Lāʻieikawai is a high chiefess of Hawaiian antiquity. Her story is a legend of romance, recited for generations in prose interspersed with song from as early as the 14th century. In this painting she represents what is sacred, precious and hidden in Hawai’i.
About this interview
In this interview, Kathleen Storm shares the research behind her painting of Lāʻieikawai, the “princess of the rainbow.” Her story was told for generations in the oral tradition before Native Hawaiian historian S. N. Haleʻole — a schoolmate of David Malo — set it down in writing, serializing it in a Hawaiian-language newspaper in 1862–63 and publishing it as a book in 1863, considered the first work of literary fiction published by a Native Hawaiian. King David Kalākaua included an abbreviated English telling in his 1888 Legends and Myths of Hawaii, and Martha Warren Beckwith published a full translation in 1919.
Born a firstborn daughter when only a son was permitted, Lāʻieikawai was hidden at birth by her grandmother Waka — a moʻo, or lizard goddess — first in a cave beneath a pond, and later in Paliuli, a garden-of-Eden place in the uplands of Puna, in a house thatched with the golden feathers of the sacred ʻōʻō bird. Forest birds attended her, she traveled shrouded in mist, and a rainbow shining straight down marked her presence. Storm reflects on Hawai’i’s native honeycreepers, whose feathers adorned the capes of the highest aliʻi and whose survival is now threatened, and on the idea at the heart of the painting: what is precious is hidden.
