The Waiʻanae moku — sometimes called Waiʻanae Moku rather than translated to "the Waiʻanae District" — is the leeward division of Oʻahu, running from Kahe in the south to Kaʻena Point at the westernmost tip of the island. The Waiʻanae ahupuaʻa, sitting between the Mākaha and Lualualei ahupuaʻa, was the Royal Center of the district in the late 1600s and 1700s, with numerous important heiau and an estimated 4,000 to 6,000 residents at the time of European contact. Captain Cook's Resolution and Discovery first sighted the Hawaiian Islands on January 18, 1778, and Kamehameha I completed the unification of the islands in 1795. Pōkaʻī Bay, the protected swimming bay at Waiʻanae, takes its name from the voyaging chief Pōkaʻī of Kahiki who, in Hawaiian tradition, brought niu (coconut) to the islands; the bay once held the great coconut grove Ka Uluniu o Pokaʻī, noted by Western sailors in the 1700s. On the peninsula at Pōkaʻī Bay sits Kūʻīlioloa Heiau, the three-platform navigation heiau dedicated to Kū in his dog form Kūʻīlioloa. The Hawaiian creation tradition places the birth of the demigod Māui on this coast.
The Western era arrived in stages. The 1820 arrival of the first Christian missionaries on Oʻahu reached the Westside through Stephen Waimalu, who was installed as the first Hawaiian minister of Waiʻanae in 1850. The Treaty of Reciprocity in 1876 opened duty-free sugar exports to the United States, and a sugar-plantation economy followed. In 1888, Benjamin F. Dillingham obtained a franchise to extend his Oahu Railway and Land Company line along the Waiʻanae coast, ultimately running rail from Honolulu through Pearl Harbor and along the Westside past Kaʻena Point to Waialua and Kahuku. The Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown in 1893, the islands were annexed by the United States in 1898, and Hawaiʻi entered the Union as the 50th state on August 21, 1959.
Why People Visit Waiʻanae Hawaiʻi
Waiʻanae offers the original home of big-wave surfing at Mākaha Beach, the world's first international surfing competition (1953-1954) and the long-running Buffalo's Big Board Surfing Classic, the protected swimming waters of Pōkaʻī Bay with its Pōkaʻī coconut-grove legend and Kūʻīlioloa Heiau, the 15th-century Kāneʻāki Heiau in Mākaha Valley, the 4,025-foot summit of Mount Kaʻala as the highest peak on Oʻahu, the westernmost tip of Oʻahu at Kaʻena Point, and the long Native Hawaiian heritage of the Waiʻanae moku that has carried this coast for centuries. It is the leeward Westside of Oʻahu — a residential community whose culture is alive, and where the world first watched surfers ride big waves on television. On the Westside since time before contact.
