“Shapeshifting Lands of Lāhainā, Maui: Mo’o and Moku’ula”

with Mahealani Ahia

Thursday,  September 21, 2023 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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Following the devastating fires on August 8, 2023, in Lāhainā, Maui, there has been a call for a restoration of the sacred lands of Mokuʻula, once the seat of Hawaiian government and home to the great akua moʻo (reptilian water deity) Kihawahine. In this kairotic moment, my dissertation research entitled “Shapeshifting Hawaiian Biography: The Life and Afterlives of Kihawahine” intends to share a longer and richer story than tourist and colonial myths have perpetuated of this famous site. My project is an Indigenous Hawaiian biography centering Kihawahine —daughter of 16th century Maui high chief Piʻilani— who was ritually deified into a guardian akua moʻo and later elevated to island-wide worship under Kamehameha. Shapeshifting moʻo are kiaʻi wai, the most revered and feared water protectors. The study of Kihawahine’s life, afterlife, and multiple body forms—giant lizard, white dog, spider—invites deep examination of Hawaiian history, religion, politics, culture, art, and language.

By historicizing various re-tellings and interpretations of her story across time and region, I map the meanings and intentions behind keeping her image alive for each successive generation. The story of Kihawahine is found in many sources including Hawaiian-language newspapers, missionary journals, ship logs, archaeological reports, oli (chant) and hula (dance). Her kiʻi (ritually carved wooden image) is currently sailing around the world aboard the Hōkūleʻa voyaging canoe. Unfortunately, another kiʻi sits behind glass in the Berlin Ethnological Museum. By sharing these stories, Kānaka ʻŌiwi hope our voices will aid in the repatriation of our ancestral kiʻi, restoration of sacred Mokuʻula, and return of our life-giving waters.

Māhealani Ahia is a Los Angeles-born Kanaka ʻŌiwi artist, scholar, activist, songcatcher and storykeeper with lineal ties to Lāhainā, Maui. With a background in theatre arts, writing and performance from U.C. Berkeley and U.C. Irvine, Māhea is committed to creating artistic and academic projects that empower Indigenous feminist decolonial research. Her Master’s Degree in Mythology and Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute focused on cultural trauma and the power of stories and chanting to heal. As a PhD candidate in English (Hawaiian Literature) and a graduate certificate student in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, her dissertation research “Shapeshifting Hawaiian Biography: The Life and Afterlives of Kihawahine” inundates biography’s genre boundaries as it theorizes feminist power and leadership within the moʻo (reptilian water deity) clan. Māhea teaches courses like Indigenous Feminisms, Island Feminisms, Creative Writing for Healing. She serves as editor for Hawaiʻi Review and ʻŌiwi: A Native Hawaiian Journal and is co-organizer of the Mauna Kea Syllabus Project.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Thursday October 12 at 3 PM Eastern Time

“She Who Hunts: Artemis, the Goddess Who Changed the World”  

with Carla Ionescu

Upcoming Salons are on October  19, November 2 & 16 2023.

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event. 

A PaGaian Cosmology: Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis

with Dr. Glenys Livingstone

Thursday,  September 7, 2023 at 6 PM Eastern Time  (September 8th at 7am AEST)

REGISTER HERE

I was born in the Southern Hemisphere, a white European girl-child, in a land colonized by my people, who had long forgotten their own Indigenous heritage. The Land was no longer a sacred entity for them – it was a place where one travailed, and from which one would be saved eventually by a father god whom they believed in. Most of the texts and graphics explaining the Cosmos to me and all, were drawn from the Northern Hemisphere perspective: Moon in her phases were “backwards”; Sun’s daily movement from East to West was described as being “clockwise”, which it wasn’t; the seasons in the stories were always at odds with real experience. This was never regarded as important enough to mention, yet deep within me there was scribed the cosmic essence of disregarding one’s senses. And then there was the thing of being female, which exacerbated this sense of being “other”, and not worthy of mention. I and many of my Land, were perhaps some of Earth’s most alienated of beings.

From this base I searched for Her, and sought relationship with my place, who was revealed quietly in the Sun and deep dark night sky, and the red soil, which I as a country girl was touched by.

This presentation is an introduction to the PaGaian Cosmology which I authored, and practiced, and documented in doctoral work: and published as a book in 2005. It is a religious practice of seasonal ceremony based in a synthesis of Western scientific understanding of the unfolding Cosmos with female metaphor or the sacred. My new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony documents this poetic ceremonial process practiced over decades, as I and others engaged in it. We were making a world (which is what “poiesis” means), a creative context in which She could be expressed and heard. This ceremonial practice is based in the Seasonal Moments of Earth-Sun relationship of the Old European indigenous traditions: that is, specifically the Solstices, Equinoxes and cross-quarter transitions.

Glenys Livingstone Ph.D. is the author of PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, which fuses the indigenous traditions of Old Europe with scientific theory, feminism, and a poetic relationship with place. This book was an outcome of her doctoral work in Social Ecology.  She was born and lives in country Australia, where she has facilitated Seasonal ceremony with an open community, taught classes, and mentored apprentices. Her education has included an M.A. in Systematic Theology and Philosophy from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, within which she also learned liturgical practice at the Jesuit School there.

Her new book A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony documents the synthesis of her work over the past decades. She is the author of the children’s book My Name is Medusa, and co-editor of the anthology Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom. Glenys has contributed to eleven other anthologies, including Goddesses in World Culture edited by Patricia Monaghan (2011), Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble (2015), and Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture, edited my Mary Ann Beavis and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang (2018). In 2014, Glenys co-facilitated the Mago Pilgrimage to Korea with Dr. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang. She teaches a year-long on-line course “Celebrating Goddess and Cosmogenesis in the Wheel of the Year” for both hemispheres. Her website is http://pagaian.org.

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Save the date for this upcoming ASWM Salon:

Thursday September 21 at 3 PM Eastern Time

“Shapeshifting Lands of Lāhainā, Maui: Mo’o and Moku’ula” 

with Mehealani Ahia

Upcoming Salons are on September 21, October 5 & 19, November 2 & 16.

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.