him as the kapu's defender.

The slopes of Lekeleke, final resting place of hundreds of warriors killed at the Battle of Kuamoʻo. NPS photo / Mandy Johnson-Campbell.

The battle

According to the moʻolelo, it was on Manono's advice that Kekuaokalani refused a diplomatic settlement with Liholiho. The fighting ended at Kuamoʻo, a strikingly beautiful place above the coast. Part of the 175-mile Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail crosses it today; at the time of the battle, the Ala Loa trail ran around the entire island.

Kuamoʻo is easy to remember only for bloodshed — 300 warriors died there — but for centuries it was full of life: a place where Hawaiians met to trade goods and news, farmed, worshiped and, above all, loved.

Manono and Kekuaokalani's deaths hold both sides of that story. Historical accounts say Kekuaokalani fought on despite a leg wound until he was shot in the left breast. Manono fought beside him all day, according to William Ellis's 1827 Narrative of a Tour Through Hawaii, "with steady and dauntless courage." When he fell she called for mercy, and was shot in the left temple. She fell across her husband's body, speaking her last words as she died.

The Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail in the Kuamoʻo ahupuaʻa. NPS photo / Mandy Johnson-Campbell.

In his 1888 book The Legends and Myths of Hawaii, King Kalākaua wrote: "Thus died the last great defenders of the Hawaiian gods. They died as nobly as they had lived, and were buried together where they fell on the field of Kuamoʻo."

"Keep your love"

Winona Kapuailohiamanonokalani Desha Beamer — "Auntie Nona," the renowned hula advocate and teacher — told the story of Manono's last words with deep affection. For her they were far more than a message to family: they were a way the whole world should try to live. Thinking of the suffering of that time, and of people standing up for what they believed was right, she said, keeping one's love rises above all of it — no matter who we are or where we come from.

The power of the words is that they serve everyone:

• the defeated traditionalists, mourning their loss;
• the women on the winning side, who set out to change the kapu system and what it meant to be Hawaiian;
• the losses still to come — missionaries, colonialism and annexation, a series of threats to Hawaiian traditions and, in the end, sovereignty.

Today "keep your love" is the heart of efforts to restore Kuamoʻo to the values of the moʻolelo — turning a place of conflict into a refuge for learning that brings traditional Hawaiian culture into modern life.

Sources

Based on "Manono at the Battle of Kuamoʻo," by Nicole Martin, PhD, part of the National Park Service's Home and Homelands Exhibition: Loss series, made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article drew on Kamuela Meheula, "Dying Words of a Fearless Chiefess" (Aloha Kuamoʻo ʻĀina, 2016); Catharine Lo Griffin, "Kuamoʻo: The Last Stand" (Hana Hou!, 2017); William Ellis, Narrative of a Tour Through Hawaii (1827); David Kalākaua, The Legends and Myths of Hawaii (1888); and the Hula Preservation Society's "E Manono: Recounting the Story of Kuamoo."