A Hawaiian perspective on Apple TV+’s breakthrough series — and what the next seasons owe the truth
Published on elementLOTUS · Jimmy Langford · elementlotus.com
Jason Momoa just did something remarkable. He put the Hawaiian people on Apple TV+ in a nine-episode historical epic, in their own language, from their own point of view, with a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. If you were raised on Hollywood’s version of Hawaiian history — which was mostly surfboards, leis, and Elvis in a floral shirt — Chief of War lands like a thunderclap.
We see the islands. We see the warfare. We see Ka’iana crossing oceans, returning with foreign weapons and the dawning knowledge that the world beyond the horizon already has its eye on home. We see Kamehameha — not as a monument on a street corner, but as a man who burned to unify and was willing to pay for it in blood.
All of that is real. All of that matters. Season 1 deserves every word of praise it has received.
And now, with aloha and a small bowl of poi offered respectfully to the writers’ room — we need to talk about what comes next. Because Chief of War ended exactly at the moment when the most important chapter in Hawaiian history was about to begin.
The hammer has been shown. Now show the covenant.
What Season 1 Got Right (and Where the British Subplot Got a Little Murky)
The show’s critics have been gentle about one particular thing: the British subplot in Season 1 operates as though Hawaiʻi were a remote, barely-known corner of the Pacific. The reality — well-documented, well-sourced, not even controversial — is that by Kamehameha I’s time, European and American ships were regular traffic through Hawaiian waters. The islands were not a discovery. They were a destination.
This matters not as a small historical footnote but as the entire spine of what comes after. Because the reason Kauikeaouli — Kamehameha III — was able to do what he did was precisely because he understood the game that had already started. He didn’t inherit a kingdom in isolation. He inherited a kingdom that foreign powers had already decided was worth having.
His genius was making sure they couldn’t simply take it.
The Man the Show Has Not Yet Shown
Kauikeaouli, Kamehameha III, is one of the most consequential figures in the entire history of the Pacific. He reigned from 1825 to 1854 — twenty-nine years, the longest reign in the history of the Kingdom — and in that time he did something no warrior with a cannon could do:
He made Hawaiʻi legible to the world on Hawaiʻi’s own terms.
In 1840, he gave his people the first written constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom. It was written in Hawaiian first. Not translated from English, not borrowed from a Western template — written in Hawaiian, from Hawaiian values, then rendered into English for the world to read. His opening declaration was not a concession to colonial form but a statement of sovereign intent: the people of this land have rights, and those rights are now written.
In 1843, British Captain Lord George Paulet sailed into Honolulu harbor, made a series of demands, and pressured Kauikeaouli into handing over the Kingdom. Paulet raised the British flag. For five months, Hawaiʻi was occupied.
What Kauikeaouli did next was not fight a battle. He wrote letters. He sent emissaries to London. He played the long game with the precision of someone who understood international law better than the man who had just invaded his harbor. Five months later, British Admiral Richard Thomas arrived, reviewed what Paulet had done, and gave the kingdom back.
On July 31, 1843, at a ceremony at Kawaiaha’o Church, Kauikeaouli spoke eight words that have never left the Hawaiian people:
Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono.
The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.
That sentence is not a slogan. It is a covenant. And it is, to this day, the motto of the State of Hawaiʻi — carved there by the very government that replaced the kingdom, perhaps without fully understanding what they had preserved.
The Aloha Overlay: What the Show and the History Share
Here is where Chief of War and KKiii’s story intersect at something deeper than plot.
The show’s emotional core is the tension between the way things are — fractured, warring, vulnerable to any ship that arrives with better weapons — and the way things could be, which Kamehameha I believed was unity. Ka’iana is the character who has seen both worlds and carries that impossible knowledge.
KKiii lived that tension as a governing philosophy. His great insight was that unity inside the islands was not enough. The real battlefield was international recognition. And you could not win that battlefield with warriors. You had to win it with constitutions, with literacy, with schools, with the deliberate documentation of a civilization that insisted it was modern and sovereign and here.
By 1840, he had built a public school system. Hawaiian literacy rates were among the highest in the world. By 1843, Britain and France had formally recognized the independence of the Hawaiian Kingdom — Lā Kūʻokoʻa, Independence Day, celebrated on November 28.
The show has shown us the foundation of the house. The walls, the roof, the quiet genius of governance — that is the story of Kauikeaouli. And it is extraordinary.
What Future Seasons Could Do — Flashbacks from the Truth
Here is an invitation, offered with warmth, to the writers’ room:
Season 2 could open with the flag coming down.
Not the flag going up for Paulet — the flag coming down for Kauikeaouli. A scene at Kawaiaha’o Church, July 31, 1843. Kauikeaouli standing before his people, having won by not fighting. Having written his way to sovereignty. Eight words delivered with the weight of everything Ka’iana and his generation paid for.
From there, flashbacks write themselves:
The Library Scene — Young Kauikeaouli being told by his advisors that his kingdom’s survival depends not on warriors but on readers. The scene where he looks at the ships in the harbor and decides that the pen they carry matters more than the cannons. He orders his people to read and write. Within a generation, Hawaiian literacy is extraordinary.
The Paulet Scene — Not played for drama or spectacle, but for something rarer on television: the drama of patience. Kauikeaouli does not reach for a spear. He reaches for paper. He writes London. He waits. And he wins. Show that. Show a Hawaiian king winning through the law — and winning fully, on the record, in front of the world.
The Constitution Scene — 1840. Kauikeaouli and his advisors drafting the first Hawaiian constitution. Written in Hawaiian. The debate in that room about what kind of governance the kingdom will be — absolute monarchy or constitutional monarchy, the people as subjects or the people as participants. He chooses the people. Write that debate and it becomes one of the great scenes in television history.
The Great Māhele — 1848. This one is complicated, and the show should not look away from its complexity. Kauikeaouli formalizes land rights — a genuine sovereignty act, a way to create legal standing for Hawaiian people against foreign land grabs. And yet the structure of it also opens a door that foreign landowners will walk through for the next century. Show the king who made a brilliant and imperfect decision in the middle of an impossible situation. That is the truth, and it is more interesting than any simplified version.
The Death — December 15, 1854. Kauikeaouli dies at forty-one. He leaves no surviving heirs. He has spent his entire reign fighting for a kingdom he will not be able to pass to his own children. In the context of everything Ka’iana sacrificed in Season 1, that scene carries the weight of tragedy and triumph at the same time. Play it right and there is not a dry eye in the room.
On the Moon and Sovereignty
One more thread worth pulling: Chief of War Season 1 pays attention to the sky. The seasons, the stars, the sea. Hawaiian navigation is rightly celebrated. But the moon — kaulana mahina — deserves its own moment.
The Hawaiian lunar calendar is not folklore. It is a sovereign operating system. Every night has a name. Every phase of the moon tells farmers when to plant, fishermen when to cast, healers when to gather. Kauikeaouli’s reign, with its emphasis on documentation and preservation, was also the era when this knowledge began to be written down — to be kept, not lost.
There is a scene in there: someone writing the names of the moon nights into the record, by candlelight, knowing that what is written does not disappear. That is the act of sovereignty the show has not yet shown. Not the conquest. The keeping.
The Ask
Jason Momoa and Thomas Paʻa Sibbett built something that Hawaiʻi has been waiting a long time to see. The reception proves the appetite is real. The next seasons have the opportunity to do something television almost never does: show a civilization winning not just through war, but through wisdom.
Kauikeaouli — Kamehameha III — spent his life making sure the life of the land would be perpetuated in righteousness. He earned the right to have his story told at the same scale, with the same care, that his grandfather’s warrior years received.
Chief of War showed the hammer.
Now show the covenant.
Jimmy Langford is a Hawaiian sovereign rights artist and the creative director of elementLOTUS, a film and music network rooted in Maui. elementlotus.com
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