Kilohoku Ho`okele Wa`a : Astronomy of the Modern Hawaiian Wayfinders

This paper provides an introduction to Kilohoku Ho`okele Wa`a, the astronomy of the Hawaiian wayfinders. Rooted in a legacy of navigation across the Polynesian triangle, wayfinding astronomy has been part of a suite of skills that allows navigators to deliberately hop between the small islands of the Pacific, for thousands of years. Forty years ago, in one manifestation of the Hawaiian Renaissance, our teachers demonstrated that ancient Hawaiians were capable of traversing the wide Pacific to settle and trade on islands separated by thousands of miles. Today those same mentors train a new generation of navigators, making Hawaiian voyaging a living, evolving, sustainable endeavor. This paper presents two components of astronomical knowledge that all crewmen, but particularly those in training to become navigators, learn early in their training. Na Ohana Hoku, the Hawaiian Star Families constitute the basic units of the Hawaiian sky. In contrast to the Western system of 88 constellations, Na Ohana Hoku divides the sky into four sections that each run from the northern to the southern poles. This configuration reduces cognitive load, allowing the navigator to preserve working memory for other complex tasks. In addition, these configurations of stars support the navigator in finding and generatively using hundreds of individual, and navigationally important pairs of stars. The Hawaiian Star Compass divides the celestial sphere into a directional system that uses 32 rather than 8 cardinal points. Within the tropics, the rising and setting of celestial objects are consistent within the Hawaiian Star Compass, providing for extremely reliable direction finding. Together, Na Ohana Hoku and the Hawaiian Star Compass provide the tropical navigator with astronomical assistance that is not available to, and would have been unknown to Western navigators trained at higher latitudes.