ʻAlae, Kinolau of Hina
Ua moʻa ka maiʻa, he keiki māmā ka Hina.
The bananas are cooked, [and remember that] Hina has a swift son.
-Letʻs finish this before we get caught. This saying comes from the legend of Māui and the mudhens. For a long time he tried to catch them in order to learn the seret of making fire. One day he overheard one of them saying these words. He caught them before they could hide and forced them to yield the secret of fire. (ʻŌlelo Noʻeau #2830)
The ʻalae is a kinolau of Hina, Goddess of nocturnal currents and intuition. And as the mudhen is both winged and water born, this speaks to the access to both conscious (winged) and unconscious (water) systems of knowing.
According to our kaʻao (myth) traditions, the ʻalae kept on Puʻuʻōpeʻapeʻa the secret of making fire from human-kind until Māui, son of Hina, wrang the neck of the chief of the ʻalae flock until the secret was exposed. After receiving the secret of fire making, Māui burned the lae (forehead) of the ʻAlae as reminder of this achievement. Having said this, the act of branding the forehead with fire is a metaphor for convincing the truth of knowing to enter into the world of the now- one might say, to experience the world from the eye of all-knowing (the third eye).
Haʻakūmalae, Into the Center of Knowing Protocols Program takes its cues from this mythic reality.
