Kō: An Ethnobotanical Guide to Hawaiian Sugarcane Cultivars

Noa Kekuewa Lincoln

Softcover, 192 pages

The enormous impact of sugarcane plantations in Hawaiʻi has overshadowed the fact that Native Hawaiians introduced sugarcane to the islands nearly a millennium before Europeans arrived. In fact, Hawaiians cultivated sugarcane extensively in a broad range of ecosystems using diverse agricultural systems and developed dozens of native varieties of kō (Hawaiian sugarcane). Sugarcane played a vital role in the culture and livelihood of Native Hawaiians, as it did for many other Indigenous peoples across the Pacific.