Essay On Hawaiian Culture

I chose to write my essay on these two cultures, because they are both native to their land, and they were both overthrown, for lack of a better word, from their homeland by more “Civilized” people. They were both thriving, self sufficient cultures that were living and progressing fine on their own. But others saw them as primitive and wanted to change them. This is what I think they have most in common.
The Hawaiians and the Indians both had very interesting cultures that worked well for them. Both of these cultures had some form of government/hierarchy in place, with chiefs, elders, and other such ranks. The ancient Hawaiians had gods that they worshiped, built temples to, and made sacrifices to. The Indians had spirits that they held many

ceremonies for, but while the Hawaiians all had the same beliefs, the Indians’ spiritual beliefs and practices differed between tribes.
The Hawaiians were very accomplished sailors and navigators who made long voyages over open ocean and used things like the stars, the wind, the currents, the birds, and even the taste of the water to guide them. The Indians only traveled across land but they were excellent navigators too, using many signs around them.
Both of these cultures were very physically fit, but I think the Hawaiians more so. They both had to do a lot of hunting, and were farmers to a degree. The Indians farmed mainly maize and wheat, while the Hawaiians farmed mostly just farmed taro and left the rest of the farming up to nature. Hawaiians also did a lot of fishing, and while this was not as readily available to the indians, they still fished from streams and rivers (Mostly salmon).
The Hawaiians and the Indians were both dependant on their own bodies for every kind of manual labor.

They didn’t have any machines to do work for them and in some ways I think this is better than having all our machines today. I mean, unemployment definitely wasn’t a problem. Both the Hawaiians and the Indians were mentally healthy. They seemed to act as we do today, but in their own time. Both of these culture’s best tools were their bodies. They were much more physically fit than pretty much everyone in our day and age, and mentally they were just fine.
Both the Hawaiians and the Indians had very developed and functional languages. The Hawaiian language is a polynesian dialect that has a thirteen letter alphabet. It is currently an endangered language only really used for chanting and other things like that. In 2001, native speakers of Hawaiian amounted to under 0.1% of the statewide population. Linguists are currently worried about its fate.
Contrary to popular belief there is no one indian language. There were in fact many, many languages depending on the region. The current most common ones are Navajo, Cree, Ojibwa, Cherokee, Dakota, Apache, Blackfoot, and Choctaw, in that respective order. Some of these could even be as complex as languages like Russian or Latin. An interesting side note that I found was that none of these languages had a writing system until the Europeans arrived. Before that they used pictures and

symbols.
Both of these cultures are very interesting and have unique things about them that I haven’t heard of before. I'm kind of biased towards the ancient Hawaiians since I live in Hawaii, and I already knew a lot more about them, but they were still both interesting to learn about. They had lots of things that were similar in the big picture, but the details were a bit different. After completing this project I have found that they are not very similar, but much more so than some cultures.