History
Hawaiian Kakau: The Lost and Found Tradition
Hawaiian kakau marked genealogy and protection for centuries, nearly died after 1820, and came back through one tattooer trained in Samoa.
Hawaiian kakau (the word means "to tattoo" and "to strike") was a comprehensive pre-contact body-marking tradition that recorded a person's genealogy, social rank, religious affiliation, and mourning, and that carried protection. It was struck into the skin by hand with a moli (a hand-carved comb of bone set in a wooden handle) tapped by a hahau (a wooden striking stick), worked by a specialist called the kahuna ka uhi, literally the "expert who strikes the uhi," the mark. After Queen Kaahumanu abolished the kapu system in 1819 and the first company of New England Calvinist missionaries arrived in 1820, customary kakau came under sustained pressure. Over the following century the master-to-apprentice chain that carried the hand-tap method broke. There is no documented unbroken line of the technique into the twentieth century.
The tradition was found again starting in 1990, when a Hawaiian hula performer named Keone Nunes (born 1957) went looking for a traditional alaniho, a hip-to-ankle leg piece, and could only get a machine version because no living Hawaiian held the hand-tap craft. That search led him to the Samoan master Sua Suluape Paulo II, with whom he began training in 1996 in Samoa and New Zealand. In 2001, two years after Paulo II died, the Suluape family conferred the Suluape title on Nunes, making him the first Hawaiian and first non-Samoan to hold it. The same year he founded the Pauhi training school in Waianae, Oahu. That cross-Polynesian transmission, Samoan craft compensating for a broken Hawaiian chain, is how the tradition came back.
What kakau actually carried
Kakau was not decoration. The sources describe it as a working system that recorded a person's place in the world. It marked genealogy (mookuauhau), social rank, religious affiliation, and mourning, and it carried spiritual protection. A mark could state who your ancestors were, where you stood in the social order, which gods you were tied to, and that you were grieving a death. The tools and the role of the practitioner were specialized: the moli comb, traditionally cut from bone, with needle-like teeth set in a wooden handle, and the hahau, the wooden striker that taps the moli to drive pigment into the skin. The person who did the work, the kahuna ka uhi, held an expert role, not a commercial one.
The technique itself was not particular to Hawaii. It is the same hand-tap method shared across western Polynesia, related to Samoan tatau (worked with the au comb and sausau striker) and to the Tongan and Marquesan equivalents. What set Hawaiian kakau apart was its own vocabulary of motifs and its own protocols, not the mechanics of striking pigment into skin. That shared mechanical root is exactly why, when the Hawaiian chain broke, a Samoan master could still teach the method.
How it nearly disappeared
The decline traces to a specific window. In 1819 Queen Kaahumanu abolished the kapu system, the customary order of sacred law and prohibition. In 1820 the first company of Protestant missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions landed in Hawaii. The two events together opened sustained pressure against many customary practices, kakau among them. This is the documented pattern across Polynesia, though the outcomes differed. The record shows that Tongan tatatau was outlawed outright in 1839 under the Vavau Code, that Tahitian and Marquesan traditions were suppressed and later required twentieth-century reconstruction, and that Samoan tatau, by contrast, was never legally prohibited and never lost its hereditary chain, in part because the Samoan tufuga ta tatau held chiefly matai rank that the missionaries chose not to confront.
Hawaiian kakau fell on the harder side of that ledger. Over the nineteenth century the working master-apprentice chain attenuated. By the late twentieth century the practice survived mainly as motif vocabulary inside machine tattooing, not as a living hand-tap craft. I want to be careful here, because the sources are careful. The record does not claim the tradition was totally and cleanly erased, it says the documented continuous transmission line of the hand-tap method into the twentieth century cannot be found, and that what survived was the imagery more than the method. That is a real loss, but it is a loss of technique and lineage, stated at the confidence the evidence supports.
How it came back
The revival has a documented catalytic moment. In 1990 Keone Nunes, then preparing for a hula competition, wanted a traditional alaniho and could obtain only a machine version, because no living Hawaiian practitioner held the hand-tap craft. The search for a teacher led, through the Dutch tattooer Henk Schiffmacher of the Amsterdam Tattoo Museum, to Sua Suluape Paulo II, who invited Nunes to study with him beginning in 1996. The record preserves a detail worth keeping: on the third day in Samoa, Paulo II asked Nunes whether he wanted to make his own tools, and Nunes spent that day fabricating his first instrument. Training continued until Paulo II's death in 1999. In 2001 the Suluape family elevated Nunes to the Suluape title.
From there the revival became an institution rather than one person's project. Nunes founded the Pauhi school in Waianae in 2001, organized around long apprenticeship ending in uniki, formal transmission. One apprentice, Kamaliikupono Hanohano, completed a roughly decade-long apprenticeship and uniki, was given the title Keoneulaikapopanopano, and now leads Pauhi in Nunes's stead. Nunes relocated to Thailand in 2020 and remains active. The record flags a correction worth stating plainly for honesty: a tertiary web summary circulated a claim that Nunes died in 2024. That claim is refuted. He was a documented featured performer at the Sawasdee Bangkok Tattoo Show on October 18 to 19, 2025, and no obituary appears in any reputable Hawaii outlet. He is living, born 1957, Thailand-based since 2020.
Where this sits in the wider Pacific revival
Hawaiian kakau is one strand in a larger Pacific story, and it should not be collapsed into the others. It is distinct from Samoan tatau, from the Marquesan revival, and from Maori ta moko, each of which followed its own path through suppression and return. What ties them is the shared hand-tap method and, in the modern era, the Polynesian tattoo revival that moved craft and knowledge across island lines. The Hawaiian case is the clearest recent example of one tradition's gap being closed by a neighbor's unbroken chain. Nunes did not invent a Hawaiian method from nothing. He learned a living Polynesian method from a Samoan master and rebuilt the Hawaiian practice on it, adapting Samoan-trained toolmaking to Hawaiian motifs, protocols, and ceremony.
For a working tattooer, the honest takeaway is twofold. First, the imagery you may see filed under "Hawaiian tribal" sits on top of a real system that once recorded genealogy, rank, religion, mourning, and protection, and that system is not yours to invent. Second, the craft came back through patience and proper transmission: years of apprenticeship, fabricating your own tools, and a title conferred by the family that held the knowledge. The moli and the hahau, the kahuna ka uhi, the uniki that ends an apprenticeship, these are the spine of the tradition. The revival worked because it respected that spine rather than shortcutting it.
ATLAS PRESS is the articles and opinion desk of the Tattoo History Atlas. For the full story, read The History of Tattooing, a free and sourced timeline.