Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography: Hula, Navigation, and Oratory

Kanaka Hawai'i Cartography Practices are a compilation of intimate, interactive, and integrative processes that present place as "experienced space," situate mapping in the environment, and encode spatial knowledge into bodily memory via repetitive recitations and other habitual practices, such as hula. Kanaka Hawai'i cartography is similar to Western cartography in that it provides a shorthand system of understanding spatial phenomenon, but distinctive in that it places emphasis on multisensual cognitive abilities and multidimensional symbolic interrelationships, and privileges performance as a primary mode of communication.