Hawaiian is the Polynesian language of the Hawaiian Islands, sibling to Maori, Tahitian and Samoan within the Austronesian family, and before contact it carried one of the richest oral literatures of Oceania entirely without writing. Its monument is the Kumulipo, a cosmogonic genealogical chant of more than two thousand lines, composed for a high chief and recited by trained specialists, which unfolds the origin of the world from the deep darkness, Po, through the emergence of coral, fish, birds, plants and people, binding the chiefly line into the genealogy of the cosmos itself.
Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last monarch, translated the Kumulipo into English during and after her imprisonment, publishing it in 1897. Around such court chants stood the wider ecology of sacred speech, pule, prayer addressed to the great gods Kane, Ku, Lono and Kanaloa and to family guardians, the aumakua, mele hula, the chants that hula embodies, and the specialist knowledge of kahuna, the trained experts of temple rite, healing and navigation. Hawaiian belief in the power of the word itself, expressed in the saying that in language there is life and in language there is death, made accurate recitation a sacred discipline long before literacy arrived with the missionaries in 1820.