Moûolelo are the narrative stories of the Native Hawaiian people. These fiction and nonfiction narratives were exclusively oral at first, but began to be disseminated through writing in the 1800s after the development of the written Hawaiian language. The 1896 ban on Hawaiian language instruction in schools prevented several generations of Native Hawaiians from reading moûolelo that were not translated into English.
The word moûolelo is a compound, formed from moûo (a series or succession) and ÃȈ Âlelo (spoken language). Moûolelo thus means "a succession of spoken language", as the Hawaiian language was originally oral. However, the term can also refer to written narratives.
There are various traditional genres of moûolelo, as well as contemporary moûolelo written in nontraditional genres. Features of traditional moûolelo include kaona (a Hawaiian rhetorical device involving allusion, puns, and metaphor, translated as "underlying meaning") and the use of cultural imagery such as kalo. Mo'olelo can be both fictional and nonfictional narratives; the term refers specifically to a fictional story, while kaûao refers to a fictionalized story that may still be true. All moûolelo are set in specific and identifiable locations.
Before Western contact, moûolelo were passed down through oral storytelling (including song and chant) and hula. Some epics took multiple days to tell in full.
In the 1800s, moûolelo that affirmed the history and spiritual power of the Hawaiian Islands became popular as a response to the Western narrative of Hawaii as a place of spiritual darkness.
In the 1820s, white missionaries developed a system of written Hawaiian that used the Latin alphabet. This system was used by the native Hawaiians to preserve more oral literature in native-language writing than almost any other colonized indigenous people. Moûolelo were written down and published in Hawaiian-language newspapers such as Ke Kumu Hawaii and Ka Nonanona as literacy in the written Hawaiian language became widespread.
In the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, there was a concerted effort to write down and preserve aspects of Hawaiian tradition including moûolelo.
In 1896, three years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the use of the Hawaiian language for instruction in schools was banned. This caused several generations of Native Hawaiians to grow up without knowledge of the language, making them unable to read moûolelo that had not been translated into English.