Hawaiian mythology Hawaiian religion refers to the indigenous religious beliefs and practices of native Hawaiians, also known as the kapu system. Hawaiian religion is based largely on the tapu religion common in Polynesia and likely originated among the Tahitians ...

, the Nawao are a legendary people, a wild, large-sized hunting

people A person (plural, : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of pr ...

, descended from Lua-nu'u (Beckwith 1970:321-323). Other sources suggest that the Nawao were present in

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only stat ...

before the

Menehune Menehune are a mythological race of dwarf people in Hawaiian tradition who are said to live in the deep forests and hidden valleys of the Hawaiian Islands, hidden and far away from human settlements. The Menehune are described as superb craft ...

who are thought to have driven them out or destroyed them. However, folklorist

Katherine Luomala Katharine Luomala (September 10, 1907 – February 27, 1992) was an American anthropologist known for her studies of comparative mythology in Oceania. Born in Cloquet, Minnesota and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, Luomala beg ...

believes that the legends of the Menehune and similar creatures are a post-European contact

mythology Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narrat ...

References

Hawaiian mythology {{Hawaii-stub