Post #117353 by christiki295 on Thu, Sep 30, 2004 6:59 PM

On 2004-09-30 17:44, dangergirl299 wrote:
which queen did away with the following kapu laws?:
women eating with men
women smoking
women eating kalua pork and coconuts

You also should add eating bananas.

Technically, it was young King Kamehameha II who did it by sitting down to a meal with his mother, a meal which ate very voraciously and quickly.

However, apparently this act was motivated by his mother, Queen Ka‘ahumanu, the (one of the?) wife of King Kamehameha I.

Some say the Kapu was a useful way of preserving Hawaii's natural resources, and thereby avoiding a fate like on Easter Island.

(although Hawaii has more beaches to make fishing easier, readily grew bananas, unlike Easter Island and had numerous islands for population expansion, so such a fate probably was unlikely.)

Nevertheless, I agree with you, Kapu favored men at the expense of women and favored royalty at the expense of everyone else and should have been done away with.

(Maybe if the royals had been more equitable, the result would have been giving more land then only the 3-10% in the Great Mahale to commoners, etc.)

Possibly, the only shame in eliminating Kapu was almost all of the tikis of the historical gods, Ku, Lono, Hina, Kane, etc. were destroyed.