Archive Note
The practitioner is the kahuna ka uhi, and the tools are the moli, a hand-carved comb with needle-like teeth, and the hahau, a wooden stick that taps the comb to drive pigment into the body. The technique is the hand-tap method shared across western Polynesia. The arrival of New England missionaries from 1820, alongside the abolition of the kapu system, pressured the practice, and the working master-apprentice chain attenuated through the 19th century, surviving mainly as motif vocabulary in machine tattooing. The principal revival figure is Keone Nunes (born 1957), who in 1996 began training under the Samoan tufuga ta tatau Su'a Sulu'ape Paulo II because no living Hawaiian held the hand-tap craft; in 2001 the Sulu'ape family conferred the Sulu'ape title on him, the first Hawaiian and first non-Samoan to hold it, and he founded the Pauhi training school in Waianae the same year. His successor Kamaliikupono Hanohano now leads Pauhi.