Mo'olelo

Mo'olelo are the narrative stories of the Native Hawaiian people, encompassing both fiction and nonfiction accounts. These narratives were exclusively oral at first, passed down through storytelling, song, chant and hula, with some epics taking multiple days to tell in full, and they began to be written down in the 1800s after the development of a written Hawaiian language. The 1896 ban on Hawaiian-language instruction in schools prevented several generations of Native Hawaiians from reading mo'olelo that were not translated into English.