Kānaka Maoli

The Kānaka Maoli are the indigenous Polynesian people of the Hawaiian Islands. Voyagers from the Marquesas and later Tahiti settled the archipelago between roughly 940 and 1200, their society growing into chiefdoms under hereditary aliʻi. Land was organised in ahupuaʻa, wedge-shaped districts from uplands to sea, with irrigated taro gardens and fishponds.

The islands had no single name and were ruled separately until firearms arrived with James Cook, who sighted Kauaʻi in 1778; the contact-era population may have been around 300,000.

Kamehameha, chief of Hawaiʻi, used European guns and ships to conquer Oʻahu, Maui, Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi in 1795, completing unification in 1810 when Kauaʻi and Niʻihau joined. His son Kamehameha II abolished kapu taboos in 1819; Protestant missionaries arrived from 1820, and introduced diseases reduced the native population to about 142,000 by the 1820s.