The Kumulipo is a Hawaiian genealogical creation chant, roughly two thousand lines long, composed to honor a specific high chief by tracing existence itself back to a beginning in darkness and forward through an unbroken line of descent to the chief being celebrated. Its opening sections describe a cosmogony proceeding through pairs of life forms emerging from the sea and land in a structured sequence, corals, shellfish, fish, birds and plants named in turn, each new form paired with an unseen counterpart, before the chant moves into passages of human genealogy.
Because the chant links the natural world's unfolding directly to the ancestry of a ruling family, it functions simultaneously as cosmology, natural catalogue and dynastic record, a combination that has made it a significant source for scholars studying traditional Hawaiian understanding of the relationship between chiefly authority and the wider order of the natural world. The chant is organized into sections called wa, divided between a period of darkness, po, and a period of light, ao, marking a structural transition partway through its full length.
Tradition associates the Kumulipo with the birth of a specific eighteenth century chief, and the genealogical portions extend the chant's lineage claims down toward the royal family of Hawaii in the period closer to the chant's recording, which is part of why it carried direct political significance for the chiefly line it was composed to honor.