Well, if no one Objects:
Hawai’i in Medieval America
Located 2,000 miles west of California, the Hawaiian Islands are the most geographically isolated settled areas in the world. To sail there from the Republic’s main port city of San Francisco can take roughly 2-3 weeks depending on the winds over vast, Open Ocean that only a very small number of people have any idea how to navigate. To many scholars in Medieval America (or Menlan as the Hawaiians call it), the idea that old United States extended all the way to these remote islands, and that the ancient Americans actually traveled there for such a trivial purpose as leisure seems to defy credulity.
But they did.
The time immediately after the Event is remembered in Hawai’i as a time of great sorrow and tragedy. Isolated from the rest of the world, the population experienced widespread famine and rapidly collapsed from lack of food and trade. Among those who fared the best in these times were the Kanaka Maoli or Native Hawaiians who around this time were undergoing a cultural revival and beginning to turn away from the old world’s technology. Other survivors gradually adopted the Kanaka ways though not without adding some traditions of their own. Likewise generations of intermarriage among the various peoples of Hawai’i, Natives, Americans, and Immigrants from Asia and the Pacific, have caused racial and ethnic differences to blur to the point of being all but forgotten. Everyone became simply Hawaiian.
Shortly after a semblance of order was restored, groups of brave Hawaiians, using the ancient art of Wayfinding preserved in old records, began to set out only their canoes to seek out and reestablish contact with the outside world. They eventually made contact with other Pacific Island peoples of Micronesia, the Marquesas, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, many of whom were more or less doing the same thing. They also reached California, where they quickly found themselves in audiences with the Governor and high ranking officials of the Church of Scientology. After rather tense negotiations, the Hawaiians agreed to allow some of the Church officials to travel back home with them, and even agreed to teach them the rudiments of Wayfinding (nothing more and nothing less than what would be needed to travel from California to Hawai’i and back again), and to build Shrines on Kilauea in Hawaii Ike to commemorate the Atrocities of Xenu . The Shrines remain a major pilgrimage site for Scientologists in both the Republic and the Free Zone and source of wealth for the Chiefdom.
A more important source of wealth for Hawaii however is the vast, Trans-Pacific trade network through the Pacific Islands in which Hawaii plays a vital role as the main link between the Americas and Asia.
Food: Seafood, rice, and taro are by far the three most important staples of the Hawaiian diet, with sweet potatoes, potatoes, bananas, breadfruit, and maize serving as supplementary starches. Wheat is grown in the Higher Elevations on Hawai’i Ike and Maui but nowhere else. Coconuts are also very important. Fruits and vegetables are abundant in the Islands, and are as likely to be gathered in the wild as they are to grown in gardens. As stated before most protein comes from seafood with other common sources being beans, eggs, dairy products. Meat is usually eaten only on special occasions except for the wealthy for eat it more often. Most meat eaten is usually chicken, duck, pork, goat, or rarely beef. Though other forms of wild game (wild turkey, pheasant, moulfon sheep, deer, wild cattle) are also found.
Clothing: For men, the Basic article of clothing is the malo a loin cloth made from kapa, a barkcloth derived from the paper mulberry. He may also wear a kihei a cloak worn over the left shoulder and extending down to his thigh, also made of kapa. For women, the basic article of clothing is an ankle length skirt called a pa’u and a kihei cloak. Tapa is the most common cloth, though hemp fiber is also used and many wealthier indivuals also wear cotton, silk and feathers. Ki leaf capes are often worn for warmth and men of the alii class with often wear bright yellow and red capes as a mark of status. Bright colors in general are often used in clothing of wealthy merchants. Necklaces made of shells, flowers, teeth and metal chains, rings, piercings, bracelets and anklets are also commonly used for adornment, as are tattoos.
Housing: Shelters are made frame of wooden poles either fitted and held together by twine or in wealthier homes nailed together and covered with grass for insulation. Most common families will have a single house while wealthier ones will a complex of several buildings with multiple uses.
Trade: As stated earlier, Hawai’i is crucial hub in a maritime trade network, spanning across the Pacific Islands connecting Asia to the Americas, from Hawai’i, great trading canoes sail to the ports of Monterrey and San Francisco in the Republic of California and Santa Barbra and Elei in the Free Zone, where they sell goods from Asia (silk, tea, porcelain, spices), and purchase wheat, California wine, cotton, and various other goods including most importantly, metal. It returns home with these goods, some it keeps for its own small market, the rest it sells to other Nearby Islands groups, The Marshall Islands, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, The Cook Islands, Tonga, and onward from there until they reach Asia and Australia. Hawai’i itself exports coffee, sugar, dried fruit ,Coconuts and coconut products (oil, rope fiber, copra), and rice.
Society: Hawai’i is currently divided into four Kingdoms based around the Eight Major Islands, Hawai’i Ike (the Big Island of Hawai’i) Maui Nui (which also includes the Islands of Lāna’i, Moloka’i, and the uninhabited island of Kaho’olawe), O’ahu, and Kaua’i, (including the nearby Island of Ni’ihau). Each of these Kingdoms is Ruled by an ali’i nui or High Chief, these kingdoms are divided into various smaller chiefdoms called moku each ruled by an ali’i ai moku who owed fealty to the ali’i nui and who in turn had their land divided into smaller chiefdoms called ahupua’a under an ali’i.
Hawaiian society is organized along a modified, but no less rigid form of the pre-Contact caste system. At the top are the ali’i the warrior aristocracy. Just below them are the kahuna, priests of the local religion who also serve as healers, scholars, skilled artisans, performers, musicians, dancers and perhaps most remarkably, navigators on long distance ocean voyages. Last of all are the maka’ainana. Common people who work the lands, fish the open seas, tend the fishponds, perform manual labor, work the less glamorous trades, and buy and trade as merchants.
Hawaii is also similar in many ways to Secretarial States of the Caribbean. Families are matrilineal and marriages are matrilocal. Men fight, hunt, fish, perform heavy labor whenever the ali’i demands that they do so. Women stay home, tend to the household, and do much of the farming and gathering. Among the ali’i class, men are full time warriors their lives devoted to training in martial arts. Women are entrusted with the civil affairs of state, bureaucracy, and diplomacy, administration of justice, drafting laws and keeping records. Women in the kahuna class are largely equal to male kahuna in many respects.
Technology: Hawaiians are master seamen, among the finest navigators in the world. Able to navigate over open ocean using the stars, the clouds, the waves, and the migration patterns of birds. The art of Wayfinding is a closely guarded secret of the a small number of the kahuna caste which they have only shared once with Scientologists of California and even than only in part. The Hawaiians sail the ocean in canoes called wa’a , which can either have one or two hulls. A singles hulled wa’a will have a float called an ama attatched to them of the port side to provide stability at sea. The largest wa’a are roughly 60 feet long and are used in merchant fleets.
Another noteworthy technology possessed by the Hawaiians is aquaculture. The Hawaiians keep and maintain numerous fishponds where various types of fish, shrimp and eels are raised for food.
Hawai’i has no native metal resources of any kind. As such it is one of their main imports from Menlan and is thus very expensive. For this reason, Hawaiians use metal sparingly and will most often use native, non-metal substitutes when they will do. (i.e., a Hawaiian household might have a cast iron cooking pot and a wok, but they might use gourds for storage, and stone knives and other tools)
Warfare: Hawaiian warfare is fought on foot or from canoes, limited land making cavalry simply not worth it. At the core of most armies are the koa men of the noble ali’i who train exentsivly in both armed and unarmed martial arts. The koa were usually armed with a javelin, an ‘ihe laumeki or short spear (usually about six feet with either shark teeth, wooden or metal barbs at the end) and a some sort of warclub. War clubs come in a variety of shapes and sizes, some have are even sharpened, and even some clubs are even fitted with shark teeth, pieces of broken glass or even small metallic blades, some warriors will carry a knuckleduster instead of a club. These also often have shark teeth or other metal studs. All of a koa’s weapons are made from the wood of the koa tree, a native hardwood.
The koa are supplemented by levies conscripted from the maka’ainana class. Some of these men were armed with pikes up to 15 feet long and fought in phalanx formation. Others were used as skirmishers and harassed the enemy with javelins and slings. An open battle will consist of first the Skirmishers harassing the enemy as the koa and pike men advance towards each other, eventually the two lines will meet and attempt to break each other, often while rival koa chant and taunt each other. They may even seek prominent rivals out and challenge to single combat, especially if the battle is ground to a stalemate.
Religion: Hawaiian religion is best described as a syncretic mix of every faith practiced in the Islands at the time. The traditions of pre-Contact Hawai’i are combined with elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Shinto, Western Neopaganism, and New Age Spirituality. Hawaiian beliefs revolve around I’o, the un-manifested source of all creation and mana the divine spiritual energy that pervades everything. The various gods worshipped in Hawaii (Kane, Kanaloa, Ku, Lono, Jesus, Mary, Buddha, Kuan Yin and others) are commonly regarded as being manifestations of I’o understood by different peoples at different courses in history. All things are believed to contain mana in some form or another and are thus worthy of respect. As a result Hawaiians have very deep reverence for nature and the management of land and resources very seriously.
Language: Neo-Hawaiian is the spoken vernacular of the Islands. It is the direct descendant of Hawaiian Pidgin, a Creole language based on Old American English spoken in Hawai’i during the American Era. Pidgin was also strongly influenced not only by the Original Pre-Contact Hawaiian language (now most commonly called Old Hawaiian) but also Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Ilocano, Tagalong and Samoan. During the Second Medieval Era, Old Hawaiian influence began to become more marked upon the language, especially in the speech of the ali’i class, to the point where the language has now largely adopted verb-subject-object syntax. Another notable feature not shared with Old Hawaiian is the fact that Neo-Hawaiian is also the only language in the American Anglic family that is a tonal language.
Old Hawaiian also remains an important language. It is the liturgical language of the kahuna, the language of ceremonies of state and diplomacy. It is also used as a language of scholarship. English also has a place as a secondary scholarly language, analogous with that enjoyed by Greek in Western Europe in the Early Modern Era