Nā Pō o ka Malama: The “Nights” of the Hawaiian Month

Abstract

This article discusses when the traditional Hawaiian twenty-four-hour period called pō 'night' began and ended. The Pukui and Elbert dictionary (1986) states that the twenty-four-hour period began at nightfall. However, the research presented here, examining the earliest Native Hawaiians who wrote about the Hawaiian calendar, shows that the Hawaiian pō began with daybreak, not nightfall.