Hawaiians included one-handed spears (ihe), a dagger made from wood
(pahoa), a short club (newa), a two-handed club (la-au-palau), the sling
(maa), and a cord that was used for strangulation (kaane). Lua could there-
fore be considered a complete martial arts system, covering both weaponry
and unarmed combat.
There also existed sportive forms of Hawaiian martial arts that were
presented before crowds of onlookers, unlike Lua. Hawaiian-style boxing,
known as mokomoko(from the verb moko,“to fight with the fists”), was
practiced and demonstrated during religious festivals. From descriptions of
the art, mokomoko was apparently a form of bare-fist fighting where the
closed fist was used as the exclusive offensive weapon. This Hawaiian box-
ing differed profoundly from Western styles.
From accounts given by eyewitnesses, the participants were not al-
lowed to block their opponents’ punches with anything other than their
own closed fist. This type of deflection is not used in Western or Asian mar-
tial arts. In addition, mokomoko combatants would evade their opponents’
blows by either retreating or moving the body out of the way. All blows
were aimed for the face, and the person who was the first to fall to the
ground was the loser. It was a contest that was designed to test the abilities
of the contestants to persevere despite extreme consequences.
It is also important to note that these boxing matches occurred during
the season of Makahiki, the Hawaiian New Year. The Hawaiian pantheon
contained a multitude of deities, and during this time of the year the god
Makahiki was worshipped. Therefore, these Hawaiian sporting events may
be considered analogous to other combinations of ritual with sport, such as
the Olympic games of the ancient Greeks, who organized those games to
honor Zeus, the father of the gods who dwelt on Mount Olympus.
Reports of the outcome of mokomoko contests state that the combat
was brutal and the competitors could expect no mercy. Those who did fall
to the ground after being defeated were screamed at by the spectators,
shouting the phrase, “Eat chicken shit!” Western observers noted that even
the winners of matches would have bloody and broken noses, bruises
around the eye sockets, and bloody lips. It was not uncommon for teeth to
be lost. Participants who excelled in the sport would probably have hands
that had become callused and hardened from the repeated blows they in-
flicted and had inflicted on them. The danger of developing arthritis in the
hands, of course, also proportionally increased.
Hawaiians practiced other types of martial disciplines as well. An ex-
ample is the art of wrestling, hakoko, mentioned earlier. The exact param-
eters of this wrestling style, or styles, are unknown. From the few remain-
ing descriptions of the art, it seems to have been a sportive as well as
combative form of wresting. For the sport variant, the opponent would sig-408 Pacific Islands