Wākea and the Origin of the Sacred Taro

The relationship begins with a difficult birth.

Wākea the sky father and his daughter Ho’ohōkūkalani conceive a child. The child is born stillborn — or born in the form of a root, a bulb, a twisted thing that is both dead and not dead, that has the shape of the taro plant’s corm. Wākea buries it near the house.

From the grave of this first child, taro grows.

The plant is named Hāloanakalaukapalili — the long trembling stalk — and it is the first taro. When Wākea and Ho’ohōkūkalani have their second child, that child is a human being, also named Hāloa after the plant. The human Hāloa is the first Hawaiian human. The taro plant Hāloanakalaukapalili is his older sibling.

This is the genealogical claim that organizes Hawaiian agriculture as a spiritual practice: the taro is not a crop but an elder sibling. Human beings are the younger relatives of the plant that feeds them. The obligation to care for the taro plant is the obligation of family — not the obligation of a farmer to an asset but the obligation of a younger sibling to an older one who has been providing since before the younger sibling could.

The lo’i kalo — the flooded taro paddies of the Hawaiian valleys — are maintained as family. The water that flows through them is managed by the ahupua’a system, the Hawaiian watershed-to-coast land management unit, which allocates water to every taro paddy in sequence as it descends from the mountain. The system is hydraulically sophisticated and ecologically elegant: it maintains the productivity of the entire valley by managing the water as a common resource rather than a competitive one.

The social philosophy underlying the lo’i is called mālama ʻāina — caring for the land. It is not stewardship in the European sense, which implies a hierarchy in which the steward stands above and manages from outside. It is the care of kin — the recognition that you and the land share a lineage, that the land was here before you and will be here after you, that your job is to care for your older sibling the way your older sibling cares for you.

Papahānaumoku, the earth mother, watches over the whole system. She is the earth in which Hāloanakalaukapalili was buried, the earth from which the taro grew, the earth into which every human Hawaiian will eventually return. She and Wākea are the grandparents of both the plant and the people. The taro paddies are the site of an ongoing family reunion.

When a Hawaiian family still today gathers to pound poi — the paste made from cooked taro corm, the staple food of traditional Hawaiian life — they are gathering around their elder sibling’s body. The poi bowl is a communal space. The act of sharing poi from a common bowl is the enactment of the genealogical principle: we are all descendants of the same sky father and earth mother, we share the same older sibling, we eat together from the same source.

The land is not property. The taro is not a commodity. The oldest sibling feeds the younger ones, as older siblings do. This is the obligation. This is the tradition. This is what Wākea set in motion when he buried the first child in the ground and the taro grew.