Hina got tired of her family and moved to the Moon
Below Kauiki Hill on the Hawaiian island of Maui, above the reach of the surf, lies a long black stone. It is said to be the board on which Hina and her maidens beat out kapa, cloth pounded from bark, the softest and finest there was. William Westervelt wrote the story down in 1910, and in his telling Hina grew weary one day, of her work and of her family. Her sons, it was said, were unruly. Her husband was lazy and shiftless.
First she climbed the rainbow towards the Sun, but the heat scorched her and she slipped back down to earth. That night, when the full moon rose, she decided to climb up to it and rest there. Her husband called after her not to go. "My mind is fixed," she answered, and kept climbing. He leapt and caught her foot, and as he fell he broke her leg, so the lower part came away in his hands. Hina limped into the Moon carrying her calabash, a gourd she had packed with the things she valued most.
The story has many versions. The folklorist Martha Beckwith, in Hawaiian Mythology (1940), summarises one from Fornander in which Hina escapes to the Moon because she is weary of her husband's tapus, his sacred restrictions. In Beckwith's own retelling of Westervelt, the husband only resists her leaving, and there is no broken leg. In Tahiti, Beckwith writes, the moon goddess is called "Hina who stepped into the moon" and "Hina the tapa beater" (tapa is the wider Polynesian word for kapa), and at night she watches over travellers from the Moon.
According to Westervelt, Hawaiians look at the full moon and see Hina there, her calabash by her side. One of her Hawaiian names, Hina-i-kapa‘i-kua, Beckwith translates as "Hina the tapa beater." So she took the work with her. This time, though, she chose it.
Sources
- Westervelt WD. Legends of Ma-ui — a Demi God of Polynesia, and of His Mother Hina. Honolulu: The Hawaiian Gazette Co., 1910. Ch. XV: Hina, the Woman in the Moon, p. 165 ff. Project Gutenberg eBook #32601.
- Beckwith M. Hawaiian Mythology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940. Ch. XV: Hina Myths, pp. 214–225. Online edition: Internet Sacred Text Archive.