Pili‘Oha/Kinship: (Re)Imagining Perceptions of Nature and More-Than-Human Relationality

Abstract

It is well documented that feral pigs ranging through Hawaii's upland forests today bear little physical or cultural resemblance to the smaller, domesticated pigs brought to the islands by voyaging Polynesians. It remains a popular misconception that pigs are native to Hawaiian forests and that pig hunting was a common practice in ancient Hawai'i. This paper will briefly compare the traditional role of pigs in Hawaiian culture with the largely western practice of hunting feral swine in modern Hawai'i today. Origins and traditional relationshipsPigs are not native to Hawai'i. The first pigs were brought to the Hawaiian Islands by Polynesians as early as the fourth century A.D. i Skeletal remains of pigs and recorded traditional knowledge sources indicate that pua'a (the Polynesian pig) was a much smaller animal than the feral pigs of today. ii Historical evidence and genetic studies trace the ancestry of these animals to wild Asiatic swine (Sus scrofa subsp. vittatus).