The Menehune

In Hawaiian tradition the Menehune are a small, very active people who finished any work in a single night. Old stonework, including the Kīkīaola ditch on Kauaʻi, is credited to them.

Moke Manu's account, printed in Thos. G. Thrum's Hawaiian Folk Tales in 1907, describes the Menehune as small, energetic people who always worked together on any task asked of them. Their rule was that a job had to be done in one night. Anything left unfinished by dawn stayed that way, because they never worked twice on the same job. The account ties this to a Hawaiian saying about work begun at night and complete by daybreak.

Martha Beckwith's Hawaiian Mythology (1940) says old heiau, fishponds and other stonework are credited to the Menehune, and at times to the Mu. She links them with the legend of Ola, a Kauaʻi chief, and with that of Ka-hanai-o-ke-akua, an Oʻahu chief raised at Waolani as the ward of the gods Kāne and Kanaloa.

Two real sites carry the name. Kīkīaola, an irrigation ditch near Waimea on Kauaʻi also called the Menehune Ditch, has been on the US National Register of Historic Places since 16 November 1984; Wikipedia says the Menehune are said to have built it. The Garden Island reported in 2021 that Mālama Hulēʻia has looked after the Alakoko fishpond, also called ʻAlekoko and known as the Menehune Fishpond, with the community since 2018. The group holds a 20-year lease and has cleared invasive mangrove from more than 26 acres to restore a watershed 600 years old.

Wikipedia records a theory from some early scholars: that Hawaiʻi was settled first from the Marquesas and later from Tahiti, and that the newcomers from Tahiti oppressed the commoners, called manahune in Tahitian, who escaped into the mountains and became the Menehune. Supporters of the idea cite a census of Kauaʻi taken in 1820 by its ruling chief, Kaumualiʻi, which counted 65 menehune.